Tag: o

Okay, S.I.R.

  By

★★★
“Two Angels for Europol?”

“Brussels: home to many European authorities. This one is new. It’s an international combination of security forces from European countries: EUROPOL. For a long time the criminal underworld hasn’t respected borders, and continually develops new techniques. So crimes are often committed for which the usual police methods are not enough. In such cases, Europol has trained employees who are out of the ordinary. Unconventional cops, with unconventional methods, like us. Biggi. Conny. And our boss is a lady! Her name is S.I.R. – S for ‘Sicherheit’ (security), I as in ‘Information’, R for ‘Recht’ (justice).”

What sounds like a mid-60s promotion intro to The Avengers (John Steed + Emma Peel, not the other ones!) is indeed a spoken monologue. And it leads into one of the strangest oddities in the “girls with guns”-subgenre, which still can surprise me when I dig out something new. Now, I don’t want to summarize the whole of German film-making history, but I think a couple of words would actually be quite helpful in this case, before we get under way.

Early German movie-making had a very high interest in the fantastic film genre. Indeed, you could actually say the fantastic film was born in Germany with such early and successful cinematic efforts as Der Golem (1920), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), the Doctor Mabuse films, Metropolis (1927), Die Nibelungen (1924) and Nosferatu (1922). With the rise of the National Socialists in the 1930s such topics suddenly became problematic. No oppressive regime ever likes people to be able to dream. The fantastic genre is a kind of escape no dictatorship can control, and that’s why they hate these things. However, the mindset stayed prevalent for a long time in Germany after World War II.

As a result, things such as comics or science fiction literature were usually seen as suspicious in the 1950s. Germany only slowly rediscovered its ability to dream on film and TV in the 1960s, during that beautiful period that gave us Karl May westerns, the Spessart Ghost comedies, new Doctor Mabuse movies and the Edgar Wallace series. It was really a very productive time in the German film industry. Then, suddenly, in the late 60s – not just here but worldwide – films seemed to hit a roadblock due to a stronger focus on politics than on popular culture by the younger generation. In Germany the old movies were abandoned as “Papas Kintopp” (“father’s cinema”). The young generation which discovered the Nazi era was being glossed over in their history classes, rejected what that generation offered, and went on to create their own movies in the 70s, very often politicized and dealing with “real life issues”.

And while American cinema gradually got its mojo back, as film makers like Spielberg, Lucas and others fully reinvented the fantastic film, that never happened to Germany. It initially suffered from state-funded “author’s cinema”, resulting in very boring movies, mostly forgotten today. But it mainly degenerated into very average and (in my personal opinion, mostly lame) TV-crime shows. They lacked the wonderful mixture of over-the-top, unambiguous heroes and villains, uncanny horror-like atmosphere and outlandish plots of the Edgar Wallace movies of the 60s.

“Krimis” suddenly became some kind of social dramas, that were more about the depiction of society’s flaws and personal backgrounds of criminals then about the creation of suspense and imagination. The kind of crime drama the German public TV channels would usually co-produce, became as exciting as a visit to a tax office. They guaranteed “realism” and rejected as childish any depiction of outlandish things. When I look at today’s German TV programs, nothing has changed since then.

Given that, I was surprised to find this little campy gem of German TV-series. Produced between 1971-72, and shown on German TV between 1973 74, the series depicts two investigators Biggi (Anita Kupsch) and Conny (Monica Peitsch). [Quick aside: “Biggi” and “Conny” were also the names of two well-known German girl-comics in the 80s] They work for a mysterious lady (Anneliese Uhlig) who seems to have no real name and works under the alias of “S.I.R,” as discussed in the intro. She lives in a luxurious villa with candlesticks, a library and what we today would probably call a prototype version of a computer.

Upon closer inspection, I get the impression the makers of this show must have been inspired by shows from abroad. In the mid-60s, the Steed/Peel Avengers enjoyed great success on German TV screens. There was the similar themed Department S and I’m quite sure the original Mission Impossible series also ran on TV in the early 70s. Though, Okay, S.I.R. can’t for a moment compete with these much better shows, it is by German standards a miracle such a series was produced at all. The 70s in Germany still weren’t a time when anything fantastic would be embraced. Heck, when the first Star Wars came out, that movie was heavily lambasted by critics as “fascism in space” and “fantastical nonsense” that would spoil the youth.

In this TV series, the two good-looking girls usually get called to a new investigation by means of a beeping ring. They meet up with S.I.R., who comes across like a female “M”, 22 years before Judy Dench arrived on the scene. They’re then sent off to investigate strange occurrences. These usually turn out to be the machinations of criminals, using strange gadgets or methods that would make any John Steed-Emma Peel screenwriter happy.

