Gremlins Go Home – Unexpectedly Decent

In 2019, I won second place in the Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award (I was third in 2021, too). Part of my prize was a wonderful box of Baen books. With the vicissitudes of the Argentine post, these arrived in March of 2020, and they’ve only now begun to reach the top of my TBR pile. Since many of these books were new to me, I put them in the pile in pretty much random order, to discover treats as they come.

So I reached the first one, entitled, strangely, Gremlins Go Home.

Now, I’m going to be honest. The only reason I was looking forward to reading this one at all was because of the fact that it’s written by Ben Bova and Gordon R. Dickson. Those two guys were genre powerhouses for decades… but this slim volume didn’t seem like their usual fare, and the cover seemed aimed at a younger audience.

Well, I was right about the younger audience. Though this book is from an era before YA became a distinct category (remember when they were called “Juveniles”?), its protagonist is a youth with non-adult problems and preoccupations.

And while I normally wouldn’t have picked up a juvenile, this one was a fun read. The situation is admittedly ridiculous (personified gremlins around a Mars launch), but that is part of the book’s charm. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

I’ll also be reviewing all the rest of the books in that box. There’s some core SF which I’m really looking forward to, and a lot of other subgenres that I’m not quite as familiar with (urban fantasy and alternate history, in particular) that will be a learning curve for me. Should be a fun ride.

As for this one, I consider it an appetizer, a short intro to the entertainment to come. If you are the type to seek out juveniles or SF/F mashups from a more innocent age, you’ll really like this one.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book in his popular monster series is Lost Island Rampage. If your idea of a relaxing holiday is being trapped on a small island with genetically modified carnivorous dinosaurs on one side and murderous natives on the other, then this book can almost serve as a travel guide. For the rest of you, it’s just pure fast-paced entertainment. You can check it out here.

Sometimes they do a Catch-All edition

As a writer whose work sometimes appears in magazines (mainly literary and SF mags), I think about how magazines are put together quite frequently. For example, I imagine that if a magazine receives a story from, say, Stephen King, they’ll rush to put it on the cover of their next edition and fit the rest of the content around it. Maybe the story is a little long, so you have to fill the magazine with stories that would normally have been slotted in as filler- good stories, but perhaps not strong enough to be featured strongly.

I think that’s what happened to the February 1981 issue of Road & Track.

As you likely know if you’ve been reading my opinions about these old mage, the late 1970s and early 1980s, were an era in which cars were getting worse. Part of that worseness was that you could buy smaller cars for more money (though the inflation was mainly Jimmy Carter’s fault, not Detroits). Politics aside, small cars were the future.

And Ford had just launched the Escort, the first truly serious Detroit competitor to the German and Japanese invasion. Now two of the three cars the Ford was up against in this test (the VW Golf and Honda Accord) were on their way to becoming giants that still exist today.

It’s unsurprising that the Escort’s reception in this company was lukewarm. The Mazda and the Honda defeated it soundly… which must be something to do with how cars are perceived by Americans because, as we all know, the Escort did spectacularly well in the rest of the world (and sold acceptably in the US, too).

This test is one of those elephant in the room situations. It was a massive, multi-car feature aimed at the exact center of the market. These four cars probably outsold every other car R&T tested in 1981. But it seems to have left the editorial team exhausted, as the rest of the mag, except for a wonderful Salon article about an ex-Maharajah Rolls-Royce, felt like filler.

Sure, there was a Runoff article by the always eccentric Manney… but that was about it, and even that one was shorter than the man’s usual ramblings. And there were no GP reports, because, once again, we are in the dreaded offseason!

Anyhow, that was what I thought as I read this one, and finally found a similarity between the way a car magazine was put together in 1981 with fiction mags today – of such thin inspiration are reviews sometimes composed.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose latest book is a collection of short stories that twine together to tell a cohesive tale of everything from the love life of a terrorist to the unhappy end of a serial killer… who are only tangentially important in the story. It’s called Safe and Sorry, and you can check it out here.

Flynn Keeps at it

Apart from a couple of Follett books, the pile of modern (1980s or later) books I’ve been reading lately contained two Mitch Rapp thrillers by Vince Flynn. I’ve already raved about one of them, and the second was entitled The Last Man.

Perhaps the most notable aspect of these books is how, unlike Follett, Flynn manages to keep the quality steady. You probably won’t find anything that surprises you in one of these books, but if you like one of them, you’ll probably enjoy them all.

