Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Jupiter theft, The Genesis quest, A gathering of stars
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Sondheim, Victor; Kenyon, Paul; King, Paul
BIRTHDATE: 7/20/1931-12/10/2014
WEBSITE: http://www.donaldmoffitt.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES: INCLUDED IN CA 111. ENTRY NEEDS TO BE MOVED TO CANR.
PERSONAL
Born July 20, 1931, in Boston, MA; died December 10, 2014; married; wife’s name Ann.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Editor, author, ghostwriter, filmmaker, and PR executive.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Man’s Action, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Wildcat, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Monsieur, and Gent.
SIDELIGHTS
Donald Moffitt maintained involvement in a number of industries throughout his professional life. Some of his lines of work involved ghostwriting for other professionals, creating industrial films, and executive-level PR management. However, his greatest love was penning novels. Moffitt’s genre of choice was sci-fi. However, he released works under a few other genres under alternate names, including Paul King, Victor Sondheim, and Paul Kenyon. His earliest works appear under various other pen names in an array of popular magazines, such as Monsieur and Man’s Action. Towards the end of his life, Moffitt began shifting focus from science fiction to the mystery genre. While Moffitt passed away December of 2014, he left behind a sizeable body of work, some of which has been published after his death.
The Ecstasy Connection is one of Moffitt’s earlier novels, originally published back in the early 1970s under one of Moffitt’s pen names, Paul Kenyon. The Ecstasy Connection differs from the rest of Moffitt’s work in terms of genre, classifying more as an adventure story than sci-fi. The Ecstasy Connection is the first volume of a long series called “The Baroness.” The title of the series refers to the story’s protagonist, a woman involved with a classified organization of extraordinarily talented secret agents. The Baroness is a jack of all trades: she possesses immense wealth, knockout looks, and is an accomplished fighter and assassin with a charismatic personality. It was only due to ennui that the Baroness got involved with her current line of work. She used her first marriage to make lots of friends in high places, which in turn led her down the path of solving cases for the government. At the start of the novel, The Baroness finds herself tasked with getting to the bottom of one of her most unusual cases yet. Citizens from all walks of life are becoming consumed with a new strain of ecstasy so potent that it is capable of completely incapacitating its users. The effects of taking this drug vary from person to person, but cases involve the likes of public indecency and even death. It is the Baroness’s job to decipher the drug’s source and cut it off immediately. However, her investigation leads her into some highly risque situations. She winds up having to chase down a group of thugs who break into a drug party. Hours before the raid, the party erupted into a wild bout of group sex that overtook everyone in attendance but the Baroness, who declined taking the drug and continued her investigation by camouflaging herself as a sexual participant. The Baroness’s efforts lead her beyond single parties and out of country. She locates the origin of the new ecstasy strain in the heart of Hong Kong. It is there that she also realizes who has been behind the release of the drug, and his goal in issuing this drug worldwide may be more nefarious than anyone ever considered. In order to get to him, the Baroness will have to get past his team of guards, most of which have fallen prey to his drug and are effectively under his sinister control. On the Glorious Trash blog, Joe Kenney said: “At 224 pages, The Ecstasy Connection moves at a steady clip, and it’s a fine introduction to the series.” He also stated: “There’s some good dialog, inventive action setpieces, and a lurid quotient which outdoes pretty much any other ’70s men’s adventure novel (which is saying something!).” In a later review on the Glorious Trash blog, Joe Kenney called the book “one of the more sleazy, lurid, and entertaining men’s adventure novels I’ve yet read.” He went on to add: “And true to the standards of producer Lyle Kenyon Engel’s Book Creations Incorporated, it’s very well written.”
Children of the Comet was released after Moffitt’s death, published in the year 2015. The novel’s setting places the human race in a new and precarious position. Eons ago, humanity was conquered by a group of aliens who promptly ejected humanity from the galaxy to find somewhere else to live. By this point, however, humanity has grown quite advanced in its technology. The work of scientific inventors and experts from the period has led to formation of a new tool, the “Higgs drive,” which allows those who use it to travel at lightning speed and across thousands upon thousands of miles in one trek. This type of travel effectively creates a chronological wormhole. While the traveler believes they have only spent a few years in transit, the remaining population has experienced several times past that perceived amount. Mankind has fully utilized this technology by using it to help themselves survive outside of Earth. They now live on comets and similar celestial bodies, their sustenance gained from specially fostered trees that have been engineered to provide their inhabitants with all of the resources and sustenance they could ever need. The novel’s main focus lies with Torris, a man whose coming of age ceremony leads to him finding a world he never could have thought possible. He meets another settlement of people who have developed a society much different from his own, and he must cooperate with one of their members in order to face a looming alien threat. A Publishers Weekly reviewer called the book “a fascinating scientific essay still in search of a worthy literary framework.” On the Bill’s Book Reviews blog, Bill Mackela commented: “Great concepts, great story line and characters on the tree, average finish, makes for a 4 Star book.” A contributor to the Koeur’s Book Reviews blog remarked: “Torris’ saga was at once thought provoking and entertaining.” On the Big Shiny Robot blog, one reviewer stated: “Depending on your level of comfort with the scientific concepts at play, you may be thrilled with the science or you may be bored.” They added: “From a philosophical standpoint, it’s a good novel to have under your belt.” A Milliebot Reads blogger expressed that “If you’re into hard sci-fi that’s heavy with science and slow on plot, you might enjoy this book.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, November 9, 1992, review of The Dreamers: A Novel of Adventure and Discovery, 1418-1425, p.78; November 22, 1993, review of The Voyagers, p. 60; July 20, 2015, review of Children of the Comet. p. 173.
ONLINE
Big Shiny Robot, http://www.bigshinyrobot.com/ (November 3, 2015), review of Children of the Comet.
Bill’s Book Reviews, https://bmackela.wordpress.com/ (October 13, 2015), Bill Mackela, review of The Jupiter Theft.
Donald Moffitt Website, http://www.donaldmoffitt.com (November 2, 2017), author profile.
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/ (September 15, 2017), author profile.
Glorious Trash, http://glorioustrash.blogspot.com/ (August 11, 2010), review of The Ecstasy Connection; (October 5, 2010), review of Diamonds Are for Dying; (February 16, 2011), review of Death Is A Ruby Light; (April 28, 2011), review of Hard-core Murder; (February 6, 2012), review of Sonic Slave; (April 5, 2012), review of Flicker of Doom; (August 2, 2012), review of Black Gold; (August 4, 2016), review of The Ecstasy Connection.
James Nicoll Reviews, http://jamesdavisnicoll.com/ (June 1, 2014), James Nicoll, review of The Jupiter Theft.
Kirkus Reviews, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/ (November 1, 1981), review of Inheritors of the Storm.
Koeur’s Book Reviews, https://koeur.wordpress.com/ (June 9, 2015), review of Children of the Comet.
Marooned, http://sffbooksonmars.blogspot.com/ (March 10, 2011), review of Crescent in the Sky.
Milliebot Reads, https://milliebotreads.com/ (November 27, 2015), review of Children of the Comet.
Raymond’s Reviews, http://www.catb.org/ (January 25, 1990), review of Crescent in the Sky.
Sci-fi & Scary, http://www.scifiandscary.com/ (October 2, 2015), review of Children of the Comet.
DONALD MOFFITT was born in Boston on July 20, 1931, and lived in Manhattan for a number of years working as a public relations executive, industrial filmmaker, and ghostwriter before moving to rural Maine with his wife, Ann. In the late 1980’s and 1990’s, having previously published fiction under an assortment of pen names, Moffitt began writing and publishing the acclaimed science fiction novels for which he is best known –– high-speed, high-tech stories sought by dedicated fans of hard-SF adventure.
Moffitt has been praised as a visionary novelist whose cosmic scope is immense ––
an “amazingly prescient” writer who anticipated Operation Immortality two decades before it was launched and invented the idea of music sampling on a Moog computer years before music sampling became everyday practice. His admirers include Arthur C. Clarke, who after reading THE JUPITER THEFT wrote editor Judy-Lynne Del Rey to say he found Moffitt’s imagination “astonishing” and his scientific accuracy that of a “professional scientist.”
LOCUS, calling the GENESIS saga “enthralling, mind-boggling, magnificent!” said, “How can anyone top it? It rivals anything that Larry Niven imagined in RINGWORLD, or Arthur C. Clarke depicted in RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA, and went on to call it “Science fiction in the grand tradition…a magical mystery tour.”
Of A GATHERING OF STARS (which plays billiards with black holes to move entire solar systems) LOCUS said, “A really audacious idea.”
Of JOVIAN, Greg Bear said, “Fans of Larry Niven, Peter Hamilton, and Arthur C. Clarke will find more than ample excitement in Moffitt’s novels –– they’re packed with ideas and the true spirit of high-tech adventure.”
THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SCIENCE FICTION describes Moffitt as an author of “numerate, physics-oriented, fast-moving hard-sf adventures…a competence with mythopoeically large scales and calculations…the focus of the tales…is firmly on the wide-scale action and the physics.”
IBOOKS, launching JOVIAN –– “an event in the science fiction community” –– said of Moffitt, “His writing combines scientific knowledge, wonderful, almost cinematic characters, and the kind of action/adventure that appeals to fans of STAR WARS and STAR TREK, but is much more of a first-rate novel than a media tie-in.”
ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION AND FACT applauded Moffitt’s sense of wonder, predicting that although fashions in science fiction change, his GENESIS QUEST novels would become permanent classics.
BEFORE IT ALL BEGAN:
In the 1950’s –– twilight of the pulps and Playboy imitators –– Moffitt published approximately 100 short stories under 15 or more pen names (Wilson MacDonald, James D’Indy, and an assortment of others), in magazines like Man’s Action, Wildcat, Gent, and Monsieur, while editing trade magazines by day.
Writing as PAUL KENYON:
In the early 70’s, using the pen name Paul Kenyon, Moffitt published eight BARONESS novels –– a pulp series featuring a female superspy in the James Bond tradition. These have been translated into several languages and continue to have a strong cult following.
Writing as VICTOR SONDHEIM:
In the 1980’s, using the pen name Victor Sondheim, Moffitt published the epic historical novel INHERITORS OF THE STORM, a saga of America between the World Wars.
Writing as PAUL KING:
In the 1990’s, using the pen name Paul King, Moffitt published THE DREAMERS and THE VOYAGERS, vivid novels of the voyages of discovery and conquest by early European explorers of the New World.
LATE FICTION:
Don continued writing stories and novels under his own name until his death on December 10, 2014. His late work included both time travel and historical mysteries published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Children of the Comet, a science fiction novel completed only weeks before his death, was posthumously published in 2015, and is available from Open Road Integrated Media.
SEPTEMBER 15, 2017
Moffitt, Donald
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(1931-2014) US author who started publishing work of genre interest with "The Devil's Due" for Fantastic in May 1960. His first outright sf novel is The Jupiter Theft (1977), a tale which established him as an author of numerate, physics-oriented, fast-moving Hard-SF adventures (see Jupiter). After some years of silence came the Genesis series – The Genesis Quest (1986) and Second Genesis (1986) – which demonstrates a competence with the mythopoeically large scales and calculations typical of Moffitt's category of Space Opera as Earth sends terminal messages through space which reach their Alien targets millions of years hence, generating an aeon-leaping response. Slightly closer to home, the Mechanical Sky sequence – Crescent in the Sky (1990) and A Gathering of Stars (1990) – posits Arab-dominated venues in space. Though some local-colour weaknesses (the first volume features a court eunuch) might reasonably irritate Muslims, the focus of the tales – especially the wide-ranging second instalment – is firmly on the wide-scale action and the Physics. The hero of Jovian (2003) has adventures in the inner planets.
Under the pseudonym Paul Kenyon, which Moffitt has acknowledged, he wrote the Baroness sequence of eight vaguely Near-Future, Invention-saturated thrillers starring international socialite/spy Baroness Penelope St John-Orsini and beginning with The Ecstasy Connection (1974). These combine Sex and futuristic anti-West conspiracies; the general effect is reminiscent of, though far from equal to, the James Bond novels of Ian Fleming or perhaps the Modesty Blaise sequence by Peter O'Donnell. Two further instalments by Moffitt, «A Black Hole to Die In» and «Death is a Copycat», were sold to Pocket Books but not published owing to the cancellation of the series. Moffitt has also written non-genre novels as by Paul King and Victor Sondheim.
