Spring is in sight! The bovalo are getting frisky. The ice is cracking on the river.

Abigail Maye "Blackie" Brewster can't believe her luck—schlepping around in the summer heat as the assistant of a high-maintenance movie producer.  When did her life become a mix of flat and irritating?  What's a world-wandering nomad from Saskatchewan to do?

Abagael Mae "Magpie” Brewster can't believe her luck—spending the summer sailing the skies in a prototype steam blimp, flying a circuit of the Western Domains, engaging in a little light espionage.  What more could a University of Saskatchewan Academician desire?

Blackie's life veers in a direction that threatens to snap her mind.  Magpie's light-hearted spying takes a hard and dangerous direction that threatens to snap her spirit.  When the paths of these identical twins born of different mothers intersect and tangle together, their lives become a race across a rolling prairie landscape both familiar and strange.

Home on the Strange is a rootin'-tootin' daredevil tale of far-fetched fiction in a west that does not share our history.

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Destination selection

A question for book lovers. Earlier today I came across this question, only it dealt with magic doors and led to quasi-medieval realms of fantasy fiction.

 I thought fans of science fiction needed their chance, so I whipped up the following:

new holiday!

Hitler vs Dracula by P.S. Duncan

Dracula vs. Hitler

by Patrick Sheane Duncan

Hardcover, 506 pages

Published October 25th 2016 by Inkshares

A lurid title to catch the eye.  A well-written interior to hold the imagination.  Yet, I can only give it a passing, middling grade.  “3 stars out of 5”

The good starts with Duncan’s basic writing skills.  He knows his craft on a nuts & bolts level.  The aspect that most appealed to me were the descriptions.  Characters had facial features, the landscape had colour, the world was vibrant.  After so many modern books written by lazy and/or untalented hacks who abstain from description*, this book was like eating a fully-loaded pizza after a plate of stale baloney sandwiches (without mustard).

(* ”Why would I bother describing my starship?  Everyone’s seen ‘Star Wars’.” -actual quote from work-shy wannabe writer.)

Duncan’s characterizations are also good, if a bit of a stereotype.  Then again, he is fully channeling “Dracula” by Stoker, so the characters may be more “homages” than “stereotypes”.  I’m willing to grant him a pass on this.

The action scenes are well-told and vivid.  (There’s that description stuff again!)

These points all added up to making it relatively easy to finish the book (though I don’t know if it needed to be 500 pages)  

Okay, I know for a fact it didn’t need to be 500 pages.  This is where the list of unfortunate elements starts.  I think a 100 pages could be excised without too many tears or sweat.  In particular, there is a strange section in the front half that feels very much like a late addition insertion.  It strikes me as if Duncan’s beta-readers felt the book too short for a modern market lusting after overweight books, so he created this narrative to wedge in between events.  

(-possible spoiler warning-)

The story revolves around the town of Brasov and its environs.  We meet upstanding heroes, dark villains and intriguing oddball characters.  History is established in the area, reaching back five decades and much more.  But this “insertion” sees our heroes skip off around Rumania on a tour of destruction.  The derring-do reads well enough until the merry band returns to Brasov.  There is then an abrupt change in tone.  Despite living and fighting together for months, the characters act and react in their relationship to one another as if those months never happened.  By way of analogy, I felt like I was driving on a road (the main plot) and innocently followed a detour sign.  After a winding, rambling route over hill & dale, I returned to the main road to discover I was only a block and a half distant from where I obeyed that first exit sign.

Obviously, this is nothing but my theory, but I’d lay money my “postscript insertion” theory is correct.

THE biggest problem is that the book is supposed to be Dracula versus Hitler.  Vampires in WW II.  And that promise comes up woefully short.  I’d estimate this book is nigh on 75% WW II adventure with at most 25% supernatural antics.  As a vampire, Duncan’s Dracula is quite…mundane.  Oh, he has power, but there is only a smattering of occult atmosphere around him.  For far too many scenes, Dracula is just “one of the commandos”.  He could as easily be a shipwrecked alien with extrahuman power as a vampire (which I would have preferred, in hindsight.  More honest and less disappointment from preconceptions betrayed) 

Stepping away from the vampire angle, there are also a few tasty suggestions that functioning magic and spellcraft exist.  However, that is all we get; suggestions.  Nothing but a few, brief, fleeting moments that add almost nothing to the plot.  Nothing but a pointless tease.

