My primer on John Carter (to go along with the earlier one on Doc Savage) has bee published on SFSignal.

An excerpt:

With Disney’s trailers and announced March release of the movie John Carter, readers of the books that inspired the movie are at once hopeful and fearful: hopeful that the movie will actually capture the imagination as well as the initial reading of Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom series did; fearful that the movie will be an unfaithful adaptation, or, at worst a lemon in the tradition of pulp movie adaptations like the Doc Savage movie.

Though never a large Tarzan fan, I, like many readers my age, tore through the other worlds created by ERB. But Barsoom was always the cornerstone. Here, then, is a Primer on John Carter and the Barsoom series of novels.

SPOILER ALERTS – for those readers who have not read the books and would like to be surprised at the movie plot (which hopefully doesn’t stray to far from the book plot line), this primer is written with the potential spoiler pieces at the end. Feel free to read the Author section. The John Carter section contains a bit of preview, but stay away from the sections below that if you want to go into the movie fresh.

Born September 1, 1875, Edgar Rice Burroughs held numerous non-writing jobs before breaking into the world of print in 1912 (at the tender age of 37). He is better know as the creator of Tarzan, but he also created many other worlds and characters. And the very first one he created was called “Under the Moons of Mars,” the original name of the story that would be known as A Princess of Mars, the first novel in the Barsoom/John Carter series.

The legend of ERB says that he held a job checking the advertisements in the pulp magazines of the day, and dreamed that he could write on better. This first attempt was one crazy daydream, and contained a fairly fully conceived world within it.

When initially submitting the story to The All Story magazine for publication, he was concerned that its plot was so fantastic that publishers and the public of 1912 would think him quite mad. So he submitted it under the pen name “Normal Bean”. The publisher presumably thought this was a typo and changed the author’s name to Norman Bean. Thus Barsoom and John Carter were born.

ERB created many more worlds and characters than just Tarzan and the Barsoom of John Carter. He imagined the adventures of David Innes in Pellucidar At the Earth’s Core; Carson(Napier) of Venus; The Land That Time Forgot trilogy; the Moon Maid and others. And the success he had with these inspired the pulp writers of Doc Savage and The Spider, who themselves inspired the science fiction writers that we all know and love.

In all, through 1967 with the release of I Am A Barbarian, ERB published almost 70 books of these worlds and others.

In his later years, ERB spent time in Hawaii, and was living in Honolulu during the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He volunteered to be a war correspondent, and was the oldest one in the Pacific Theater. He died in 1950.

—–

The rest of the article covers John Carter, Barsoom, the rest of the books in the series and a link to other sources.

Read the full article here.

My review of READY PLAYER ONE by Ernest Cline has been posted on SFSignal.

An excerpt:

REVIEW SUMMARY: A fast-paced story in a bleak future, where escape into virtual worlds is driven by a contest based on 1980s trivia and culture and the winner gets billions.

MY RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: Wade Watts hides from the nasty real world of the mid-21st century inside the virtual world/MMORPG called OASIS. Like many, he searches for the clues that will grant the solver the fortune left by the will of the founder of OASIS. When he is the first one to solve the first of three main puzzles, the real world and the virtual starts in hot pursuit.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: Any book that ties in Rush, Zork, Monty Python and other relics from my past into a Second Life meets World of Warcraft virtual reality gets my vote.
CONS: A made-for-Disney-movie ending; if you don’t like 1980s trivia and culture, you may not dig this book (if it’s too loud, you’re too young)
BOTTOM LINE: With a high geek and 80s factor, this book won’t appeal to everyone. But Cline lays down a well paced-plot with some good twists, and doesn’t spend too much time buried in the minutia of 80s trivia, making this an enjoyable read.

I do not propose to trivialize any book with an outline, but let’s do a quick plot summary exercise:

• Guy builds virtual reality, combination of Second Life/World of Warcraft/(insert name of fave MMPORPG here); guy makes billions;
• World has energy crisis meltdown;
• People get poor, depressed, escape into virtual reality.

So far, sounds like lots of other books and movies, don’t it? Tron, Surrogates and many others come to mind (and while we are talking Surrogates, can we all just agree that any SF movie Bruce Willis is in rocks?).