This author should not be confused with the Texas-born Donald Moffitt (1931- ), a journalist who writes books on finance. [JC/DRL]
Donald Moffitt
born Boston, Massachusetts: 20 July 1931
died Monroe, Maine: 10 December 2014
works (sf only)
Alphabetical Chronological
series
Baroness
The Ecstasy Connection (New York: Pocket Books, 1974) as Paul Kenyon [Baroness: pb/Hector Garrido]
Diamonds are for Dying (New York: Pocket Books, 1974) as Paul Kenyon [Baroness: pb/Hector Garrido]
Death is a Ruby (New York: Pocket Books, 1974) as Paul Kenyon [Baroness: pb/Hector Garrido]
Hard-Core Murder (New York: Pocket Books, 1974) as Paul Kenyon [Baroness: pb/Hector Garrido]
Operation Doomsday (New York: Pocket Books, 1974) as Paul Kenyon [Baroness: pb/Hector Garrido]
Sonic Slave (New York: Pocket Books, 1974) as Paul Kenyon [Baroness: pb/Hector Garrido]
Flicker of Doom (New York: Pocket Books, 1974) as Paul Kenyon [Baroness: pb/Hector Garrido]
Black Gold (New York: Pocket Books, 1974) as Paul Kenyon [Baroness: pb/Hector Garrido]
Genesis
The Genesis Quest (New York: Ballantine Books/Del Rey, 1986) [Genesis: pb/Ralph McQuarrie]
Second Genesissfgateway.com (New York: Ballantine Books/Del Rey, 1986) [Genesis: pb/Ralph McQuarrie]
Mechanical Sky
Crescent in the Skysfgateway.com (New York: Ballantine Books/Del Rey, 1989) [Mechanical Sky: pb/Don Dixon]
A Gathering of Stars (New York: Ballantine Books/Del Rey, 1990) [Mechanical Sky: pb/Don Dixon]
individual titles
The Jupiter Theft (New York: Ballantine Books, 1977) [pb/R H van Dongen]
Jovian (New York: Ibooks, 2003) [hb/Bob Larkin]
Children of the Comet (New York: Open Road Integrated Media, 2015) [pb/]
Donald Moffitt
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other people named Donald Moffitt, see Donald Moffitt (disambiguation).
Donald Moffitt
Born July 20, 1931
Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Died December 10, 2014 (aged 83)
Monroe, Maine, USA
Pen name Donald Moffitt,
Paul Kenyon,
Victor Sondheim,
Paul King
Nationality USA
Donald Moffitt (July 20, 1931 – December 10, 2014) was an American author who wrote a number of science fiction novels. Most famous among these are The Genesis Quest and Second Genesis.[1] While he was the author of many titles under his own name he also used the pseudonyms Paul Kenyon, Victor Sondheim, and Paul King. Known for his science fiction, Moffitt later turned his attention to historical mysteries.[2]
Contents [hide]
1 Bibliography (incomplete)
1.1 As Donald Moffitt
1.1.1 Short fiction
1.1.2 Novels
1.1.2.1 Genesis Series
1.1.2.2 Mechanical Sky Series
1.2 As Paul Kenyon
1.3 As Victor Sondheim
1.4 As Paul King
1.4.1 Dreamers Trilogy
2 Notes
3 External links
Bibliography (incomplete)[edit]
As Donald Moffitt[edit]
Short fiction[edit]
The Devil's Due (Fantastic Science Fiction Stories, May 1960; reprinted in Strange Fantasy, Fall 1969)
The Scroll (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1972)
The Man Who Was Beethoven (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1972)
Literacy (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, April 1994)
The Beethoven Project (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, April 2008)
Feat of Clay (Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, September 2008)
The Affair of the Phlegmish Master (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, June 2009)
Deadly Passage (Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, November 2009)
A Death in Samoa (Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, October 2011)
A Snitch in Time (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, January–February 2011)
The Color of Gold (Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, March 2015)
A Handful of Clay (Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, July–August 2015)
Novels[edit]
The Jupiter Theft (1977)
Jovian (2003)
Children of the Comet (2015, published posthumously)
Genesis Series[edit]
The Genesis Quest (1986)
Second Genesis (1986)
Mechanical Sky Series[edit]
Crescent in the Sky (1989)
A Gathering of Stars (1990)
As Paul Kenyon[edit]
Also writing under Book Creations, Inc., house pseudonym "Paul Kenyon", he wrote in mid-70's The Baroness, a spy thriller series.
As Victor Sondheim[edit]
Inheritors of the Storm (1981)
As Paul King[edit]
Dreamers Trilogy[edit]
Dreamers (1992)
The Voyagers (1993)
The Discoverers (1994)
Children of the Comet
Publishers Weekly. 262.29 (July 20, 2015): p173.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Listen
Full Text:
Children of the Comet
Donald Moffitt. Open Road (openroadmedia.com), $15.99 trade paper (332p) ISBN 978-14976-8294-8
The final novel by Moffitt (1931-2014), set six billion years in the future, envisions humans being forced out of the Milky Way by an alien race known as the First Ones. Fortunately, this eviction takes place only after development of the Higgs drive, which makes travelling near light speed possible. Humans can travel unimaginable distances in the course of a single lifetime, while millennia pass outside the ship. Unsurprisingly, scientific advancement is no indicator of social progress, and the crew of the starship Time's Beginning is riven by factions that variously want to return to Earth's solar system, find a hospitable new planet, or search for the beginning of time. Meanwhile, another group of humans has been forced to take up residence in a collection of giant space trees rooted in comets, where they devolve into a primitive culture and manage to survive in the harsh vacuum of space until catching the attention of the Time's Beginning crew, which lavishes upon them the blessings of recivilization. The premises underlying this book are inventive, and the science is sound but long-winded. Alas, Moffitt (The Jupiter Theft) is not as talented with narrative and characterization as he clearly is with astrophysics, and the result is a fascinating scientific essay still in search of a worthy literary framework. (Oct.)
The Voyagers
Publishers Weekly.
240.47 (Nov. 22, 1993): p60.
COPYRIGHT 1993 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
This pallid adventure novel rejoins the seafaring protagonists introduced in The Dreamers; it skips from one to the
next of its parallel stories at dizzying speed but with little suspense. Ines, a Portuguese gentlewoman wrongly accused
of stealing a handkerchief, is on a prison ship bound for the colony of Madeira when she falls in love with Pedro, one
of the sailors. Once they reach the colony Ines must marry quickly to escape a scoundrel named Lobo, and Pedro
returns from a voyage to find her married. Englishman Tom was first taken on board a ship as an apprentice; as an
adult he has allied himself with the powerful Chinese eunuch Cheng Ho and lived in the Forbidden City. Now he is
eager to sail around Africa with Cheng Ho and possibly see England again, though he must leave his pregnant
concubine. Sandro, the younger son of a powerful Venetian family, was sold into slavery because of his jealous
brother's ruse. Having escaped, he is now achieving business success. He loves a tavern waitress, but she refuses to
marry him until he resolves his desire for revenge on his brother and his longing for his late wife Marina, whom he
married as a slave.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Voyagers." Publishers Weekly, 22 Nov. 1993, p. 60. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA14784481&it=r&asid=e15e8580d721de1a0539c1f573d2f960.
Accessed 24 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A14784481
10/24/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508887342609 2/2
The Dreamers: A Novel of Adventure and
Discovery, 1418-1425
Publishers Weekly.
239.49 (Nov. 9, 1992): p78.
COPYRIGHT 1992 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
THE DREAMERS: A Novel of Adventure and Discovery 1418-1425
Paul King. Bantam, $5.99 ISBN 0-553-29242-0
The first volume in the pseudonymous King's Discoverers series doesn't even try to stand as a complete story. But set
in an impressively detailed--and by no means pretty-- 15th-century landscape that ranges from Bristol, England, to
China's Forbidden City, it introduces a cast of faseinating characters who seek their destinies at sea. Prince Henry of
Portugal launches a search for a mysterious lost island; his motley crow includes Zarco Goncalves (a pirate), Martim
Alves (a gentleman) and Pedre Costa (a kitchen boy). On the other side of the world, Admiral Cheng Ho tries to
outmaneuver China's powerful Anti-Maritime Party and to find a sea route to the West. In Venice, Sandro Cavalli, son
of a prosperous Venetian merchant, is abducted and sold as a galley slave, while in England, lusty young apprentice
Tom Giles flees to the waves when he's accused of seducing his master's wife. The only complaint to be made is that
the jumps between these scenarios can be irksome. For example, after Sandro is sold into slavery, the text cuts to
Tom, Martim and his family, back to Tom, and then over to Sandro, still sitting where he was chained two years (and
more than 100 pages) earlier. (Dee.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Dreamers: A Novel of Adventure and Discovery, 1418-1425." Publishers Weekly, 9 Nov. 1992, p. 78. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA12928959&it=r&asid=66c8ead2ce18f34d8584ef392aafdb33.
Accessed 24 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A12928959
The Jupiter Theft
Donald Moffitt
the-jupiter-theft600
Well, this didn’t play out the way I expected. This was for many years my go-to book for how not to write hard SF but on rereading after a lapse of 20 years I find a book that while flawed definitely has strengths.
I am not sure if they give a specific year this is set in but it’s closer to the end of the 21st century than its beginning. The US, now centered in Texas, still exists despite an attempt by New England to leave that was put down with harsh political measures and nuclear weapons. There is what amounts to a caste system and if you are not lucky enough to be born into GovCorp’s service, you pass life as a presumed criminal and/or political dissident.
China, now the other superpower, is still a gray Maoist state. The Soviets are gone, having been vanquished the “the police action of 2003-2008”, Europe is irrelevant, Greater Japan is around but not involved in the plot and and I don’t think India is ever mentioned. I am a bit surprised not to see Brazil mentioned.
Despite ongoing rivalry comparable to the Cold War, the US and China are working on a joint crewed mission to Jupiter. We see right off the bat that the security measures both sides are taking are placing the mission in danger, as a spy camera disguises as a bolt fails under load. The respective security organs of the two governments have far too much power to be effectively opposed and so most people settle for keeping their heads down.
The mission to Jupiter begins to look a little irrelevant when astronomers note a new x-ray source that turns out to be surprisingly close to the solar system and headed directly towards it; since it is powerful enough to sterilize the Earth down to the bottom of mine shafts, even mere survival seems moot, let alone exploration. Everyone is relieved when the invading world slows and goes into orbit around the Sun and later Jupiter, or they would be if this did not make it clear the wanderer is under intelligent control.
Working under a set of unrealistic assumptions designed to make the people in power feel good (and with not one but two semi-autonomous nuclear weapon teams added to the crew) the Jupiter ship heads out on a four-month mission to what very quickly develops into a curb-stomp battle with the immeasurably technologically superior aliens.
One of the few surviving humans, Jameson, gets dragged off away from the rest (who are stuck in a zoo for captured animals). By luck and the direct intervention of the author he has just the right mix of skills and moments of luck to uncover most of the story of the Cygnans, who they are, what they are, where they came from and where they are going. This puts him in the position later on of knowing enough to see the scheme some of the security people have come up with to give the aliens one from Uncle Sam will have the unintended side-effect of 1/3rd chance of dooming humanity to extinction.
The problem is, team extremist overreaction have all the guns.
Why did I buy this? Because it was hard SF and there was a time when I’d buy pretty anything SFnal that had a Del Rel colophon on it. At this time they were Larry Niven’s publishers (before he jumped ship for Tor) and I think Lester del Rey kept an eye out for authors who could fill the same sort of niche as Niven, which is why Moffitt and Hogan1, to name two, popped up in the late 1970s. This would be closer to the Big Dumb Object end of Niven’s range than the Beowulf Shafer hijinks; the title comes from the alien habit of using gas giants as combination fuel tanks/radiation shielding for their star ships.
(it wouldn’t surprise me if del Rey picked Killough and Slonczewski to fill the same niche, down at the Shafer end of the scale)
I discovered on rereading it that my annoyance at the broken parts overwrote the stuff for which Moffitt should be praised. Chief amongst this is an attempt by him to have alien aliens. The beings responsible for re-purposing Jupiter don’t reproduce as humans do, although it takes the protagonist a while to realize he is projecting human patterns onto an alien species. Similarly the aliens from 61 Cygni, who were taken prisoner when the Cygans stopped there, superficially look terrestrial but turn out to differ significantly in detail once humans get around to paying closer attention.
There were also some stage-setting details that surprised me, like the fact people are using what are clearly close analogs of tablets in a design linage where styluses didn’t go out of fashion and a description of futuristic cameras that seemed to use charge-coupled displays. CCDs date back to 1969 but I don’t recall other SF authors realizing the potential.
I did have some questions that I didn’t get answers for, like where the US gets its billion people? Granted, they’ve annexed Canada and perhaps other countries as well but they’d pretty much have to either have annexed the whole of the new world or had much steeper birth rates than we actually saw. I suspect the answer is the latter.
