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Just finished Conan the Conqueror audio book from the Conan series.

History:
As with most of Robert Howard’s works, this one has been edited and came through many different sources before reaching the form it has today. Though titled Conan the Conqueror now, it was originally published as a 5-part serial in Weird Tales magazines in 1935-6 under the name The Hour of the Dragon.  A British publisher (Dennis Archer) originally turned down some of Howard’s collected short stories, but suggest the idea of a novel to him.  This is the result of that effort, but the publisher when bankrupt before the novel could be printed.  It wasn’t until it was bought by Gnome Press in 1950 that it earned the title Conan the Conqueror and was finally published in book format.

Story: (spoilers)
The story takes place later in Conan’s life, during his reign as King of Aquilonia.  As with many Howard tales, he doesn’t follow a chronology of Conan’s life, but tells tales about the whole spectrum of his life as tales might be told around a campfire of a great warrior.  This story follows a plot by a group of conspirators to depose Conan in favor of Valerius, heir to Conan’s predecessor Numedides, whom Conan had slain to gain the throne. To accomplish this they resort to necromancy, resurrecting Xaltotun, an ancient sorcerer from the pre-Hyborian empire of Acheron. With his aid the Aquilonian army is defeated by that of the rival kingdom of Nemedia and occupied. Conan, captured, is slated for execution until the sympathetic slave girl Zenobia risks her life to free him.

Meanwhile, the conspirators are also learning that the ancient Xaltotun wishes to throw off the shackles of his co-conspirators and physically reform the world into the one he knew centuries before and conquer them as he once did.  The conspirators steal a gem that constantly burns with flame, the Heart of Ahriman, which they mistakenly think to be the source of Xaltotun’s terrible and unmatched power.  In reality, the gem is the only thing that can defeat Xaltotun.  Conan learns of this from temple priests persecuted by the conspirators armies, and Conan quests to retrieve the Heart of Ahriman from the thief sent to throw it in the sea.  He retrieves the stone after an epic voyage that takes him to the very heart of the corrupted Stygian temples, and sets to raising an army with neighboring countries to defeat Xaltotun, the conspirators, and reclaim his kingdom.

As the armies meet, an epic battle then erupts. Not only the clashing of armies, but the clashing of sorcery between the Heart of Ahriman and Xaltotun.  It’s an epic battle with many twists and a satisfying ending.

Summary:
Some consider this one of Howards best works.   I don’t know if I’d go that far, but it certainly is epic and certainly good.  I have to say I actually like the swashbuckling style of the free-roaming Conan more than the one that rules a kingdom.  Conan even ponders the idea of leaving ruling (which doesn’t seem to agree with his carefree style) and go back to those earlier days of pirating the seas and high adventures.  One gets to see many of the great traits that makes Conan so awesome as a character.  His desire to join into combat during the first fights is notably different than the tone you would read in many novels today.  Conan is certainly a lover of battle and adventure, and it’s fun to read.
Overall, I give this story a solid A-, and recommendation for anyone that would like to further their reading of Conan.  I wouldn’t recommend it as a first introduction to Conan since this story takes place later in his life after much of his adventuring is done; but it’s a great story for those familiar with the series.

We’ve all probably seen Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001.  Its use of symphonic music, mesmerizingly slow expositions, fantastic futuristic sets, and what-the-heck-did-I-just watch ending are part of movie history.  I dare say, however, that most people don’t know what the ending, nor the movie itself, was trying to communicate.  I certainly didn’t the first few times I watched it in my college years.  Rampant speculation and wild claims about it’s meaning have been made for years. I personally adhere to a much more practical and straightforward interpretation given by Kubrick himself, but there is even an official website devoted to answering these questions.

So, to help me understand better, I went and read Arthur C Clarke’s book version.

Working Together
The history behind 2001 is interesting.  Kubrick wanted to make an epic space movie after pondering the idea of extra-terrestrial life; but didn’t have any source material or direction.  Kubrick was searching for the best way to make a movie about Man’s relation to the universe, and was, in Clarke’s words, “determined to create a work of art which would arouse the emotions of wonder, awe,…even, if appropriate, terror”.  Kubrick met with Clarke, and hit off a relationship.  According to the book’s opening notes, the book and the movie were written nearly side-by-side; and is based of Clarke’s short story “The Sentinel”.  Towards the end, Clarke’s writing wasn’t much ahead of Kubrick’s filming.  Kubrick would even come over to Clarke’s place for dinners to talk while Clarke was finishing the book, and Kubrick was filming right behind him.  Consequentially, the book and movie parallel each other quite well.