While I’ll admit these aren’t for everyone, because the level of violence and the fact that the lives of scumbags and terrorists (and anyone who sympathizes with them) are considered not only worthless, but actively worth snuffing out will make certain readers move onto something else. But I like them. It’s entertainment for people who can simply enjoy the ride without having to subject everything to a moral analysis, and as such, it’s a wild ride. The best part is that even the bloodiest of the assassins in here is a real character, someone with feelings you might not share, but you can at least believe.

There’s not a lot more to say about this one, except that I read it in like two days even though it isn’t quite as good as the previous pair. Still makes for more compelling reading than 90% of the stuff out there.

Recommended if you like action / thriller books.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is a literary paean to those who prefer living to merely existing. It’s called Safe and Sorry, and you can check it out here.

Senso, a Period Film that Feels Contemporary… for the Fifties

I had no idea what to expect from Senso (1954), except that it was an Italian film, which means that it can be pretty unpredictable. So I started watching and it begins with an Opera set in Austrian-Controlled Venice during Garibaldi’s war for Italian Independence.

And it goes on in the most melodramatic way possible from there. While the period sets are beautifully realistic, the story is a 1950s tale in that takes advantage of the social structure (and social unrest) of the era.

Basically, it’s a love story in which a married noblewoman falls head over heels with a young, handsome Austrian Army officer. Since she’s one of Garibaldi’s partisans, the effect is a Capulet and Montague situation, exacerbated by the fact that she’s married.

But the marriage never really plays a role in the question. The love affair is the central question, but those of us who know our Shakespeare, know that it can’t end well. And it doesn’t, but unlike many Shakespearian tragedies, the ending is highly satisfactory, and you feel that things ended as they should, with everyone getting pretty much what they deserved.

Unlike many dramas, this one is entertaining to watch, visually lush and interesting, as it also uses the technique of having the actors speak in several languages and then dubbing according to market. I watched the Italian version, but you could tell some of the actors were off on their own tangent. Since I make a point of watching these in their original language, it’s a little disconcerting to see this.

Anyhow, an interesting piece, and one that I’d probably have missed without the list.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book, Safe and Sorry, is a literary story told in the form of several interlinked short pieces. They tell of life, of love, of adapting to new cultures, and of the possibility of living versus the reality of just existing. You can check it out here.

More Turbos

If you were a kid in the 1980s, you played Test Drive, probably the first computer game that anyone actually found cool (Leisure Suit Larry was launched that same year, but it was more of an underground phenom among kids). Two of the cars involved were the Ferrari Testarossa and the Corvette (1984) version. Those were launched after this magazine was published… But the other three were already extant: Porsche 911 Turbo, Lamborghini COuntach and this month’s cover car, the Lotus Esprit Turbo.

Now the regular Esprit wouldn’t have been anyone’s first choice to be in this game. Just look at that lineup: three large displacement sports cars (Ferrari, Corvette, Lambo) and the perennial 0-60 champ, the bestially boosted 911 Turbo.

But in 1981, people were turbocharging everything from awful economy cars like the Renault 18 to… well, to sports cars like the Esprit. It made a lot of sense to do this with the tech available at the time. After all, with a turbo, you could keep the existing engine, suitably beefed up, which you already knew would fit in the car. The turbo would give you higher horsepower numbers when you needed them while staying off boost puttering around town. The result was that a turbo would allow you to have the power of a larger engine with much less fuel consumption (and remember that US politicians had panicked after the fuel crisis, so apart from legislating moronic speeds, they also legislated fuel economy).

In the Esprit’s case, the fuel economy was probably a secondary consideration, as who really cares if your junior supercar gets decent mileage. The real gain was in turning the esprit from a well-respected car that was known for its handling to a kid’s dream poster pinup that could legitimately be included in the video game.

From what I recall of the game, the esprit was quick-revving and nimble, but slow on the top end. Of course, i’t been thirty years since I last played, so I might be misremembering.

Other interesting stuff in this mag was Alan Jones bringing Williams its first championship, and the Ferrari P4 as the Salon car (which is pretty fun, as the car was only 14 years old. I can’t imagine a car from 2007 being considered a Salon candidate today).

Anyhow, a good x-ray of what was up in 1981.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is a linked series of literary stories entitled Safe and Sorry. You can check it out here.

Unpredictability – Thy name is Follett

After struggling through a couple of Ken Follet Books lately, reviewed here and here, I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t have high hopes for Code to Zero, another book of his in which a historical setting–in this case the first US orbital launch–is used to write a thriller. In the last two, I found the historical elements to be much more interesting than the weak storyline.

So imagine my surprise when I began reading and was immediately hooked. Unlike in the previous two, Follett creates a mystery from the beginning, and you read along desperately wanting to find out what’s going on.

