Tales From Planet Earth, by Arthur C. Clarke

The Skinny

Score: 38%

Clarke was a pioneer in the field, but the field has moved on from his early writings. This outdated short story collection has only a couple of worthwhile reads.


The Meat:

This is a collection of short stories written by science fiction god Arthur C. Clarke. Most of them imagine a future world, and were originally published between 1950 and 1962, although a few are more recent.

In The Road to the Sea, a young man in a future earth visits a derelict city even as technologically advanced humans return from the stars to evacuate earth.

In Hate, a pearl diver with a grudge against Russia finds a recently submerged space vessel with a Russian astronaut trapped inside.

In Publicity Campaign, a peaceful alien race's visit to earth is made unpleasant by the unlucky timing of an immensely successful movie in which aliens arrive, War of the Worlds-like, to conquer earth.

In The Other Tiger, two men who are discussing the fact that in an infinite universe, all possible events must occur an infinite number of times are confronted with one of the least likely of events.

In The Deep Range, a future earth is imagined in which man's food and oil comes from culling whales, who are herded and bred in the tradition of old-style shepherding.

In If I Forget Thee Oh Earth, a young boy in a colony on the moon gets his first glimpse of a beautiful earth that he can never visit, as it is still spoiled by the effects of an atomic war.

In The Cruel Sky, two men who climb Mt. Everest using the world's first levitator packs get stolen by a storm and have to face a rough landing in the wilderness. While trying to come up with a plan for rescue, they are beset by a wild beast.

In The Parasite, a man from our time is visited by a mental parasite, a highly evolved, yet sadistic form of the human race that likes to view human suffering.

In The Next Tenants, a scientist on a remote island comes across another scientist who is grooming termites to be a competitor with humans for global dominance.

In Saturn Rising, an astronaut is approached by a hotel magnate who wants to build a hotel on one of Saturn's moons.

In The Man Who Ploughed the Sea, a trip in a homemade submarine leads the narrator to a scientist who has discovered the secret to mining gold and uranium from seawater.

In The Wall of Darkness, a very future earth (or perhaps another earthlike planet) is home to a race of humans who are prevented from exploring their planet by a mysterious wall of darkness that bifurcates the world.

In The Lion of Comarre, an intrepid genius sets out to rediscover a hidden Utopia in which machines put humans to sleep and ply them with images of their findest dreams.

In On Golden Seas, a US President decides to eradicate the deficit by mining the sea for gold.

Of all of these stories, the best are Hate and The Man Who Ploughed the Sea, which are, ironically, the least rooted in science. They have human stories that seemed mildly interesting, and that's the best that can be said of them. Hate is particularly good.

In all the rest, the sci fi has taken over, apparently eclipsing the need for realistic characters, motivation, or plot. And the sci fi itself generally seems dull, rooted as it is in the decades before computing. Unlike in the well known Clarke masterpiece "2001," the writing is, as a rule, very stilted. A few of the ideas are interesting, but many of them have been done to death (like the idea of a scientist working with insects to conquer the world-yawn). If you want to get more stories like 2001, you probably should pick up Clarke's oldest, and therefore least polished, work.

The Fat:

No new copies of this out-of-print book in stock, but you can buy it used for $0.75:

Buy it here from Amazon

The Fourth Hand, By John Irving

The Skinny

Score: 90%

This book is a middling effort by Irving, but that still makes it a masterpiece when compared to most other authors out there. Quirky characters interact in interesting ways, with the characteristic Irving signatures: weird sex, props given to great literature, and bizarre circumstances surrounding naive people.

The Meat:

I borrowed this book from the library with the thought that, since Irving has written three of my all-time favorites (Cider House Rules, Owen Meany, and Hotel New Hampshire), I should probably read everything else he's written in case there are other gems in his life's work

The Fourth Hand is not such a gem, but nearly half the book was a delight to read.

Irving departs from the formula that has guided other of his works that I've read. In The Fourth Hand, the characters are not insulated from the real world; as a television field reporter with a degree of fame, protagonist Patrick Wallingford is as immersed in the real world as it is possible for a minor celebrity to be. He gains international notoriety when his hand is eaten by lions while covering a story at a circus in India. A significant time after the accident, Patrick receives a hand transplant. The widow of the donor, Doris Clausen, demands visitation rights with the hand, which is, after all, a still-living part of her husband. Patrick falls in love with Doris, perhaps because, on first meeting him hours before the transplant, she has sex with him in order to conceive the child that she and Otto never could.

The doctor who performs the transplant, Dr. Zajac, is an extremely interesting character who tries to develop a relationship with his son despite the best efforts of his ex-wife. Zajac's frumpy housekeeper is so moved by the doctor's feelings for his son that she falls in love with him, and transforms herself into a sexpot in order to gain his affection.

The second half of the novel tracks Patrick's efforts to develop a relationship with Doris after his body has rejected her late husband's hand. At the same time, Patrick's dalliances with women and the office politics of his television anchor job become entangled in these efforts and each other.

Most of Irving's novels follow their protagonist from beginning to end; they are sprawling, and let you know how everything turns out. In this book, we get a section out of the middle of Patrick's life, and I was left wondering about the ending, and not in a good way. I would have preferred to see what contributed to the curiosities of Patrick's character; he is an affable man without any sense of "deepness," but we don't know why. The book tracks his development into someone with values and integrity, but there is something missing.

