Stainless Steel Reviews - Part One

Part One of our recent return journey through the biblioverse with a certain well-known intergalactic rodent. (Reproduced from Goodreads.)

A Stainless Steel Rat Is Born

I'm not generally a fan of prequels and I don't remember feeling any differently when I first read this the first time round. But this time I get to read it as though it was an actual beginning of a series and it'll be interesting to see if it holds up as such.

As an individual book, it's a cracking read as we're introduced to young Jim DiGriz and follow his exploits after a less than spectacular plan to get himself incarcerated in one of Bit O'Heaven's penal institutions in hopes of learning from master criminals. The twist being that if there are any master criminals to be found they are all on the outside. Seems a bit obvious when you think about it but Jim is meant to be a bit green around the gills. Indeed he varies between being smart as a whip and a bit slow, with wits as flexible as his fortunes it seems as we run from a brief stay in jail into a series of mishaps and lucky escapes, seasoned with a few ingenious and elaborate schemes.

But while it's a bit of a rambling affair, it's a brisk and entertaining romp. Ideally, I'd have liked more on the starting premise with Jim doing stir, but the book is not about to hang around for any length of time on one situation when it has so many to throw at you with each short chapter.

The planet and circumstances where Jim and master-criminal mentor The Bishop ultimately find themselves embroiled struck me as more likely fare for Jason DinAlt in Harrison's Deathworld series and an odd setting for a young Rat to cut his criminal teeth, but it does establish some precedent for Jim's later switch to life as a secret agent.

But there I'm getting ahead of myself and showing it's impossible to read this entirely free of 'foreknowledge'. All in all, a winning combination of light and smart and quick. It won't tax the brain, but Harrison's love for his most famous character shines through - and Jim DiGriz is very much opposed to taxes of any kind.

The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted

While in the previous prequel, the opening premise (young Jim DiGriz getting himself arrested as a means of enrolling in some hypothetical academy of crime) is just that – an opening, breezed through pretty quickly before moving on to other things – here our freshly graduated Stainless Steel Rat doesn’t get pressed into military service until page 60.

The book isn’t War & Peace, but with this slightly stretched route to the crux of the plot it begins to feel overlong for a Rat caper. That’s not to say the journey isn’t fun – the spirit and tone are there, but the first few chapters are more like a pleasant diversion before we get to the nitty gritty. Not that a Rat book is ever going to be gritty. From there on the story comes alive a bit more though and the author warms to his subject matter, ripping into the bureaucratic and blinkered mentality of the military machine.

And no sooner has Private Rat enlisted, he’s moving up the ranks in a nice twist on self-promotion. Then he’s Oscar Mike on an interplanetary invasion. And just as Harrison enjoys playing with the military, he rolls out another different society model (building the impression of a wonderfully colourful variety of worlds making up his League universe) and has fun with that, pitting the invading force against a thoroughly pacifistic and altogether genial populace who embrace a philosophy known as Individual Mutualism. I’m not sure how it would ever work in practice, but it’s a nice idea and incidentally strikes a nice satirical note against our current system of rampant-monetarism-gone-horribly-wrong.

The usual combination of ingenuity, incident and accident drive the plot forward and there’s no lack of momentum as you’d expect, with Jim occasionally dropping himself in the cagal with a rash and ill-considered move, reminding us that the young rodent is still a bit wet behind the ears. And you expect a generous helping of serendipity to bail him out from time to time, although it’s a tad disappointing here that the conclusion relies too heavily on one of these fortuitous rescues.

Taken together, it’s also something of a shame that both see Jim working for the League Navy as between the prequels and his actual debut it paints him as having spent way more time as an agent than as a crook.

All in all, perhaps not Grade A Stainless Steel, but good (and mostly clean) fun. And with names like Zennor and Praze-an-Beeble cropping up in a sci-fi book, you have to wonder if Harry Harrison holidayed in Cornwall around the time of writing. Which would explain some of the lazier aspects of the plot – I get that too from time to time.

The Stainless Steel Rat

 

James Bond in space.

The tagline could easily be as simple as that. The fact that this James is recruited from the criminal world is almost incidental, but it does throw an additional cherry bomb into the basic ‘martinis, girls and guns’ cocktail.

One thing you learn after reading three Rat books on the trot is that while the mazes they run in aren’t complex, they are pretty free-wheeling. Harrison drops his anti-hero into a given situation and sees where it takes us, tossing in extra ingredients and events along the way to keep the sauce bubbling.