The Story
While the movie follows the book very closely, we get a LOT more helpful details and explanation in the book than the movie version.  We start with our early simian ‘ancestors’ not doing so well.  They’re barely scraping by and in a constantly daily struggle for basic survival.  They then encounter the monolith; which mysteriously just appears outside their camp one day. It is presented as an entity/machine actively wishing to changing them.  The simians start making huge, evolutionary leaps forward in capabilities as the monolith ‘grabs them’ with an invisible force each day.  One by one it teaches them to use their hands, perform dexterity tricks, and even bits of thinking, etc.  The monolith isn’t perfect though – one of it’s experiments accidentally kills one of he simians.  Yet, the changing takes place better with some than others and we soon see the simians start to thrive and use the first tools.  It marks the first great turning point for man.  The monolith has clearly changed the course of evolution of these primitive creatures.
Fast-forward to the near future.  We encounter a team of men flying to the moon. There is a fake quarantine in effect to keep a the discovery of a monolith (called TMA-1) a secret.  In the book, we get a clear picture that this monolith is designed to be a cosmic ‘trip-wire’.  It is described as having been deliberately buried; but emitting a huge magnetic field that made it almost impossible to miss by surveying crews.  After it’s dug up, the first sunrays of a new dawn on the moon touch the monolith’s surface and activate it.  The tripwire of digging it up has been cut.  The monolith sends a massive signal towards Saturn while deafening those around it posed for pictures.
Fast-forward a bit further to the Discovery on it’s way to Saturn (in the book).  In the movie, the special effects guys apparently couldn’t get a facsimile of Saturn done well enough for Kubrick, so he decided to use Jupiter instead.  HAL the computer then does what he does best – go crazy and kill everyone but Bowman.  Bowman shuts HAL down and is finally told by Earth that his mission is really to go to the moon of Saturn where the signal of the monolith from the moon was sent and find out what is there.  We get the first clues that HAL went crazy because it was told conflicting information about the true nature of the mission, was forced to ‘lie’, and hence killed the crew in order to protect the real mission which they were in danger of discovering.  It’s an interesting side thread of how man can easily do this sort of mental gymnastics, while computers do not.  Symbology with man’s own evolutionary pains abound.
In the movie, this is where everything goes crazy – and we get no dialog for a long time.  Bowman descends to the surface of the Saturnine/Jovian moon and discovers a gigantic monolith.  It appears exactly the same as the one of the moon – but hundreds of times bigger.  Bowman utters his famous phrase “My God, it’s full of stars” and disappears.  In the movie, this is where a psychedelic trip down the rabbit hole commences.  In the book, it’s because Bowman sees that the monolith is actually a stargate, or wormhole entrance.  He is seeing the stars of the place where the other end lets out.  He enters, and is taken on a fantastic voyage across the galaxy.  He makes a stop at a cosmic ‘switchboard’ planet which is bathed in completely inverted light – implying a hyperspace of some sort.  He pops out again to pass great fleets of dead ships all floating lifeless next to a large dying star.  He is pulled in and sees a smaller white star orbiting the larger and is pulled into some sort of energy field where he awakes.
He is now in the famous white apartment of the movie.  Everything there has the appearance of reality; but is all fabricated as if looked at through TV.  Books open but have no real words in them.  The food is packed in all kinds of familiar containers but every one contains the same blue, edible paste.  Everything is a kind of ‘set’ piece.  His TV actually works, and broadcasts shows from several years back.  In one show, however, he sees a program in which he’s in the exact same hotel room as he is now.  Clearly his ‘keepers’ modeled it on what they saw on our television.
Bowman is then stretched and twisted, just like his earlier simian ancestors.  But this time, the evolution is on a whole new scale.  He can travel across the galaxy with a though.  His corporal form becomes mutable in age/time until he finally realizes he no longer needs it and transitions from his form to a higher form.  He travels back to earth where he destroys all the orbiting nuclear missile platforms with a thought.  He knows he is now to help his earth-bound brethren reach his new state of evolution. The book ends with him pondering how, but knowing “He’ll think of something”.  In this state, he is a star child.  A new being.  Capable of traveling infinity of space and time and change things with the force of his will alone.  It is our next evolutionary step.

The summary of the symbols:
So, we see the monolith is the active ‘force’ of evolution – the thing that facilitates a dramatic shift of our being to something higher.  We see two clear evolutionary steps of man.  From animal -> man -> star child.  Clarke indicates the monoliths have come from alien intelligence and origin; but the aliens nor their motivations and purpose are ever revealed.
In a broader sense, the monoliths are a symbol.  They stand for a key moment, a key input, a flip of a chromosome, a flash of …something… that sparks transformation and evolution of a species.  Kubrick/Clarke made that symbol a black box in the dimensions of 1x4x9. It indicates intelligence, form, and perfection instead of randomness and chaos.

The monolith is a symbol of something we do not know; but caused man to become something more than the other animals around him.  In many ways, this symbol is mutable.  One could even posit that while Clarke choose to attribute the step to higher alien intervention, theists might attribute it to God.  As a symbol, both of these could work.

Recommend:
Because of all this, 2001 is a great movie – but only once you get a much better picture of what is going on.  Reading the book is a huge step in that direction.  I give this book a solid A- since it helps one understand the movie so much better.  It is near required reading, however, for those that wish to understand and read the first exposition of this often-reoccurring theme of alien intervention in human evolution that is so prevalent in modern sci-fi.

After getting a bit tired of a string of Bond novels, I switched over to a series I’ve been interested in for some time.  The Conan Series.

For the un-initiated, there is a little history behind the Conan series.  While written by Robert Howard (1906-1936) in the early half of the 1900’s, most of his current novels as we have them today come from editors that collected and cleaned up his works that were original published in magazines and from notes.  The canonical editor for his work has more or less come to be L. Sprague de Camp.  This book is no different; and contains some of Conan’s (argueably) best stories.

The first story is considered one of the best, and is titled Red Nails.  It starts with the battle-hardened Valeria of the Red Brotherhood escaping the clutches of a nearby city in which she killed one of the chiefs who made unwanted advances.  She heads out into the unknown wilderness where she is found by Conan – who is tracking her down like a love-lorn puppy.  After some clever boasting, swaggering, and a little bit of threatening on both sides, they get distracted and cornered by a dragon.  In their escape, the spot a strange city hereto unknown to the outside world.  As they enter the city, they meet the strange inhabitants who have split into two camps and have been fighting a clan war for decades.  Valeria and Conan get embroiled in the fighting and the story takes many twists and turns as the truth behind the mysterious city, the clan leader that never grows old, and a missing wizard become clear.  It’s a great story – full of magic and no shortage of carnage.

The second story is the Jewels of Gwahlur. Conan is trying to track down the mythical and fabulous Teeth of Gwahlur from their hiding place in a mystic castle inhabited by an oracle.  He is in a race against the clock as the nearby town has sent a party of cultists to track them down as well.  Inside, they encounter the oracle (who is very different than they expect!), as well as the true guardians of the Teeth.  Another fabulous hack and slash as well as a great twisting and turning story.

The third story, Beyond the Black River, differes from the first two in that Conan is attempting to save a group of settlers and an outpost from a growing horde of attackers lead by an evil and mysterious dark lord.  The expedition into the frontier to track them down turns into a slaughter of Conan’s men, and they engage in a running battle back to the fort.  Conan turns to fight the dark creature and a fantastic final battle ensues.  The back and forth banter between Conan and the evil leader is priceless and really shows the fearlessness and cunning wit of Conan.

Overall, it’s a great collection.  I found myself surprised again and again by Howard’s originality and cleverness.  You rarely can guess what’s coming next, which keeps the story engrossing to the end.  The worlds he paints are equally fantastic.  They absolutely explode with imagination and originality.

While not for everyone’s palette in style, I give this a solid A and recommend to anyone who enjoys high adventure and great warrior characters.

Continuing my slightly out-of-order journey through Ian Fleming’s Bond novels, I just completed Thunderball.

Thunderball is a pretty pivotal book in the literary Bond series because of its introduction of SPECTRE and Ernest Stavro Blofeld.  Like many of the early Bond movies, the movie version of this book is very close to the book version.

The book starts comically enough with Bond being sent by M (who is on a health-kick) to Shrublands – an all-natural health spa.  Apparently there is a good in-story on this.  Fleming had been accused by critics that his books were too immoral.  The whole Shrublands portion is comically lampooned by Fleming – and later in the book makes a big point of pointing out that Blofeld doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, rarely eats and is apparently a virgin.  Take that do-gooders!  Being ‘healthy’ will just make you frustrated and a sexless evil villain!  Anyway, while at Shrublands, Bond unwittingly has a run-in with a SPECTRE member while trying everything to avoid the rigors of the food and health treatments.

Upon returning to duty, it is learned that SPECTRE has stolen two nuclear weapons via hijacking a training flight and landing it in the waters of the Bahamas.  Bond is sent on a hunch to check out the possible Shrublands guest which leads him to the Bahamas.  While there, Bond pairs up with Felix and learns of a ‘treasure hunting’ expedition that has all the right equipment for the kind of recovery operations that an operation like SPECTRE’s might need.  Further suspicions are aroused by their overly-squeaky clean crew and sailors headed by Emilio Largo.  While keeping up the public treasure-hunting facade, Largo is actually SPECTRE’s #2, and in charge of the recovery and delivery of the nuclear devices to their targets.  In the process of investigating, Bond meets Largo’s mistress Domino who actually snubs Bond’s first advances.  We meet the ruthless SPECTRE organization that kills it’s own dissenting members and get to see Bond at his trademark card-table antics when he takes a pile of money from Largo while sizing him up.  The story rises to a head as the clock ticks down and they chase Largo’s boat to the target and get into one big underwater battle with everything at stake.  It’s non-stop action, sinister characters, and Fleming’s usual vivid descriptions that make this a great read.

While there are far too many lucky coincidences that lead Bond down the right track, this is still a great (and a little terrifying) story.  Despite it’s grandiose plot and characters, it is handled very believably.  Honestly, many people have claimed that such a hijacking/nuclear threat was, and still is, just a matter of time.  While today it is more likely someone would get their hands on such a device from the fallen Soviet Union, or from a middle-east country, the threat is still very real today.  Even if the device stolen were fairly small yield – it would be more than enough to destroy the heart of most US cities and leave countless dead and irradiated.  It’s a terrifying and real threat in our world even today.

Overall, I think this book steals the top prize from my other top pick of the series – Moonraker. The writing by this point in Fleming’s career has gotten the kinks worked out, and the characters are very palpable, unique, and much more believable.  I give this a solid A and a highly recommend rating for anyone that just wants to pick one or two of the original Bond series to read.

Ah, now on to Ian Flemming’s Bond book 4 – Diamonds are Forever.

This book is only about 50/50 the same as the movie.  Bond is trying to track down a diamond smuggling ring this time.  He starts by slipping into the Spang mob’s supply chain by kidnapping and replacing one of their diamond couriers.  He meets the lovely Tiffany Case who is his mob ‘boss’ and they smuggle some of the stolen African diamonds into the US.  Bond tries to track through the hierarchy of the mob and get his hands on the mysterious Spang Brothers.  In the process, he goes to some horse racing, journeys to Vegas where he mixes it up with the Spang mob, and then has one final adventure on his trip back to England on the Queen Elizabeth.

While the adventure is grand in concept, this book falls far short of most of Fleming’s other novels.  It’s a bit schizophrenic in it’s plot lines with a few too many villains.  Also, the job itself of tracking down the diamonds is more like police work instead of the high government intrigue  we’re used too.  His smuggling of the diamonds with Tiffany case is a good bit of writing, but it falls apart again when he goes for some horse racing in which the delightfully evil, well-done, but far underutilized mob couple Kidd and Wint dump hot mud on the jockey that Bond bribed to toss a horse race in order to tease out the mob.

Bond adventures to Vegas, and decides to stir up the mob by ‘stealing’ money from the mob casino which is set up to pay our Bond’s smuggling pay via a rigged card game that Tiffany deals for him.  This starts the mob after him and eventually gets him captured.  He’s dragged out to the Spang estate – which is a somewhat ridiculous western-era town recreation.  Here we see Bond run completely out of ideas, and take a clean beating from Kidd and Wint.  It’s only by the action of Tiffany that he’s saved, and a train race ensues.  This whole plot line is weak and a bit schizophrenic.  Knowing what we do of mobsters, we’re wondering why they don’t just off bond with a few bullets and be done with it?  Why do these gangsters treat Bond with any respect or concern?  The height of hubris is when Bond, finally captured after killing at least half a dozen of Spang’s men, asks the Spang brother to make him a drink before he talks – and he DOES it.  In every story of mobsters I know they would have beaten him senseless and chopped off a finger for even opening his mouth.  To me, if feels very much like a very British Flemming trying to write about American gangsters from just what little scraps of info would have drifted back across the ocean of his time.  He doesn’t seem to really get mob behavior, and still tinges it with a bit of British culture.

Alas, Flemming pretty much flubs the whole track of the Spang brothers.  They make some amazing blunders for supposedly being so careful – and it just didn’t feel like Flemming knew what he was going to do with these characters.  It’s almost like he set it in motion, realized he was running out of space, and just ends the thread.  Badly.  It’s no surprise they never make it to any of the movie editions.  There’s so little of them present, and what there is is so schizophrenic, that there’s little to even grab hold of.  Probably the worst Bond villains in the books I’ve read to date.

The love interest with Tiffany is as equally disappointing.  She’s certainly an interesting character, but for being such a tough character, she just sorts of falls in love with Bond for little to no reason.  The final adventure they have on the cruise back to England also feels rushed and somewhat hollow and unbelievable.

So, Diamonds are Forever is a so-so book.  One could easily skip it and not miss anything; but for the true Bond fan, there’s plenty of good stuff in here to enjoy.  Give it a C+

I continue to make my way through Ian Fleming’s Bond novels – and this time it’s the mysterious Dr. No.

Set after ‘From Russia with Love’, Bond has recovered from the deadly poison attack and is put on a ‘routine’ checkup of a reporting station that went silent in Jamaica.  In what is supposed to be an easy R&R assignment, he discovers the evil Dr. No has people infiltrated large sectors of the locals and is likely behind the disappearances of the reporting station.  He is also apparently up to something on, and behind other mysterious disappearances at, his private Crab Key island.  Bond pairs up with the local Jamaican Quarrel and investigates.  We meet the beautiful and wild Honey Rider who’s grown up by her wits in the tropics gathering shells.  He is captured and after given luxurious treatment and dinner with Dr. No; he is subject to physical abuse as he is beaten, burned, and attacked by sea creatures on Dr. No’s torture course.   And of course we also meet the mysterious and evil Dr. No who wastes no time extolling his own prowess and intellect in true evil genius style.  Can Bond escape the torture course, rescue the girl, and destroy Dr. No?

Dr. No is another case in which the movie actually follows the book pretty closely – and in some ways – surpasses the book.  The characters are the same, but there are a few differences.  The pipe that the movie Bond crawls through in the movie is actually a torture course in the book.  Dr. No doesn’t have any nuclear reactor in the book, and his hands are simply claws, not the mechanical apparatus of the movie.  The death of Dr. No in the nuclear reactor of the movie was almost more cool than the ‘ironic’ death he gets in the book buried under a pile of guano. Dr. No’s reasons for keeping people off the island are due to his use of slave labor in the book, and his missile interception is secondary to profits from the island’s guano mining.

Technically, the writing shows it’s ‘pulpy-ness’ for sure.  Like usual Fleming novels, you’re not going to find any Pulitzer depth or anything resembling literary prose; but you will find a tight little book that keeps the action moving. His dated concepts of ‘good breeding’ and disdain of the Chinese and those of African-American descent are typically prejudiced and bigoted.  Bond’s in-servitude and only passing concern about the death of poor Quarrel leaves a particularly bad taste in your mouth.  Quarrel helps him, protects him, is more fit, stronger, of better character, and would follow Bond anywhere.  Yet barely half the love Quarrel should have got was given.  As in other Bond novels, we see the book Bond’s flaws much more clearly – he’s got far more imperfections than ever show in the suave movie Bond.

Yet there are some great parts.  In true stereotypical fashion, Bond is captured and taken to a beautiful dinner where Dr. No spills his life story because he believes only Bond is ‘smart enough’ to understand his achievements.  There is a great window into the ocean that is a technical marvel Dr. No built to show off his genius. But one of my favorite parts is the introduction of another spy-era villain fax-paux. When Bond is put through the torture maze and Honey is tied up outside to be devoured by crabs, nobody actually watches them or checks to make sure the job is done.  They just wander off at the critical moments and leave them to their oh-so-obvious escape.  Reminds me of the quote, “Now I’ll leave you alone to your almost certain doom by this complex apparatus with that innocuous looking pen and one inept guard.”

So, overall, we have the classic maniac and Bond must destroy him. A great little book, but you won’t get much more out of this than just seeing the movie.  It gets a B because it’s good, but you can get all of that and more out of the 2 hour movie.