Author Ernest Cline adds the following twists to this well used base plot:

• Guy who built virtual reality dies. But his last email to all users of this world, he describes a contest in which the winner will get all of his billions;
• Contest is built on 1980s trivia, and involves finding three keys;
• People get excited, dive into virtual reality world;
• Corporations are formed, just to get expertise and win the prize;
• Little guys versus big guys, in reality and in the game.

Read the full review here.

My article on how to gift Kindle ebooks, nook books and Apple App Store apps has been puslihed on the JoSara Media web site.

You can use the following shortcuts to get to each separate guide (with screenshots):

Kindle eBook
Nook eBook
Apple App Store App

Eric Shaw has visions, visions which ruined his promising film career in Hollywood and has damaged his marriage. Returning to Chicago, he makes documentaries about the lives of the deceased, paid for by their families to be shown at their funerals. His visions help him pick out key details, often surprising those viewing.

At one such viewing, he is recruited by Alyssa Bradford to make a documentary about her wealthy father-in-law, whose unknown history is tied to a small resort town in Indiana, West Baden. She gives him an old bottle of Pluto Water, for unknown reasons a prized possession of Campbell Bradford, the elderly and dying father-in-law. Even in the heat of the summer, the water bottle stays ice cold. As Eric gets to West Baden to research his project, his visions increase; when he takes a swig of the water bottle, his visions become lifelike. The visions are of the Campbell Bradford of the past, powerful and violent ruler of West Baden; to many, he was the embodiment of evil. Eric struggles with his sanity: are the visions real? Is the water causing them? Or is he simply insane?

Author Michael Koryta employs the element of doubt…Eric’s doubt about his sanity, doubt about his work…and changes that doubt into one of growing belief in himself. The supernatural part of the book is intermingled with the story line; is Eric sane, or are these visions just that? The author also adds to Eric’s “normal guy” status (a regular hero wouldn’t doubt himself) by having Eric make mistakes, lose in a fight, and generally act ungrateful to his wife and her family. This makes for a much more believable character.

Also unique about this story is the setting. Really, a spa/mineral springs in rural Indiana (near French Lick, home of Larry Bird!) is usually reserved for stories like Hoosiers and other sports oriented themes, not supernatural thrillers.

The ending (no spoilers here) offers a few surprises, and could have been warped to provide room for a sequel…kudos to the other for tying up the loose ends.

The Scholastic Book Club was a huge fetish of mine during later elementary school and middle school. Every six weeks a pulp magazine of their latest offerings would arrive. I’d check off the ones I wanted, then work to persuade my mom and dad to get me some subset of the list.

That was how I read about Bart Starr and the Green Bay Packers.

In January of 1967, and again in January of 1968, the Packers, champions of the National Football League, defeated first the Kansas City Chiefs and then the Oakland Raiders of the American Football League. Winning those first two Super Bowls made legends out of many of the Packers players and, of course, of their coach Vince Lombardi.

One of those players was Bart Starr, subject of the Scholastic published biography by John Devaney. I devoured that book, and was then handed a copy of Jerry Kramer’s Packer Diary, Instant Replay which I also absorbed. Though I was in Texas, the Packers became my team. Stories of the Ice Bowl and the two Super Bowl wins, of Lombardi and the great Packers of those times, made them instant favorites.

Shortly after this, the Packers made the playoffs again, in 1972. This would start a pattern of testing Packer fan resolve for a decade, making the playoffs again in 1982, and then again in 1993. There were consistent playoff participants thereafter; but it was a LONG wait for us Packer fans…nearly three decades, until January of 1997, for the Packers to return to prominence and win another Super Bowl with Brett Favre at quarterback. They came close the next year, losing to Elway and the Broncs.

Unless you’ve been living under certain rocks, you’ll know that the Packers under Aaron Rodgers are reining Super Bowl Champs, and are currently undefeated.

I have never seen the Packers play. My wife did win tickets to the Super Bowl in a contest, so we’ve been to Super Bowl 41, in February of 2007, watching her favorite Peyton Manning and the Colts defeat the Bears.

That changes next Sunday, November 20, when, for my 50th birthday (still a few weeks away) my wife takes me to sit in the 5th row of the LeapZone at Lambeau Field when the hopefully-still-undefeated Packers play the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Stay tuned….