So when Slippery Jim’s caught and recruited by the Special Corps, you’ve no idea where it’s all going to lead. Having previous notorious master crook, Harold Inskipp, as head of the Corps is inspired, painting the impression of a sort of MI6 staffed by a whole host of ne’erdowells. Of course, one slight wrinkle thrown up by the prequels is that none of Jim’s past service for the League is mentioned at all, but that’s just a problem with prequels and not a failing here.

One thing we do know is that Jim, for all his crooked ways, is no killer. And there’s a nice bit o’ character conflict as his first case pits him against a ruthless murderess, Angelina, who also happens to be a worthy intellectual rival – or better, since she’s steps ahead of him most of the time. That he falls for her is perhaps the only predictable element, but it would be churlish to dismiss any given Bond movie on the basis of knowing which women the Commander is going to end up in bed with.

Harrison does seem to love applying the retro touch to his sci fi worlds and the final action here takes place on a backward, feudal planet, just emergent after the galaxy-wide ‘Breakdown’ which is part of the make-up of the Steel Rat universe. But it’s fair enough, since they’re the sort of society that allows for internecine activities within the otherwise very orderly and controlled League.

Fast, fun, skims along like a powerboat with almost no depth, but you can readily see how the book – and the series that followed – made waves.

How this has not been made into a movie is beyond me.

SAF

(More Rat reviews in a couple of weeks!)

Lights! Cameras! Autons!

At the risk of spoiling the ending, two main things of note stand out at the close of Terror Of The Autons.

One, the Nestenes, enigmatic controllers of the Autons and masters of all things plastic, almost but not quite entirely fail to materialise. Two, the Doctor admits to rather looking forward to his next encounter with the Master.

The first is fairly familiar territory if you’ve seen Spearhead From Space, debut for both Pertwee and the Autons. The Nestenes are among the most fearsome of Doctor Who creatures never to have properly appeared. (And no, I’m not counting the shapeless but doubtless expensive CGI doggie-doo that seethed and glooped a bit at the end of Rose.) We want the giant octopus-spider-crab-brain-monster as seen on the cover of the Doctor Who And The Terror Of The Autons Target novelisation! A bit more exciting than the rubber tentacle mass that wrestled Perwee from within its fish tank (Spearhead). To say nothing of what we see in this, which amounts to an energistic Rorschach test in the sky which, when asked, perhaps three out of a hundred people would tell you looks vaguely like an octopus.

Still, 70s Who obliges forgiveness for budget limitations and we must be grateful that they didn’t attempt a full-on giant octopus-spider-crab-brain-monster as I suspect the finished result would have fallen a tad short.

The production is further hamstrung by overuse of CSO. It’s fine (as fine as it can be) for shots of hovering Time Lords and ugly demon dolls coming to life on car seats and radiators. But here it’s providing backgrounds that render some pretty ordinary settings wholly unconvincing. There are oddly framed reaction shots, such as the Brigadier against a plain brick wall, turning on hearing the Doctor’s call for help. And there’s obvious use of a studio set for shots of the Brigadier and UNIT troops taking up an overwatch position in a quarry, when you’d think it’d be just as cheap to have filmed them  lying on their the grassy knoll when they had the actors together for the location sequences in the quarry.

When all that is said and done, however, what you’ve got is one hundred-carat (plastic) gem of a story. One of the most surprising aspects, I found, was the pacey way in which it is all chopped together. There’s barely a pause or closing note to the majority of scenes before we’re onto the next. And yet we’re furnished with all the essentials to follow what’s going on and there’s plenty of all that vibrant SF action adventure which so characterises the Pertwee-era tales.

It also dishes out the Terror at frequent intervals, with writer Holmes playing more freely with the idea of the Nestenes’ affinity for plastic, delivering a colourful riot of murder and mayhem with an inflatable chair, aforesaid demon doll, telephone flex (anyone remember those?) and killer daffodils. (The basis for a cult classic B-movie if ever I saw one.) The asphyxiating yellow flowers are handed out up and down the country by Autons with big carnival heads and these brightly clad figures strike a brilliantly creepy image, while possessing that weird and wacky offbeat quality you might find in episodes of The Avengers.