Despite these complaints, The Fourth Hand is an interesting read, and some of the scenes are absolutely delightful. As always, Irving finds a way to incorporate text from other authors; in this case, EB White's tales Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web share time with The English Patient. And the intricacies of certain characters should serve as a model for novelists everywhere. Dr. Zajac, who is unhealthily thin, a bird watcher, a former lacrosse player, a brilliant hand surgeon, a miserable observer of human nature, a struggling father, and more, is the prime example of how to make a character interesting and engaging.

Irving has tinkered with the formula that has made his writing such a unique joy; the deviations are, on balance, more negative than positive, but I hope that the experience will help him to produce more masterpieces.

The Fat:

$11.66 for a new copy, or just a penny for a used copy:

Buy it from Amazon here

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Cuba Libre, by Elmore Leonard

The Skinny

Score: 81%

Only an author with Leonard's experience could have pulled this off. Using his modern crowd-pleasing style, he blends a rootin', tootin' Western with a stuffy historical novel to extract the best from both worlds.


The Meat:

Cuba Libre represents a masterful handling of a middling genre. Leonard breathes life into a fascinating historical period (Cuba, 1989), but this isn't historical fiction in the literary sense.

Rather, this is a pulse-pounding modern suspense novel transposed into an authentic, western-friendly setting. The character development is significant and neatly woven into the text, but all aspects of the story are subservient to fast-paced action and crowd-pleasing plot twists.

Expect to meet heroic bandits and the requisite "hooker with a heart of gold." In this case, they have just enough of a scruffy exterior to be interesting.

People who like historical fiction may be pleasantly surprised by the way this book zips along, running us through a variety of historical settings and events at a breakneck pace. I would also recommend this to those who enjoy a good yarn-- fans of Louis Lamour or even Thomas Harris might find that this book injects that type of story with a little bit of weight.

The Fat:

$7.50 for the paperback new, or 1 penny:

Buy it at Amazon

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

The Skinny

Score: 85%

Biblical women are given a depth and strength that's not always on display in the bible. Not the most sizzling read, but the slow pace allows for thoughtful introspection and depth. Historical fiction as moving human drama.

The Meat:

This is a fantastic imagining of the lives of women during the time period of the Book of Genesis.

It demonstrates how women can carve out a slice of power in a patriarchal society-- even though their roles were strictly defined by convention, that convention also allowed for them to play in important, if secondary role.

No one who reads this would think that it's ok for women to be subjugated in the manner that the book portrays, but it is an inspiration to see how the characters in the book handle the cards they've been dealt.

The book is extremely nuanced, exploring all manner of familial and societal issues while maintaining an intensely personal focus. The setting is so richly detailed, and so exotic, that it warrants the effort of reading by itself.

The writing itself has a matter-of-fact, flattish tone, which I found to be quite enjoyable. It wasn't as lean and fast-paced as it could have been, but it did succeed in evoking the "flavor" of the bible, which is a neat trick when writing a modern novel.

As a white american atheist male, I suspect I'm not the target audience for this "biblical chick-flick on paper," but I truly enjoyed it, and wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who enjoys heady, thoughtful books.

The Fat:

$8.95 for the paperback new, or you can buy it used for one red cent:

Buy The Red Tent from Amazon here

Dumas Key by Stephen King

The Skinny:

Score: 92%
King turns out his best book in years, fueled by a new Floridian setting, an artful story, and a lead character who is suffering from some truly interesting ailments.


The Meat:

Early Stephen King books were genre-defining, relatively simple gorefests that bridged the gap between horror junkies and the general reading public.

Somewhere in there, King started flexing his literary aspirations, and the last twenty years have been inconsistent. King's voice is always very evident and well-developed, but he's struggled to find that perfect balance between experimentation, ambition and pulse-pounding entertainment.

Books like Blaze have shown that King can boil pots with the best of them, while more complicated outings like Bag of Bones have shown a tremendous capacity for literary writing, but at the expense of a forward-moving plot.

I would call Dumas Key the first perfect blend of the old King with the new. The story is complex, multi-layered, and epic, as with most of his more cerebral works. And yet? It's fast-paced, emotionally stirring, and damned interesting to boot.

The story takes place in the titular Dumas Key, a tiny island off the Florida coast, where Narrator Edgar Freemantle rents a vacation home while convalescing from injuries sustained in a horrific accident. While there, he takes up painting, but finds that his injuries, his newfound painting abilities, and the island's dark history are all connected.

Freemantle is sympathetic without being a goody two shoes. The finale is bittersweet and unpredictable. And, like most of King's best work, the characters exercise a level of ingenuity that doesn't leave the reader rolling his eyes and asking "Why doesn't he just _____?"

If you don't like horror, or have already decided that you don't like King, this might be the book that changes your mind.

Hopefully, King will continue to write books of this quality, and Dumas Key signifies the beginning of a new golden age in his enormously prolific writing career.

The Fat:

The new hardcover is about 20 bucks, but the used ones are already down to $4.62 and counting.

Buy it from Amazon here