In summation, a competently written WW II adventure-thriller.  There is raw excitement and several cliff-hanger moments for anyone that enjoys commando capers.  If you were also (like me) expecting the mythology of Dracula and supernatural powers locking fangs with the Nazis, you will be left quite hungry.

Oh, one more observation.  All thru the work, I could not help but compare Duncan’s depiction of Dracula with the masterpiece novels of Fred Saberhagen.  Duncan comes up a bit short of Saberhagen’s artistry, but he makes a good effort.

prof read

Early Riser by Jasper Fforde

Early Riser by Jasper Fforde

Hardcover, 403 pages

Published  2018 by Hodder & Stoughton

Years ago, I read The Eyre Affair by Mr. Fforde and came away vastly entertained.  A lot of other people were as well, it seems, as a series of adventures featuring the literary troubleshooter Thursday Next poured from Mr. Fforde.  These did not entertain me as much.  I do love wry humour, dry humour and even doses of zany humour, but these books were increasingly, well, "silly".  Nonstop silly.  Silly for the sake of being silly.  Silly overriding any sort of plot or tension or forward action.  Silly to the point that I expected the stuffy major from Monty Python skits to stomp into the scene and demand the proceedings stop on account of being too silly.

Maybe the major did just that.  The books certainly allowed for it.  I, however, was no longer reading them by the time he did.

So, the years dribbled by with me acknowledging Mr. Fforde as a damned creative and clever writer, but not for me, thanks anyway.

And apparently enough years went by that my irritation blurred and faded until only my foggy admiration remained.  When I saw this new novel, I was immediately intrigued.  The clincher came in two parts:  1) It didn't appear to require a minimum of a Bachelor's degree in English Literature to fully appreciate. 2)  It was a stand-alone novel and not part of a #*@&#! series. 

What a wonderful blast of fresh arctic air!  It doesn't require a Lit degree, but a lifetime of SF&F reading certainly helped.  By that I mean, Fforde sets the reader on a strange twist of an Earth and without a suffocating info-dump nor rambling pre-amble, starts off at a brisk trot.  It's one of those races where the reader simply has to trust the author and his skill will keep feeding us details to follow the track and not trip up.  Any and all previous training in dealing with bizarre alien worlds will only help.

And he does.  Tidbits and morsels and offhand remarks place jigsaw pieces to expand the world picture with nearly every page.

(I am tempted to start the book over so I know what some of the background terminology means from the first page)

This "winter Earth" (focussing on Wales) is an elaborate creation and I enjoyed every snow flake of it.  It's strange and crazy and Jasper Fforde at the height of his convoluted creativity.  And while it gets odd in some places, a little goofy in others, it never gets "silly".  Despite the plot revolving around the dead of winter and people lying in hibernation, it is a frenetic action-packed tale that covers a mere handful of waking days for Our Hero, Charlie Worthing.

As always with my reviews here, I don't bother with plot details.  Read the blurb-synopsis on the back of the book for such information.  Early Riser is a fun, engaging romp that will have you thinking differently about winter and wondering about any dreams you have tonight...

PS And Jasper Fforde is a role-model for me as an author.  Not that I could match that convoluted creativity, but that he publishes books like these that defy easy labelling as "science fiction" or "fantasy" and add frown lines to people who find a place for books on their shelves.  I want to write what I want to write, not to write to order for a particular niche market and demographic.

Neutronium prose

I have this minute coined a term in my head for poetry:  neutronium prose.

Poetry takes a perfectly good concept that could be elegantly written in normal sentences but then crushes it and strips it of small but essential words until it is nothing but oddly shaped, mashed metaphor.

Prose is the shining star that beautifies the night or gives life as a sun during a warm day.  A neutron star is a fascinating anomaly without much purpose.

And, I don't want to belabour the comparison any further.