Does it matter that their bus of about twelve seems a limited means of paving the way for a full-scale invasion? Not really. Does it matter that their distribution of 450,000 deadly daffs would seem to have required many a trip back to the factory for a resupply? Ultimately, no. Because the effect is what counts and their perma-cheerful grins and Maplins outfits subscribe to Richard III’s philosophy of murdering while they smile.

And they’re given free rein to kill. Wholesale slaughter of hapless UNIT troops is a given, but it’s not afraid to show a deadly enemy being deadly. The horror is often bizarre, but nevertheless doesn’t pull punches. Terror Of The Autons earns its title.

The infamous sequence where the mask is pulled from the policeman to reveal a blank Auton face must have been genuinely shocking at the time. (Albeit none of this traumatised me as a kid – if anything it excited me and was an integral part of what got me hooked on Who. What good’s a hero if he doesn’t have any actual menace to overcome?) The edit, to be fair, could be sharper where masks are pulled off as, in contrast to all the other quick cuts going on, the camera tends to linger just long enough to undermine the effect every time.

Which is something of a shame, because it’s a favourite trick of the Master.

And as much as this story is about the Autons, it’s even more about the Master. A Moriarty for the Doctor – an inspired creation that proves the simplest ideas are often the best. And Delgado brings him to life with subtlety, sophistication, panache and menace. His introduction is superb and, from the materialisation of that horsebox to his mesmeric control over circus-master Rossini this single scene must have been a real hallmark moment in Who history. You get a sense of the occasion even viewing it from an informed perspective.

Yes, his change of hearts at the end is all too easy but Delgado does his best to convey the self-preservation thought process in the short time he’s given and the Master’s callous final use of Rex Farrell (the excellent Michael Wisher) is an appropriately cold signing off until next time.

Well the Doctor should look forward to it. While it’s true that Letts and Dicks overused the character for the season, choosing to feature him in every story, I can’y say I blame them. I’d have been tempted as well and, as a fan, I’m glad we have as much Delgado Master as we do.

Flawed and dated then, but wickedly creative and not a bad turn of speed for one of those old adventures. Terror and plastic and plenty that’s fantastic, these are the things that great Doctor Who is made of.

Flash, bang, wallop, what a picture!

SAF

Time Gentleman

The Next Big Thing was the title of a chain of blog posts in which I was tagged a little while ago, which amounted to a self-interview on the topic of my current main writing project (Evil UnLtd Vol 3, folks!). Alas, we missed out on that occasion the opportunity to tag a certain writer, gentleman and scholar of our acquaintance.

The good news is that the gentleman in question, by the miracle of internet technology and some complex temporal science, can now be brought to you direct.

So without further ado, ladies and gentle-Morlocks, I give you not the Next Big Thing but the Previous-Next-Big-Thing, Craig P Kelly, man of many talents and author of Time Gentlemen, which I read and enjoyed not so very long ago.

What's the elevator pitch for Time Gentlemen?

Good question! To answer that I'll have to quickly check what an elevator pitch actually is. Just give me a second to google it...

 

Oh, I see. Let me think about that and I'll get back to you, okay?

 

What genre does your book fall under?

Humorous fiction. It's actually a science fiction adventure, but really I'm just trying to write something funny and the subject matter isn't all that important. I wonder if I'll sell more copies if I label it as erotica?

 

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I don't really know. I guess someone decided that it would be a good idea to bind sheets of paper in such a way so as the individual sheets wouldn't fly away, but I've not really looked into the history.

 

How long did it take from inspiration striking to completion?

Ten years, although I had middle 8 years off for good behaviour.

 

With all the time shenanigans going on, did you find it easy to keep track of all the temporal threads or did you have to resort to a flowchart?

I started with a hand drawn flowchart. To be honest the flowchart criss-crossed so much that it got a little bit messy, so I used a spreadsheet to try and help me nail things down. Actually, the chapter headings themselves helped me a lot, as I used these as a device to help me (and the reader!) follow the chronological thread. I was quite tempted to put all the chapters in reverse order just to see if anyone noticed. Maybe I could do that when I release the 'director's cut' or something.

 

What other books would you compare this to, if any?

My influences are Douglas Adams, Robert Rankin, Terry Pratchett and, of course Simon A Forward (you might not have heard of him). But I find it hard to directly compare my work with any of the above greats (or Simon A Forward) as I'm far too modest. So I'll say Tom Holt.

 

What actors, if any, would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie adaptation?