It’s not spectacularly unpredictable. An alert reader will figure out who the bad guys are and who they work for well before Follett reveals it, but that’s where the historical setting shines. By the time the mystery is gone, you know the stakes are enormously high and you also want to know how things end for each of the players. It’s a very good book where each aspect complements the others.

Perhaps the best part of this one is that the book starts in the middle of the action (that’s an old writer’s rule for short stories, not something I made up), and Follett doesn’t give us hundreds of pages of character history in which we slowly and tortuously learn to hate the characters. By starting in the middle of the action, and getting us into the plot, he makes this book a heck of a lot more readable.

Another thing which helps this one is that, like it or not, Follett made his name as a writer of WWII and Cold War thrillers. That is what he is good at. Later in his career, he moved over to more historical pieces, which I don’t enjoy in quite the same way. As Code to Zero one falls into the Cold War thriller category, one can conclude that the muscle memory is still there and that the old talent is as relevant as it ever was.

I am not the kind of reader who demands writers write what they like to read. On the contrary. I think Ken Follett has more than earned the right to write whatever he wants. And his name on the cover will sell it because a lot of readers like his new direction.

I’m not necessarily one of those readers, but Code to Zero is a throwback, and I really enjoyed it.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose latest book is entitled Lost Island Rampage. It’s a story about a relaxing tropical holiday that happens to go awry when the Triads show up. Then everyone is attacked by genetically-modified monsters. If that sounds as fun to read as it was to write, he invites you to check it out here.

Reading Car Magazines as a Way to Handicap Elections

Last time I wrote about my quest to read every old Road & Track, we talked about the 55 Mile an Hour Speed limit. Today, since the cover car is an econobox and the issue has way too many diesels and sedans in it for my taste, I’d like to talk about a cultural aspect of reading these magazines.

I’m consistently amazed by how much you can glean about society at large by reading these mags. For example, in the 70s, it became clear that, as the flower children of the sixties matured and became responsible adults, the tolerance for government involvement in daily affairs was much higher. The rugged individualist was dead, and society was king.

So the seventies were definitely not a me-first decade. By the end of it, however, you can tell just how much society wanted freedom from Big Brother. It wasn’t just the car nuts complaining by 1980, it was everyone.

Another interesting data point is watching car prices rise and rise and rise, showing an inflation which I’m not certain has been matched since.

And the recession is mentioned often, which I found noteworthy. Remember that this is a magazine that didn’t even mention the Vietnam war… they dedicated themselves to talking politics only when it involved cars. For a non-automotive political issue to be cited so often is notable.

Now, this December issue would have hit the newsstands in November 1980, an election month. If you’d asked me, just based on reading a couple of years’ worth of auto magazines, I’d have said that American society was ready for a huge change, and that, in the elections, they’d go in a completely new and different direction.

Enter Reagan and the real start of the 80s. No matter what your politics (and I’m from Argentina and I live in Argentina, so I’m pretty much neutral in US politics) the US really needed that change at that moment. Only someone very biased, or someone ignorant of the history of the 70s can deny that.

Hell, if you’re ignorant of the history of the seventies, you can probably pick up car magazines for cheap on Ebay and get an education while reading about stuff that’s infinitely more interesting than politics.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose latest novel is a monster-filled romp across a tropical paradise entitled Lost Island Rampage. You really want to read this one… and you can check it out here.

And the Pinnacle – Seven Samurai

It’s a truism (whether it’s actually true or not is left as an exercise for the reader) that the 1950s are the Golden Age of Japanese cinema. From what I’ve seen over the past few months, you can definitely make a strong argument for that to be the case.

But something that nobody appears to be arguing about is that the very best Japanese film ever made is Seven Samurai.

One would expect–at least I did–that this film would be a constant war movie. And while it does have a brilliant battle, it doesn’t stat out that way. It starts out by following a group of peasant farmers trying to decide what to do about their bandit problem.

And though the narrative is carried forward, it becomes clear reasonably soon that the story isn’t about the conflict itself but about the people involved, the personalities, and how being from a particular social class or occupation will color the way you look at the world around you.

Of course, the samurai do appear, eventually, and they take over the film from the somewhat sniveling farmers. Their leader is a man with honor and the rest of them are honorable men with all the usual archetypes sprinkled in: the quiet but deadly warrior, the young man who aspires to earn respect, and the slightly ridiculous wild card who isn’t what he appears to be–but gains honor in the end.

One notable thing about this film is that the battle scene at the end isn’t built to western narrative conventions. It’s not tense, even though it’s well-filmed and entertaining. Why? Because the end result is never in doubt.