Let me give you some examples. A computer which can hypnotize people; a club for people who enjoy stolen paintings; an artist who steals a woman’s hair; fake nuns that create fake relics, and so on. One episode features a female gang who use subliminal influence through television, in order to put women in top company positions. They do this to gain access to financial means and further feminism: I guess some things never get old! ;-)

The budget can’t have been high. Considering that these two investigators work for a European authority in Brussels, it’s strange how the series usually takes place in and around Munich – with the few exceptions when the show allowed them to look into a case in Italy! It has to be said, the girls don’t really go in with guns blazing. Usually they take weapons from the villains or their goons, to gain the upper-hand. Though it isn’t too difficult, since the villains in these 25-minute episodes are not so smart, and make mistakes that really make you shake your head. Mind you, the girls are not exactly subtle in their investigative technique either…

The series is mainly what we would call “camp” today. It’s a very odd TV relic from the early 70s, though I had a lot of fun watching the series. Just to see the hairstyles, fashion, cars or interior designs of that time is always a marvel to behold for me! The girls themselves… truth is, they both lack a bit charisma. One would wish for them to have some good banter, clever lines of dialogue, tongue-in-cheek humor – or at least some slightly believable fighting choreography, like Miss Peel in The Avengers.

But I can’t really judge such a series negatively on the basis of a comparison to British TV series, considering it essentially stands alone in German TV history [there were a couple of other series at the time that flirted with the fantastic, but as far as I know, this was the only one with female leads]. And as German TV of the time, they are sympathetic nevertheless, Biggi usually playing the decoy with her female charms. She’s a bit too confident of her appeal, but of course that’s entirely subjective.

I personally preferred Peitsch’s Conny, who sometimes also gets into a criminal group’s business, disguised and/or with an alias. Especially in the beginning, the stories unfold quickly, sometimes so quickly you wonder if they make much sense at all, or if some important explanations has been forgotten. It gets better as the series progresses. There is often a reward for the girls at the end of an episode, though for a number of reasons they aren’t allowed to take it, and S.I.R. invests it back into the organization.

Anita Kupsch, a Berlin theatre actress, would become more well-known at the end of the 80s when she played the secretary of Günther Pfitzmann in medical series Praxis Bülowbogen. I only know Monika Peitsch due to her damsel-in-distress role in Edgar Wallace movie The Hunchback of Soho (1966), which also featured Anneliese Uhlig, the S.I.R. of the series. The real famous name in the cast is music composer Klaus Doldinger, who would go on to compose soundtracks for movies such as Das Boot and The Neverending Story. There are also quite a number of well-known German actors guest-starring over the 32 episodes of the show, though none of international renown.

While today’s viewers may look, with some amusement, down on this strange German attempt at being different, at the time it was produced this was groundbreaking. The idea of women taking over the investigator’s job was absolutely unthinkable for Germany at that time. It would take five more years, until 1978, before the first female police inspector would appear in Tatort (an extremely long-running and realistic crime investigation series, still being made today). That would eventually help lead to a lot of TV-Krimi series of female police investigators in the 1990s.

Meanwhile, these two heroines very often worked “undercover”, used fake identities to get close to the baddies, had their own cars, flirted without marrying (yes, I know: scandalous!) and being… what we would call today a normal single woman. It’s easy to to forget how unusual such a life-style used to be, not that long ago. As ridiculous as this series may appear, it came out 3 years before Charlie’s Angels and 8 before Cagney & Lacey. At the time, it was quite unnatural for a “normal” TV show to feature women in this kind of position. Though, admittedly, British shows such as The Avengers, as well as American ones like The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. and Honey West had been there before – albeit with a much higher budget and often not having to deal with a 30 minutes limit for every episode. 

Also, at the time of the series’ release (1973) the whole idea of “Europol” was indeed Science Fiction: In reality the decision to create this organization was made as late as 1992 and the authority didn’t became a reality until 1999. So, yes, one can actually call this series kind of prophetic! Overall, I give Okay, S.I.R. three stars. One for being ahead of its time, one for the wonderful weird campiness of the 70s style and one for trying to emulate the style of shows like The Avengers and Mission Impossible – even if they were, admittedly, better able to pull it off.

Ocean’s 8

  By

★★★
“Diamonds are eight girls’ best friend.”