Originally published in 1997, The Sparrow combines some of mankind’s most basic questions into an interesting story:

• Are humans the only species in the Universe? And if we find another species, how do we approach them?
• From Anne, in the story: “What sticks in my throat is that God gets the credit but never the blame. I just can’t swallow that kind of theological candy.” In other words, if God is responsible for the good times, is He responsible for the bad?

Both of these themes thread through the novel, told in flashbacks and first hand narative. The answer to the first question is unique: without consulting any other Earth organization, the Jesuits launch a mission, just as they have launched missions to remote and unknown places at different times in their history. This is a unique angle in the sci-fi “meet the new aliens” genre.

The second theme is the strongest, and centers on Jesuit priest Emilio Sandoz, who sees the hand of God in the “coincidences” leading up to the mission, and the first part of the mission itself…but has lost his faith by the time of his return.

Emilio Sandoz is the only survivor from a Jesuit sponsored trip to the planet of Rekhat. Originally the inspiration and the spiritual leader of the mission, he is blamed, and basically put on inquisition, for the heinous crimes he is thought to have committed. The discovery of the alien race (through transmissions of their singing) and the mission to visit them, told in flashbacks, seems pre-ordained, particularly to Sandoz, a survivor from the rough part of San Juan, Puerto Rico, who went on to become a Jesuit priest. When a young friend of Sandoz, Jimmy, hears the alien singing while working at the Acerbo dish, and the first people he calls are Sandoz, his friends Anne and George (she a doctor, he an engineer, both friends of Sandoz and pulled to San Juan by him) and Sofia Mendes, an indentured servant/savant whose specialty is AI programming (she had already developed a linguistic program by questioning Sandoz, and was doing the same with Jimmy and his ET Searches). Emilio sees the gathering of these folks as divine, as the right team to go to the planet, on the other side of Alpha Centauri, in private while the United Nations debates endlessly on what to do.

After a while it became hard to ignore how, against odds, the dice kept coming up in favor of the mission. The crew members went on with their training, their work unaffected by the waxing and waning of confidence, but they all experienced varying degrees of amazement. Even the Jesuits were divided. Marc Robichaux and Emilio Sandoz smiled and said “See? Deus vult,” while D. W. Yarbrough and Andrej Jelacic shook their heads in wonder. George Edwrds and Jimmy Quinn and Sofia Mendes remained agnostics on the question of whether these events were minor miracles or major coincidences.

At first, the mission is divine. The team meets and Emilio builds communication with the alien Runa, and then the Jana’ata. But it goes incredibly and suddenly wrong with the team misunderstanding the cultures and relations of the two races, prompting the inquisition of Emilio as he returns to Earth as the sole survivor, questioning his own faith, blamed for the murder of his alien liason and possibly the deaths of the rest of the team.

The main drawback of the storyline is the suddenness and ferocity of the violence, which happens much too near the end of the story. With one or two clues that the carnivorous Jana’ata were agressive and violent (the main one being when Supaari attacked Emilio when first seeing him), the Earthlings discover too late in the game what they are really up against.

The implosion today of two buildings (CCA 7 and 8) on the former Compaq campus comes nearly ten years to the day after the business implosion of Compaq through its acquisition by HP. Like Compaq, CCA7 and CCA8 on the Houston campus, now owned by the local community college, had been deemed too expensive to renovate; the choice was made to blow them up and rebuild.

This parallels not only HP’s recent “blowing up” of its tablet and (profitable) PC business, but the final disposition of the great COMPAQ Computer Corporation, a company that I proudly worked at for fifteen years. Compaq in the beginning was an incredibly innovative company in portable computers and servers…but in the later years was one Steve Jobs shy of a full Apple cart.

It is easy to envy Apple, now one of (if not the, depending on market closings) the highest valued companies in the world, and in the enviable position of charging and receiving premium prices on almost all of their products. The history of Apple is well known, and its story and that of Compaq can be seen as mirror images…until Apple’s turning point, when Jobs returned, grown up and ready with innovation, differentiation and a long term plan.

In between the leadership of John Sculley and Steve Jobs’ return as interim CEO in 1997, Apple faced similar crossroads to Compaq’s at the same time. Obviously over-simplified, in 1998 Compaq chose to follow the kings of the day, and emulate IBM by acquiring services (and people and debt)-heavy Digital Equipment Corporation; while Apple chose a gambler’s path of innovation, a path to no longer try to compete on the speeds and feeds of cpu/memory/disk with the PC vendors of the day, but to create a content consumer/content creator vision, to innovate and differentiate.