And that’s actually pretty cool. A western director would have made it so that you were wondering how the good guys were going to survive all the way through the battle. But in this case, you’ve already seen how they’re going to win: with honor, preparation and hard work. The result of the fight is a known factor even before they start to fight, because any deviation from that would minimize those values. And there’s never a sense that this movie wishes to subvert such central tenets of human existence.

If you haven’t watched this film, do yourself a favor and watch it. Not only is it a critical part of the cultural landscape, but it’s also extremely good, with a couple of memorable characters.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose latest book is a relaxing beach vacation–if your idea of relaxation is to be chased by monsters. It’s called Lost Island Rampage, and you can check it out here.

Is Ian Rankin Trying to be Colin Dexter?

I love Inspector Morse, both the original TV series and the book I’ve read. It combines nicely sordid detective fiction interwoven with some of the finer and more intellectual things in life. Music, literature and the Times crossword are just as important as the beheaded corpses and drug stashes.

Enter Ian Rankin’s Strip Jack.

Now, I’ve learned that this is the fourth book in a series so, though I probably shouldn’t jump in in the middle, the truth is it reads perfectly well as a standalone novel.

My impression is that Rankin was aiming for an everyman’s version of Inspector Morse. So while Morse is much more educated than those around him, Rankin’s Rebus is proudly less so. And Edinburgh, of course, is a normal city, mixing its rich cultural heritage with a more down-to-earth segment… unlike Oxford which is a world cultural capital.

One would expect these books to be a little earthier than Morse, a little more tawdry overall. Maybe something like this one.

But that’s not the sense you get. Rankin drops bits of high culture into the text when it’s least expected: Rebus likes classical music, a literary reference flits through the narrator’s exposition, puns abound.

Overall, it works, albeit nowhere near as well as Dexter’s use of the same elements. Nevertheless, this is a world that one can become engrossed in. I’d give the book a solid six out of ten (for comparison, the Morse book I read was probably a nine).

The story: MP is caught in a raid on a brothel and his wife disappears. All their friends are suspects. Not a lot original there – but the execution is good enough to keep me reading.

So it’s succeeds as entertainment and the risks Rankin takes don’t fall completely flat. I probably need a larger sample size to pass a definitive judgement, but based on this book, I’d pick up another if it crossed my path.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose thriller Timeless is set in the present day, in southeast Europe. It’s a fast-paced, sexy romp where the stopped time of monastic life collides messily with modern crime. You can check it out here.

The English Spy – Daniel Silva is Also Good

Okay, apparently those “be offended at everything that subsegments humanity” classes didn’t take. Just a few days ago, I was busy telling everyone how good the Vince Flynn book I read was. If you’re unaware of Vince Flynns style, he pretty much says that he doesn’t care if all his bad guys are Muslims: as long as muslims are terrorists, he’s going to gleefully enjoy having Mitch Rapp blow their heads off. It’s awesome stuff.

And here I am about to tell you that The English Spy by Daniel Silva is just as good, if not better…

Now, a pattern emerges. In this book, the bad guy is a former IRA bomb maker. Now, while the PC police will likely tell you that type-casting the Irish is just as bad as type-casting muslim terrorists (and yes, there are ALSO muslim terrorists in this one), I’m here to tell you that it makes for excellent reading. Once you get beyond the politics, you need to remember that both of these groups exist, and writing them only shows the world as it really is. Avoiding them just panders to people who want to rewrite reality to fit their own vision of how others should think.

(Pro tip: NEVER let anyone tell you what to think. Left- and right-leaning, politically correct or savagely un-PC, written by dead white guys or angry activist black women, read it ALL. And only after you’ve done that, come to your own conclusions. You’ll find that the stuff political movements (left, right, up or down) are trying to sell you is a distorted and extremist viewpoint, and that, in the end, politically active people are either lying to you or to themselves.)

But back to the book. Anyone who is offended by stereotyping is missing a spectacular spy book (apparently a series, in fact). This one is written with what is either a deep knowledge of how things happen behind the scenes or by a man who is a master of the art of making it feel that way. This one should be obligatory reading not just for fans of the genre, but for anyone taking a college-level creative writing class. Maybe leave the drudgery of Katherine Mansfield aside for a few days and show writers that it’s possible to actually engage readers with a story. If teachers did this, we’d leave the doldrums and train a generation of writers to bring forth a new golden age.

Yeah, and watch out for flying pigs.

I won’t go further into my review than that. It’s an international-intrigue manhunt tale with a few fun twists, a spectacular down-taking of the Lady Di legend and a decent body count. As I said, fun reading of the kind there should be more of. It was good, suspenseful fun, which is what these things should always be.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose thriller, Timeless, is a fast-paced sexy romp through the smuggling paradises of Southeast Europe. You can check it out here.