I have not seen any of the entries on the male side of the Ocean’s franchise, so can’t say how this compares. Maybe it would have helped – I sense there were efforts to tie them together, with a pic of George Clooney (whom I assume played the late brother of Bullock’s character). Maybe it would have hindered – even with my ignorance of the series, the heist movie we get here seems more than slightly familiar. The obvious touchstone here is the gender reversal of Ghostbusters, though while that was a reboot of the franchise, this is just another entry. Female-led, to be sure, but part of the universe, rather than writing over it. Perhaps that explains why this didn’t receive a fraction of the backlash; the lack of any significant, pre-existing rabid Ocean’s fanbase is perhaps also a factor.

And, having watched this, I’m not exactly inspired to fill in the blanks in my prior knowledge. This is unquestionably competent, even reaching the level of well-made on occasion – yet is entirely bland and completely forgettable. Maybe that explains the lack of backlash; no-one could be bothered. After all, there has never been a revolt triggered by vanilla pudding. Debbie Ocean (Bullock) gets out of jail, and along with former criminal associate Lou (Blanchett), puts together a team to steal the legendary Toussaint necklace. Since this is locked in the impenetrable Cartier vaults, the plan involves first getting it brought out for a gala at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, using a bankrupt fashion designer (Bonham-Carter) and a patsy to wear it (Hathaway). Then, it’s “just” a case of replacing it with a fake and getting away with the real thing.

I guess this is a “crime procedural,” with the focus on the procedures used by the criminals to commit their misdeeds. As such, you kinda wonder why they bother throwing  so many participants into the plot, since there’s not enough time, or apparently, interest, in making them three-dimensional characters. [One is played by “Awkwafina”: I’m not sure which is more cringey, taking inspiration for your name from a crappy brand of bottled water, or spelling it that way] These are more like well-dressed chess pieces – there are points where the heavy branding echoed Sex and the City – being moved around New York to achieve the end-game for Debbie and, to some extent, Lou.

However, it’s during the actual robbery when the film is at its most entertaining, as we get to watch the scheme unfold, reminding me of the old military adage, “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” Fortunately, it’s an extended sequence, which helps repay the viewer for sitting through the far less interesting stuff both before and after. Again, I don’t know how closely that aspect apes the structure of its predecessors; whether or not it does, what seems a fairly lazy approach to its script is a bit disappointing. I was adequately amused. Definitely no less, but no more either.

Dir: Gary Ross
Star: Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter

Operation Lipstick

  By

★★★
“I have a knack for stealing hearts, just like the way I steal your wallet.”

So warbles Li Bing (Cheng), a second-generation thief who has abandoned the criminal life and now performs a cabaret turn which is part song-and-dance, part magic act. These efforts to go straight are derailed when her former partner (Lee) shows up, demanding shelter due to being pursued for a wallet he lifted. She agrees to help, only if he returns the stolen property: when they try to do so, they find the owner now lacking a pulse.

It’s all part of a convoluted caper involving a dead nuclear scientist, and the microfilm containing the secrets of the atomic engine on which he was working. Various parties want said data, including: a Triad gang specializing in espionage, who operate out of a rival nightclub; the local counter-intelligence authorities, who recruit Li to their cause; and freelance operative Zhang Yee (Chung), who reluctantly partners up with Li and provides the romantic interest. The trail involves the key to a locker in a Turkish bath-house, which in turn leads to a hollow statue that does NOT contain the microfilm. So, where is it?

I would likely have appreciated some kind of scorecard, to help me figure out who was part of which faction, and perhaps with a chart indicating the McGuffin in play at this particular point. The key? The statue? The fake copy of the key, which I may have forgotten to mention earlier? It’s all rather confusing, a cinematic version of three-card monte, in which the elements are swirled around at a dizzying speed, apparently designed to perplex, rather than enlighten. Yet, it remains entertaining, in the way only a Cantonese cover-version of James Bond could be.

Depite the poster, the talents  of Cheng that are put to use here are more towards the musical end, rather than the martial side. Indeed, save for a battle around the bath-house against a pair of enemy agents, and a roof-top face-off against the head of the Triad gang, it’s light on the meaningful action for her. Despite this, it certainly qualifies for inclusion, with Li demonstrating a persistent level of smart feistiness that is not out of line with her more fisticuff-oriented roles. [I’d love to have seen a prequel depicting her thieving days, and explaining how she ended up becoming a nightclub act!]

The best parts are when the film is at its most inventive, such as the trio of singing assassins with their lethal musical instruments, also a nightclub act. Bit of a giveaway that the lyrics to their song go, “We are world-famous for assassination, a few notes and you’re dead”! And if I ever become an evil overlord, who has access to a fiendish death machine, I will always check who is in said machine before I activate it, even if I am sure I placed my prisoner in there a few minutes earlier… Although sporadic, I found those fun moments did provide enough entertainment to repay my investment of time.