In 1997, Compaq’s revenues were approx. $25 billion, and income was approx. $2 billion.

In 1997, Apple’s revenues were approx. $7 billion, and income was a LOSS of approx. $1 billion.

Three years after Compaq acquired Digital Equipment Corporation, HP acquired Compaq, a controversial acquisition according to HP’s board (mixed if with a bit of Deutsche Bank conflict of interest scandal). The services division of the combined Compaq and DEC was not meshing, and was not proving as “accretive” as had been hoped in the original merger documents. CEO Eckhard Pfeifer was let go in 1999, and by 2001 Compaq’s meteoric time in the technosphere flamed out.

Four years after naming Jobs interim CEO, Apple released the iPod..then the iTunes store…then the iPhone…then the iPad.

Could those paths have been switched? If Compaq had not purchased Digital, would it still exist? There were many variables, and I’ll leave the possible scenarios to the academics, to future business school case studies. As a man I admired said, “you can’t un-honk a honked horn.”

Like many people, I found my fifteen years working at Compaq an incredible experience. I met the love of my life while working there. After we were married, she would look out the windows in the break room at CCA8 and see our daughter waiting for the school bus in front of our house in Lakewood Forest. With the demise of those buildings, and the presumed demise of the last vestiges of Compaq with the pre-announced sale of the PC business, we choose to think back fondly on those days , the great people we worked with… and whimsically wonder what could have been.

Paine L. Winthrop, President of Seaven Seas ship building company, is murdered, his office destroyed by a launched missile. Monk and Ham are in Monk’s lab in the same building, and go to investigate. They are ultimately taken captive by the Silver Death’s Head gang (so named because of their silver costumes). the gang apparently responsible for Winthrop’s murder.

The Silver Death’s Heads gang launches a crime spree in New York City, including the murder of Winthrop, robbing armored cars, banks. etc.. They net over $1 million, but there is a larger conspiracy at work; multiple shipping companies are being acquired under mysterious circumstances, accidents befalling their leaders, and stock transactions worth over a billion.

Doc enters first to save Ham and Monk, then to stop the Silver Death Heads gang, as they try to get him out of their way.

This is the first adventure in the re-read where only Monk and Ham (with a brief appearance by Pat) join Doc. Renny is off working on the dam project in South Africa, which is a large part of the novel Python Isle by Will Murray.

This also makes the first adventure in the re-read where the action stays in NYC (and the NY Harbor).

There is a reappearance (from #4 The Polar Treasure and #10 The Phantom City) and apparent sinking of the Helldiver submarine.

My sortable table of Doc Savage books is here.

• Written by: Lester Dent
• Villain: the mysterious Master in Silver, leader of the Silver Death Heads; his scientist named Ull;
• Doc Gadget: underwater radio, underwater diving apparatus; adjustments to the sub Helldiver to make it squirt black ink underwater;
• Doc Feat: lots of underwater swimming for long lengths of time.;
• Exotic locale: none, except for the New York harbor (and under it) and, of course, NYC.
• By the numbers: originally published October 1934; Bantam #26 (July 1968); Philip Jose Farmer dated July 1934

My review of A Dance With Dragons by George R. R. Martin, the fifth book in the Song of Ice and Fire series, has been published at SFSignal.com.

An excerpt:

REVIEW SUMMARY:An extremely well written, well paced book, with excellent characterizations where, like many “bridge books”, not much forward movement on the plot is achieved…well-worth the the read.

MY RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: The fifth book in the Song of Ice and Fire series parallels the previous novel, following characters Tyrion Lannister (running into hiding after killing his father), Jon Snow (after the fight with the wildlings, determining how to stop the undead “Others”), Daenerys Targaryen, Arya Stark and others as they deal with dragons, the Others, multiple kings, politics and the lead up to the final show down between Ice and Fire (hopefully not too many thousand pages away).