I would have been surprised to see that the Jupiter ship used a 11boron+p reaction except this is where I first ran into the idea. The set-up to use it seems awfully kludgy (in large part because half of the system is Chinese, half is American and neither wants the other side to know how their side of the power system works) and it was never clear to me why they were using 11B+p. It’s true the reaction produces fewer neutrons but as far as I can tell that’s not mentioned, plus they are using a D+T reactor to get the 11B+p reaction started.
The social stuff is dated but no more off base than other SF from this period. This was written in that time when male SF authors had discovered one could have sex with women but before they discovered women might like to have some say in when they have sex and with whom. It’s possible the ‘part of your duty to the crew is to be promiscuous’ stuff is there to underline how authoritarian this particular US is but I suspect a lot of this is just a reflection of the 1970s zeitgeist.
What annoyed me about this book is two-fold:
One is that the author fails to consider the implications of some of the details he relates to the reader. For example, he has the Cygnans originate at Cygnus X-1 (or what became Cygnus X-1) and while he understands how quickly such stars evolve, he doesn’t seem to understand the implications for the evolution of life on planets orbiting those worlds. It’s not that conditions will be difficult, it’s that the planet’s crust will barely have had time to solidify before various exciting events evaporate the place. The evolution of complex life in the short interval allowed seems impossible.
[The easy fix is the Cygnans evolved somewhere else, and settled the world orbiting future Cygnus X-1 on the grounds it would last long enough for the purposes of the colonists. Let their great-great-nth descendents work out what to do when the time comes]
Another example is the photon drive the aliens use to move between ships. As we all know, P = FC, which means a 100 kg alien zipping along at 10 m/s/s is generating a 300 GW beam out the back of their broomstick. The humans worry about being swarmed by the aliens but really they should worry more about the aliens deciding to react to the humans who’ve just run through one of the alien ark ships like weasels in a chicken house by carving the human ship into small, harmless bits.
[He does acknowledge the conversion drives produce a lot of energy]
Oh, and despite his attempts to imagine the alien, there’s a needless ‘Earth is standard’ angle. Although the aliens come from a 1/3rd gravity home world, they prefer to accelerate their ships at 9.8 m/s/s…
The other, the one that really irked me when I was a teenager, is he misses the mark on certain classes of problems over and over. For example, Moffitt puts the average distance between stars (6 light years) together with the distance the Cygnans have travelled (10,000 LY) and concludes there are about 10,000/6 or about 1700 stars on a direct line between Sol and Cygnus X-1.
This pales beside the issue that enraged me as the sort of teenager who’d tried to abuse his connection to faculty to get time on the machines in the red room to make calculations pertaining to star flight under certain highly unrealistic assumptions, which is Moffitt fundamentally does not get relativity even to the limited degree a moderately bright farm kid thought he did. Specifically he looked at 300,000,000/9.8 m/s/s and concluded this meant you could get arbitrarily close to the speed of light in about a year. It followed from this star flight would consist of a year getting as close to the speed of light as you could survive without the interstellar medium abrading you to nothing, a short period cruising (letting Uncle Albert reduce the time in ship frame) and a year slowing down.
This is not me reading things into the text:
Mike leaned back, looking smug. “So at that speed, the time dilation effect is a hundred to one, right? So the subjective time for the crew is maybe two years and two weeks to Alpha Centauri compared to two years and six weeks to 61 Cygni.”
AUGH! Not only are the numbers wrong but ‘subjective’ suggests there’s a preferred frame. A PREFERRED FRAME!
Well, it matters.
In any case, a flawed work but not without some praiseworthy elements and not nearly as bad as I had remembered.
If you’d like to try this novel for yourself, an ebook of it seems to be available here. Although probably you have to be in the UK. And that ‘p.o.r’ makes me wonder about availability.
North Americans can find it here.
I am probably obligated to review Inherit the Stars, aren’t I?
A REVIEW OF CHILDREN OF THE COMET BY DONALD MOFFITT
OCTOBER 13, 2015 BMACKELA LEAVE A COMMENT
Children of the Comet
by Donald Moffitt
4,0
This is a very difficult book to review. There are two scientific concepts that are the basis for Children of the Comet. These brilliant ideas have the potential for a fantastic book.
If a spaceship is traveling at a speed very close to the speed of light, time slows down for its passengers. The closer to the speed of light that you get, the more time compresses. So if you spend 50 or more years traveling at near light speed, billions of years will pass for the rest of the universe. Then when you turn around and head back to Earth at the same speeds, you may arrive back at Earth 7 billion years after you left. It is as if you were a time traveler.
If a tree can be genetically modified so that it could live in a vacuum and also could use the icy material in a comet to furnish its water and minerals, then that tree could grow to be hundreds of miles tall. This could furnish wood for building in space. After many thousands or millions of years, these trees could become living worlds, with people and animals living in and on them.
I could imagine so many great epics that could be told using either of these ideas. Children of the Comet could have been one of those epic books, but the promise was only partially realized. The first half of the book, especially the portion that takes place on the tree is great. The second half is more of the typical sci-fi space opera. It wasn’t bad, just disappointing. I was so excited. I thought that this might really be great. Then it ended up just being average.
So I guess that I have to average it out. Great concepts, great story line and characters on the tree, average finish, makes for a 4 Star book. I still give Children of the Comet a Big Thumbs Up, because I love the ideas that Mr. Moffitt had. I just wish that the whole plot could have lived up to its potential.
I received a Digital Review Copy from the publisher.
Book Description
Children of the Comet - Donald MoffittIn the far future, on top of a gigantic tree rooted in the ice ball of a comet, a young man’s journey leads to unexpected encounters
In this brand-new cosmic adventure by the author of The Genesis Quest and The Jupiter Theft, Torris, son of the Facemaker, knows only his small community at the base of the great Tree on a comet with almost no gravity or atmosphere. Torris’s daily struggle for survival includes harvesting frozen air to keep breathing, dodging flutterbeasts, and hunting meatbeasts for food. When it comes time to make his vision quest to the top of the Tree, Torris is completely unprepared for what he finds: first, a thieving and hostile fellow quester; then, Ning, a female hunter from a neighboring tree-bearing comet, who has catapulted across empty space in search of food to save her family; and ultimately, alien visitors in a massive starship that has spent billions of years crossing the galaxy.
Shocked at the cultural differences between his home and Ning’s and stunned by the changes precipitated by the arrival of the spaceship, Torris must learn quickly, adapt even faster, and face an uncertain and rapidly changing future unlike anything he has ever imagined.
Book Details
Paperback: 332 pages
Publisher: Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy (October 13, 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1497682940
ISBN-13: 978-1497682948
Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces
About the Author
moffittDonald Moffitt (1931-2014) was born in Boston. A former public relations executive, industrial filmmaker, and ghostwriter, he wrote fiction on and off for more than twenty years, often under one of many pen names. In 1977 he published his first full-length science fiction novel, The Jupiter Theft, under his own name.
Moffitt was a visionary novelist, praised for his scientific accuracy and his high-speed, high-tech stories. He lived in rural Maine with his wife, Ann, until his death in December 2014.
REVIEW: CHILDREN OF THE COMET BY DONALD MOFFITT
cover68093-medium
Publisher: Open Road
Publishing Date: October 2015
ISBN: 9781497678460
Genre: SciFi
Rating: 3.2/5
Publisher Description:In this brand-new cosmic adventure by the author of The Genesis Quest and The Jupiter Theft, Torris, son of the Facemaker, knows only his small community at the base of the great Tree on a comet with almost no gravity or atmosphere. Torris’s daily struggle for survival includes harvesting frozen air to keep breathing, dodging flutterbeasts, and hunting meatbeasts for food.
Review: Torris’ saga was at once thought provoking and entertaining. The parallel story line of the ship, Times Beginning and its crew was a little too patterned and smug. The idea that Earths descendants want to come back after 6 billion years (spent mostly traveling) is kind of weak. What failed was the characterizations of its crew. For example, there is spunky, smart as a whip, Nina!. Cranky, good natured and caring, Captain Joorn! Asian side-kick and expert scientist, Chu! etc. etc.
Besides the contrived dialogue there just wasn’t a deep connection to scifi as expected. The novel moved from the comet trees into kind of a dorky space opera when Torris meets his galactic ancestors and soon learns to speak their language as well as speak dolphinese (don’t ask). These interactions come off as contrived and not too realistic.
In my opinion there was definitely some “borrowing of ideas” from Larry Niven’s “Integral Trees” (1984) novel. Two warring tribes on separate trees. Check. Near weightless environment. Check. Massive life supporting trees with resident adapted flora and fauna. Check. Spaceship saves tribe. Check. Happily integrated Tribes after saving. Check.
Children of the Comet Review (Speculative Fiction)
Posted on October 2, 2015 by Lilyn G
Children of the CometIn the far future, on top of a gigantic tree rooted in the ice ball of a comet, a young man s journey leads to unexpected encounters. … Torris, son of the Facemaker, knows only his small community at the base of the great Tree on a comet with almost no gravity or atmosphere…. a daily struggle for survival includes harvesting frozen air to keep breathing, dodging flutterbeasts, and hunting meatbeasts for food. When it comes time to make his vision quest to the top of the Tree, Torris is completely unprepared for what he finds: first, a thieving and hostile fellow quester; then, Ning, a female hunter from a neighboring tree-bearing comet, who has catapulted across empty space in search of food to save her family; and ultimately, alien visitors in a massive starship that has spent billions of years crossing the galaxy. Shocked at the cultural differences between his home and Ning’s and stunned by the changes precipitated by the arrival of the spaceship, Torris must learn quickly, adapt even faster, and face an uncertain and rapidly changing future unlike anything he has ever imagined. -Goodreads
–S&S–
Children of the Comet Review
Telling a story in two timelines can be hard for a lot of authors to pull off. You have to keep things simple enough that your readers aren’t having to constantly backtrack to remember what happened before the switch, but not so simple that the attention begins to wonder. Few authors ever really fail at it, but on the other hand, few authors ever truly succeed at it. The author managed this. He even went a step further and managed to join the separate timelines together in a way that sounded logical enough to be believable!I can’t say exactly how accurate the science is, as I am most definitely lost when it comes to astronomy, physics, etc, but I was not lost when reading this book. The author manages to get his point across without it coming across as a blob of big-word mumbo jumbo. Though, occasionally, you get the feeling you’re being talked ‘down’ to via the author using a teenager as a device. 4 Star Rated Children of the Comet Review
For those of you thinking “Riiiiiiiggghht…trees on comets. The author is blowing cheerios out his backside“, apparently it actually has some grounding (pardon the pun), as it was introduced first Bernal, but then brought into larger notice by Freeman Dyson, and Carl Sagan (whom you might know as Neil deGrasse Tyson’s role model if you’re younger) even discussed it in his 1985 non-fiction book “Comet“. Its called “The Dyson Tree” (though in this book its called a Bernal Tree).
I like that the animals aren’t given much description. Just enough to get the point across, but not enough that I can’t spin them into wonderful creatures of my own making in my head. Meatbeast, flutterbeast, etc, are the perfect choice for names to assist this.
I outright cackled at some of the puns and bad jokes that the author unexpectedly dropped in.
Overall: I have no strong negative criticisms of this book. The only reason I didn’t rate it 5 is that it, while solid, it did not quite induce me to rave about how awesome it is. (Though it was very close!)
PS: I was looking up the author to see if he had a twitter account, and I discovered that he died on Dec 10, 2014. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was one of the last things he worked on. If it was, all I can say is Man, he ended on a good note. We lost a talented author when he passed.
Click here to find Children of the Comet now on Amazon.com
'Children of the Comet' by Donald Moffitt Review
November 3, 2015 11:07 a.m. This review by baldassbot in Books
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‘Children of the Comet’ (6 out of 10) by Donald Moffitt. Published by Open Road Media. Available Now.
Donald Moffitt’s "Children of the Comet" is an interesting piece of science fiction. Unfortunately, it can’t quite seem to decide what kind of science fiction it is trying to be. Despite issues with its identity, however, it does tell an appropriately epic story with interesting characters and twists. There is a lot here to like for the hard sci-fi nerd, but it just never hits on all cylinders well enough to make a great novel.
If you like hard science in your fiction there is a lot to enjoy with the theoretical nature of the various plots in this novel. We see the concept of humans not being alone in the universe and how that impacts our progression once we reach interstellar travel. It’s not as pretty as Star Trek and far more depressing, but it realistically addresses the inherent stupidity of a galactic war and its complete ineffectiveness. The odd time paradox of travel at relativistic speeds is also a key element and is played to an unusual extreme. The titular science at play is the Dyson Tree, a hypothetical form of plant life that could grow utilizing the ice in comets, solar energy, and the low gravity to become a potential life-sustaining heavenly body. Combining these elements builds the universe for our characters.