Dir: Umetsugu Inouye
Star: Cheng Pei Pei, Paul Chang Chung, Pang Pang, Lee Kwan

One Armed Swordswoman

  By

★★★
“Mostly armless…”

Official disclaimer. I watched two seventies Taiwanese kung-fu flicks the past weekend, this one and Revengeful Swordswoman, and I’m having serious difficulty keeping them separated. You are therefore warned that some plot elements discussed here, may actually have seeped over from Revengeful, or vice-versa…

When we first meet heroine Li Feng (Chang), her count of functioning limbs does actually surpass one – it’s after she is poisoned by a blade wielded by one of her numerous bandit enemies, that the title comes true. She’s rescued from death by the mysterious, masked Black Dragon, albeit at the cost of her infected arm, before he leaves. Li wants to locate both the Dragon, to thank him, and the bandit responsible for her limb-deficiency. She manages the former first, eventually having a one-night stand with him, only to be callously dumped the next day (he more or less insinuates she’s a whore, giving her a pearl which she crushes, bare-handed).

She vows revenge on the man who took her chastity, and to this end, begins going after anyone wandering the countryside in his trademark hat and cape (looking like a sword-wielding beekeeper). Which, it turns out, is a surprisingly large number of people, only adding to the number of those who hold a grudge against Li. Admittedly, in this case, I can see their grounds for grievance, since they were guilty of not much more than an unlucky choice of couture. It turns out, too, that Li’s desire for vengeance is greatly misplaced, with her seducer only having been pretending to be the Black Dragon, in order to gain her confidence.

This 1972 film comes five years after Jimmy Wang Yu played the male predecessor to Li Feng in Chang Cheh’s seminal Hong Kong film, One-Armed Swordsman, which created a new bloody genre of martial arts movies, populated by anti-heroes. However, a more direct ancestor here is probably the Japanese series which included 1969’s Lady Sazen and the Drenched Shallow Sword; the protagonist there was also 50% short in the ocular department. [Though the character of the disabled female warrior dates back even earlier, perhaps to 1937 and Onna Sazen, played by Hara Komako] As such, there isn’t much new, but I did like the idea that the heroine spends much of the film looking for revenge on an innocent party.

Chang does a decent job of fending for herself, despite the arm shortage, even if the surfeit of trampoline work in the action scenes is disappointing, especially given her occasionally impressive skills. At one point, it looked as though the Black Dragon was going to end up saving the day. Doesn’t quite happen like that, and Li ends up by a river, having to fight solo against, not only the main villain, but also his sidekicks and their spears that spray acid. This isn’t exactly what you’d call a traditional martial-arts weapon – indeed, it appears more likely to have strayed in from a sixties 007 knock-off – yet we’ll just about give it a pass. The same goes for this overall.

Dir: Sheng-En Chin
Star: Ching Ching Chang, Ming Chiang, Ming Tien, Ming Lei

Outsystem by M. D. Cooper

  By

Literary rating: ★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

This is certainly “hard” SF, by which I mean a story driven by (and to a large extent, more interested in) scientific advancements. In tits 42nd-century future, humanity has expanded to fill the entire solar system, and is now reaching out with colony ships to nearby stars. One such ship, the Intrepid, is being assembled at the Mars Outer Shipyards, one of the massive ring-like complexes which surround the planet. But not everyone wants the project to succeed. Major Tanis Richards, who will be one of the colonists, is first tasked with ensuring the project’s security. The scope of her job becomes apparent quickly, as immediately on arrival, she has to fend off a terrorist attack, trying to set off a nuke on the Intrepid. It’s just the first of a number of sabotage attempts.

There is a lot of tech here, to the extent that the book includes multiple appendices, devoted to explanations of it. Everyone is interfaced to networks, each other and their own AIs – Tanis’s is called Angela – and medical advances mean age is now little more than a number. I found it a bit much, as if technology had become a gigantic, all-encompassing “Mary Sue” of unstoppable power. Whatever the problem… Well, there’s an app for that. The reality, as we’ve seen, is that new technology tends to create as many new problems as it solves: you don’t get much sense of that here. The issues are more old fashioned than that: terrorism is now corporate-sponsored, rather than state-sponsored.

The storyline also tends to get bogged down at times, in an alphabet soup of organizational structure. It seems as if the Major spends as much time in meetings, as actively hunting down the bad guys: it almost turns her into the world’s first bureaucratic action heroine. There are frustratingly incomplete hints at her past, with an incident which caused her to be tagged “The Butcher of Toro“. Though it’s suggested this is an unfair sobriquet, the incident – whatever it was – appears to have played a significant role in her decision to apply to become a colonist. Such an important piece of character motivation likely should not be swathed in such mystery, though it’s possible the details are revealed in one of the later volumes in this three-book arc.