MY REVIEW:
PROS: Continued awesomeness in the characterizations; the blending of the magical/fantasy aspects has them not overpowering the characters or the story; dragons and Daenerys; a few surprises (though, five books in, I almost put this aspect in the CONS list).
CONS: Unlike the first three books in the series but like many “bridge” books in the middle of a series, not a lot of forward plot movement; no summary at the beginning, and I’d rather rely on an author’s summary than random Wiki entries to refresh my old memory; one or two characters who seemed superfluous (Quentyn Martell???).
BOTTOM LINE: Though I kept wondering when a momentous event such as those that were in every chapter in the first three novels, I was a hundred pages on, and enjoying the prose. It’s GRRM, just read it!

George R.R. Martin’s fifth doorstop in the Song of Ice and Fire series, is, like its predecessors, extremely well written and full of fantastic and memorable characterizations. The fourth book, A Feast of Crows, runs in parallel for about the first 600 pages of A Dance With Dragons; but this new novel returns many of our favorite characters: Jon Snow, now Lord Commander of the Wall; Daenerys Targaryen, Queen of Meereen, freer of the slaves and stuck with her dragons, trying to determine how best to return to Westeros to vie for the Iron Throne; Arya Stark (though too briefly mentioned, IMHO), learning to be an assassin; Theon and Asha Greyjoy, sea warriors stuck on land, Theon tortured to become Reek, Asha trying to hold on to the castle at Deepwood Motte; and everyone’s favorite dwarf, Tyrion Lannister, running after killing his father and being smuggled out of town.

But this is the fifth book in what is rumored to be a seven book series. It is a bridge book; the characters grow, some change. But, unlike the first three books, where the plot pace was quick, wars were fought, main characters were killed off at a splendid pace…this novel explores the characters. Not much happens, except for one surprise I would not presume to reveal (small hint: it did lead me to a solid theory on who Jon Snow’s mother is).

My concern before investing my precious time in this 959 page hardback — I made the mistake of buying the hundred pound hardback to add to the similar first four novels causing a slight hernia carrying it on planes…should have bought the eBook — was that it would follow the path of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time Series, which I stopped reading around the sixth or seventh book; those characters were slow to change and uninteresting, and new characters that were introduced five books in did not grab my attention. As Neil Gaiman so eloquently put it, GRRM is not my bitch…but I’m not his either. Reading a novel this large and a series that may go on another 2-3,000 pages is a large investment of time by a reader to an author.

As a lover of books and technology, I’ve spent a lot of time the past few years investigating how to combine them. The proliferation of tablet computing, and the need/availability for interaction, have pushed us to a point where a book can be more. Terms like enhanced eBook, interactive eBook and others have been bandied about; but whatever the term, adding multimedia to a print book turns it into something more.

We also recently have been working with non-profit organizations, such as my friends at the Texas State Historical Assoication, helping them to take their unique and valuable content (most of it in print format, or even out-of-print) and get it into a digitized, interactive medium…into a format that will continue to promote their goals of education, research, preservation and membership.

I stumbled across the work of some fine people utilizing HTML5 to build enhanced eBooks (the Baker Framework, and the Laker Compendium. With the current ePub standard, there is no standard support for adding multimedia; Amazon’s Kindle format provides some, but only on certain platforms.

With these converging trends, technologies and paths, I’ve put together an app for the Apple App Store that is an experiment of sorts; a proof point, if you will, that not only can you build an entertaining enhanced eBook, but that utilizing available content that you can use this content as a bridge to sustainable funding for non-profits.

That available content happened when my brother took me on a journey through the Grand Canyon, with some great guys. A once in a lifetime trip - hiking, rafting, and experiencing one of the natural wonders of the world.

With that introduction, I am happy to announce:

Cecil does the GRAND CANYON holding a poptart
For iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch

If you want to reflect back on a trip you made to the Grand Canyon, one of the eight natural wonders of the world, or you just want to imagine one, this app will take you there.

With proceeds benefiting the Grand Canyon Association, this Grand Canyon app follows the author, friends and guides as they:

• hike down Bright Angel Trail;
• raft one hundred miles down the Colorado River;
• hike the so-called “Death March” hike to Thunder River and Surprise Valley;
• visit Havasu;
• brave Lava Falls (and live to tell about it);
• helicopter out from Whitemore Wash.

Containing hi-definition videos, hundreds of photos, maps and the story of the journey, this multimedia application will be sure to remind you of your own trip to the Grand Canyon…or increase your desire to visit.