Jack - David Threlfall off of Shameless crossed with Johnny Vegas.

Joe - Hugo Weaving (halfway between Elrond and Agent Smith, with the brains of neither).

Alyssa - Karen Gillan, maybe with a bit of Tilda Swinton in her (not literally).

The Instructor - Robbie the Robot (with a cloak and after he'd lost a bit of weight).

Drager - me with hair.

 

Have you called Time on your titular Gentlemen or can we expect more from them?

No way! I'm well under way with a sequel and with a good wind behind me I'll finish this summer. The story starts with our time travelling anti-heroes stealing a historical artifact for an archaeologist who has decided to cut some corners. But can Jack and Joe travel through history without causing an almighty cock-up in the space-time continuum? Do they even know what a continuum is? The archaeologist thinks not, and decides to cut out the middle men (that's Jack and Joe in case you weren't paying attention). Meanwhile former friends become enemies, and enemies become friends. Or have they? The story features a stolen time machine or two, a famous sword, zombies-that-shouldn't-be, a nuclear meltdown, a mighty battle in an inappropriate location and at least one old man. The working title is "Swordplay" or "My Other Clock Is Also A Time Machine", I can't settle on which (so will probably pick neither).

 

Anything else you'd like to mention about the book might pique the reader's interest?

Yes. It's only £1.99. It has jokes in it (not real ones). I guarantee you will laugh out loud at some point if you read this book (although some laughs may be delayed and you might not realise what you are actually laughing at. I get that a lot, ask my lawyers).

 

Oh, wait, you wanted an elevator pitch. Here goes! Time Gentlemen is story about what happens when two clueless deadbeats accidentally stumble on a time machine and decide to steal it. They travel as far into the future as is possible and inadvertently free the enslaved remains of the human race from a crazed robotic overlord. They top this off by finding a missing cat, losing a missing cat and then stealing a missing cat. And, even better, the story finishes with a- oh wait, this is my floor. See you!

Thank you, Mr Kelly.

And by Next Big Thing I didn't mean to imply he was a Thing or indeed Big in anything other than a complimentary way. But I recommend you check out his book and you can discover more of his writings and other pursuits he, er, pursues, whether in or outside of elevators, on his site.

SAF

The Rise And Fall Of Veggie Peril

Eleven minutes late. Carnivorous plant the size of a cathedral on the line at Athelhampton.

The plant is none other than the Krynoid, what you get when you propagate one of The Seeds Of Doom. It’s also what you get when you cross an earlier Avengers  script (The Man-Eater Of Surrey Green) with Doctor Who and a smidgen of John Carpenter’s The Thing.

By Avengers, of course, I mean the one with the lady in the black catsuit – who does martial arts. The one without the scientist who turns into a big green monster. Wait, we’re back on The Seeds Of Doom.

Anyway, there are no karate-kicking catsuited heroines in this six-parter from 1976, but after the opening two episodes in Antarctica the adventure does emulate The Avengers (a show writer Banks Stewart worked on) in tone to a degree. No bad thing and it’s something that the Pertwee era might have carried off even better – Mr Smith and Miss Grant, we’re needed! (Jo was trained as a special agent, don’t you know.) As it is, Tom Baker and Lis Sladen are in fine form, thrown into the action duo role and making a good meal of the vegetable matter on offer. Baker’s mood swings seem especially pronounced as he veers from ultra-flippant grinmeister to Fang Rock-style doom-and-gloom-Doc – compare that to the unflappable John Steed! While Sarah Jane is given some good plucky feminist material to go with the screaming and a Penelope Pitstop moment in the compost grinder.

And take note, I’m not averse to the screaming companion. A good hearty scream is as essential as all the pluck. Horror doesn’t have a hope of being scary if our favourite protagonists aren’t ever scared. Heck, the Doctor should scream once in a while.

Never mind that modern monsters have the benefit of more realistic digital rendering, it’s the conviction that sells Doctor Who’s various terrors and there’s a healthy measure of that from the cast here, regulars and guests alike.

Harrison Chase is right at home, a villain clearly rooted in Avengers soil, with his big country estate, private guards and a typical English obsession (gardening) taken to extremes. Cold chlorophyll flowing through his veins, he’s a vegetarian the way Mother Theresa was a humanitarian and Tony Beckley takes it all wonderfully seriously (even the ludicrous ‘plantain of the opera’ moment when he’s playing his excruciating atonal symphony to a full greenhouse) while obviously enjoying every minute.