Re-reading the above, this all seems highly negative, more so than it deserves – though I note Cooper recently released an expanded version of this and its sequel, which does suggest he was perhaps not satisfied with the first version. Still, despite flaws, such as a supporting cast who could have used more fleshing out (particularly Joe, the uninteresting romantic interest), I found the pages turned at a a solid rate, and the action sequences generally hit the spot. The version I read included the first couple of chapters of part two, A Path in the Darkness, and it possesses a good enough premise to make me consider going forward. Less is likely more, and the smaller-scale setting of the Intrepid is perhaps a better fit for Cooper’s voice, which isn’t strong enough to populate the entire solar system here.

Author: M.D. Cooper
Publisher: The Wooden Pen Press, available through Amazon, in both printed and e-book versions.

Operações Especiais

  By

★★★½
“Brazilian whacks.”

The Brazilian special police unit, known as BOPE (Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais) have a ferocious reputation for a hard-edged approach to its work. This is, likely, necessary for surviving the favelas (slums) of Rio in which they operate, going up against heavily-armed drug dealers. But with this also comes a “by any means necessary” approach, which has come in for criticism. They’ve been the topic of films before, most notably the incredible Elite Squad, which is an all-time classic of action cinema (and removed any chance of us attending the 2016 Olympics). It’s into this obviously macho environment, that rookie policewoman Francis (Pires) is dropped, and has to make her way.

Early on, this is a heroine who is seriously out of her depth, being a former hotel administrator, who opted to join the police after a robbery at her place of work. Quite how she ends up on the squad is a bit vague: quotas may have been involved. Anyway, they’ve just succeeded in flushing the bad guys out of Rio, but the perps have taken root in a suburb instead, so for their next mission, BOPE are sent there to supplement/replace the local cops. Initially, both residents and city government are delighted to have someone there, following an incident in which local kids were shot. But after the gang members are defeated, the squad decide to turn their attention to the resident corrupt politicians. All of a sudden, they aren’t quite so welcome any more…

I loved Francis’s character arc: far from initally being any kind of bad-ass, her reactions during the first raid and subsequent gun-battle are much closer to the “cowering in a corner” which would likely be my personal approach to coming under attack. Her courage is latent, and somewhat misdirected – early on, she’s chewed out by her commanding officer, after risking herself to drag a wounded suspect out of the line of fire, something which clearly demonstrates the attitudes of BOPE. But she gets a tip from a prisoner, which pays off, giving her the self-confidence to come out of her shell. She blossoms from there, to the point that, by the end, she has become almost indistinguishable from her colleagues in terms of that attitude.

It does share a certain, alluring crypto-fascist attitude to Elite Squad: it seems to suggest that the cops deserve greater slack, since they never have anything but the best interests of the population at heart. At least Squad was willing to admit the potential for corruption – something this largely skirts, with the main villain carefully portrayed as a former cop. It also ends abruptly, feeling more like a pilot than a fully rounded feature, with too many loose ends. It’s still a sharp piece of social observation, with some good characters; her commanding officer is a particularly delight, someone who clearly gives not a damn for the niceties of convention. However, I’m still not likely to book any holidays to Rio for a while.

Dir: Tomas Portella
Star: Cleo Pires, Fabrício Boliveira, Thiago Martins, Marcos Caruso

Operation Chaos, by Poul Anderson

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Literary rating: ★★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½

operationchaosPoul Anderson (d. 2001) was one of the leading lights of speculative fiction in the latter half of the 20th century. He’s perhaps best known for his science fiction; but this excellent novel is a sample of his fantasy.

We’re in an alternate mid-20th-century U.S. here, in a world where magic, though dormant since the Bronze Age, somehow reasserted itself around the turn of the 20th century, and became the major force (rather than technology –although here technology adapts to and works with it) that revolutionized modern society, industry and daily life. (For instance, rather than using cars, people travel by broomstick or magic carpet.) The magical system is normally incantational, manipulating impersonal and morally neutral paranatural forces in the world (but the villains may also invoke demonic powers). It’s also a world where science has demonstrated and accepted the reality of Deity, the afterlife, atonement, moral law, and the angelic and the demonic, without establishing (or denying) the truth of any particular theistic creed. That represents our hero/heroine’s take on the spiritual (and apparently Anderson’s as well) –and it’s a theme taken seriously here.