Those characters, while not bad, are the starting point for where the novel might lose you. At a high level the characters can be interesting, like a tribe of sentient dolphins that are extremely valuable for their zero-g repair work to a ship’s hull. There are two main societies present in the story. One, the tree people, is fascinating. The other, the travelers, is less so. On a more personal level, the stereotypes overwhelm the novelty of the story. And this is where the identity struggle resides. Is Moffitt trying to tell just another science fiction story with our existing tropes, or is he trying to create a unique universe that has to play by certain rules? If you’ve got the science behaving rationally why do your characters have to be so lifeless? From the politics to the family dynamics, everything happens on a personal level exactly as you’d expect. His humans, in any form, just don’t seem to have any humanity. Somehow their reactions to something completely unexpected still manage to contain no surprises.
And there should be surprises - unless you’re reading extremely closely and pausing to reflect on the foreshadowing. From a nuts and bolts perspective, the craft of writing has been performed well. There is foreshadowing, there are recurring themes and hints at what’s to come. Unless you’re extremely fascinated with the science and the mundane characters you’ll probably have plenty of time to consider those elements as well, since this isn’t really what you’d call a page turner that will have you flying through with no time to pause for plot considerations.
Depending on your level of comfort with the scientific concepts at play, you may be thrilled with the science or you may be bored. But you still get an interesting universe. From a philosophical standpoint, it’s a good novel to have under your belt. From the interesting story and fascinating characters side of things… it’s a bit lackluster.
Donald Moffitt’s "Children of the Comet" is published by Open Road Media. It is available now on Kindle or your preferred book retailer.
Book Review: Children of the Comet
NOVEMBER 27, 2015
MILLIEBOT
pic from Netgalley
Children of the Comet
By Donald Moffitt
MY EDITION:
ARC E-BOOK, 332 PAGES (PAPERBACK)
2015, OPEN ROAD MEDIA SCI-FI & FANTASY
ISBN: 9781497682948 (PAPERBACK)
I received this book for free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. All opinions in this post are my own.
Torris is part of a small community that lives at the base of a huge tree on a comet floating through space. He must journey up the tree on a quest to receive a vision and become a man, and it’s there he meets a female, Ning, from a neighboring tree. She is hunting for food to save her family and Torris is shocked by the differences in their two cultures. After a scandal involving Ning, Torris ends up on a spaceship that has suddenly come into their orbit and must adapt to his rapidly changing future.
This book was just alright for me. I was pretty interested in Torris and his clan of comet-dwelling tree people and it reminded me a bit of Dark Eden (which I loved). They had an interesting culture and I also liked hearing about the wildlife that lived on the tree and in nearby space. I mean, there are creepy space-bat type things…which is pretty cool.
But then, there was a second plot involving people on a spaceship, trying to colonize, or rather, recolonize, our old solar system, and I couldn’t have been more bored. I didn’t really connect with the characters or their mission and there was so much science and space jargon that I couldn’t even follow most of what they’re discussing. I’ll believe whatever you want me to believe about space life and space travel – as a reader, I don’t need pages upon pages of facts (or what sounds like facts) and the science behind how this is done. It’s just not what I’m looking for. At one point they were holding a seminar and it was just all info-dumping regarding how life evolved in space, and probably a lot of other stuff that I didn’t pick up because I didn’t really read that section.
The two story lines do eventually converge, but by that point, I was too bored to really care. The story strayed so much from what I was really interested in, which was the people of the comet and how they lead their lives, that I wasn’t invested anymore. I didn’t look into whether this is part of a series, but it doesn’t matter because even if it was, I wouldn’t continue.
Mostly it just made me want to read Dark Eden all over again. If you’re into hard sci-fi that’s heavy with science and slow on plot, you might enjoy this book, but it wasn’t for me.
THURSDAY, MARCH 10, 2011
Blues for Allah: Crescent in the Sky by Donald Moffitt (1989)
Crescent in the Sky (1989), a hard science fiction-alternate history-political fantasy novel by American author Donald Moffitt. The first book in his The Mechanical Sky series.
Paperback original (New York: Del Rey / Ballantine Books, 1989) 280 pp, $3.95. Cover art by Don Dixon. Here is the promotional piece from the back cover:
Blues for Allah.
For a thousand years the Great Awakening had spread the word of Allah to the stars. And for a thousand years there had been no Caliph to unite the disparate Islamic planets—the vast interstellar distances made the required pilgrimage to Mecca nearly impossible for the more far-flung rulers.
Then the Emir of Mars announced his plan to travel to Islam's most holy shrine and to capture the prize of the Caliphate. Thus all Mars was plunged into a whirlwind of plots, intrigues, assassination, and revolution.
Young Abdul Hamid-Jones cared little for politics. But in spite of himself, the cloning technician was unwittingly caught in a vicious power play and a political game in which there were more players than rules—a game in which the least he could lose was his life!
According to the website Islam and Science Fiction, “The history of Islam in the 20th century in this story [Crescent in the Sky] is different from OTL."
A thumbnail review in an old issue of Library Journal concluded: "Featuring an intriguing premise—the Islamic conquest of space—and an engagingly ingenuous hero, this sf adventure/intrigue belongs in most collections."
Canadian science fiction fan and writer Randy McDonald was less impressed, writing in 2005: “My opinion of Moffitt as a basically competent science fiction author only began to change when I came across his novels Crescent in the Sky and A Gathering of Stars. Set in a vaguely alternate-historical setting, as the Islam in Sci-Fi site notes, these books do carry on in Moffitt's tradition of grand hard-sci vistas. The only problems with these books is the fact that the Islamic world-civilization they describe bears more similar to Disney's Aladdin than, say, the infinitely superior novels of George Alec Effinger, or, in fact, any plausible modern Islamic society. Were I a Muslim, I'd certainly be offended; as a non-Muslim, I'm unsurprised that he doesn't know what he's talking about.”
Surprisingly, Crescent in the Sky is available as an e-book through Amazon, Apple or Fictionwise.
Posted by Paul at 12:57 AM
Raymond's Reviews #2
%S The Mechanical Sky
%T Crescent In The Sky
%V I
%A Donald Moffitt
%I Del Rey
%D Jan-Feb 1990
%O paperback, $3.95 each
%P 282
%G 0-345-34477-4
%S The Mechanical Sky
%T A Gathering Of Stars
%V II
%A Donald Moffitt
%I Del Rey
%D Jan-Feb 1990
%O paperback, $3.95 each
%P 281
%G 0-345-36574-7
Donald Moffit proved in The Genesis Quest and Second Genesis that he is one of the gifted few who can write sense-of-wonder hard SF that both satisfies and gets the details right. These books aren't quite the riveting epics his last two were, but they are a damn sight better than most writers ever do -- and, arguably, his aims were different this time around.
We start with Abdul Hamid-Jones, a cloning technician in an Islam-dominated high-technology culture spanning the Solar System and a few nearby stars. In the first volume, our unwilling hero finds himself caught up in a deadly whirl of politico-religious intrigue when the despotic Emir of Mars's scheduled body transplant is disrupted by a terrorist attack. Eventually he is forced to flee to the Martian deserts, where the Bedouin ride gene-adapted Marscamels between tented and domed `oases'. While on raid with them he is recaptured by the black hats, rescued in turn by another underground group and eventually packed off (in disguise) to Alpha Centauri on a wooden starship.
The second volume more than satisfies the expectations set up by the first. What can you say about a writer with enough chutzpah and a slick enough line in speculative engineering to make you believe in wood-and-cloth starships and a scheme to sling entire solar systems around at relativistic velocities without rattling teacups on their inhabited planets? (I know what I can say... MORE! MORE!).
The atmosphere of these two novels veers from thrillingly dramatic to near slapstick, with Moffitt never quite losing control of the narrative. Jones's giddy pursuit of an overblown, mercenary `beauty' (the boss's daughter) and his frantic everything-I-do-gets-me-in-deeper attempts to untangle himself from several vicious but incompetent underground groups provide plenty of chuckles.
But don't get the idea that Moffit sacrifices any world-building precision to get cheap yucks. Except for one eminently pardonable and necessary McGuffin (the Harun Drive) the physics and biology are all quite conservative (no FTL drives or antigravity in this universe). One precise dissection of the energy requirements of starships in the second volume (which demonstates, among other things, why Bussard ramscoops are unworkable) is worth the price of admission by itself.
And, oh, does Moffitt have fun with it all. You will too -- this book is definitely a good read in the classic SF sense. May the beneficient Allah rain his blessings on Donald Moffitt, so that we see many more from this major and too-little-recognized talent!
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
The Baroness #1: The Ecstasy Connection
The Baroness #1: The Ecstasy Connection, by Paul Kenyon
February, 1974 Pocket Books
If I could meet just one character from a men's adventure novel...then it would just have to be the voluptuous, brunette, high-cheekboned, sex-starved Penelope St. John-Orsini, aka The Baroness. For sure the creation of a male writer, the Baroness is so gorgeous as to turn heads wherever she goes, she just loves a good time, and she can kill with her bare hands. Plus she's a millionaire...and a supermodel!
The Baroness is usually tagged as a "female James Bond," but she's more like a female Doc Savage. For, like the Man of Bronze, the Baroness is the leader of a group of men and women who are differentiated from one another moreso by their specialities than by their personalities. There's Tom Sumo, the Asian electronics wiz, Skytop, the American Indian ruffian, Wharton, another big guy who hides his love for the Baroness...and some others, but they were all so bland and incidental to the narrative that I couldn't remember them or tell them apart.
In the first installment of this 8-volume series, we meet the Baroness en media res -- in true men's adventure tradition there's no origin tale for our heroine. Instead her backstory is awkwardly placed in the first half of the book as a quick, two-page flashback. Married twice, her first husband a secret agent, her second a baron, the Baroness is a widow twice over. Bored with her high-society, jetsetting life, she decided to make connections with her first husband's circle, eventually becoming an uber-secret agent operating under the codename "Coin," her handler codenamed "Key," himself a top-secret NSA agent who answers to no one but the President.
The Ecstasy Connection blasts full steam ahead from beginning to end. An unknown new drug has worked its way into the elite echelons of drug society, an ecstasy pill (decades before such a thing existed) which sends users to a level of such sexual euphoria that they lose the ability for any basic functions. The opening features a montage of various people suffering the consequences -- most memorable of the lot is when an opera singer disrobes before her audience, plays with herself, and dies backstage of multiple orgasms. When an operator in a missile control center falls under the drug's sway, the NSA calls in "Key," who calls in "Coin," and the Baroness and her team are on the job.
There are some good setpieces here as the Baroness investigates. The highlight -- and the highlight of the entire novel -- is when she infiltrates a mob-thrown party in a downtown tenement building, one which turns into a drug-fueled orgy. This sequence just keeps improving upon itself, revelling in its own exploitative energy, as the Baroness, fully nude, hides herself in an orgy as the entire party is gunned down, and then, still naked and unarmed, plays a game of cat and mouse with the encroaching mobsters, killing her prey from the shadows.
Eventually the team goes to Hong Kong, where they've traced the mysterious drug. Here we meet the villain of the piece: Petronius Sim, a mountain of blubber (I kept envisioning him as a late-model Orson Welles) who lives in extreme opulence in a Hong Kong villa, surrounded by armed mercenaries and "juiceheads," unfortunates whom he has gotten hooked on his pleasure center-enhancing devices. These people have metal plates in their heads, into which they are fed electricity which stimulates the hypothalamus, giving them jolts of pleasure beyond normal human experience. Sim is devoted to pure pleasure -- his first name being a dead giveaway -- and his master plan is to get the leaders of the world hooked on his drugs and devices so that he can...rule the world.
There's a lot of action and sex from here on out, and some psychedelic stuff too, which I especially enjoyed. Sim and his scientist henchman Dr. Jolly have constructed an artificial brain "the size of a small house" with which they "map" the brains of their victims; the Baroness is hooked into it and the sequence which ensues comes off like a lurid variation of the finale of Stanley Kubrick's 2001.
Whoever Paul Kenyon was, his writing isn't bad. At 224 pages, The Ecstasy Connection moves at a steady clip, and it's a fine introduction to the series. There's some good dialog, inventive action setpieces, and a lurid quotient which outdoes pretty much any other '70s men's adventure novel (which is saying something!). Both the action and the sex scenes are incredibly graphic, the latter moreso. Which makes me wonder. The Baroness series is unlike most other men's adventure novels in that the main character is a woman. Therefore, the sex scenes are told from a woman's perspective. And again, these sex scenes are very graphic, with no detail spared.
So I wonder -- who was this series written for? It's obviously part of the men's adventure genre, but since it has a female lead character it subverts the entire "men can empathize with the protagonist" thrust of the genre. But with The Baroness series...I mean, let's face it, the Baroness is having sex with men, and the sex scenes are from her point of view. So it seems a little...strange to me. Are male readers meant to empathize with this protagonist as she has sex with...men? Or was this series some sort of attempt at a "women's adventure" genre?
To give further thrust to my theory, the advertisement in the back of The Ecstasy Connection is for Eileen Ford's A More Beautiful You In 21 Days, a book for women -- how to lose weight, stay young, etc. You know the marketing of '70s paperback fiction..."If you liked this book, you'll love..." So then why an ad for a female-centric book at the back of Baroness #1? But then... for every time we have a sex scene from the Baroness's perspective, there'll be a moment where we can objectify her in true men's adventure tradition; ie, she'll start ogling herself in a ceiling mirror. So who knows.
Anyway, it's incidental. This is certainly one of the best men's adventure series ever published, up there with TNT. (In fact, that would be the team-up of all time, the sexually-insatiable Baroness running into the sexually-insatiable Tony Nicholas Twin...)
Posted by Joe Kenney at 9:46 AM
Thursday, August 4, 2016
The Baroness #1: The Ecstasy Connection (second review)
The Baroness #1: The Ecstasy Connection, by Paul Kenyon
February, 1974 Pocket Books
Some people re-read Moby-Dick; I’m re-reading The Ecstasy Connection. Six years ago I first reviewed this initial volume of The Baroness, and while I enjoyed it then I really loved it this time. This is opposite of the experience I had when I re-read The Enforcer #1 last year; while I loved that one the first time I read it, on my second reading I found it rather padded and uneventful.
Not so for The Ecstasy Connection, which still retains its position as one of the more sleazy, lurid, and entertaining men’s adventure novels I’ve yet read. And true to the standards of producer Lyle Kenyon Engel’s Book Creations Incorporated, it’s very well written. I don’t know how Engel did it, but he managed to always find quality authors – authors who all seemed to have the same sort of professional style. Thanks to ppsantos at The Baroness Yahoo Group, we now know that Donald Moffitt was the author of this book, as well as the seven volumes that followed (not to mention two others that were never published). Sadly, I’ve also learned from the Yahoo club that Mr. Moffitt passed away in December, 2014. Luckily he was able to discover the fan base his old series had acquired before he shrugged off those mortal coils.
I developed a lot of respect for Moffitt as I re-read this novel; the minor sleazy tidbits he packs into the book are incredible. He leaves no lurid stone unturned, from mentioning the “foamy pubes” of a nude woman who has died of a massive orgasm to detailing the plentiful carnage in the book’s frequent action scenes. While I didn’t much care for some of the later volumes (and I plan on re-reading them, too, so we’ll see if I still feel that way), it must be said that this first volume of The Baroness is one of the best men’s adventure novels ever written, hitting all the bases one could want.
This makes it all the more interesting that The Ecstasy Connection was actually the second manuscript Moffitt wrote – the first one he wrote was Diamonds Are For Dying, which was published second in the series. (Thanks again to ppsantos for this info!) Diamonds Are For Dying was one of my least favorite books in the series, but maybe I should’ve read it first this time around, just to see how Moffitt improved between volumes. At any rate there is textual evidence throughout The Ecstasy Connection that it actually takes place after the second volume; for example, Penelope “The Baroness” St. John-Orsini at one point mentions her “previous mission in Brazil,” where she lost her favored pistol, a Bernadelli VB. All of this happened in Diamonds Are For Dying.
Perhaps Moffitt just figured out the series he wanted to write with The Ecstasy Connection; maybe he had trouble finding his footing with Diamonds Are For Dying. Whatever the reason, he scored a home run with this one, with a wildly over-the-top plot, constant action, a likable protagonist (the Baroness here isn’t as gratingly arrogant as she sometimes is in later volumes), and plentiful sex – yet again I wondered this time who exactly this series was written for. Was Lyle Kenyon Engel envisioning a women’s adventure series? Penelope’s frequent sex scenes are all written from her point of view, so we read of the pleasure she experiences as a man slides into her “scabbard” and whatnot. In the traditional men’s adventure novel, these sex scenes would of course be relayed from the man’s point of view. But then, there’s no way to get around this when your protagonist is a woman (unless you POV-hop, which you shouldn’t), so I digress.
Speaking of the rampant, explicit sex scenes, it occurred to me this time that perhaps the focus on sex is the very reason why The Baroness was published by Pocket Books, which didn’t really do much in the way of men’s adventure. However Pocket had cornered the market on trash fiction, mostly because it retained the paperback rights to Harold Robbins. Perhaps Engel envisioned this series as expressly catering to Pocket’s demand for sleaze – the dude was a genius for marketing and packaging books. Whatever the thinking, it got some attention; another thing Moffitt revealed to ppsantos of the Yahoo Baroness group was that Robbins himself at one point was trying to make a movie out of The Baroness!
Well anyway, this volume’s outrageous plot is about a dangerous new drug which activates the pleasure center of the hypothalamus, causing its users to literally die of pleasure. The novel features I believe the most memorable opening sequence in the series, with a gorgeous and famous stage actress, strung out on the ecstasy drug, doffing her clothes in front of a packed audience and yelling, “Screw me, darlings!” Meanwhile other notables are suffering from the drug, most damningly a nuclear missile operator in a military base who almost triggers WWIII before collapsing dead on his console. After the mandatory scene in which the various intelligence agency heads argue over who should get the job, we learn that “Key” – aka NSA man John Farnsworth – has been tapped by the President to activate “Coin.”
This is of course Penelope, the Baroness herself, and when we meet her she’s hosting one of her famous bi-annual parties in her plush Manhattan apartment. All the jet-setters are here, and Moffitt capably injects just the sort of sleazy ‘70s stuff we want throughout: “A blue haze of hemp hung over the rooms and drifted out over Central Park.” Interestingly, it’s just assumed that the reader already knows that Penelope is “Coin;” she sees a Senator in her party and reflects on the “NSA dossier” on him. Clearly this is yet another indication that this was intended as the second volume; I’m pretty sure Penelope was given a little more buildup in Diamonds Are For Dying.
A famous covergirl model – whom we learn later has even starred in two movies – Penelope is a smokin’ hot, raven-haired babe with an incredible bod, “huge luminous green eyes,” and “spectacular cheekbones.” (In other words, if Robbins had gotten a movie made, there was only one damn actress he could’ve hired to play the Baroness – Lynda “Good Lord!!!” Carter.) Oh, and cover artist Hector Garrido consistently depicted Penelope in a skin-tight black suit, which I always figured was his own invention. However at one point in this volume Penelope is in fact dressed in a black leotard, so maybe that’s what inspired Garrido.
Farnsworth contacts Penelope just as she’s engaged in her favorite activity – kinky sex. This too would become a recurring scene in future volumes, each of which for the most part follows the same template as The Ecstasy Connection. Moffitt turns out the first of his pages-long, XXX-hardcore sex scenes, as Penelope eagerly boffs a Joe Namath-esque football star. No detail is spared here. But once she answers Farnsworth’s call – and Penelope is contacted via her watch, which sends shocks through her to get her attention – Penelope meets her contact in the downtown Manhattan offices of International Models, Inc., where Farnsworth, an OSS veteran in his fifties with gray hair and a clipped moustache, acts as the company’s general manager.
The Baroness, tasked with finding out where this dangerous mystery drug is coming from, puts together her eight-person team. This time I actually paid attention to who they are, but be aware they are for the most part ciphers who add little to the series. Interestingly, it turns out that Moffitt himself felt the same, and indeed was requested to give the Baroness a large team – check out his comments on the origins of the series, which he also sent to ppsantos. But for posterity, here are the members of the Baroness’s team:
Dan Wharton: Described as “blond” and “bearlike,” he’s a former Green Beret who is in love with the Baroness. He’s also curiously prudish and there are many subtle mentions of how he will shyly look away when he sees a nude woman. It’s later explained that he was raised in a strict family, but still there’s enough textual evidence here for the reader to go “hmmm.”
Inga (no last name given): A “big-boned, babyfaced blonde,” whose cover is as one of Penelope’s models. She’s one of the team members who won’t contribute much here or in future volumes. This time she gives Penelope a massage.
Joe Skytop: Like Dan Wharton, he’s one of the few team members who will actually do anything in this and ensuing volumes. Another bear of a man – it’s not outright stated but I believe he’s supposed to be even more muscular than Wharton – he’s described as a “full-blooded Cherokee Indian” and he’s a master of all forms of unarmed combat.
Tom Sumo: Like Wharton and Skytop, another of the team members who actually matters. The Q of the Baroness’s team, Sumo is Japanese-American and contributes a variety of high-tech gizmos, each of which Moffitt overdescribes with annoyingly “gee whiz”-type narrative and dialog. (Ie, “My saliva is the electrolyte.”)
Paul (no last name given): An “elegant black man,” who I believe has maybe two lines this time. He won’t go on to much greater in the series. His cover is as one of Penelope’s top male models. We’re informed he’s some sort of guerrilla warfare specialist. (Meaning maybe he was a Black Panther??) And like June Cleaver, he can speak jive; ie “chillen” instead of “children.”
Yvette (no last name given): The other black member of the team, and usually paired with Paul, stereotyping be damned. (Humorously, when Penelope sends off her team on various missions early in the book, Paul and Yvette are instructed to don fly threads and head “uptown” to find out what’s going on with the pimps and the drugdealers!) She contributes nothing here and won’t in future, either. We’re informed she’s from Haiti, speaks with a slight accent, and is expert with disguises and piloting “small craft.”
Eric (no last name given): The most cipherlike member of the team, this dude’s apparently blond, the son of a merchant seaman or something, and a good fistfighter. He does absolutely nothing. We’re informed he’s Penelope’s “top male model.” It’s implied that he and Inga are an item.
Fiona (no last name given): A ravishing redhead, Penelope’s “top female model,” with no stated speciality. About the only thing we learn is that she’s notoriously late for meetings and is generally lazy.
Penelope spends the first half of The Ecstasy Connection in Manhattan, with Skytop and Wharton sent out around the country to track down various leads (which leads up to the memorable moment of Skytop taking on a bunch of bikers). This half I believe is the highlight of the book, with Moffitt capably juggling multiple threads and really keeping things moving. Not to mention sleazy – the villain, we learn, is a mountain of blubber named Petronius Sim who is behind the ecstasy drug but has hired the American Mafia to kill off any who might have taken it, as he doesn’t want any details leaked yet. One of his thugs kills one such user, and we watch again as a female character dies in the throes of orgasm. When Penelope later discovers the nude corpse, we’re informed: “Her crotch was a foamy mess.” As mentioned, Moffitt peppers the novel with such sleazy details, and it’s a wonder to behold.
The absolute highlight of the book is almost midway through, when Penelope crashes a party of the drug elite in Manhattan, where the mysterious “Big E” drug is supposed to be handed out. But Penelope quickly deduces that something rotten is going on. The Mafia hosts don’t seem too interested in the eager women here, and they also seem to insist that everyone engage in an orgy while they stand off on the sidelines. When Penelope sees the moving trucks down below she realizes that it’s a hit – they’re planning to kill everyone off and haul away the corpses. Acting fast, Penelope sheds her clothes and heads for the “biggest pile” of group-sexers: “She dove for the bottom of the pile and began wriggling her way inside. Eager hands groped for her breasts and buttocks. It was warm and steamy in the middle of the bodies, smelling of sweat and semen.”
Moffitt pulls out all the stops here, with the Mafia soldiers blowing everyone away mid-orgy, the bullets thudding into the bodies atop Penelope. In her escape she employs one of her trademark weapons, a black cigarette lighter/holder which dispenses “a splinter of synthetic black widow spider venom.” Even though I’d read it once before, I was still very caught up in this cinematic sequence, which sees a nude, blood-covered Baroness escaping up to the building’s rooftop and luring out the Mafia soldiers one by one, killing them with stolen weapons or with her bare hands. It’s a masterfully-written scene and proof positive that there was some very high-quality material in the otherwise-grubby world of ‘70s men’s adventure novels. And Moffit’s just as wonderfully descriptive in the gory action scenes as he is in the sex scenes, like when the Baroness shoots one of the mobsters: “His shattered skull began to ooze brain tissue like toothpaste.”
After this thrill-ride of a sequence – which is capped off with a nude Penelope stealing a moving truck right out from under the Mafia stooges’s noses – the team determines that the Big E has its origins in Hong Kong. After another several pages of sex with the football star, our heroine heads for Asia, Farnsworth having set it all up as yet another photo shoot for International Models, Inc. Penelope brings along all of the high-tech gear created for her – and annoyingly overdescribed via dialog and narrative – by Sumo, including her ever-reliable spyder, the “powerful little pistol-winch” that’s used throughout the series. There are also the “plastic sandal straps” which can become throwing knives, as well as a bra with “super polymer threads” and a pair of shoes with a “thermite core” in the heel. You can tell that Moffitt was really into sci-fi, and he appears to have done a lot of research on satellite technology and espionage gear of the day.
Moffitt was also well ahead of the curve in that he seems to have predicted the future sci-fi genre of cyberpunk; Petronius Sim employs a variety of “juiceheads,” each of whom have metal plates in their heads, which they insert wires into and, after entering that day’s code (provided by Sim), they experience orgasmic joy. It’s all very much like something out of a William Gibson novel from a decade later. He’s also good at capturing the feel of exotic places; Penelope is given a tour of Hong Kong’s slums by Major Nigel Pickering, who presents himself as a member of the police, and Moffitt brings to life the squalor of the place – and still doesn’t forget the sleaze, with Pickering at one point propositioned by a prepubescent girl!
Meanwhile Penelope knows instantly that she’s going to be having some hot sex with Pickering – even though she just screwed the football star half to death a few pages before. After an expensive dinner these two repair to Penelope’s hotel room for more XXX action, Moffitt again mostly relaying it through Penelope’s perspective. Who cares that she’s already deduced “Pickering” isn’t who he claims to be, and might even be an enemy agent? She wants to screw him anyway. Another overlong sex scene follows, Penelope’s “magnificent breasts” heaving away.
Moffitt hews closely to the Bond formula – after being wined and dined at the palatial residence of Sim, Penelope finds herself a prisoner of the sadist. But instead of the “mink-lined cell” of Fleming’s Doctor No, Sim instead straps a nude Penelope onto a matress and hooks her into a colossal artificial brain! Sim has used countless human guinea pigs to fully map the human brain, something no one else has been able to do; thus he knows exactly where the pleasure and pain centers are, and how to stimulate them. He proceeds to carry out his learnings on Penelope.
It all gets pretty psychedelic, with Sim and his scientific crony Dr. Jolly (and let’s not forget the flunky named Happy!) activating the portion of Penelope’s brain which still retains the hybrid sexual state it possessed when it was an embryo; soon Penelope feels that she is equipped like a man, even though she can see her nude body is unchanged. It gets more and more out-there, capping off with the unforgettable line: “And now Penelope herself was a giant penis.” It gets even more like an XXX-rated 2001: A Space Odyssey as Sim and Jolly next activate Penelope’s female region, so that she has sex with herself in a supremely psychedelic sequence:
And then, somehow, she was a vagina too. A starry tunnel bored into the sky. The two parts of herself, male and female, worked together at their cosmic copulation, and she could feel all of it.
And then the universe ended in a galactic explosion. There was a vast milky spurt that shot to the boundaries of creation, and an answering shudder from the vaginal sky. Fiery meteors rained down from the heavens. The solar system shook.
As Dr. Jolly later says, the Baroness, like a regular Barbarella on the Excessive Machine, has “an extraordinary capacity to feel sex.” After beating the shit out of a nurse Penelope’s able to escape, and here the novel shows that it’s a bit too long for its own good – 223 pages of small print – as we have this arbitrary bit where Penelope, feverish and dazed, just manages to get away from Sim’s men and ends up collapsing on the Hong Kong docks. There she’s picked up by a kindly old junk trawler who cares for her – for three days! Once Penelope is recovered she discovers the man’s kindness was just a ruse; he intends to sell her to an old madame. Penelope laughs it off, goes back to sleep(!?) – and then the scene proves how arbitrary it is when Sim’s men board the junk and take her captive again!
So now our heroine is right back where she started, plus Skytop and Dan are also now captives; temporarily mindless thanks to Sim’s various pleasure center controllers. Pickering’s also a prisoner – turns out he’s a British secret agent. Sim plans to wire Penelope and Pickering’s minds together, so that they feel each other’s pleasure, and to get the festivities started he orders that the two be dosed with aphrodesiacs and chained together, given a night of total privacy so that they can become attuned to one another’s sex drives(just go with it!). This of course leads to another of Moffitt’s patented super-hardcore scenes, as the chained nudes have heroic sex:
He was moving in and out in a corkscrew motion now. She butted him with her bottom at each jab, trying to get all of him inside her. One of her bumps was too violent. Pickering lost his balance and fell over backward. Before he could get to his knees again, she swung around, dragging the ankle chain with her, and squatted atop his mast. She lowered herself and it pushed deep within her. “I want to watch your face when you come,” she whispered hoarsely.
Even though the Baroness frequently gets captured, she always manages to stage an ingenious escape – what will also prove to be a recurring theme in the series, and usually the highlight of each volume. After the night of super sex, Pickering is taken away and Penelope’s all alone. She manages to cajole Happy the stooge into opening her special pillbox, which really hides a microwave radar or something. At any rate it fries the wires in Happy’s brain, and a freed Penelope once again beats the shit out of the same nurse, steals her clothes, and massacres everyone in the operating room in one of the more wonderfully-gory scenes in the book…a scene complete with Penelope ramming a bonesaw through the “soft jelly” of Dr. Jolly’s brain.
The finale gets wilder and wilder, intentionally or not recalling Island Of Lost Souls, ie the Charles Laughton movie based on Island of Dr. Moreau. Penelope and her freed comrades lay to waste half of the villa, freeing Sim’s various human experiments, all of whom want their pound of flesh. Meanwhile Sim floats in a pool of honey(!), bombed out of his skull on a super-ecstasy drug he just perfected. He’s impossible to get to, safely behind steel bars and other protective barriers. However the designers of this fortress didn’t count on the freakish strength of the human guinea pigs, who break through the barriers and rip Sim to pieces with their claws in a gloriously outrageous finale.
Sadly, I don’t recall any of the successive volumes of The Baroness reaching the incredible heights of The Ecstasy Connection. Many of them come close, though, but with this one Moffitt really struck trash gold. It’s a shame the series has become so collectible and thus overpriced on the used books market. Moffitt’s even sure to end on the sleaze, with Penelope, back in Manhattan, looking up that football quarterback and demanding another night’s fun, whether he’s playing in the SuperBowl tomorrow or not.
Technically this volume would lead into #3: Death Is A Ruby Light, but I’ll read Diamonds Are For Dying next, mostly because it was published second. Ideally I guess you should read that one first, though, then this one, and then continue on with volume three. At any rate I do look forward to re-reading the rest of The Baroness, and I had a grand ol’ time enjoying the sleazy mastery of The Ecstasy Connection.
Posted by Joe Kenney at 6:30 AM
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
The Baroness #2: Diamonds Are For Dying
The Baroness #2: Diamonds Are For Dying, by Paul Kenyon
March, 1974 Pocket Books
The Baroness Penelope St. John-Orsini returns a mere month after the first volume of the series, The Ecstasy Connection, this time heading south into Brazil where she must infiltrate and destroy a militant colony of neo-Nazis.
These Fourth Reichers have developed a newfangled laser system which is powered by diamonds; the Baroness and her team have further been tasked with either confiscating this new weapons technology or destroying it. Along the way she finds the time to implement several new spy gadgets, have lots of graphic sex, and admire herself in various mirrors.
The Nazis are under the command of Heidrig, a high-ranking SS officer who served under Hitler himself. Now Heidrig lives in a fortress in the Brazilian jungle, surrounded by his fellow old-school Nazis and a new generation who retain the same fervor despite being raised in Brazil. The Baroness, again using her cover as a globetrotting model with her multi-ethnic team of fashion consultants and photographers, uses her beauty to lure Heidrig in so she can get a special invite into his fortress.
One of Heidrig's men is a waifish youth who is treated with respect by the older men, a psychotic punk named Horst who gets his kicks torturing women and feeding traitors to pirhana. It turns out of course that Horst is Hitler Junior; Heidrig reveals that Hitler didn't die in Berlin. Instead, Heidrig and his fellows snuck the Fuhrer into Brazil with them; and, before his psychosis-ravaged death, Hitler impregnated a local wench.
Despite this the villains this time out are no match for the Baroness and her team. You'd think born-again Nazis would make for some great opponents, but really they don't pose much of a threat. Even Horst is dealt with rather quickly. Unlike The Ecstasy Connection, which featured several well-staged action sequences throughout, Diamonds Are For Dying saves the fireworks for the end, which would be fine if they weren't so anti-climactic. For the most part the action on hand lacks the novelty of the previous installment, save for the bit where the Baroness fights off several Nazis while dressed in fetish lingerie. Her spytoys this time out include a bra-strap which when heated forms into a sturdy bow with a heavy pull, shoes which conceal plastique, and a grappel-firing gun.
Like I wrote, Diamonds Are For Dying was published a mere month after The Ecstasy Connection, and it reads like it. This novel is so rushed that it comes off like a carbon copy of its predecessor. Here again we meet the Baroness at one of her lavish parties, where again she has sex with a stranger, during which she's again alterted of her new mission. When arriving in her target location of Brazil, she is accosted by an attractive local man who has an air of mystery about him -- just as she was approached by a similar mysterious man in The Ecstasy Connection. And here too, despite her concerns the Baroness has sex with the guy. And here too, her teammates are attacked while following him.
On and on -- the entire novel comes off like a retread of The Ecstasy Connection, only with Brazil replacing Hong Kong and with half of the thrills. This is especially apparent in the sex scenes, which happen back-to-back. It's funny in a way; we read this super-detailed sex sequence between the Baroness and Silvio, her Latin lover...after which they'll exchance a few lines of dialog...and then they go right at it again, in even more detail. I admire the Baroness' sex drive, but it all comes off like padding, like a quick and dirty way to reach the page count.
Last time I wondered who "Paul Kenyon" was; thanks to the knowledgeable fans over at the Baroness Yahoo group, it appears that "Kenyon" was really Donald Moffitt. The jury's still out on if he wrote all of the 8 published books in the series (it's certain he wrote a few of the installments that weren't published), but at any rate Diamonds Are For Dying seems to have come from the same pen as the author who gave us The Ecstasy Connection. It just isn't nearly as good.
Posted by Joe Kenney at 9:08 AM
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
The Baroness #3: Death Is A Ruby Light
The Baroness #3: Death Is A Ruby Light, by Paul Kenyon
April, 1974 Pocket Books
This is my favorite of the Baroness covers, once again courtesy Hector Garrido. I found the previous volume a middling retread, but Death Is A Ruby Light is great, as if "Paul Kenyon" took a breather and dove back into the series with renewed vigor.
The template followed in the previous two volumes is jettisoned this time out. Indeed, a lot happens in these 200 pages. You know you're in for a lurid thrill-ride when the novel opens with several pages of graphic underwater sex as the Baroness seduces a houseguest in the pool of her Italian villa. Trouble looms, though: unbeknownst to the Baroness, the satellites which relay signals to various US (and Russian) agents about the world have been destroyed; a grave situation which has already resulted in the death of many spies. The Baroness doesn't realize it, but she's next on the list.
Saved by her handler, "Key," the Baroness is briefed on what's happened and again gathers together her team. This time out, luckily, the team is a bit streamlined; I still can't remember all their names or even tell some of them apart. The first suspect of course is the goddamn Commies, so the team heads for Moscow, posing under their usual cover as global fashionistas. The Barones breaks away and tracks into the barren wastes of Kazakstahn. After infiltrating a missile base and bugging its perimenter, she realizes the Russians aren't behind this; as she listens, a repair probe is fried out of the sky, all passengers killed.
The US and the USSR now work together. The source of these laser-blasts now appears to be in the Mongolian reaches of China. A joint US/USSR team will find the base and destroy it. The Baroness will lead, as the US has the exact coordinates of where the laser-blasts have originated. Picking a few of her teammates to go along, the Baroness joins a larger Soviet party. Their leader is basically the Russian version of the Baroness, a good-looking guy named Alexey, who of course the Baroness has tons of sex with during the journey. There's also a hulking guy named Omogoy who has planned with another of the Russians to kill all of the Americans.
This section comes off like John Eagle Expeditor, with the team venturing into a freezing hell. Kenyon amps up the lurid quotient with the obligatory scene of a nude Baroness fighting for her life; the most memorable section sees her captured and held inside a yurt filled with Omogoy and his fellow traitors. The Baroness unleashes her inner Conan and kicks holy ass, despite having her hands tied behind her back. With a red-hot blade she guts one guy and cuts her way through the yurt, running pell-mell through the snow for safety; still nude, the temperature well below freezing. Despite all of this Death Is A Ruby Light follows the time-honored tradition of all pulp spy fiction: the Baroness is of course eventually captured by the main villain.
The villain this time out is Dr. Thing, a towering Chinese astronomer who happens to be albino and also has a false ruby eye. Thing has created the laserworks which are frying the satellites of the US and the USSR; his grand design is to destroy a linkup between space probes of both countries which will be broadcast on global TV. Thing will kill only the Russians so that it appears to the world that America did it; World War Three will ensue and China will emerge victorious once America and Russia have destroyed one another. Thing isn't the only villain here: there's also Sung, commander of the soldiers in the base, a cretin who enjoys torturing his captives. There's a nicely lurid scene where Sung uses a laser setup of Thing's to slice apart one of the prisoners.
It's a series, so there's no mystery of course if the Baroness and her team will escape and save the day. But again it's all delivered very well. There are a lot of good one-liners and the fight scenes are well thought-out and nicely graphic. So too the copious sex scenes, but again they mean little...sex scenes in novels only matter if something else is going on, or if there's some emotional involvement, but here it's just two people screwing (which is fine when you're watching porn, not when you're reading it). But as a guy who grew up reading Penthouse Letters, how can I complain? Death Is A Ruby Light is just further proof that The Baroness is one of the best men's adventure series ever published.
Posted by Joe Kenney at 10:01 AM
Thursday, April 28, 2011
The Baroness #4: Hard-core Murder
The Baroness #4: Hard-core Murder, by Paul Kenyon
May, 1974 Pocket Books
This is a special volume of the always-fun Baroness series, as it melds three of my favorite genres: men's adventure, trash fiction, and toga porn. It takes a while to get going, but once it does Hard-core Murder proves itself as one of the best installments yet.
The threat this time out isn't as global as in previous volumes; rather, a snuff film has gotten into the underworld which shows a notable D.C. wife having on-screen sex while all sorts of anti-government images flash across the screen. A man in an animal mask takes advantage of the obviously-doped woman in what is intended as a "screw you" message to the Establishment. (What's interesting is this is the same plot as another novel I reviewed here, a few months back: Sexual Strike Force, a 1972 paperback original by Alex Henry. I'm sure "Alex Henry" is just as much a psuedonym as "Paul Kenyon," so were the two one and the same? Or is it just coincidence? Who knows.)
The Baroness is busy frolicking with an Irish filmmaker in Italy when she gets the call. Her assignment is to destroy all copies of this film as well as the people who made and distributed it. Assembling her vast team, she sends each of them off with particular assignments. The Baroness herself will try to infiltrate the world of pornographic films -- presented here as a shadowy racket controlled by the mafia. In fact two rival mob factions are at war to control this arena: the Org and the Syn, and both want ownership of the snuff film. Finally, it develops that the Syn is bankrolling the world's first million-dollar budgeted porn film, and they hire porcine director Sully Flick to helm it. Flick it turns out is the man behind that snuff film, but this is brushed over and it's never satisfactorily explained why he even made it.
The first half of Hard-core Murder focuses on the Baroness's search for existing copies of the film. This volume is unusual in that the graphic sex scenes aren't as freqent and page-consuming. It's a much more plot-heavy affair, but strangely moves slower than the previous books. The Baroness wants an "introduction" into the world of porn-watching and so recruits that very same Irish filmmaker she was boffing back in Italy. The poor sap flies across the world to meet up with her in New York City just so he can escort her to a party in an upscale suite in the downtown area, where a film-world friend of his will be screening a new porn film for his guests.
This turns out to be the snuff film in question, and while the guests are busy getting stoned on grass or wired on cocaine a bunch of mafia thugs bust in and start killing everyone in sight -- including the poor Irish sap. In this way the Baroness proves herself just as dangerous to her acquaintances as any other '70s men's adventure protagonist; and besides it's all kind of stupid as the Baroness, with her global fame and connections, could've easily gotten an invite to the party without the poor guy.
Anyway, this sequence is another of those thrilling Baroness-versus-mobsters scenes which features our girl plummeting out of the highrise building with the aid of a handy spy-fy floating device, only to storm back inside and trap the mobsters in a descending elevator, where she blasts them apart one by one. The scene continues on as the Baroness discovers that another faction of mobsters has escaped with the actual film; she follows them to their film-developing lab and launches a late-night raid on the compound, assisted by a few of her teammates as well as her handler, "Key."
One of the guests at that party was a notorious actor named Mitch (a trash fiction-esque analogue of the young Marlon Brando); sneaking back into the apartment in the battle's aftermath, the Baroness overhears him instructing the party-thrower to call the mafia to clean up the mess. The Baroness realizes then that this guy is her "in" to the porn ring. Conveniently forgetting her dead Irish lover, the Baroness "investigates" the best way she knows how: screwing Mitch silly for a few days.
When Mitch gets a late-night phone call that sends him out, the Baroness figures this is her chance. She follows his car all the way into the Nevada desert. Here Sully Flick is filming his million-dollar porno on the estate of a Howard Hughes-type baron. The place is colossal, with full-scale reproductions of the monuments of ancient Rome: the Colosseum, the Forum, the Pantheon, etc. Sully intends to capture the decadence and violence of the Romans: the gladiator combat will be as real as the sex, and he will throw his fake "Christians" to real lions and other trained animals which will tear them to shreds.
As expected The Baroness is captured, and Sully, inspired by her fame and beauty, decides to give her a featured role. Joe Skytop, one of the Baroness's top men, is also here; in a subplot his mission was to get a job as a porn cameraman, and after various trials of his own he too has ended up in Sully's desert funhouse. Kenyon only hints at the bloodshed of the ensuing scenes, where tigers and rams and other beasts rape and eat the extras while a chained "audience" in the Colosseum is forced to cheer.
Finally it's the Baroness's turn, but of course she proves herself more than a match for the various animals Sully sends after her, thanks to a hidden weapon or two. Hard-core Murder also features the longest yet scene of the Baroness fighting nude; indeed she's nude throughout the final quarter of the novel, Kenyon always sure to mention her "bouncing breasts." Once she and Skytop have created a riot by turning Sully's elephants against him, the Baroness chases the director into the desert, where we have a nice scene of our heroine fighting "mano e mano" with an equally-nude foe: the so-called "Iron Man," Sully's well-endowed and muscular leading man.
I preferred the globe-trotting feel of the previous volumes, but Hard-core Murder was still an enjoyable installment of this short-lived series. I also appreciated that less pages were taken up with endless sex scenes, and also the Baroness's teammates were for once given something to do. All told, this is just another 200+ pages of sordid, graphic fun.
Posted by Joe Kenney at 8:47 AM
Monday, February 6, 2012
The Baroness #6: Sonic Slave
The Baroness #6: Sonic Slave, by Paul Kenyon
November, 1974 Pocket Books
The previous volume of the Baroness series left me cold; I found the Baroness herself pretty annoying, getting herself and her teammates in mortal danger due to nothing more than her ego and recklessness. Also the spy-fy aspect of the series was beginning to wear thin, with fancy gadgets described ad naseum -- not to mention the pages-filling explicit sex scenes, which by this point were too much of a good thing. So what a relief it is that Sonic Slave (now there's a name for an '80s metal band) is an improvement in every way over Operation Doomsday.
The focus this time out is moreso on plot and scene-setting. In fact there's hardly any action until the final third, and I was shocked to discover that the Baroness only has sex twice in the novel, first in the opening pages with a millionaire horse-breeder, and toward the end with the leader of the rebel faction of a fictional Middle Eastern country. I've noticed this is yet another pattern of the series; the Baroness will have sex early on in her "regular" life as Penelope St. John-Orsini, and again later on, while on a mission, in her guise as the Baroness. And I'm also happy to note that for once the Baroness doesn't pull any stupid moves while on this mission -- in the past she's always gone off on her own for some arrogant reason, only to be caught. She of course works solo at times in Sonic Slave, but it's for necessary reasons.
After outbidding a group of wealthy Japanese (at an exorbitant price) for a horse, the Baroness frolicks in the hay with the aformentioned millionaire. This is the first of two scenes in which the Baroness has sex while horses are around, her sexual prowess serving to shall we say "titillate" the beasts in both instances. Honestly, I'm not sure what Paul Kenyon (aka Donald Moffitt) was going for with this. But, as has happened in every previous volume of the series, as soon as she's finished having sex the Baroness gets a call from her handler, Coin, and races off for her next mission. I've said it before, the Baroness series is more repetitive than most men's adventure series, and I wonder how a different "Paul Kenyon" might've shaken things up.
The threat this time is the power-crazed Emir of a small patch of sand in the Middle East. The Emir likes to torture his subjects, hacking off their bodyparts and feeding them to his birds. The bigger threat however is Octave Le Sourd, a French alchemist of sound who has developed a sort of sonic attack method which renders flesh into jelly. The Emir has been using the sound cannons on surrounding villages, decimating people in horrendous ways. Posing as her usual glamorous, world-traveling self, the Baroness "visits" the Emir with the cover story of looking to breed with some of his fine horse stock -- the opening bit of the Baroness outbidding the Japanese (which has made world news) being used to good purpose here.
Kenyon brings to life the exotic world of the Emir's palace, with the Baroness and only two of her teammates living in luxuriously-appointed suites while the rest of her team pose as archeologists, digging in the desert across the border. For once the team actually comes off like a team. The Baroness finds herself drawn to the strange Le Sourd, who provides her with a variety of tours. She also successfully fends off the Emir, who has set his depraved sights on her.
There are some brutal sequences in Sonic Slave. In particular a scene midway through where the Baroness goes on a hunting trip with the Emir and his Arab colleagues; the game they hunt is the downtrodden prisoners from the Emir's jails. Kenyon shows the Baroness's noble spirit when, able to get away from her Emir-appointed watchdogs during the hunt, she saves one of the prisoners (who of course turns out to be a good looking guy -- indeed the rebel leader mentioned above), killing a group of Arabs with her bare hands.
As expected the Baroness is uncovered, but this time out it goes down in a novel way. Finding out that her cover's been blown, she escapes into the palace wearing a wisp of a nightgown made of spy-fy fiber technology. Long story short, it culminates in the Baroness hanging nude from the palace ceiling and sneaking into the Emir's harem of equally-nude women. But despite it all she's still caught, ending up in a contraption straight out of Goldfinger where she's strapped onto a torture device outfitted with a sonic beam that threatens her womanhood.
Kenyon's writing is a step or two above the men's adventure norm, with great scene-setting and description. He also excels in the action scenes; the finale, where all hell breaks loose as the Baroness and her team take on the Emir's men in the desert, is very well done. But again it's in the more intimate, close-quarter sections where Kenyon shines, with the Baroness taking on attackers by herself, usually bare-handed.
Hector Garrido's covers are usually excellent, but I find this one a bit chaotic. It's interesting though that he always has the Baroness wearing the same skintight black costume, when she wears no such costume in the series itself. In fact, she's usually wearing nothing at all -- no wonder Harold Robbins wanted to buy the film rights to the series.
Posted by Joe Kenney at 6:30 AM
Thursday, April 5, 2012
The Baroness #7: Flicker of Doom
The Baroness #7: Flicker of Doom, by Paul Kenyon
December, 1974 Pocket Books
This penultimate volume of the Baroness series finds our heroine battling a threat very similar to the one in her previous adventure. Only whereas the doomsday device in #6: Sonic Slave was based on sound, the evil-genius-created device in Flicker of Doom is based on sight. This adventure even takes place in Morocco, again quite similar to the Middle Eastern locale of Sonic Slave.
But then, this series has been based on repetition from the start. Each novel has followed basically the same template, as if Donald Moffitt (aka "Paul Kenyon") was following some chart. Despite all of this, the series is still fun, always delivering pulpy plots with a good heaping of violence. And let's not forget the pages and pages of graphic sex scenes, though how could we? Actually the Baroness is a bit more frisky this time out, bedding three men during the course of the novel. She even finds time to smoke a little dope, something I don't think she's done since way back in #1: The Ecstasy Connection.
Flicker of Doom continues on the series-improvement begun in Sonic Slave; I'm almost sad that the next volume is the last. It seems to me that Moffitt was becoming more adjusted to writing action series fiction; with each volume he has better worked the Baroness's large team into the plots. Here he does his best job yet, with each of her teammates actually doing something useful instead of just standing around until the gun-blazing finale.
Also Moffitt here slightly tones down the too-perfect qualities of the Baroness, making her a bit more human and likable. He even appears to have been inspired by Hector Garrido's cover paintings for the previous books; at the finale of Flicker of Doom, the Baroness actually wears a skin-tight black costume which appears to be identical to the one Garrido has drawn for her since the first volume.
The main villain in this novel isn't as colorful as previous ones, but still entertaining: Don Alejandro, descendant of Inquisitors, who wishes to reclaim his family's control of Morocco. In order to do this he has, with the help of his simian assistant Dr. Funke, created a device which induces epilletic fits. The fits are induced by lights which flicker so subtly that the eye can't see them, but once directed upon the subject a messy and painful death quickly ensues. Already the duo has killed off high-ranking officials and Iranian soldiers (this was back when Iran was still "friends" with the US).
Dr. Funke is actually the more entertaining villain, a German brute who looks just like an ape. However I kept laughing, because every time I read "Dr. Funke" I flashed back to the character Dr. Tobias Funke on Arrested Development, a show I miss to this day. Funke, we're told, is a sexual deviant, and enjoys using his own seizure-studies to take advantage of women. Of course he sets his perverted sights on the Baroness as soon as she arrives on the scene in Morocco, where Funke and Alejandro have set up headquarters in Alejandro's palatial estate.
After the usual set-up, the Baroness ventures to Morocco with the cover story that there she will pose for a new line of "Angelface" cosmetics, for which she's being paid half a million dollars. Again we are constantly reminded how beautiful and gorgeous she is. While she attempts to figure out the culprit behind these latest attacks, her team handles their own assignments. Ironically, each teammate is at one point in their mission discovered and confronted by several attackers. In each case, the Baroness's teammates are able to fight their way out and avoid being captured. However when the Baroness is discovered and attacked, she is captured.
I know, this is so Moffitt can deliver the required scene of a bound and nude Baroness who must free herself. But once again I say that the Baroness comes off as the weakest member of her own team. Whereas her subordinates are able to overcome odds and escape, the Baroness is always outfought and captured. It's happened in every volume yet.
But even so, her capture again leads to the best scene in the book. Taken prisoner by a group of Islamic terrorists in a shadowy section of a Moroccan bazaar, the Baroness -- again, despite her struggling -- is bound to a chair and about to be tortured. What with the sadistic, lecherous torturer and his host of bladed equipment, it all comes off like something out of a sweat mag.
Freeing herself in a pretty cool fashion (one I don't think would work in reality, but so what), the Baroness lays waste to a horde of men, once again fighting in the nude. This series always excels when it features the Baroness alone (and usually naked) against several attackers...though I always wonder if she fights so well after being captured, why can't she fight just as well before being captured? As a matter of fact she's captured twice in Flicker of Doom, first in the bazaar and later in Alejandro's villa, where Moffitt can deliver another required scene: the Baroness strapped into some insane torture device.
The epilepsy-inducing gizmo is more than a match for the Baroness, and she's quickly overcome. Dr. Funke attempts to take advantage of her, but the Baroness is saved by a brazen act of deus ex machina -- a character previously thought dead turns out to still be alive, long enough that is to save the Baroness before croaking for real. Pretty lame. The finale isn't as gun-blazing as previous installments; rather, the Baroness suits up in the skin-tight black costume and sneaks into Alejandro's villa, bypassing the hidden epilepsy-inducing lights via a diving-style helmet.
This was another good volume, but once again I must question who this series was written for. I still say The Baroness was an attempt at a "women's adventure" series. The majority of the book is written from her perspective, so all of the sex scenes are rendered from a woman's point of view. More proof is offered up in the advertisements within the books themselves; previous volumes have featured ads for women-themed publications, in particular one about weight-loss tips for women. Flicker of Doom features an ad for a book titled Give Your Child A Superior Mind, complete with a photo of a lady playing with her toddler!
I don't think you'd see an ad like that in the back of a Marksman book, that's for sure...
Posted by Joe Kenney at 6:30 AM
Thursday, August 2, 2012
The Baroness #8: Black Gold
The Baroness #8: Black Gold, by Paul Kenyon
February, 1975 Pocket Books
Here endeth the sex-filled saga of the Baroness, in what by far is the rarest and most overpriced volume of the series. I wish I could say that Black Gold ends the series with a bang, but this turned out to be the worst entry of all: underwhelming, tepid, and boring, even worse than #2: Diamonds Are For Dying. In other words, it's not worth the inflated price online booksellers list it for.
The biggest problem with Black Gold is the lack of action, or even interest; hardly anything happens throughout the novel. Instead the reader must endure endless pages which describe oil carriers and oil rigs, not to mention pages and pages and pages of "Scottish" dialog ("I dinna hae the key!" and so forth), as if some faux-Irvine Welsh has taken over the series. It's really an uphill battle getting through all of this, and I suspect Paul Kenyon (aka Donald Moffitt) was losing his interest in the series.
As usual though the threat is a good one: a terrorist group calling itself SPOILER has unleashed an experimental chemical which destroys oil. Each of these books always opens with a scene in which we witness the devastation wrought by the latest threat, and in these parts Moffitt always shines (though not a single one of them has topped the opening of #1: The Ecstasy Connection, which featured people around the world dying of orgasms). Here we see parts of Europe collapsing as oil-powered vehicles just stop working, thus rendering entire armies impotent. SPOILER threatens more attacks if their demands aren't met: they want half of various oil company profits.
Enter the Baroness, who is in England, where she's doing a series of cosmetic ads for the AngelFace line. As coincidence would have it, the Baroness's latest flame is a rakish Englishman named Tony Cavendish who runs an oil business. Tony's about to head over to Scotland where he will stay in the castle of Lord Angus Bane, who happens to have won the Nobel Prize for his research into chemicals and oil and etc. The reader can already see where this is going, and indeed after a lot of page-filler where the Baroness and her vast team tracks various suspects, the Baroness settles on Bane as being a likely culprit behind SPOILER.
Here the rot sets in. Moffit brings the novel to a standstill with endless scenes of characters who speak in "Scottish" dialog, while nothing else of much importance takes place. The Baroness meanwhile researches, keeping in touch via the usual spy-fy means with her team, most of whom are themselves in Scotland. She also learns more about the mysterious Lord Bane, who is rarely seen on his estate and who allows a group of equally-mysterious Germans to stay there, ostensibly because they go hunting on his grounds. There's also reports of a local sea monster, the "Crombie beastie," as well as a Japanese team of scientists who are trying to capture it.
But honestly, nothing happens. It's just wheel-spinning of the worst sort. The Baroness even suspects her boyfriend Tony, due to his affiliation with those mysterious Germans, not that it stops her from the occasional uber-graphic sex scene with him. Things don't even pick up after an attempt is made on the Baroness's life while she's out driving Tony's car for a look at the "beastie;" surviving a major crash after her car is squirted with that oil-eating chemical, she tapes up her bruises and just continues to snoop around.
Gradually Moffitt brings the series back to the form we expect from previous volumes, but even then it's too little, too late. There's a nice part where the Baroness thinks she's found the castle's legendary ghost, only to discover it's one of Bane's men, who slinks around in between the chambers to snoop; the Baroness breaks his neck and sends the corpse off into the sea via a bra that turns into a balloon(!). Another good sequence has the Baroness and her teammate Fiona watch as the "Crombie beastie," which turns out to be an experimental sub, attacks that Japanese crew; a team of frogmen emerge from the sub, gleefully killing the scientists one by one.
At length the Baroness catches up with the reader and knows that Bane is behind SPOILER. But before that we have to endure more boring stuff, like an overlong sequence where the ever-arrogant Baroness challenges Bane in the annual Highland Games, calling in big Joe Skytop to out-toss some Bane employee in the treetrunk toss, and Tom Sumo to outfight Bane's top swordsman in a sword fight. It's so boring, mostly because you know the Baroness's team is going to be victorious, yet Moffitt blithely writes on for pages and pages, documenting each tree-toss and sword stroke, until the matches finally end...just as you knew they would, with the Baroness's team victorious.
This leads into a mini-"Most Dangerous Game" sequence where the Baroness is hunted by those Germans; there's some dark comedy at work, here, as the Germans keep trying to "accidentally" kill the Baroness before finally dropping all pretense and coming after her. Of course, the Baroness makes short work of them and escapes. This in itself is one of the highlights of the novel, with the Baroness inflating a life-size balloon replica of herself as a decoy! Nevertheless she's captured as is expected, only to awaken and find herself nude to the waist, hanging upside down over a pot of boiling oil.
Part of the Bane clan's ancient notoriety was the boiling of their enemies, and since she's pissed them off so righteously they're going to boil the Baroness the slow way. Thanks though to her nifty plastic spy-fy belt, which turns into a sword when heated, she's able to cut her way out and then hack up the torturer. Here follows another of those series trademarks where the Baroness, nude and covered in oil, waltzes through the castle and hacks people apart.
One scene that had me scratching my head was her swordfight with that aforementioned swordsmaster; somehow the Baroness is able to cut him in half, from groin to breastbone, and it just doesn't seem possible the way Moffitt describes it (he has her slicing up with the sword "like a golf club" into her opponent, who is sitting down at the time). But then, after we just saw our heroine escape a boiling cauldron with her belt-cum-sword, I guess reality has little import.
Meanwhile the Baroness's team is raising hell in Bane's castle, and here we have actual action series stuff, with gunfights and explosions. But the finale itself is rushed, which makes you wonder about all of that page-filling banality that came before; Bane escapes in his sub, and the Baroness and Tony fly out in a helicopter to Tony's oil rig to intercept it. It all leads to the Baroness, in a wetsuit, swimming down to some impossible depth so she can plant a bomb on the sub, thus destroying it and the last of Bane's oil-eating virus.
It's all over in about three pages, and just leaves the reader unsatisfied. If more time had been spent on the finale (or at least the action), and less on the wheel-spinning, then Black Gold would have made for a much better read. But then, even the villains this time are a step down; Bane is downright boring, not nearly as colorful or bizarre as some of the previous villains. Again, it all reeks of an author either bored with his series or just rushing to meet a deadline.
Honestly, the cult fame of this series baffles me. Having read every volume, I wouldn't even place the Baroness in my top ten of favorite men's adventure series, let alone top five. There are so many other series more deserving of a cult following, like John Eagle Expeditor, TNT, Phoenix, and especially Doomsday Warrior. But then, I get the feeling that a lot of the fans of this series haven't actually read any of the novels; they just like the idea of it.
From the Baroness Yahoo Group we know that Donald Moffitt became ill shortly after turning in Black Gold, and so was unable to write for a while. By the time he came back, with two written manuscripts ready to go, series owner Lyle Kenyon Engel told him that publisher Pocket Books was no longer interested. I think Black Gold offers a little indication why; it's no surprise that sales weren't good enough to continue publishing the series. What's sad though is that the Baroness started off so great with The Ecstasy Connection; such a shame, then, that it ended so ignobly.
As mentioned there were a few more novels written for this series, but never published; I'll focus on them in my next Baroness post.
Posted by Joe Kenney at 6:30 AM
Labels: Baroness, Book Reviews, Donald Moffitt, Men's Adventure Novels, Paul Kenyon, Pocket Books
2 comments:
Tom Johnson said...
The Baroness never did hold any interest for me. I had to try the series, however, and did read two or three, but quickly traded them off for something better. I thought at the time I read them that they were trying to create their version of Modesty Blaze, but they missed by a mile. I'm currently reading John Eagle #1, my first encounter with this series. Much better than The Baroness.
INHERITORS OF THE STORM
By Victor Sondheim
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KIRKUS REVIEW
A surprisingly diverting display-case buster (751 pp.)--which sets up a family of five siblings on its way from 1932 to a possibly infinite trade-paperback future; this installment begins with FDR's first inaugural address and is lopped off at his second. Iowa banker Bradford Sinclair, faced with bankruptcy and dishonor, shoots himself, leaving a wife, who never regains her wits, and five children who are about to fan out all over America's 1930s. Brad Jr., with one year of Yale Law to go, fast-talks his way into the new Roosevelt administration, working for colorful General Hugh S. Johnson (who hatched the Blue Eagle). Jeremy, struggling to write in Manhattan, follows his dream of cultural excitement to Germany--where he will report on a revolt of Brown Shirts, interview top Nazis, and visit Dachau (no one but Communists will print his findings); he then flees to Russia, falls for an ex-aristocrat, and interviews Stalin (who just might have spared Shostakovich because of Jeremy). Gordon freight-cars his hobo way to West Point, graduates (despite barbarous treatment), and serves General ""Vinegar Joe"" Stilwell in China. Little sister Julie is molested by the awful uncle she's been forced to live with, flees with a giant-hearted family of Okie tenant farmers, marries silent but sterling Floyd, has three children, and survives the dust bowl, exploitative farmers, and near-starvation. (At the close, her siblings haven't as yet traced her). And Pamela, deserted by the man responsible for her pregnancy, has an abortion and is brought by brother Brad to Washington--where she rises in the government-worker ranks and eventually marries a flamboyant but weak would-be newspaper tycoon from a rock-ribbed Republican first family. (Brad will meanwhile marry playgirl Sally, a terrible cook and great mother.) All of Sondheim's real personages are plausibly within the media perceptions of the times--FDR jaunty and shrewd, etc.--and his technique seems to consist of typing with one hand and manipulating a Times microfilm machine with the other. So those who were around then will enjoy the details (NRA parades, for instance), and family-sage lovers will find this above-average fun.
Pub Date: Nov. 1st, 1981
Publisher: Dell