John Challis is brilliant as Scorby. No thug with a heart of gold here, but a brutal mercenary with personality nonetheless. He essentially begins as part of a great double act with Keeler, then we sit back and watch self-motivation (and preservation) oblige him to ally with the Doctor and Sarah as the situation goes to pot. We can take him seriously as a killer and as the butt of the Doctor’s jokes at the same time – and the look Sarah gives him at his remark about women is priceless. It’s only a shame that he’s reduced to so much self-pity in the end and a rather pointless demise in a weedy pond. I always wished he'd survived to make a return appearance in Who.

But if that’s an unfortunate end, consider Keeler. A reluctant accomplice in everything, he has nervousness down to a fine art and is green about the gills when it comes to crime. Mark Jones does a superb job of portraying him as pathetic, while still being sympathetic. Once the Krynoid takes hold, it’s fairly obvious this isn’t going to be one of those cases where a last vestige of the man survives to resist the alien domination.

Hargreaves is an odd character, the sort of gentleman’s gentleman who takes his master’s eccentricities in his stride even as his activities spiral into lunacy. The butler didn’t do it, but he’s very much an accessory after the fact – and Seymour Green performs his duties admirably. If Poison Ivy ever felt in need of her own Alfred, she should seek out a man like Hargreaves.

Not Hargreaves himself, since he’s pushing up the daisies. But (almost) everyone is doomed in this – the clue is in the title.

Spared any nasty demise is Amelia Ducat, an ‘old lady from AUNTIE’ who is perhaps an even bigger nod to the story’s Avengers roots than Chase. Expect her to be the subject of a Big Finish spin-off any time soon.

For a six-parter, it cracks along at a pretty pace. It’s main problem lies in the fact that it starts as a fairly taut two-part thriller which ends with the monster destroyed by a bomb and ends as a more padded four-part thriller which ends with the monster destroyed by bombs. And the Doctor has the gall to lecture Scorby on how ‘Bombs and bullets don’t solve everything.’ It’s weak.

The writer has worked well to craft a formidable threat – no accident surely that the Krynoid grows to a creature ‘the size of St Paul’s’, calling to mind The Quatermass Experiment as it looms over the Chase mansion. And the creature is generally effective in its different forms, from seed through to green-painted Axon through to shambling cabbage mountain.

Superimposed snowflakes help in the opening segments (and are better at contributing to the atmosphere than they are at disguising a quarry as an Antarctic landscape), night-shooting further enhances the menace later on in the estate grounds and model work on the house is on a par with the exploding church in The Daemons. Only relatively few shots are let down by the usual limitations of budget and technology. But in the end it’s too formidable and the writer has left the Doctor no cleverer option than calling in the RAF in the form of a full squadron of stock-footage Phantoms. (To a poorly misjudged piece of soundtrack, I might add – weird pseudo-patriotic ditty removes any last vestige of tension from the moment.)

A lesser but still significant letdown is that this is blatantly a UNIT story – even down to the civil servants (Michael Barrington is highly typical of the period, albeit Thackeray is more congenial and less of a buffoon; and Kenneth Gilbert does a decent job as the duplicitous and corruptible Dunbar who tries to redeem himself). But UNIT are missing. Which is to say, they’re present – with something like a full complement of half a dozen troops – but not as we know and love them. No Brigadier, no Benton and no Harry Sullivan.

So this particular blend of vegetable soup comes with an aftertaste of missed opportunity.

Episode Three has more than its share of running around, which I don’t object to in principle – it’s all part and parcel of an adventure yarn and it shows off the spectacular grounds (and it is a great location). But it all feels a bit circular, with the one object of leading to that cliffhanger with Sarah and the pod. There’s an extra sense of contrivance to the cliffhangers as though the writer had all of them sorted in his mind and wrote the rest of the tale to fit. There’s further too-obvious contrivance at work later to bring about Chase’s ultimate end in the crusher. Poetic justice, maybe, but a defter touch in the plotting might not have gone amiss. Again, it’s as though the writer was so fond of that conclusion for his prize villain he was determined to make it happen, no matter what.

Can’t say I blame him too much, as in the end I’m quite fond of the story in spite of these few misgivings. Which, let’s face it, is a common or garden response to many a Doctor Who story.

The grass may often be greener in the imagination, but a tale like this sows a great many seeds.

SAF