Steve and Ginny, the aforementioned H/h, are, respectively, a werewolf (Anderson’s werewolves, like Anthony Boucher’s, are simply people who can shapeshift into wolves –that doesn’t make them vicious or madly homicidal) and a white witch. When we first meet them, they’re Army officers serving in World War II –but in this reality, the Allies’ main adversary is a restored, brutal Islamic Caliphate (considered heretical by some other Muslims) that’s out to conquer the world and impose its version of theocracy. (This book was published in 1971; it’s interesting to see how subsequent history has developed in the Middle East, with ISIS, etc.) And of course this is a war in which magic is the principal weapon employed by both sides. At the book’s outset, our co-protagonists are tasked with a probably suicidal mission that’s vital to the war effort, and from there the action and the jeopardies continue thick and fast. But their real battle is much bigger than the war, and the real Adversary isn’t the Caliphate. Who is he? Well… he’s our Adversary, too.

Steve serves as our narrator; Anderson uses the conceit that he’s in a trance state, communicating across the ether between alternate realities to share the benefit of his experiences with any receptive inhabitants, who share a common cosmic struggle and destiny. IMO, that device works well. The author’s prose style is conversational, but erudite, with a rich substratum of dry, dead-pan humor in the way things are phrased and the matter-of-fact acceptance of how magic permeates daily life. But this is also a serious book, with lethal violence and life-and-death (or worse) danger, defining moral choices, real psychological depth in places, and underlying spiritual and social messages that are as serious as a heart attack. Anderson’s solid knowledge of worldwide mythology and occult lore enriches the tale, as does his accurate understanding of Gnosticism and its significance. Steve and Ginny are characters readers can readily like, admire and root for. Bad language here is limited to an occasional h- or d-word, and there’s no inappropriate sexual content.

Ginny is a strong, capable woman with a cool head in a crisis, iron nerves and will, quick reflexes and an ability to handle physical challenges thrown at her by demons and elementals. She acquits herself well in combat situations; though she’s mostly up against non-human foes. During the war, though, she proved herself a lethal fighter against enemy soldiers as well (although we don’t actually get to see her most deadly exploit directly –Steve just finds the bodies after the fact!).

All in all, I found this a great read, from a master writer at the top of his game. My wife greatly liked the book, too, as well as another of the author’s novels we’ve read together years ago, The High Crusade. The main female character there, Lady Catherine, isn’t really an action heroine as such for most of the book –but when the chips are down, she can come through, and that book can also appeal to fans of strong heroines.

Author: Poul Anderson
Publisher: Baen Books, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

On Basilisk Station, by David Weber

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Literary rating: ★★★★½
Kick-butt quotient: Depends on how you define it…

onbaskiliskThis series opener is one that was been on my radar for a long time, so I was delighted to finally read it last year! Although I’m a science fiction fan, I’m not generally attracted to military SF, which of course this is. But that’s mostly because my impression is that much of that sub-genre concentrates heavily on futuristic military hardware, to the neglect of the human element (and I think the human element is what good literature is all about). But that’s not a problem here. To be sure, there’s futuristic military hardware, and techno-babble (see below). But the human element, and a rousing tale of human adventure, is the core of the book.

Ever since junior high school, I’ve appreciated historical fiction about the British Navy in the age of sail; I like the ambiance, the ethos, and the action of the storylines. Weber’s a kindred spirit in this respect, and particularly a fan of C. S. Forester (to whom he dedicates this novel). The latter’s Horatio Hornblower series provides the inspiration for Weber’s series, and the identity of the initials of the respective protagonists is no coincidence. This has led some Hornblower fans to cry “Foul!” and “Rip-off!” I’m not joining in those cries, however. Yes, Weber has definitely brought something of the flavor of the earlier novels, set in the life of an ocean-going navy in the Napoleonic Wars, to this tale of a space-faring navy in the far future. Honor’s Manticore is a kingdom with an aristocracy and a political system reminiscent of Regency England (the author actually provides a plausible historical explanation for this!), while its rival, Haven, has affinities to revolutionary France. And Honor has heroic qualities in common with Hornblower, as well as her initials. But that’s where the parallels end. She’s her own person, not a Hornblower clone, and I did not see the plot as duplicating anything from the earlier series; it’s original. (Granted, I’ve only read one Hornblower novel.) What we have here, IMO, is an SF homage to Forester’s canon, not a plagiarized rip-off.

Of course, it’s an updated homage, most noticeably in that the all-male world of Hornblower’s navy has finally met the world of women’s liberation. Not only do we have a female protagonist; women in Manticore (which currently happens to have a ruling Queen) enjoy full role equality with men, can occupy positions of power, and serve in the space navy on an equal footing with males. Being an (equalitarian) feminist myself, that’s music to my ears! Moreover, I’m a long-standing admirer of strong, take-charge, combat-capable heroines, and that definitely describes Honor. She’s got the smarts, guts, determination and decisiveness to captain a warship; but more than that, she’s a person of integrity, ethics, loyalty, and moral courage. (Honor isn’t just her name; it’s a quality that defines her.) No, she’s not perfect (she’s got a temper, that she sometimes has to fight to control!); but she’s a woman you can respect and admire. Her “kick-butt quotient” above is ambiguous only because she doesn’t engage in direct or one-on-one combat here (although she’s a strong, solidly-built woman, and back in her naval academy days once defended herself against a would-be rapist, thrashing him soundly). But she does command a starship, with cool-headed resolution and skill, in lethal ship-to-ship combat.

Weber’s supporting cast is life-like as well. His plotting is good, carefully developed and well-paced, with real suspense that rises to nail-biting intensity at the climax. Likewise, his world-building is capable and vivid. Spot-on political commentary with real contemporary relevance is embedded naturally in the storyline; and in the tradition of heroic action adventure, the moral message here is one that’s supportive of virtue, duty, patriotism, and loyalty.

That’s not to say it’s an unflawed debut. As other reviewers have noted, Weber’s partial to the info-dump technique. There are a couple of long ones here. The first one explains Manticore’s political system, and at least has the merit of being interesting in its own right. The second attempts to explain the mechanics of FTL space travel and hyper-space currents, as they work in the author’s imaginary view of the galaxy, in such a way as to provide a veneer of hard science. How valid any of this is (even by the standards of modern quantum theory, which I don’t understand or necessarily even fully accept!) I don’t know, and don’t care; and the excursion through it left me slightly glassy-eyed. I don’t have to have a solid basis in known science for my SF, so I’d have been happy with much less explanation –just a basic indication of what the spaceships can or can’t do. (If he wanted to include all this techno-babble, IMO, Weber would have been better off to put it in an appendix, as he does with his extensive discussion of Manticorean chronology –though my copy is missing a page of this. I didn’t miss it!)

There’s also a significant amount of profanity and obscenity here (though not from Honor); mostly from villains or military types under severe stress. (Readers who dislike extremely grisly violence should be warned that they’ll find some of that here, too!) But despite these factors, this was easily a four-and-a-half star read for me!

Author: David Weber
Publisher: Baen Books, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book. But the first two volumes, this and Honor of the Queen, are actually for free from the publisher, in electronic formats.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Our Girl

  By

★★★★
“GI Molly”

ourgirlMolly Dawes (Turner) has just turned 18, works in a nail-salon, lives on a council estate with her five siblings, pregnant mom and unemployable father, and has a Muslim boyfriend who is cheating on her. Oh, she looks kinda like a chav version of Daenerys Targaryen too, but given her unsurprising lack of dragons, has no apparent future. Throwing up at the end of a night out with her gal pals, she finds herself in front of an Army recruitment office, and decides it offers a potential way out from her dead-end life. Naturally, it’s not quite as easy as that, since her boyfriend is unimpressed, and her parents think the big announcement is that she’s pregnant. But she persists, and the film follows her journey through basic training, as the mouthy peroxide blonde turns into a combat medical technician.

Yes, it’s a fair criticism that this is heavily pro-Army, occasionally feeling like a recruitment video more than a movie. But it doesn’t soft-pedal the dangers at all. Indeed, a constant thread in the second half is Molly’s reluctance to write the “letter from the grave” required for all recruits, to be sent home in the event of their death, and perhaps the film’s most poignant moment has a ceremony at a war memorial, with a veteran reading John McCrae’s poem, In Flanders Fields. But the film’s biggest strength is undeniably Turner, an escapee from long-running British soap EastEnders. She captures perfectly the multi-faceted character of Molly, who wants more out of life, but has no apparent way to get it. In that aspect, this reminded me somewhat of Dangerous Lady, and I could see the heroine here ending up slipping into crime to escape her situation – and doing just as well. But Molly lacks self-confidence – describing herself as stupid even when that clearly isn’t the case – and that, along with the opportunity, is what the military provides.

There’s an interesting subplot where Molly talks about basic training with another recruit, who compares the Army to a cult, designed to break an individual down so they can build you back up the way they want. He means it disparagingly – and later is tossed out, as “unfit for Army service”, apparently not having fooled anyone. But the film seems to be making the case that this is not necessarily a bad thing, because the end product, particularly in this case, appears to be a much more productive member of society than the one who enlisted in the cult. Even if it’s also someone who is now estranged from her pals, her boyfriend  and some of her family as a result. Thought-provoking and engaging, this was turned into a five-part series, that I think I may now have to track down.

Dir: David Drury
Star: Lacey Turner, Flossy Grounds, Daniel Black

Operation Angelica, by Juliene Lloyd

  By

Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

operation angelicaFull disclosure at the outset: I accepted the author’s offer of a free copy of this book, in exchange for an honest review. Author Lloyd dedicates this debut novel, appropriately, “to all the invisible heroes in the world who risk their own lives to save others.”

It’s the opener for a projected series, the Vormund/Ames Files, dealing with a secretive consulting firm that caters to governments and businesses with needs in the security and counter-terrorism area. What they provide is usually advice and analysis –but there are times when they go beyond that. While they’re not amoral mercenaries simply out for a buck –they choose to be on the side of good, not evil– they may operate on the edge of the law, and in operations where their employers sometimes might want some “plausible deniability.” The author’s own comment (in a personal message to this reviewer) sums her work up best: “There are serious themes, but framed in terms of good, evil, and hope. I consider my characters to be imperfect people trying their best in an imperfect world.”

Though published this year, the book is set in 2008. A few months before it opens, a small party of innocent and idealistic American botanists ventured into the jungles of Honduras, researching medicinal plants. Unfortunately, they blundered into the territory used by drug lord Hector Vega, and while trying to flee from a fire fight between his minions and a rival gang, they were all brutally gunned down. Both the U.S. and Honduran governments know, from eyewitness testimony, that Vega was responsible; but his political connections and back-scratching arrangements give him blank-check immunity. He’s not as home free as he imagines, however, because the grief-stricken fiancee of one of the murdered men is a soft-spoken young woman from Georgia named Elizabeth Ashton. Liz is a decent, ethically-oriented person who cares about others and about doing the right thing. She’s also a professional sniper for the FBI, with the rank of Special Agent, and probably as deadly a markswoman with a rifle as it’s humanly possible to be.

The plot here has two focal points of action (and this doesn’t disclose anything that’s not already outlined in the cover copy): the Vega problem in the early chapters, and the main plot strand, code-named “Operation Angelica.” Law enforcement runs in Liz’s family (her father is a county sheriff, and her brother a state trooper); respect for legal due process and commitment to basic justice are both important principles for her. When they’re in irreconcilable conflict, and she has to decide which one trumps the other, she doesn’t take it lightly. Personally, I don’t have any problem with her decision (I’m much less hard on her on that score than she is on herself!). But it’s one that, eventually, brings her to the notice of the Vormund/Ames management –who are impressed rather than scandalized. That leads to a job offer (and given the series title, it’s no surprise that she accepts!).

The company’s current big project in hand is a rescue mission for a group of hostages –especially a critically ill journalist with both Columbian and French citizenship– held by a drug-trafficking Marxist guerrilla rebel group in the South American jungle. We also have a sub-plot involving a high-ranking CIA official with a gambling-debts problem and a lot fewer ethical scruples than he needs to have.

Lloyd’s prose style is accomplished and assured, which is to say that she handles diction, syntax, and vocabulary very well (a refreshing experience nowadays!). In 253 pages, I only found four typos, which indicates pretty good proofreading. She also appears to have genuine technical knowledge of firearms (although modern pistols don’t have to be “cocked,” as one is here; but many writers make that minor mistake) and of the training, procedures and equipment involved in SWAT-style ops; I don’t have personal experience in that area, but the writing has a solidly realistic feel to me. Not only Liz, but all of the major characters here are clearly delineated and lifelike.

Character and relationship development occupies more of the book than action, as does planning, intelligence gathering and set-up –that’s also realistic for this type of thing, where the time involved in actual gun-blazing action, if you’ve planned well, is actually relatively brief. That said, there’s a good deal of taut tension that mounts steadily before the shooting starts, and there’s a high body count when it’s finished. (Also, GWG fans will appreciate the fact that this novel gives us at least two major female characters who can handle a gun capably, not just one; CIA agent Katherine Williams is certainly one formidable lady!)

For the most part, the plotting here is linear and straightforward, without a lot of convolution, and this is a quick read. I withheld the fifth star in my rating because of several logical missteps in the CIA-official subplot; but that didn’t stop me from really liking the book, and I definitely intend to follow the series!

Note: Liz and other characters use a certain amount of bad language, of the d/h/s/a-word sort, at times, but no obscenity or religious profanity. Their speaking style is well within the bounds of realism for these types of characters and situations. One of the flashbacks has Liz recalling a conversation she and her fiance had when they were lying together in bed, and it’s clear that another couple make love at one point; but there’s no explicit sex, and Lloyd doesn’t portray any of these four people as promiscuous types.

Author: Juliene Lloyd
Publisher: Dark Sword Press. Available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.

[A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads]