Time for another installment in the series of book reviews which I call "Books That are not Worth Reviewing" -- This time, it's the "nautical thriller" The Assault on Mavis A, written by Norman Stahl and published in 1978. Of all the books I've reviewed, few have had as little information available online as this book. There's no real review of it, and very little information at all, other than pictures of the books for the copies available on eBay and elsewhere. And yet, someone thought it was worth translating into both Swedish and Norwegian. This book fits the definition of a Book Not Worth Reviewing perfectly. It has no apparent worth or value, and since no one else is talking about it, I intend to review it here in great detail.

Norman Stahl got his start working in advertising. He was creative director of Ted Bates Worldwide, working on ads for Pepsi, Dodge, HBO, and apparently he worked on this famous Palmolive ad:

According to the book, Stahl is a pilot, "an avid follower of air racing," he lives on Long Island, and this is his first book. After publishing this book, he wrote two other novels. As little information as there is for Mavis A online, these other two books have even less data -- I have found no reviews at all. Towers, charts the history of two families in NYC. The Burning Man is a thriller involving a KGB sleeper agent posing as an adulterous priest. I sure hope I didn't pick the worst of the lot for reviewing!

He also co-wrote A Fellowship of Valor: the Battle History of the United States Marines, which looks like a very well-regarded book.

I found my copy of this book at the Montague Bookmill, and bought it for 99 cents. Judging from the bookplate, they got it from "The Young Men's Library Association", which is the name of the library in Ware, which has a fairly random history.

Roughly speaking, this is a book about the hijacking of the largest oil tanker built, and an attempt to crash it into the largest oil rig ever built. It's a "naval thriller" involving a big slow ship and a stationary target. It's not exactly Tom Clancy, or even Under Siege. Here's the summary from the inside of the book:

For thirty terrifying hours in the heart of a wild North Sea storm, a handful of doomed men fight a war for the solvency of the West.

The key to British survival is Mavis A, an immense oil platform fueling an entire economy. Bent on destroying it are the hijackers of the supertanker American Enterprise, a third of a mile long and the greatest mobile structure ever built by man. From the moment commandant Dominic Quinn and his desperate handful of IRA guerrillas seize the Enterprise until they steer its million deadly tons at the towering legs of Mavis A, history swings in the balance.

The relentless battle demands every ounce of courage and ingenuity from the opposing forces. On the American Enterprise, Quinn must control not only his own band of hand-picked killers and demolition men, but the captured crew of the supertanker, including the beautiful, lonely woman who plays both sides. On Mavis A, the fists and brilliance of platform master Noel Cullenbine must deal with the murderous subversion of Scottish nationalists who have infiltrated the crew, and with the final defense of his critically damaged platform.

The Assault on Mavis A builds in tension with every page, finally exploding in a climax as mighty as the forces at work within its narrative.

That's a pretty thorough summary of the book -- I should stop right now!

This book accomplishes the thankless task of taking a moderately interesting concept, and turning it into a story that is dull, overly complicated, and at times utterly vulgar and disgusting. There's a certain amount of excitement via killing and violence, and yet most of the book is about a fairly slow ship moving toward an immovable target without any conflict at all. There's some sex, but it's definitely not sexy -- more on that later. It definitely doesn't live up to the billing on this alternative cover to the book:

There's a lot of overwrought prose, like this bizarre sentence from the opening of the book: "Like many of the insignificant, the North Sea has a vile and dangerous temper." This doesn't even make sense. In what way is the North Sea insignificant? The North Sea has played a critical role in European history for the last 600 years. Stahl is clearly an amateur historian, but his love of adjectives goes way too far here.

Between the liner notes, and the helpful maps and diagrams included at the beginning of the book, there's basically no point in actually reading this novel. BUT I DID.

The Tanker!

The Rig!

The Map!

The first character introduced is Noel Cullenbine, platform master of the Mavis A, newest and largest drilling platform in the North Sea. A ridiculous amount of oil has been recently discovered in the North Sea, which is fortunate because England's economy is in utter shambles. We're told in detail how smart he is:

The mind of Noel Cullenbine had been kept prisoner by the community, like the body of a queen bee. What was in his head was simply too valuable to be left in his own care. He had been a child wonder - a Mozart of science. At the age of seven he had been brought to Edinburgh, at the university's request, to be studied by wondering professors. While his railway-engineer father and seamstress mother fretted in a hotel room the phenomenal ability of their only son to retain, process, organize and transmit information astounded his examiners.

By the age of eighteen Cullenbine had grown to feel that he was unable to touch any thing that breathed, and to try and save himself as a man he rebelled. He disappeared from the university [...] and drifted to work in the oil fields. Here he found the first task he'd ever loved: the brutal challenge of wresting from the earth a running treasure, the energy stored by a hundred million years of suns. He had felt its power beneath his feet as he now felt the shock of waves, and ever since he had wanted to unleash and command its power.

At first he had been content to work, to learn and to make his way slowly up through the lowest backbreaking, limb-crushing jobs. But within a year he yearned to multiply his energies and to be a leader [...] He was a foreman in the toughest fields of Mexico and Texas by the time he was twenty-four. The Limey, as the other workers called him, commanded hard men by becoming a walking terror.

He punished with his voice, which was loud, metallic and abrasive when he raised it. He punished with his fists, which were ridged with knuckles so massive that they might have served for models of a gladiator's glove. And he punished with his scorn. It shot out of his eyes like venom; men who felt it once would perform wonders rather than face it again.

Now, just past forty, Cullenbine needed all these savage talents as the operating boss of Mavis A. Brilliant, computer-nurtured plans flowed into operation largely because of the fists and tongue of this spectacularly effective man.

So, we're told he's smart, and we see some examples of that, but mostly what he does through the whole book is yell, and bash the shit out of people.

Opposing him is IRA commandant Dominic Quinn. Quinn has a plan to ruin England -- he will hijack a supertanker, and crash it into Mavis A. If Quinn succeeds, England will be devastated, and Ireland will be liberated. As part of his plan, Quinn has built a luxurious brothel in the fictional Irish seaside town of Coltry Bay, which is basically a "geological miracle" cooked up just for the book - an incredibly deep yet isolated bay where huge oil tankers dock all the time. Quinn plans to lure a crew into the brothel, hijack a ship, and go from there.

Quinn has managed to lure Will James, one of the junior officers of the American Enterprise -- which without a doubt is the best name ever for an oil tanker -- with free sex and food. Once he has enjoyed "the bone-white nakedness of Mariclare Brady," the first thing he wants to know is "how a brothel, even one so fine, was able to use the tightly controlled company frequency of Petromarine to call the American Enterprise at sea. Or how the call went unentered in the radio log" -- but Mariclare distracts him before he asks -- "James saw only the wide blue eyes locked on his. He did not in time perceive it as the blinkless gaze of a hunting cat, nor feel the paw upon his back." Yipes.

Quinn watches as James and Mariclare eat in his lavish dining room, which supposedly cost 100,000 pounds to build, with Waterford chandeliers, a chef from a famous London Hotel, and a string ensemble with performers who "would have been recognized by name at New York Lincoln's Center." Sounds nice.

He introduces himself to James, and immediately he has the advantage -- James has clearly been enjoying himself, offers his thanks to Quinn, and now Quinn is able to lean on him to insist that the rest of the officers of the American Enterprise should be invited into port immediately. In fact, he's got a list of them in his hand to make sure he's not missing anyone. James doesn't really like the sound of this, so he's reluctant. Mariclare speaks up briefly, and blurts out that Quinn knows a lot about ships -- he clearly didn't want this known -- so he asks her to leave. James was raised to be polite, so he stands up as she goes, and Quinn tells him "You're very polite to your whores." James doesn't really like to hear a woman called that:

The young officer did not like this contempt for the receptacle of his sacred seed. "I suppose a man in your business must have that attitude." It was the noblest defense he had ever made of a woman.

They argue for awhile until Quinn tells James "you do understand that you are not pimpin', if that's what’s on your mind? Your friends will pay nothin'. It is their good will I want." James says that he's been very well-paid, and Quinn replies "As many a pure lad in the twenty-six counties is bein' paid on a front-parlor couch at this exact minute. The cunt is always buyin'. Fur coats, food, security, husbands."

James thinks he notices something a little strange about Quinn, and he accuses him of being gay -- "You're a homosexual, aren't you?" -- and he's right. Quinn is a gay IRA terrorist. And although James is Catholic, and has been feeling some level of guilt for extramartial sex, "He had been brought up to believe that the power of a boy who had never missed mass was God-given and illimitable over Jews and homosexuals." Always nice to have a firm belief structure to back up your double standards.

Quinn cures James' reluctance to call the ship by forcing him to watch the kneecapping of a supposed IRA traitor. Pretty soon, James has made his call and invited the officers to the brothel. They almost all head into Coltry Bay except for the Captain and First Officer, who stay behind to take care of the ship.

Quinn needs more than a luxurious brothel to pull off his plan. He also needs a team of crack operatives, but there must be a shortage in the IRA ranks, because he stages not one but two prison break-ins. The first is to retrieve an IRA member from a prison hospital where he is actively dying of tuberculosis, and the second is to rescue a bunch of other people from a jail in Belfast. The sick guy is rescued solely for the task of holding his finger on the trigger of a bomb while the other prisoners are rescued -- a decent example of the over-complication that happens in this book. During the escape, the bomb goes off, killing a bunch of guards.

The freed prisoners include Molaise Mullins aka "The Dropper", an IRA demolitions expert, who violently rapes a prison guard with a billy club once he is released, and is smart enough to notice that everyone rescued has experience with boats. I could write a bunch about the rest of the prisoners, but it would take up way too much of this review, and it wouldn't be worth it. I will mention that one of them is a former priest turned gunman -- Father Costello, and another one is named Paddy -- Stahl has a short supply of Irish names and stereotypes.

Meanwhile, on Mavis A, Cullenbine is worried about attacks on his rig, and he is describing the issues to Colonel Lustgarten and his aide Captain Zamke, two Germans who work for the fictional "North Sea Security Services." They have flown in on helicopters on an inspection tour of company rigs -- right before a giant storm comes through that will conveniently isolate them for the next few days.

Zamke, the younger one, is particularly uninformed about the platform, so this provides a convenient opportunity to spend a few pages talking about the weaknesses of the oil rig -- notably, there are no blowout preventers, so if something bad happens to the platform, a lot of oil will be released into the North Sea. Also, half of the crew is Scottish, and none of them like England. As it happens, a couple of the Scots are in cahoots with Quinn -- this book takes place during a period of high Scottish Nationalism -- and they have a bomb in place to disable the radio on Mavis A and wreak havoc in general as part of the plan.

Cullenbine and his boss Magnus describe the potential catastrophe if something happens to Mavis A:

"Not only will this destroy England financially, it would be utterly devastating for the whole planet. What it adds up to," Magnus said, "is that we would greatly damage the ability of the world to feed itself over the next fifty years."

Cullenbine talks about the danger of an oil spill:

As if that isn't enough, if there's an accident, oil will rush out of the wells because there aren't any blowout preventers -- does that ring a bell? "We might have installed choke valves below the sea bed, but they're often troublesome, and given Mavis's extra strength and other precautions we've taken, we thought it more efficient to do away with them. That's a mistake that will need to be corrected someday. We were thinking too much about nature and not enough about men.

There's not a lot of point in criticizing the thought process of fictional characters, but this statement would be ludicrous in a book published today, especially given the history of oil spills in the last 25 years. If this book was published today, the company would just have to say they were cheap, or cut corners to increase shareholder returns, or they'd just be assholes.

The Germans are interesting characters because they are emotionally detached from the events of the book -- they clearly don't care what happens beyond an almost academic interest in doing their jobs. Lustgarten was a General in World War 2, and he doesn't like the British very much. He "allowed himself the moment's luxury of savoring this thought" when discussing the catastrophe that would be a successful attack on Mavis A. And he seems to be grooming Zamke in his own image.

In some ways, they serve as some sort of vaguely detached chorus. They work for the English, but they certainly aren't pro-England. They spend the early part of the book researching possible attacks, studying news reports, and making connections between the hijacking and Mavis A. And they discuss all of these events as sort of a detached summary of what is going on. And all the time that they are trying to learn what is happening, they are sitting on Mavis A, in the middle of a huge storm, and they serve as the only connection between the two sides until the end of the book.

Back in the brothel, the officers of the ship are enjoying themselves, until Quinn has them dragged naked into his office, and tells them he needs help hijacking their boat. Of course, he doesn't tell them the actual plans -- he tells them that the plan is simply to hold the ship ransom. They'll sail around in the North Sea until they get their money, then escape to Libya. And what's strange about this is that they seem pretty happy to comply. It's one thing to be kidnapped and have your boat hijacked, and something else to be excited about it. But, Quinn basically convinces them that they're going to have a great adventure and have a story to tell their whole lives.

Quinn felt a thrill like a fighter who had struck a perfect blow. He had hit the Americans precisely square and true. Using only his tongue, he had turned the frightened captives into comrades. The spirit of mischief and adventure -- always underrated as a shaker of events -- had hold of them; he could see it plainly in the sly grins that they exchanged, first with another and then with him.

What stories they would live to tell. Days or weeks in the hot eye of a watching world. Poking a stick in the eye of their millionaire bosses and not having to pay for it. Jesus, they might have pulled this off themselves. Libya. So long, straight world; sorry, tired wife and girlfriend.

Toss some booze into this last bit and it's like a Raymond Carver story set on an oil tanker.

While all this happens, First Officer Owen Browne is watching a storm brew on the American Enterprise when his wife calls him from their quarters. Browne is a careerist who wants to move high in the company. He's a good sailor, but he considers his Harvard MBA to be more valuable, and he's very open about his desire to leave the boat and get a management position with Petromarine -- the company which owns the American Enterprise. Ethel is very attractive -- she "had the blond good looks of the high-school cheerleader she had once been. Her nose was tiny, her breasts were large, and the stylish wire-framed glasses that she was never without made her enormous brown eyes bigger yet." But her relationship with her husband is strained, mostly because of his career drive.

Ethel has been on the ship for two years, travelling along with Owen. She's the only woman on the boat -- since the American Enterprise almost never docks in a port, no one really wants to stay on it voluntarily. And since Owen is really only concerned with his career, he doesn't even take shore leave or vacations. But having Ethel on the boat is a source of tension for the crew. "Being the only woman on a big ship that sailed for months without shore leave made Ethel the sole subject of intense sexual focus, and she was not unaware of it... Only her husband seemed unaware of her sexual presence."

Ethel convinces Owen to get a little kinky, and gets him to have sex on the bridge of the deck. But oops! -- they're caught in the act when the terrorists and crew return.

The Captain of the boat quickly learns to appreciate Quinn. "Captain Cody had taken a grudging liking to Dominic Quinn... Above all, Cody admired people who made things happen swiftly." He seems to understand that he doesn't have too much control over the situation, so he focuses on getting the ship moving. "They roused the general-purpose seamen that they needed and ordered them to their posts." -- This book has enough characters, but this is literally the only mention of non-officers on the crew.

There's a fairly mushy paragraph about the boat departing:

To a man who has made a life of sailing, the departure is the climax, the voyage itself is anticlimactic. Every man on the bridge felt the same deep tremor as the water widened between ship and shore. The vessel so dwarfed even the tallest structure in town that it almost seemed as though they were slipping away on a safer solidity than the shore itself. Cody was commanding immeasurably more wealth, power and structure than had Nebuchadnezzar in Babylonia. Standing behind the captain, Dominic Quinn felt that his Kalashnikov assault rife was as powerless as a broomstraw against the juggernaut under him.

I don't even know what to say about this. That is some extremely overwrought prose -- Stahl does enjoy flexing his writing skills.

With the boat underway into the North Sea, very little happens for a big chunk of the book. The middle of this book is really muddled, with extra characters and plot points that are largely unneeded. The Dropper spends awhile wiring the structure of the boat to explode, and the crew doesn't really seem to mind. The big storm they are sailing through gets bigger and bigger. The American Enterprise doesn't have any trouble with it -- if anything, it's helping them to hide. But somehow, a plane from "IMAPO" -- the Intergovernmental Maritime Anti-Pollution Organization -- spots the tanker, and figures out that it is off course. The IRA folks are all shocked to see it flying. IMAPO hunts down polluters, but mostly exists in this book to mock bureaucracy, and to serve as confirmation that Mavis A is the probable target of the attack.

We learn a bit more about Quinn, who is in love with Roland O'Driscoll, one of the IRA terrorists, but nothing ever happens. "Quinn didn't try it much anymore. He had never succeeded in twenty years, and by now he knew he never would." O'Driscoll is terrified of drowning -- he watched his brothers and fathers drown in a storm when their fishing boat sank -- so maybe it was a mistake to bring him on a mission where you plan on crashing a ship in the North Sea, but Quinn hasn't told anyone other than Dropper his whole plan yet.

Eventually, the officers of the ship realize that Quinn is lying to them about his plan. The hijackers haven't made any demands yet. They haven't announced that they hijacked the ship, or even stated any intentions. Browne and Cody predict that they are probably planning to scuttle the tanker in the North Sea, which would be bad enough -- and they haven't even figured out about the oil rig part yet. They decide to try and detonate the bow storage tank of the tanker -- it doesn't have any oil in it, but the gasses left behind are highly explosive, and we learned earlier in the book that this was a constant concern. If they can cause an explosion, the ship will take on water, and hopefully start dragging on a shallow point in their course, which should disrupt the terrorist plans.

Browne volunteers to ignite the tank, all while griping about his marriage -- it's pretty dangerous, whoever does this will probably die in the explosion. "Oh I'll do it. It's a chance to move up faster -- one way or the other." But they decide to wait for a little while before trying something that desperate.

While they wait, it's time for a very awkward dinner with the officers and the terrorists. There's a nasty argument where Ethel, angry with her husband, comes to defense of the Dropper. Suddenly, he is smitten with her, as we learn in this strange passage.

The Dropper's heart opened to Ethel. For the first time he looked at her directly. In all, he was a good-looking man... In another place, he would have taken the time to fall in love with her. She had the look of his sisters as children, lifted laughing and dripping from the kitchen washtub by his mother.

This is just a weird bit of writing. The Dropper is attracted to Ethel, but what do his looks, or his naked siblings, have to do any of with that?

While the Dropper decides to seduce her, Owen freaks out after the argument and tells Ethel to remain locked in her cabin. "She had changed sides." In their cabin, Ethel takes triple a normal dose of sleeping pills, but then accepts a visit from the Dropper. He basically proposes marriage, and reveals the full plan to destroy the boat. They start to have sex, and then Ethel pukes all over him and passes out. We are left to ponder what happened next. Basically this book is full of unsexy sex.

Meanwhile on Mavis A, they've figured out that they are a potential target of the American Enterprise. They discuss the possibilities and whether it is even feasible to shut down the rig and make it safe for a collision. But the rig isn't built to deal with this sort of disaster -- there's no valves or blowout preventers on the sea floor to shut down the wells. Cullenbine does the math and figures that if they shut down the rig, it will take up all the time they have until the American Enterprise might get there (naturally), and that it would probably cost 10 million pounds to repair the damage. That's a little too much for management to handle. Even though Cullenbine warns that "If that oil starts pouring into the ocean, half the people on this planet might have to start looking for someplace else to live. Like Mars." they decide to wait until they have decent confirmation that they are the target before shutting down the rig.

Meanwhile, we get a lot of details about the problem of prostitutes being smuggled onto Mavis A -- and they're not for the faint of heart.

Cullenbine has banned liquor and women on the rig. He makes a big show of dumping booze over the side whenever he finds it, but it definitely still exists on the ship. And women are also a problem

Then there were the women. Usually they were the toughest, nastiest whores that the slums of Glasgow could breed. They had to be in order to endure the round-the-clock demands of six hundred hard and lonely men. There had been one girl who had been forced to give herself up for medical attention... the cause of her injuries had not been brutality, but simple wear. As overuse made her performance more and more painful and reluctant, the desperate men had wildly bid up the price of the act. One tool-pusher had given her two hundred pounds for a single act, and here greed had been so great that the had ignored her pain until she had finally fainted and slipped into shock.

I almost stopped reading the book at this point. This is really unpleasant. If you're still reading this review, go chug a beer or at least go stand outside for a minute and catch your breath. Ok, here goes, let's finish this.

Cullenbine has trouble finding women on the ship. They are hidden behind false walls, in makeshift expansions, etc. The two prostitutes currently on the platform, Sadie and Gail, are housed in a tiny chamber buried below the sea floor in one of the legs of the rig. They're 19 years old, and have spent five months in this 8x10' cramped chamber 'serving' sixty men a day. The ventilation is terrible, it's hot, humid, mildew is growing everywhere, and there's barely any light. There's just enough room for two beds. The room hasn't been cleaned in three weeks, the chemical toilet is almost full, and there's not enough water to bathe.

Some other details gleaned from the book:

• There's a twenty-minute limit.
• They have each made over 80,000 pounds.
• They each have a boyfriend in the crew.
• "No group activities, even though the girls had thoughtfully established a rate for it."

For all the details in this section, and I left many out of the review, the prostitutes exist in the novel largely to give Cullenbine something heroic to do after he has a melee involving 40-pound wrenches. That's right, a fight between two men wielding wrenches that weigh forty pounds. Cullenbine decides that he needs to shock some discipline into the crew.

The inactivity forced by the storm made all the jobs facing Cullenbine more difficult. The men would be drunk, lethargic and reluctant to return to their cold, bone-tiring work... It was desperately important that he pound a new sense of discipline into his men. Were there any shortcuts? He had lashed out at them so many times that he had lost some of his ability to shock. But he'd find a way; he always did.

So, he puts on his hard hat, safety glove, boots and a sweater, so that he is "formidably armored for violence." Then he sounds a general alarm to get the crew to congregate in one place, and he picks a fight with one of the Scottish terrorists aboard.

"Forty-pounders," McArdle said. There were gasps and some low whistles. A challenge to fight with the huge forty-pound wrenches was usually a challenge to the death. A refusal to accept meant a trip off on the next helicopter for anyone, including Cullenbine. Forty-pounder fights did not last long; the first man able to bring the jaws-end into solid contact had his win. A blow to a limb caused the kind of bone damage that required wiring, steel pins and surgical shortening. A smash to the torso destroyed organs; kidneys and spleens had to be removed in rags; livers could never be fully repaired; intestines burst and lungs collapsed. Blows to the head were near-decapitations and instant death. Such losers were dragged to machinery-packed areas where making the physical damage appear accidental could be stage-managed.

Quick facts about these Scottish terrorists -- there are five of them aboard, and they have a bomb rigged in the radio system of the Mavis A to detonate it at an opportune time, so that they cannot call for help after the crash. They're monitoring all radio communications so they can act as quickly as possible. They are also well-armed. Cullenbine has identified the five of them as troublemakers, although he doesn't realize the extent of it. He has considered firing them, "but they were in thick with the union stewards, and he didn't need any more labor problems." Quick tip -- a good way to avoid labor issues is to NOT USE VIOLENCE AGAINST YOUR STAFF CONSTANTLY.

Even though Cullenbine is such a good fighter, he loses the fight. At one point, McArdle traps his head in the jaws of his wrench and twists until he Cullenbine falls to the floor. But while all this is happening, Magnus decides to send out a radio message that they might be under attack, so the Scots blow up the radio tower, and things devolve from here. During the distraction, McArdle forgets Cullenbine for more important tasks, so he survives, and recovers remarkably quickly.

The Scots destroyed the radio but not the radar, so they try to get that next. There's a brief siege which ends when there's a huge gasoline explosion, killing the Scots. And now it's obvious that Mavis A is in trouble, so Cullenbine locks the crew in legs of rig to force them to cap the wells. During the chaos, a heavy pipe falls over the hatch to the chamber that the two prostitutes are hiding in. They're trapped! Luckily, their boyfriends convince Cullenbine to use his brains to rig some cables to clear the pipe, and they escape from the leg just in time. After this, they disappear from the book, never to be mentioned again.

Browne tries to get to the front of American Enterprise to cause an explosion, but instead he's washed overboard in a fight with a couple terrorists. Meanwhile, Ethel is raped by the Dropper and two of his friends, and when she finds out about her husband, she decides to finish what he started. She fights her way through stormy seas to the front of the boat, breaking bones in the process. She drops a grenade into open tank, cries out "Owen", and dies in a big explosion.

The plan works somewhat -- the explosion knocks a big hole in the ship, and it drags on the seafloor a bit, and slows down, but it's still headed toward Mavis A.

The dramatic conclusion of the book is certainly one of the oddest things I've ever read, and it includes:

• A low speed collision between oil tanker and rig
• The slow realization that if the terrorists back up the tanker and separate it from the rig, it will totally wreck Mavis A
• A drawn out firefight between terrorists with AK-47s and rig workers, led by Cullenbine, and the Germans, armed only with skeet-shooting shotguns.

The ship crashes into the rig! If they can back it up, the rig will be loose and probably it will be bad! But before this happens, Cullenbine hooks onto the ship with a big crane so that it can't move. Cullenbine and his team on Mavis A randomly discovers some skeet shooting shotguns. A skeet-shooter vs. AK-47 firefight might seem like a mismatch to you, and you would be right. The prostitutes' boyfriends get shot right away, and it's not looking good for Cullenbine's team.

But they are pretty smart, and manage to pick off a bunch of terrorists. Lustgarten retrieves an AK-47 and uses it to execute two of the terrorists -- which does not endear him to anyone at all. Unfortunately for him, he's shot dead right after this. Do Nazis believe in karma? Funny line about one of the terrorists here: "His features were twisted with hatred, and he had terrible hairless brows."

In the last moments of the fight, Cullenbine is trapped in the shack that holds the skeet-shooting supplies, and he kills the Dropper with the trap-thrower itself -- death by clay pigeon to the face.

Meanwhile, Quinn has assigned the task of exploding the American Enterprise to Roland O'Driscoll, the man he loves, who is afraid of drowning -- but Roland shoots Quinn and himself rather than face death in the icy seas. And, mercifully, that's the end of the threat. It seems like Stahl forgot a couple of the terrorists at the end of the story, but there's not a lot of point in quibbling over plot points now. WE HAVE SURVIVED TO THE VERY LAST CHAPTER OF THE BOOK!

Anyway, the damage to Mavis A was minimal. In the closing chapter, repairs are already underway, the American Enterprise has been towed off for repairs, and in many ways it sounds like things are returning to normal. In an interview, Cullenbine expresses respect of the terrorists, saying that he admires their plan. Meanwhile the next attack is already being planned by another IRA leader hovering overhead in a helicopter.

It is safe to say this this book has very little lasting value, and it definitely wasn't worth reviewing. At the same time, it's sort of terrifying that this book hasn't been discussed more on the Internet. I picked up my copy of the book not long after the Deepwater Horizion disaster, and the idea of a terrorist trying to damage or destroy an offshore oil platform is both plausible and scary. And it doesn't need to be half as complicated as the plot of this book. I found myself wondering if the government ever asked Stahl his opinion of this scenario. After all, they've employed help from writers with almost no credibility at all.

Stahl continued to write and found success working for Lou Reda Productions, a company which produces a huge amount of content for A&E and The History Channel. Some of his work has been nominated for Emmy awards. Judging from this New York Times profile of him from 1998, he has had a lot of success and clearly enjoys what he does. Because as weak as this novel is, there are moments where the writing rises out of the muck a bit, if even for just a sentence or two.

Stahl dedicated The Assault on Mavis A to "People Who Stick," and I'd like to do the same thing for this book review. Anyone who persevered to the end of this review is truly dedicated the concept of Books Not Worth Reviewing. Thanks!

Time for another installment in the series of book reviews which I call "Books That are not Worth Reviewing" -- This time, it's a book all about the gaming craze that swept the world in the late 70s and early 80s -- a slim paperback titled What is Dungeons & Dragons? written by John Butterfield, Philip Parker, and David Honigmann.

The book is a 230 page paperback originally put out by Penguin Books in the UK in 1982.  I have the American version, which was published by Warner Books in 1984.  For some reason they chose to not use either of these covers:

opting for this fairly odd dripping green letter version instead.

It makes no sense at all!  The book also has a sticker applied to the bottom which reads:

Dungeons & Dragons is a federally registered trademark of TSR, Inc.  Use of TSR's trademarks and the contents of this book have not been approved by TSR.

The back is pretty great too:

I found this book at our local Salvation Army. In just one visit, I found this book, Science Fiction Stories, a copy of Studs Terkel's The Good War, and maybe one other book that I'm forgetting.  And I wasn't even trying! Had I wanted to, I could've picked up a couple dozen books from the Left Behind and Tribulation Force series, and used them to complete the coffee table I'm making out of Chicken Soup for the Soul books. Anyway, it was a strange place to find a copy of this book, given the general position of evangelicals on D&D. Perhaps, based on the cover, they thought the book was supposed to scare people away from D&D. After all, those letters are pretty creepy.

But instead of being a long-form tract, or some sort of collection of scary stories about the occult, What is Dungeons & Dragons? is a pretty straightforward introduction to the game and how to play it.

Backstory

Pulling spent years decrying what she saw as the evil influence of D&D on our children.  She was solidly debunked at every turn (even with Ed Bradley's total puff piece on her here). In particular, the article Game Hysteria and the Truth, by Michael Stackpole, is largely directed at Pulling's claims about the game, and is a devastating argument against them. The other famous attack on D&D is the Jack Chick tract Dark Dungeons, which is analyzed smartly by The Escapist.

Any time Jack Chick is on your side, you're in trouble.

When I was a little older, I managed to get a few D&D books, mostly for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, but I never had much opportunity to play -- my parents were divorced and I was never home on weekends. But when I reached high school, I was able to play again a little bit after school, and that was pretty great.  I think all told, I spent more time creating characters and coming up with interesting dungeons than anything else. I used to love coming up with crazy ideas for adventures, and sometimes I still do.

The Authors

The authors of this book were three students at Eton, who loved D&D and wargames, and somehow landed a book deal to write about it.  And this wasn't their only book -- after this book was published, they wrote a series of three novels known as the Cretan Chronicles, which were similar to Fighting Fantasy books.  Fighting Fantasy books were a little bit like souped-up Choose Your Own Adventure books -- you would choose your path through the book, but you also had several randomly generated attributes, and there would be combat and skill tests that were based on dice rolls. I think it's definitely worth mentioning that we're talking about a couple of high-school kids doing this.

There's not a lot of data on the internet about what else they may have done. In fact, there's no evidence of anything at all other than these books.

The Book

What is Dungeons and Dragons? is roughly divided into several sections -- the first part provides a basic overview of the game, and some details on the rules of the game, character generation, and random things like money, the height of your character, and how much stuff you can carry.  It discusses the setting of most adventures -- "lairs, often hidden deep below ground, in labyrinthine complexes full of twisting corridors, secret passages, and nearly always, traps."

At the core of D&D, if you set aside the setting, the imagination, etc, there are two main things that you'll see over and over again: rules, and dice.  Dice are central to almost every RPG -- they are used to generate your characters attributes, determine your success or failure when using skills or fighting, and for lots of other reasons.  There are a bunch of dice you need for playing D&D, and they were fairly exotic before the game became so popular.  Some wackos think that dice are evidence of the game's evil nature:

The dice in the game symbolize witchcraft in my opinion. One day I decided to research the origins of role-playing dice. They originated in mystic practices! Plato has an interesting theory about what he called platonic solids. He theorized a 20-sided platonic solid represented water, a 10 sided shape represent fire, a 4-sided dice represented earth, and a 100 sides shape represented air. These are all the shapes of dice used in Dungeons and Dragons. If you put these all together fire, earth, air, water, and the player has a human spirit. That makes up all the components to cast spells!

Since most people reading this book never would have seen dice other than the normal six-sided kind, the varieties of dice needed to play D&D are described in some detail, with pictures:

The book describes the different attributes a character has - Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, etc, and how they relate both to the game, and to real life -- for example, they tie Intelligence to a rough measurement of IQ.  There's a discussion of the different languages a player might know and how they relate to gameplay -- basically your ability to speak to other non-human races in the game.

One of the innovations of D&D, and one of the things that I think offers an opportunity to use your imagination in ways other than just pretending to be a fantastical hero of some sort, is alignment. The book describes alignment as "a combination of philosophy and a way of life." and calls it "one of the most important [choices] in the game." Conceptually, alignment is the worldview of your character, in a simple categorized form.  In the original D&D (and the system described in this book), alignment was very simple -- Lawful, Neutral or Chaos.  The book describes the three alignments as:

• Lawful: "The Lawful character tends to view the group as more important than any of its individuals. He believes, therefore, that there must be rules... He will obey rules except when under extreme duress, and even then probably follows a personal code of conduct."
• Neutral: "A Neutral person thinks solely of himself. In any situation he will act only if it is to his advantage. Remember, however, that this advantage may be long-term as well as short-term... He will obey laws if they do not really restrict him, but he will not feel any qualms about breaking them."
• Chaotic: "The Chaotic character, in contrast, believes in the right of the individual and that the world is ruled by luck rather than by people's actions. He will break laws given any opportunity, and often without good reason. He will act unpredictably, carrying out his every whim, regardless of the consequences."

The book points out how this is clearly unrealistic and a "gross oversimplification" and points out several fictional characters who defy these simple categories -- for example, Robin Hood, who is clearly Chaotic but also good. Indeed, in later versions of the game, there was a grid with 9 different possible alignments, adding Good/Neutral/Evil to the three basic categories, so you could have a character who was "Lawful Evil" for example, and that character would be a tyrant, or perhaps someone who obeys the law but uses it as a tool for their own evil gains.

There are charts in the book for the height and weight of your character, and other random things like that.  You can roll some dice and do some quick math to generate the values.  I assume these charts are borrowed from the actual D&D rules.

The authors go into detail on the potential equipment a player can carry.  They have pretty clear opinions about possible weapon selection, and the other things you should be carrying:

Rope is another item no party should be without... some adventurers like to carry their own rope in case they get separated from their partners.  Other popular personal equipment includes holy symbols and mirrors... Many adventurers also carry iron spikes, which jam doors open or shut.  Many parties swear by the ten-foot pole, a piece of equipment which allows them to check for traps at a well-removed distance, but anyone who has actually carried such a pole in real life will realize just how cumbersome it is.  A six-foot poll is more maneuverable.

That's very interesting, but isn't it enough to just say that you have a long pole, and leave it at that?

Character generation is very naturally followed by a detailed chapter on dungeon design, which includes an entire dungeon known as the "Shrine of Kollchap", which is actually not too bad, and is referenced in a couple places online. Just for fun, I've reproduced it here.  The authors walk through the process of creating this dungeon as a way of learning about the design process, and while there are clearly different ways of doing this sort of thing, it's a good walkthrough of the concept.  First, they pick a basic setting - an abandoned temple.  Then they flesh out some backstory, and a goal for the players -- recovering a magical sword.  "The first step in any dungeon design, then, should be the choice of setting and scenario.  The technique of gradually expanding this, with one idea leading to another until you have a full-scale background."

After this, it's time to start fleshing out the details of the dungeon and the book covers this fully -- making sure that its possible to travel through, populating it with monsters and treasure.  They stress that the designer needs to strike a balance between keeping things interesting, but also making sure that the players can survive. There is a lot of detail here about making sure that everything is balanced and well thought out. The authors are clearly early proponents of a theory of game design now known as "Gygaxian Naturalism," which means, roughly speaking, that the environment built by the DM has a natural sense of balance. From Grognardia:

The intention behind Gygaxian Naturalism is to paint a picture of a "real" world, which is to say, a world that exists for reasons other than purely gaming ones. The implication is that monsters have lives of their own and thus go about their business doing various things until they encounter the player characters. Exactly what they do is described by reference to game mechanics, whether it be the numbers of non-combatants in a lair or spell-like abilities that help the monster do whatever it naturally does when it's not facing off against an adventuring party.

All that matters is that the DM should have some reason for choosing the monsters which he places in the dungeon... With larger creaters some regard must be given to the ecology of the dungeon. If it is filled to the brim with sabre-tooth tigers, the players might begin to wonder, with some justification, what the tigers are eating, not to mention how they got there... Granted this is a fantasy world, [but] the players still need some kind of logic to hold on to.

 

An example of what might be developed is as follows. The DM decides that in one particular area there are some Giant Rats which feed on small insects and vermin. Giant Rats are preyed on by Giant Ferrets, and so it is likely that in the same area some of these creatures would be found. In a nearby room, a man might have set up camp with the intention of snaring the ferrets and selling the skins. A group of bandits, hearing of this trade, could try to take it over, and so the DM might place some of these in the area. The Giant Ferrets and Rats might have been a source of food for some Goblins, who are now annoyed at the threat to their food supply. The list could continue, but the basic idea is that there should always be some reason, albeit perhaps a tenuous one, for a creature's presence in a particular place.

This is not a universally held theory. Plenty of game designers and D&D fans would prefer to have a dungeon where in the room next to the Giant Rats, you had some ninjas who just teleported in from the future. Debates about stuff like this continue today.

After the designer has a good idea of the details, it's time to map out everything, and the authors cover how to use graph paper and efficient use of pencils and erasers.  The book covers the basics of making sure your dungeon makes structural sense, and stresses balance issues again and again  -- "It is wise to design your dungeon so that it is constructed around corridors through which the inhabitants can reach the outside world or at least other levels. If this is not done, a situation will arise in which either monsters hardly ever leave their rooms to find food and water, or they must tramp through other rooms to acquire these necessities." Sounds like an apartment complex I lived in once.

There are some recommendations about placing monsters in a dungeon -- basically, don't kill the players right away, which seems sensible. When placing monsters that of the same type, consider how they are organized -- where does the leader/chieftain live? For some monsters, you need to consider storerooms, kitchens, etc. They really stress that dungeons should have this balance.

At the end of this chapter, there is a map of the dungeon, and a key of every room in it.  It's very detailed, and if you google Kollchap, it's obvious that people have actually played it, and have some fond memories of it.

The largest chapter of the book is devoted to a walkthrough of Kollchap by the three characters -- it's basically a dramatized transcript of an actual game, with commentary.  On the left page, there is a sort of fictional account of the course of the game with the players talking, interacting with the Dungeon Master, and working through the adventure.  On the right page, there's some commentary for what is happening.  The left pages read like scripted dialog and events, and the commentary covers which rules are applying at any given moment, what the DM is doing, times when dice are rolled, etc.  It seems sort of silly, but for someone who had no idea how to play D&D, or who lacked the modern context that I have, I'm sure it would be very educational.

After this, there's a chapter about acting as Dungeon Master.  The DM is basically the person who runs the game.  They act out all the roles of any non-players, they keep track of monsters, they know where the players are at any time, and they have all the knowledge of the environment the players are exploring.  The book describes the role as:

As a DM you may have to play any number of roles, from kind-hearted innkeeper to scheming guide; from paranoid Halfling to fearsome Dragon.  Be prepared for all of this, as the interaction with NPCs (non player-characters) can probe the most enjoyable and exciting part of an adventure, for the players.  The game revolves around the DM. It is not a straight competition between referee and players, but more a co-operative effort: the more both you and your players put into playing, the more you will obtain from it.

This chapter covers the basics of how to be the DM, with some extra tips tossed in that probably aren't in the manual.  For example, they recommend being present when your players create their characters, to make sure they don't cheat. They also recommend tracking a crazy amount of information, such as whether characters are right or left-handed, and where they stand when they open treasure chests.

There's a lot of advice about figuring out the right amount of information to give to players when describing the places they are exploring -- you need to give them enough information without boring them with detail.  You also need to be able to think on your feet, and not make it really obvious when something important is happening -- for example, your tone of voice or behavior shouldn't change when the players are walking into an ambush. There is advice about offering different options to players depending on what they want.  Not every player is going to want to hack and slash their way through an adventure -- some will prefer to negotiate or find alternate paths around problems. This chapter also talks about managing combat, handling traps and surprises that the players encounter, and dealing with rates of movement and other technical things like that.

This is followed by a pretty detailed chapter on the accessories you can get for D&D -- especially metal figurines to play the game, including some information on how to get them, painting them, and modifying them to suit your character's appearance.  There's also some information about pre-generated adventures known as "modules", and the assortment of gaming-related magazines which you could get in the early 80s.

The Future

The next chapter is on computers, and it is particularly ridiculous, since it was clearly obsolete before it even came out, and looks unbelievably ancient now.  In fact, in the few other reviews of this book that I've seen, everyone loves to poke fun at this chapter, and rightfully so.  Just to give you a taste, here's the first paragraph of the chapter:

While D&D was in its infancy, computers were reaching adolescence.  Over the last few years, computing has undergone a revolution, and one which is still continuing.  Space Invaders machines are just a visible product of this.  That computers should become associated with games, and used for them, was in some ways inevitable: games are, to a certain extent, to do with how well you handle information, and information-handling is what computers are primarily concerned with.  No matter how it has come about, there is no doubt that many D&D players are interested in computing (and vice versa); it is not surprising, then, that attempts have been made to computerize the game.  As the information technology era continues, other similar attempts will, doubtless, be made.

The chapter continues with a charming description of what a computer is, listing off the CPU, keyboards, screens ('Video Display Unit') and printers for output (this information is so dated that it talks about computers with printers for output but no screen). It theorizes that "It should be possible to play D&D with the computer acting as DM. In practice, though, there are constraints placed upon the computer's role, primarily due to limitations of time and space."  And while it's certainly true that computers of the time were limited, there were already several classic computer RPGs available, most notably Wizardry in 1981 and Ultima in 1980. There were even some before that, if you were willing to put up with interfaces like this:

The book extols the possibilities of creating characters with a computer program, although it admits to one problem: "you need to admit to yourself how much you normally fiddle the rolls."  A computer can also be used for tracking money, experience, equipment, looking up monsters, and all sorts of other housekeeping tasks.  The book derides games such as Adventure and Zork as "mere problem-solving exercises, interesting enough for hardcore computer freaks, but leaving us ex-wargamers longing for a bit of cold steel and some random violence."  This is sort of funny, since nowadays there's no shortage of random violence in modern computer games. They do however point out a fair problem with many computer games, which is that they are pricey, and once you have beaten them, there's not much left of interest.

The final paragraph of this chapter is almost as good as the first one, so here it is:

Computers have come a long way since the vacuum-tube days of the 1950s and they have a long way to go, both in terms of availability and power.  One thing that is certain, however, is that a lot of software is and will continue to be available dealing with Fantasy-related subjects if not with D&D itself.  Lots of people (Gary Gygax, for example) look forward to the day when games are played in real-time with 3-D graphics and so on, and the picture on the screen is what the character is actually seeing.  What lies in the future, only time will tell.

It's pretty safe to say at this point, more people play RPGs on their computer than they do around a table.  According to Wizards of the Coast, the current owners of the D&D franchise, "as many as four million people in the U.S. play each month, while millions more play worldwide".  It looks like there are around 11 million people playing World of Warcraft right now.  More people are getting their initial exposure to RPGs from computers than vice-versa.

I used to play computer games all the time.  My dad had an old Apple II, and on weekends I would play Zork and other Infocom games.  When I was 11 or 12 we got a Commodore 64 at home, and I played Telengard and Wasteland, and later the AD&D "Gold Box" games.  It was great fun for me, and I have no doubt that it pushed me into my current career of writing code, and occasionally writing games.

If you look at the History of Role-Playing Video Games entry on Wikipedia you can learn about a lot of the computer games that were available in the early 80s, as well as all the games that came after.  There are a lot.

Rules, Rules, Rules

There's a chapter titled "Further Complexity" which goes into detail on the assortment of extensions to Basic D&D.  In the 80s there was Basic, Expert, and Master D&D, and also Advanced D&D. There was even a rule book for becoming an immortal.  There are probably hundreds of rulebooks for D&D at this point.  AD&D became the official branch of the game in the 80s, and went through many revisions, and is currently in the Fourth Edition. This chapter discusses some of the differences between all these versions, and tells you what you get in each one.  There's some humor about the different rates of movement in each version of the game, and how the math doesn't add up.  They mention the assortment of bizarre weapons you can get in variants, such as Fauchard Forks, Becs de Corbin, Guisarmes, Lochaber Axes and so on. 

The authors seem to avoid expressing an opinion on how they feel about all these different rule books and extensions, but they do lash out at AD&D,calling it "suitable for those who wish to concentrate on running a rule system rather than a game.  Those who wish to ad lib and make up rules on the spot may find that they are discarding a great deal."  Ouch.

Other Worlds

The last substantive chapter is titled "Other Worlds," and it covers the assortment of other RPGs available in the early 80s.  The authors manage to cram quick mentions of over 25 games into just 8 pages of the book.  This chapter is interesting because it allows the reader some insight into the authors' feelings about games in general, and also because the authors' manage a pretty decent overview of the recurrent themes and systems of most RPGs.

Throughout the broad spectrum of role-playing games there are certain recurrent themes which are handled differently by the various games.  The most important of these are the character-generation system, the background, the combat system, and lastly, the objective or method of progression.

The authors discuss each of these in some detail, talking about all of the different sorts of dice rolls that can be used to generate characters, the use of interesting attributes such as "Luck" as opposed to the more traditional Strength/Intelligence/etc.

Their discussion of background splits games into three main themes with some exceptions: Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Historical.  They provide a fairly predictable commentary on these different themes.

For combat, they divide games into those that have a fast-moving, easier system, and those having a more realistic but slower system.  In their opinion, D&D is basic, with single quick dice rolls to determine if an attack is successful, and another roll to determine damage, etc.  It's certainly not realistic -- as the authors' note, in D&D wearing better armor makes you harder to hit, instead of absorbing more damage.  More complicated systems tend to deal with issues like that, and also allow for damage to limbs, 'critical hits', etc.  In the authors' opinion, "The best combat systems, generally, are those that are quick-moving and fun but have an unrealistically low death total among the characters." Sounds good to me.

The final theme they discuss is that of an objective -- in D&D, you progress through the game by gaining experience points (XP).  You get XP by killing monsters, finding treasure, accomplishing tasks, etc.  Once you get enough points, your character "Levels Up", and with that you gain more skills and hit points.  The book discusses variants of this system.  Some games don't have XP at all, which tends to remove an obvious desire to play -- the desire to improve your character.  Other games allow you to increase your attributes -- i.e., you get stronger, smarter, faster as the game progresses, and in fact, newer versions of D&D have incorporated this idea.

Some of the commentary is fairly snarky and humorous.  For example, right in the introduction the authors' knock D&D by stating that the rules were often confusing and in some places contradictory, and that "Many people realized that there was great potential for similar products with comprehensible and better organized rules." There are other random barbs, for example when writing about the Science Fiction game Universe (which incidentally was designed by someone with the same name as one of the authors of this book, which caused me all sorts of confusion while researching this review), we learn that "Unlike most Science Fiction games, it has proper rules for robots and their use."  Well thank god for that!

We also learn about games with quirky rules -- like Villains and Vigilantes, which used "character generation by the referee assigning attributes based on his judgement of the players' real strength, intelligence, etc [which] can cause more than a little ill-feeling."  Or Boot Hill, which came with a single map which depending on its orientation could represent Texas, the Mexican border, or Colorado.

One of the most intriguing games mentioned is En Garde!, a game revolving around "dueling and social climbing in 17th century France."  This game clearly intrigued the authors, they spend more time on it in this chapter than almost any other game, almost two pages.  The game was published in 1975 and was apparently perfect for playing by mail -- you could write out what you wanted your character to do for the week, and the results would be mailed out to everyone. In fact, there's a list of currently running games that operate like this now.

The final game they mention is perhaps the most interesting of all -- it's Killer (or Assassin).  This is a game that is played in real-time, the players basically are their characters, and they try and assassinate each other via fake weapons, pretend poison, etc.  I played it in high school once or twice, in what seems like a different time, when you could bring a Nerf gun to school without getting into too much trouble.  There's actually some evidence that games like this were being played as early as the 1920s. So in some ways, it was a very early role-playing game. Anyway, the chapter ends with this summary of the game:

Killer, however, depends heavily on what you put into it.  At its best, with a variety of subtle and ingenious bombs in use, along with poisons of various sorts, not just the over-used contact poison, it induces a sense of collective paranoia that is marvelous to behold.  It is also as close to true role-playing as a game can get without being life itself.

The End

After this chapter the book has a list of publishers and model manufacturers, a bibliography, glossary, and index.  The index is slim.  The glossary is sort of funny and seems quaint, defining words such as "artefact."  The bibliography is a pretty good list of science fiction and fantasy books that are worth reading, and then a few gems of non-fiction related to D&D.  The first is called Fantasy Role-Playing Games, written by John Eric Holmes, who was a writer and worked on some of the rulebooks for D&D.  The second is called Fantasy Wargaming, by Bruce Galloway.  This book is actually not about RPGs, it is the rules for an RPG itself, and is notorious for being incredibly awful. They don't really have any reason for listing either in the book, but here they are.  It's sort of funny, because earlier in the book they mention that "whole books have been written on role-playing, most of them by psychologists, and this one chapter cannot rival those."  I guess those books aren't that interesting since they didn't make it into the Bibliography.

Finally they sneak in a mention of Warlock of Firetop Mountain, which just happened to be published by Puffin, the same publisher as this book, and just happens to be the first of the Fighting Fantasy series which includes the Cretan books also written by the authors of this book.  That said, Warlock is supposed to be a classic and certainly does deserve a mention.

When I originally found this book, and considered it for the Books Not Worth Reviewing series, my original assumption was that it was a funny little book that would make a humorous review.  And plenty of things about the book are funny, given the authors' general level of snark, and quaint things like the chapter on computers.  But this is actually a really great book, a piece of history, in many ways very important to our culture.  Things that we take for granted now in the world of gaming and entertainment are covered in great detail in this book. The authors did a good job of summarizing Dungeons and Dragons, capturing some of the excitement around it, and looking to the future of games in general. And it reminded me of some of the favorite things from my childhood.

References

• The WikiPedia entry on the History of RPGs is pretty good.
• What is a Role-Playing Game on darkshire.net, which also has a good bibliography, including this book.
• Another review of What Is Dungeons and Dragons?
• Here's a page about the Cretan Chronicles.

postscript: Special thanks to my awesome partner, who puts up with many long hours of me writing reviews for books that no one will ever read, and probably shouldn't read, and for being one of the few people who will make it to this sentence. xox

Time for another installment in the series of book reviews which I call "Books That are not Worth Reviewing" -- This time, it's a sequel to another book not worth reviewing. Today's book is The Space Eagle: Operation Star Voyage, a young adult novel published in 1970.

Writing book reviews for books which aren't worth reviewing is a bit of a challenge. First, you don't want to review a book that is total crap -- there's plenty of books out there which are bad, forgettable, or haven't stood the test of time. A book can fall into any one of those categories, but still not make the grade of Book not Worth Reviewing. Second, a book not worth reviewing will often not be in print anymore, so you should be pretty thorough when reviewing, since anyone who reads the review probably won't even have a chance to read the book. You, dear reader, would have to go to great lengths to find a copy of the book to read, nor should you want to read it -- if it was worth reading, it would also be worth reviewing, and then it wouldn't be here.

Thinking about these problems reminds me of the Museum of Bad Art, a museum outside of Boston. The museum's mission is "to celebrate the labor of artists whose work would be displayed and appreciated in no other forum". They have about 500 pieces which fall into this category. But, you can't just slap some paint on a canvas to get into the collection. "The pieces in the MOBA collection range from the work of talented artists that have gone awry to works of exuberant, although crude, execution by artists barely in control of the brush. What they all have in common is a special quality that sets them apart in one way or another from the merely incompetent. " The art in MOBA is definitely bad, but going there is AWESOME.

So, with thoughts of 'exuberance', it's time to learn more about Operation Star Voyage, a book full of exuberance for itself, hope for the future, and belief in liberty and the essential goodness of the American way.

The Space Eagle: Operation Star Voyage is printed and bound very similar to the original The Space Eagle: Operation Doomsday. I bought my copy online for a couple bucks. It was somewhat hard to find, but not impossible. Like the original, this is an "authorized edition" and it is penned by Jack Pearl and illustrated by Arnie Kohn. The illustrations seem to be a little less refined than they were in the first book, if such a thing is possible. Characters are posed awkwardly, limbs pointing in strange directions. A lot of harsh angles. The ink quality seems lower as well. Luckily, it still has the "Space Eagle Pledge to America."

The book starts less than a year after the events in Operation Doomsday. In many ways, the start of this book is very similar to the original and it hits the ground running. Paul gets an opportunity to show off his talents while surfing on Waikiki Beach. He catches a huge wave -- the biggest of the day -- with a friend and a bunch of other surfers. A crowd on the beach watches them "as they rode this mountainous monster at breathtaking speed."

Surfers are crashing all over the place, until only Paul remains. Of course, he masters the wave -- an envious man says "Who else? Big man, Girard -- does everything better than anyone else." Conveniently, a newcomer wants to know just who Paul is. She wonders if he's a movie star. And thus, we get a quick summary:

"Who is Paul Girard?" she asked. "A movie star?" With his dark good looks, hazel eyes, and bronzed skin, Paul was frequently mistaken for an actor.
Her friend laughed. "No, he's not a movie star, though I heard he once turned down a fabulous contract from a major studio to play himself."
The other girl's eyes widened. "They made a movie about Paul Girard? Who is he, anyway?"

[...]

Ever since Paul Girard had won an Olympic gold medal at the age of fifteen, hardly a day had passed without some mention of his name in the newspapers of the world. At seventeen he had been decorated by the President for his heroism while serving with the Green Berets in Vietnam. At nineteen he made the College All-American football team. He graduated cum laude from the nation's leading law school and went to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship.

And now, as chairman of the board of the vast industrial empire known as the House of Girard Cosmetics and Chemical Company, he still made time to pursue numerous hobbies: judo (Black Belt), scuba diving, polo, racing cars, planes, and spaceships, and a score of less publicized pastimes such as painting and sculpturing -- not to mention being the darling of the jet set at the world's most fashionable vacation resorts, like Waikiki Beach, where he was attending an international convention of the Chemical Research Institute.

Paul rides the wave to the end. But he needs to rush away from his crowd of worshippers -- the President is calling on his little earpiece phone! Paul races off to find a hiding spot -- puzzling a number of his fans -- then he puts together his phone and calls back the President. Every time Paul has to use this phone, he needs to remove the tiny earpiece from his ear, then manipulate it with some jeweler's tools, which he always has stashed on him somewhere. It has a microscopic rotary phone dial, so Paul uses an eyepiece and pin to dial up the President.

The President gives Paul some bad news -- the Soviets are about to make some breakthroughs on an antimatter engine -- currently, there's only one such engine, and it's the one which powers Paul's ship, the SWIFT. If the Russians are able to develop an engine, it will radically upset the global balance of power.

The SWIFT is powered by spartanium, an extremely rare element which was actually smuggled out of Russia -- the USA has no access to a source. Professor Nikel Khazov, the scientist who smuggled it out, figured out how important it was, and secreted it away to the US -- without the Russians even knowing what it was or what it could be used for -- but it sounds like they've found out! Khazov's old assistant Kerenko -- who is still behind the Iron Curtain -- has secretly contacted him to let him know about a top secret mining project in Siberia, where they are refining spartanium. If the Soviets are successful, they'll be able to make a fleet of powerful ships, while the USA will only have Paul's ship.

The President orders Paul to infiltrate the Siberian base. His mission is to find out how far along they are, and bring back an ore sample for analysis. The hope is that they can find some other part of the solar system with a similar mineral composition, and manage to get spartanium there instead.

Paul rushes back to the Girard Foundation, where he meets up with his sister Julie. "People meeting Julie professionally for the first time were always startled by the sight of this attractive young woman with long coppery hair, wide hazel eyes, and a trim figure. She looked more like a fashion model than one of the world's foremost scientists." This is an upgrade on how she was described in the first novel. Julie actually seems somewhat respected in this book, and isn't constantly beating herself up. However, she's also a less important character than she is in the first novel.

Julie is working on improving the SWIFT's underwater performance. This isn't pertinent to anything that happens in the novel, but we can guess that it would've been important to the third novel, if it were ever written.

Paul and Julie meet with Khazov -- who isn't supposed to know about Paul's secret identity. However, Khazov seems to let it slip that he does -- intrigue! After the meeting, Paul and Julie take a drive to the family estate in Paul's "custom convertible sports car." Paul asks Julie if she thinks Khazov knows the truth:

"You mean, he may be beginning to guess that you're something more than a spoiled playboy?" Julie goaded him.

Paul grinned. "Watch it, little sister! You're still not too big to spank."

Paul and Julie reach the family estate in the middle of the night. In the morning, they have breakfast with their mother Emilie.

"You look a little peaked, dear, " she said as she kissed her daughter. "You really shouldn't work so hard."
Julie laughed. "Don't say it, Mother: I should get out with young people my own age instead of keeping myself locked up in that dismal lab."
Paul laughed, too. "What she really means is that you should find a nice young man and get married."
His sister winked. "Fat chance! Every time I bring a boy home, he falls hopelessly in love with mother."

Paul's reason for visiting his mother is that he wants to take the estate manager, Samuel Aarons, on his mission. Sam is in the first book as well, although he was a seemingly minor character, so I left him out of my review. However, he's important in this book, so here's his story.

"The reason for this surprise visit, Mother," Paul explained, "is that I'm off on a hunting trip to Canada, and I wondered if you'd mind if I borrowed Sam for a few weeks."
"I don't mind if Sam doesn't," she told him.
"Sam doesn't mind," a deep, resonant voice said from the kitchen doorway. A broad smile illuminated the handsome black face.
Samuel Aarons was a giant in every respect -- big of body, mind, and heart. His bald head gleamed like a polished ball. No one knew how old he was, but he had worked for the family since Emilie (Paul's mother) was a young girl. Years earlier, Paul's grandfather had saved Sam from prison, or worse, after he had struck and accidentally killed a man who was beating a horse. To atone for his tragic outburst of rage, Sam had become a student of Hindu and other Oriental philosophies which taught restraint and nonviolence.

Throughout Paul's upbringing, Sam had been a major influence in his development. High ideals, strong character, and regard for physical and moral fitness had, to a great extent, been instilled in him by Sam. In all the world Paul Girard had no closer or dearer friend than "Mr. Sam," as he called him fondly as a boy.

For all the respect Paul has for Sam, he has been abusing their relationship to some extent. He has actually taken Sam on a couple of missions already, but he has used post-hypnotic suggestion to make him remember everything that happens. But Sam is asking questions, and thinks maybe Paul is up to something that isn't so good. Anyway, Paul gets permission from the President to deputize Sam. That way, Paul can be honest with Sam, and he fills him in on everything. Paul gives Sam a silver medallion on a chain, embossed with an Eagle. Conveniently, the deputy medallion can be used to send out a distress signal!

Julie drives Paul and Sam to a remote clearing, where they summon the SWIFT from its hiding place in orbit. Once it lands "They took their places in the foam-padded, leather-covered contour seats in front of the main control panel and instrument board." Nice! The SWIFT blasts off for a quick voyage to Siberia. Sam takes a moment to admire the view:

"From up here a man realizes just how small and insignificant he really is. Do you feel that too?"
Paul smiled. "Small, maybe. But never insignificant, Sam. All of us matter very much. Every man has his own special importance."

As they travel, Paul checks on the assorted systems of the rocket, which gives the user something to learn about. The radar system can detect a pea-sized object from 10,000 miles away. There are lasers in front and back, strong enough to drill through three feet of "cadmium steel." And, there's a rocket launcher which fires rockets full of knockout gas.

Paul gets into his Siberian slave laborer costume. Luckily he speaks fluent Russian, along with about 20 other languages. He breaks out his special disguise kit, also used in the first book, which he uses to actually physically change his face -- with a little bit of wacky chemistry, he changes his face to look more Russian too.

They land about 10 miles from the prison/mine. Paul leaves Sam behind with the ship with explicit instructions to activate the autopilot and launch into space if any Soviets show up. As he leaves the ship...

A chill wind whipped fine snow into his new face. The night was frigid and unfriendly, and, silhouetted against a full moon on a distant hilltop, a wolf was howling at the dark sky. Its mournful cry echoed across the valley.
A lesser man than Paul Girard would have turned right around and gone back to his ship. And who could have blamed him?

The mine is surrounded by a tall, electrified fence. Paul manages to knock out a guard patrol with his dart gun, and breaks through the fence with one of their laser guns. He sneaks into one of the prisoner barracks and pretends to be asleep. And just in time! Right after that the guards show up -- there's an intruder in the camp! Paul jokes with the Captain -- "Some joke, eh, fellows? Can you imagine anybody wanting to get in here?" Apparently his disguise is very convincing. As he leaves, the Captain says "If there's a spy in the area, he's certainly not in here. These miserable mine workers all have that same pasty look about them."

Before catching some sleep, Paul befriends one of the prisoners, Reutov, who recognizes that he doesn't belong there. He introduces himself as "Drarig", his last name spelled backward. Clever!

Paul spends the day in the mines, and he collects an ore sample in the process. Since all the prisoners are exhausted from being in the mines for so long, Paul sticks out -- he is strong and has plenty of energy. Reutov questions him, and Paul is worried that he'll tell the guards something. That night, while all the prisoners are sleeping, Paul knocks out a guard and switches clothes with him.

On his way out, Paul tracks down Kerenko, who tells him that the USSR is very close to having a working antimatter engine. Bummer! Since they have a source of spartanium, they will quickly have the upper hand over the USA in the space race. Kerenko has sabotaged things to slow down their progress, but not enough.

Paul looks out the window to see soldiers streaming into the building. Paul tries to convince Kerenko to escape with him. He declines, saying that "Russia is my motherland. I love her. And it is my duty to stay here and continue the good fight for freedom with all my courageous countrymen who are striving for that worthy goal." Paul is moved, and tells Kerenko that he'll win, and he's not alone. And when asked for his name, Paul tells Kerenko to call him the Space Eagle. And then it's off to the roof for a thrilling escape!

On the way up, he uses his transmitter to summon the SWIFT. He holds his ground on the roof for a couple seconds, firing laser blasts over the heads of the soldiers, until the ship swoops in, and he escapes.

Back at the Girard labs, the ore sample doesn't help them much -- they were hoping it might lead to another source outside of the USSR. Unfortunately, the ore doesn't have the characteristics of any other soil on the planet or in the solar system.

But they think a little more, and realize that there might be spartanium somewhere else in the galaxy. After a little analysis, they realize that there's spartanium at Proxima Centauri, the star closest to the sun. How convenient!

Anyway, they brief the president, and just like in the first book, he gets a primer on the Theory of Relativity. In the universe of these books, this includes a concept of space warp, so that Paul can speed off to another star system without really losing any time at all. The President decides to send Paul on a mission to Proxima Centauri in the SWIFT.

So Paul and Sam hop into the ship and set off. Paul spends awhile explaining how the drive works as they accelerate. It's taking awhile though, so Paul decides to drop the hammer, even though he promised to Julie he would only go so fast. Julie is concerned that bad things will happen if they accelerate past twice the speed of light. Paul remembers the conversation:

The concept of accelerating an object up to twice the speed of light has defied the superbrains of our most advanced computers. Quite literally, they just stall and blow their circuits.
Paul had smiled and reminded her, "Remember, dear sister, back in 1492, the best brains of all the world predicted that Columbus would sail over the edge of the world."

This is basically the way Paul treated Julie throughout the first novel. His sister is actually really worried about something terrible happening, but Paul decides to ignore her advice and he speeds up the SWIFT. It doesn't go too well. Paul and Sam both get knocked out. When they awaken, they discover that they are in orbit around another planet. Suddenly they're confronted by an incoming ship, "a perfect sphere, constructed of metal that shone like polished gold." Shortly after that, they are contacted and have a fairly bizarre conversation.

They looked up as the radio speaker crackled to life. A high, reedy voice addressed them:
"Invaders... invaders... can you hear me? Reply through your transmitter. We are tuned to your frequency, and your radio system has been reactivated. The remainder of your systems, including your weapons system, is dead."
A pained look spread over Paul's face as he replied to the query. "Your choice of words is inaccurate. We are aliens. But we are not invaders. We come in peace."
To his amazement, his statement was greeted by tinkling laughter. More than one person, or creature, was laughing.
The strange voice spoke again. "That is very funny -- yes, I believe funny is your word for what we feel."
"I don't understand," Paul said.
"No matter," was the retort. "For now, it's sufficient for you to know that you are our prisoners."
"Prisoners!" Paul and Sam exclaimed at the same time. "I told you we come in peace -- to seek your help, as a matter of fact."
"To seek our help?" the voice said, with sudden interest. "How odd. We are now preparing to take your craft in tow. I hope you will not make us resort to force."
"I told you we are peaceful visitors," Paul repeated with some annoyance. This seemed a poor time to have to defend his integrity.

The SWIFT is placed in tow, and carried to the surface of the planet.

The first close-up look at this planet was breathtaking. There were trees, grass, mountains, rivers -- all of the same physical characteristics of Earth, but the colors were all different. Grass and leaves were brilliant yellow. Water was a bright crimson. The soil itself was orange.
"Looks like one of those surrealistic paintings," Sam commented.
"Much more colorful than your drab homeland," said the reedy voice indifferently.
"I'll take the bluegrass of Kentucky anytime," Sam said indignantly.
"Blue grass?" The voice sounded puzzled. "But your grass is green, isn't it?"
This time it was Paul and Sam's turn to do the laughing.

The SWIFT and the sphere land in a big hangar. Sam and Paul receive some pills through their airlock, which will help them survive in a different atmosphere.

"You are now about to disembark on the planet Mega Three," the radio announced. "If you show any hostility whatsoever, you will be vaporized at once."

They leave the ship, and meet their captors:

They looked remarkably like Earthmen, except that they were pygmy-sized and were entirely hairless. Their skin was albino white, almost as transparent as glass, so that the veins in their hands and faces and whatever parts of their bodies were exposed were clearly visible.

So, Megans are basically ageless, childlike humans. And, they have surrounded Paul and Sam. They quickly learn that the Megans can read their thoughts, and that they think of them as "savages." Captain Muz is the leader of the "Mega Three Space Patrol" which captured the SWIFT. He tells Paul and Sam that they are the first invaders in over 2,000 years. Paul protests being called savage -- "We don't think of ourselves as savages" he says. Muz replies "Oh, but I think you do," said Muz, with an amused expression.

This phase of the book is largely about the Megans being critical of Earth, based on their ability to monitor our radio transmissions, and on the occasional visit to our planet - one of which regrettably happened during World War Two -- so their opinion of us isn't very high. But Paul and Sam don't give up.

"That must have been WWII," Paul mused. "But you must know, too, that there are good , noble men on Earth who are striving to put an end to that kind of savagery -- to crime and prisions, as well. We'll do it, too, someday... But, remember, your civilization is much older than ours. I'll wager that in the beginning you had some savages of your own to deal with."

Captain Muz seemed genuinely moved by the passion and sincerity with which Paul spoke. "You two gentlemen are of a higher order than the average Earthlings, I think. Well, let us be on our way."

Paul and Sam are taken to their quarters -- there are no prisons or holding cells. They encounter all sorts of Megans on their trip -- all wearing brightly colored togas and colored headbands. "They were pretty cute, he observed -- like children's dolls on Earth."

They reach their quarters, which look "cheerful" and remind Paul of an "ultramodern hotel room" he stayed in in Scandinavia once. It has a kitchen which dispenses red water and delicious food, "if a bit too gaudily colored for Paul's taste."

"All of our food products are synthetically produced from basic vegetable organic matter," the captain explained. "It is forbidden to slaughter animals or to eat their flesh."
"I like that," Sam said. "It reminds me of the philosophy of Gnadu Goldan, the great Tibetan mystic." [emphasis mine]
Muz nodded. "It is against the laws of our society to kill any living creature."
"I'm glad to hear that!" Paul said, grinning.
Muz's face was solemn. "Except in the case of hostile aliens who invade the atmosphere of our planet."

AWWWKWARD! Not shockingly, Gnadu Goldan is totally fictional. This is a little weird. Were there no valid actual people that could be described here? Also, Sam and Paul go hunting all the time, and at some point in the book, Sam cooks up some animal meat. Obviously you can respect a philosophy without following it, or while following it in your own way, but this is still fairly silly.

Muz says goodbye and lets Paul and Sam know that they'll be notified of the time of their trial. The door is locked, and the windows are covered in force fields. Seems like they're in a spot!

After stewing for awhile, they are escorted to the grand Council Chamber for their trial. There are five members of the "Megan Council" I list them here because lists are fun, and the names/titles are fun too:

• Dirk, the "Grand Mega"
• His daughter, Cee, the Minister of Female Affairs
• Arl, his Chief Adviser
• General Gax, Chief of the Megan Defense Space Fleet
• Krell, the Megan Tyne, or Secretary of State

Arl reads off the charges from a scroll of lime-green paper -- Paul and Sam are accused of invading the territory of Mega Three in an armed spacecraft for the purpose of committing unlawful acts.

Paul steps forward, calling these claims untrue. He says that he is a representative of the US government and has a message from the President, to the leader of the Megans. This part of the story is confusing to me -- why does he have a letter? Did they expect to find another race wherever they were going?

Anyway Dirk reads the letter. It mentions the Space Eagle by name. The Megans make fun of the SWIFT, which is a fairly crude ship by their standards, but when Paul speaks of it proudly, he seems to win some respect. Then he tells them why he is there -- that the US needs spartanium, and the only place they know of to get it is at Mega Three. "Mega Three is our last hope, sir, " he said. "The very freedom of Earth depends on your willingness to give me a supply of pure spartanium to take back to our planet."

Dirk breaks the bad news to Paul -- the Megan constitution expressly forbids "intersellar transportation of any materials that would contribute to the ability of creatures in other galaxies to make war, kill, or destroy."

Paul tries to explain mutually assured destruction to the Megans -- "If our weapons are equal or superior to those of our neighbors in the USSR, then neither side would dare to use them." Dirk isn't really buying it, and calls it "curious logic." But, Paul is convincing, and Dirk says that "I suppose we are unjust to be so impatient and distrusting of your kind." The Council retires to another room to discuss the matter.

Paul and Sam are found innocent of trying to invade Mega Three. Hooray! Unfortunately, their request for spartanium is denied. Darn! But Sam won't stand for that.

Sam Aarons drew himself up to his full height. Much taller and brawnier than Paul, he towered over the small Megan soldiers around him. For the first time since the trial began, he spoke, with the quiet dignity he often assumed.

He relates what is basically a parable about gunpowder, and a time when it was very rare. A village had some gunpowder, along with guns, missiles, etc. They vowed never to actually use the weapons unless they were attacked. A neighboring village asked for help with a band of outlaws, but they refused. Anyway, the bandits utterly destroy the second village, and the first village ends up fighting them anyway. Paul's summay: "Once the Russians begin to produce spartanium in quantity, it will only be a matter of time before their space fleets reach out through space to other galaxies and to planets like Mega Three." The parable has a clear effect on the Megans, and even though they are certain that they could defeat any invasion, they decide they need to rethink their decision.

The Megans offer Paul and Sam an alternate solution to their spartanium needs. Instead of giving them the spartanium, they'll provide them with another element, Xenon, which "produces a catalystic chain reaction that converts the spartanium to a harmless element." They can spray the area of the Soviet mine with Xenon, and it will basically destroy the spartanium. So, neither nation will have any spartanium, although of course Paul will still have his space ship. This seems like a somewhat poor result for Paul and Sam. Admittedly, it will prevent the US and the USSR from starting some sort of huge space war, and it will keep the Russians away from Mega Three. But it seemingly will also make it much harder, or even impossible, for humans to explore space. It's not hard to attach a somewhat Machiavellian motive to the Megan decision here.

But Paul and Sam are happy with this solution, and with a load of Xenon on board, they start their trip back. On the way home, around the orbit of Saturn, they detect a spaceship adrift. Paul decides that he needs to check it out in case it is in trouble. As they get closer, they see that it's a "Chinese Ming Five Superrocket."

Although China and the United States had broken diplomatic relations once again, he did not hesitate. Whatever differences might exist between nations on Earth, they did not extend into space when a ship was in distress.

There's no activity or signs of life on the ship. Paul decides to board it to make sure that no one is sick or dying. They anchor the SWIFT to the ship with magnetic grappling hooks, and put on their space suits for the trip over. They enter the ship.

It's a trap! Paul and Sam are surrounded by three men in black outfits. These are space pirates! They even have a skull and crossbones logo on their black tunics. The pirates get ready to take Paul and Sam to their commander. "I'm anxious to meet your commander," Paul said coldly. "Obviously he is either insanely reckless or dangerously ignorant of the consequences of an act of piracy. Unless he releases us and our ship immediately, he and all of you will feel the full space-policing power of the United States."

They're led to the commander -- it's Lachesis Muta, the villain from Operation Doomsday! He's supposed to be dead! IT IS EXTREMELY SHOCKING TO SEE HIM AGAIN!!!

Naturally, Muta had an escape plan, so when Paul nuked his base, he was able to survive. He'd built it to withstand a powerful hydrogen bomb, and he had an underground passage to another lab in a nearby mountain. Muta is very interested in the SWIFT. He has managed to figure out that it can travel beyond the speed of light. Paul is terrified that this means Muta is working with the Russians, but Muta laughs that off. "Don't be ridiculous! Muta works for no one but himself!" However, Muta does have spies in the USSR, and he knows about the spartanium supply problem too. He's even figured out that the only place to get spartanium is Proxima Centauri -- from the Megans. Muta is also convinced that Paul and Sam have been to see the Megans, and that the SWIFT is probably full of spartanium. "The man was a genius; Paul had to admit it."

After trying to convince Paul to turn to the dark side, and a brief altercation between Sam and the guards ("remember your temper Sam" Paul chides to prevent a serious fight) Paul and Sam are thrown in a cell.

Muta and his henchmen try to break into the SWIFT, to no avail. Paul thinks glowingly of his sister "That sister of mine is truly amazing." Paul marveled as he watched the heaviest charges deflecting off the sturdy little craft designed by Julie Girard in the Girard Foundation's Top Security Three laboratories. Muta gives up and tries to bargain some more with Paul. Paul tells him that he doesn't actually have any spartanium in the ship -- then Muta tries to convince him to raid the Soviet mine. In a fit of rage, Muta gives Paul fifteen minutes to change his mind before vowing to throw him out the airlock.

But then he leaves them alone! Paul quickly pulls out his little radio set from his ear, and uses it to get the SWIFT to fire off its gas-filled missiles. The missiles lock onto Muta's ship and fill it with knockout gas -- luckily Paul and Sam still have the helmets for their spacesuits, so they're unaffected. Muta rushes into the cell as the gas fills the ship --

He fell against the bars and glared at them, his wild eyes ablaze with hatred and fury. "You! What have you done to me? … You'll pay for this. I swear it. Lachesis Muta will have his revenge. You -- you..."

But then he falls unconscious. Paul manages to get the keys from Muta's sleeping body, so they can get out of the cell. They head back to the SWIFT and prepare for the trip back to Earth with Muta's ship in tow.

But as they accelerate towards the speed of light, the ship breaks away and disappears! Paul remembers an earlier warning from his sister, about being lost "in the vast uncharted sea of space and time, on some dark edge of the universe. It might even be blown into some unknown universe in another dimension of time."

But the bottom line is that Muta is gone, and Paul still has a mission to complete. Maybe once it's done, "he would come back into space and look for Muta and his space pirates -- if the mad doctor was still a part of this universe."

They fly the SWIFT back to Earth, and hover 10,000 miles over the mine until darkness falls. Then, they speed down, seed the clouds of a blizzard over the mine with the Xenon, and that's it! No more spartanium on the planet. They fly home for some well-earned rest.

SO NOW WHAT HAPPENS?

There are brief sections at the end of the book where Paul relates the story to his sister, and also to the President. Both are more worried about Muta than anything else. We flash then to the Soviet mine, where Kerenko (who somehow survived) is telling the commandant of the mine that the spartanium is ruined. Then, Paul is back in Hawaii, enjoying some relaxation in the sun. His friend Jim is annoyed because he doesn't want to go to a rocket-speedboat race. Jim tells Paul that he needs to be careful, or his life is going to get "very dull from now on."

"Dull?" Paul's eyes opened, and he began to laugh softly. "Yes, I suppose I haven't done anything very exciting lately."
At that instant there was a soft, buzzing signal inside Paul Girard's right ear.

And that's the end of the book, and the end of the Space Eagle series -- is it really a series if there are only two books? I actually find myself wondering what might happen next. I'm sure Muta would come back, and you have to wonder what other aliens might show up at some point. I cannot deny that as awful as these two books were, I would gladly read a third one, and I'm sure it would not be worth reviewing either.

Here's a gallery of the images from the book:

Space Eagle: Operation Star Voyage

Time for another installment in the series of book reviews which I call "Books That are not Worth Reviewing". This time, it's not a book, but it does have plenty of fiction -- it's the "9/11 Investigator", a 'broadsheet' newspaper put out by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

AE911 (as I'm going to call it in this review), was formed fairly late in the 9/11 conspiracy game. Architect Richard Gage founded the org in 2006, after hearing another truther on the radio -- David Ray Griffin, who is a theologian by trade. Griffin, who was a professor of theology in 2001, decided to write a book about 9/11 after the attack, and in 2003, after reading some conspiracy theories on the web, was converted to a truther himself. Most of those conspiracy theorists were inspired by the movie Loose Change, which was wonderfully destroyed by Cracked magazine of all places. Anyway, once you start rooting around, it gets obvious real quick that that NOTHING in the world of "9/11 truth" is straightforward. It's all built on half-truths and outright lies.

So, Gage formed AE911 in 2006, and it became an official non-profit in 2007. In four years, they've gotten about 1500 architects and engineers to sign some version of the following petition:

On Behalf of the People of the United States of America, the undersigned Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth and affiliates hereby petition for, and demand, a truly independent investigation with subpoena power in order to uncover the full truth surrounding the events of 9/11/01 - specifically the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers and Building 7. We believe that there is sufficient doubt about the official story and therefore that the 9/11 investigation must be re-opened and must include a full inquiry into the possible use of explosives that may have been the actual cause behind the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers and WTC Building 7.

Sincerely,
The Undersigned

Just for reference, there are about 233,000 architects in the US, and 1.5 million engineers. So, they've gotten just about 0.01% of their expert audience -- less if you think globally -- to sign onto this petition. And, the text of the petition has changed over the years. And, as pointed out by this guide to 9/11 websites, you need to sign the petition to view a bunch of the content on their website.

Everyone who wishes to join AE911Truth website, has to sign the petition. One cannot even view their discussion board without joining and thus also signing their petition.

This year, on the anniversary of 9/11, they put out this broadsheet. It's a slim volume, just 4 pages long, newspaper-sized, with maybe a dozen articles total. I came across it in a couple local establishments -- yeah, that's where I live. Eventually I decided to snag one. The broadsheet is so flimsy that I picked up four by mistake.

The articles frequently cross-reference each other in mind-numbing fashion. For example, several articles cover Building 7 -- which collapsed a couple hours after the two towers, even though it wasn't hit by a plane. Truthers are convinced that this was a deliberate demolition. The main article about WTC7 covers several areas - first, the story of a physics teacher who disputes some issues about the speed at which the building fell. Second, some evidence that traces of thermite were found in the debris of WTC7. Conveniently, both of these topics have their own articles in the broadsheet.

Other than this self-referencing, and references to the AE911 website itself, the articles are fairly light on citations.

They focus on several areas of concern. I don't want to spend a lot of time debunking the facts, since people who are a lot smarter than me, and more devoted to the task, have done that very thoroughly. I will link where it's worth doing, and mention some general absurdity.

1,000 Architects and Engineers Challenge the Official Version:

It's not particularly clear that this is true or not. Over 1,000 of them signed a petition anyway, although the text of the petition clearly changed over time. Also, there has been enough of a spam issue here that they introduced an involved validation process. What is clear is that being an architect or an engineer does not explicitly qualify you to be an expert on building collapse, or really even to have an informed opinion. But the broadsheet proudly declares "we are technical professionals representing more than 25,000 years of collective experience."

Hmmm. I'm a technical professional. If I sign the petition, are my 10+ years of experience added to that tally?

Using phrases like "technical professional" is a pretty shallow appeal to someone's superior expertise, especially if it doesn't exist, or isn't pertinent. It's also something that truthers themselves tend to fight against. If you surf enough 9/11 truth sites, you'll see them attacking the lack of expertise of people trying to debunk their theories.

In fact, the only architect really featured in the broadsheet is Gage himself. But if you try and do research on his actual experience, and filter out the 9/11 noise, there's almost nothing to find. It seems like he has built some gymnasiums and a couple malls, and been the project manager on a couple projects. Is that experience make him an expert qualified to comment on the WTC crashes? The other main 'experts' in the broadsheet are a physics teacher, and one professor. More about them later, but the list of experts in this broadsheet is slim. And you have to assume this is the best they've got.

We have some evidence that suggests the use of explosives and/or that a plane crashes couldn't take down the WTC buildings:

There's this great sentence in one of these articles:

Aside from the fact that no steel-frame high rise building has ever collapsed due to fire prior to or since 9/11, the manner in which the buildings came down is itself a substantial cause for reinvestigation.

Is this even a valid sentence? Aside from that question, this is such an terrible logical argument -- It's never happened before, therefore it couldn't have happened this time either. Firstly, we're talking about less than 100 years of data here, and in a continuously developing field. Secondly, there are relatively few examples of planes crashing into buildings, and even fewer examples of large planes being crashed deliberately. In fact, I only know of two examples of large jumbo jets with full loads of fuel being deliberately crashed at high speed into large buildings -- the two in question here. So, the data set is small. To add some weight to this argument, there's some quotes from firefighters and first responders saying they have never seen something like this before -- well, no kidding!

Also, the fires were basically unfought. In other high-rise building fires, people were actively working to stop the fires.

There's a bunch of talk about how the building fell in a way which implies it must've been a controlled demolition -- a theory which has been well-debunked. Incidentally, although AE911 cannot possibly conceive how a couple of planes took down the towers, they want you to believe the towers were felled by controlled demolition, even though WTC 1 and 2 were three times taller than the tallest building taken down by CD.

There's also talk of "pyroclastic-like flows... similar to those observed and filmed during the explosion of the Mt. St. Helens volcano" -- this is a deliberate mis-comparison, which ties into the claims of molten steel and metal. Pyroclastic flow refers to a mixture of superhot gas and rock being expelled from a volcano. But there's no indications of superhot gas in the WTC. No one was boiled or poached, and although there was a lot of dust in the air, no one complained about the heat of it. This is a deliberate mis-usage of the word, to make it seem like some sort of explosion was involved. Speaking of which...

Building 7 Couldn't Possibly Have Collapsed -- Nothing Hit it!

WTC7 fell because it caught on fire, and not only was the fire unfought, but the sprinkler system didn't work. It burned all day long, and at the end of the day, it collapsed, after fires reduced the strength of a couple important parts of the structure. Furthermore, the broadsheet claims that the building was too far away from the other buildings to be hit by debris, but even just in Wikipedia you can find a pile of information about all the damage suffered by WTC7 when the other towers fell. Certainly enough to start a fire anyway.

Building 7 is at the heart of AE911's argument. They believe that there's no plausible way that the building could've come down without some help, like a controlled demolition. This is called an Argument from incredulity -- since AE911 cannot possibly conceive of the building coming down via fire, debris damage, it must not have happened!

We Corrected the NIST!

The NIST did an study extensive study of why the towers fell. This occurred a couple years after the original FEMA study, because a lot of people wanted to really understand what happened -- mostly people who care about keeping tall buildings from falling down. Anyway, they released a draft report in August 2008. David Chandler, a high school physics teacher and supporter of AE911, raised some issues with the analysis of the rate of fall of the buildings. He actually confronted them publicly about it. When the final report came out in November 2008, it somewhat reflected the issues that he had raised. The broadsheet is marking this as a huge victory, but it's not. Also, a lot of Chandler's conclusions have been roundly debunked.

There's a choice sentence in the article Building 7 Implosion: The Smoking Gun of 9/11:

After an embarrassing series of questions from AE911Truth petition signers, NIST’s top engineers ultimately acknowledged some of the key facts surrounding the building's destruction.

Conveniently, 'embarrassing' isn't really quantified. Nor are the acknowledgements, or any list of actual changes/corrections made by the NIST, or how those changes mark a victory for AE911.

Evidence was Ignored, Like This Weird Shit We Found:

Some people claimed they heard explosions on that day. Those accounts are dutifully mentioned here, and generally taken out of context. The article has several quotes from Karin Deshore, who is a firefighter who was there on 9/11. The broadsheet quotes Deshore from an interview with the New York Times:

Somewhere around the middle of the World Trade Center, there was this orange and red flash coming out. Initially it was just one flash. Then this flash just kept popping all the way around the building and that building had started to explode. The popping sound - and with each popping sound it was initially an orange and then a red flash came out of the building and then it would just go all around the building on both sides as far as I could see. These popping sounds and the explosions were getting bigger, going both up and down and then all around the building.

But it leaves out the next few paragraphs, which describe her actions over the next few minutes (if not longer), before the building came down. Truthers want you to believe that the buildings came down via controlled demolition. And they want you to believe that these flashes Deshore claims she saw are evidence of that. But how on earth did someone set of explosive charges, only to have the building come down several minutes later? It just doesn't happen that way.

Incidentally, you should read her complete statement. If you do, you learn that she was covered in dust after the first tower came down, and had tried to clean her eyes out with some sort of caustic water, so she couldn't see very well at all.

Truthers love to use quotes from this woman, if you google her name you'll see them everywhere, but it seems like most of them owe her a pretty big apology for taking what she said out of context.

Another article is devoted to the fact that most of the steel from the buildings was recycled -- why didn't we keep all 200,000 tons of it around for evidence! This is a decent fallback plan. That steel is gone, and never coming back. Therefore, it must've had some pretty convincing evidence! Unfortunately for truthers, the NIST did keep a couple hundred tons of steel and did all sorts of analysis.

There's a lot of talk of molten steel, which includes this photo, supposedly of some machines moving around molten steel:

That's a pretty crappy photo, and it isn't sourced, and I'm not even sure that it shows what it claims to show. Anyway, there's a bigger version on 911 Myths:

Also, another similar picture I've seen once or twice on truthy sites:

Not only are these photos poorly sourced, but they don't really show anything! They certainly don't show some giant pile of molten steel. It looks like there might be a little fire there, maybe, but mostly it's a crappy set of photos. From 911 Myths:

Now maybe it’s just us, but we have some problems with that.

First, there’s no proof here other than the caption of when and where this was taken.

Second, whatever’s glowing red here clearly isn’t isn’t “molten” in the sense of “melted”.There may possibly be something dripping off one end, but we don’t know what that is.

Third, there seems an odd lack of conduction amongst the materials being picked up. We can see that the excavator has picked up a considerable amount of nearby material that presumably was very close to the same heat source, and it looks like glowing metal, but it’s completely black. There’s no orange -- bright red -- dull red transition across the materials, it’s just a straight orange to black. Steel isn’t a good conductor of heat, it’s true, but is that enough to explain the photo?

Also, hydraulics fail around 180F, so you have to wonder how that machine is working at all with all that hot molten metal around. See also 9/11 Truth ‘Molten Metal’ Theory = Disinfo.

What About the Dust?

There's also a couple articles about the WTC dust. In particular, there's some theories that the since the dust contains a bunch of iron, there must've been thermite used to take down the towers. Never mind the long list of potential sources for iron.

Buried at the end of one article about the dust is the name of the physicist who wrote a couple articles in 2007 and 2008 -- Stephen Jones. For some reason, mentions of a paper he wrote are left to another article in 2009 on the same topic. He published "Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe" in the "peer-reviewed" Bentham Open Chemical Physics Journal in 2009. That paper, which explicitly blames thermite for taking down the towers caused the editor of the journal to resign, and has been widely debunked and discredited. (See this for some details)

Bentham's peer-review process is not very good -- someone wrote a program to generate articles, which Bentham accepted, causing couple other editors to quit.

Jones himself lost a tenured position at BYU over an earlier article on the same topic.

Also, Jones thinks that the US caused the Haiti earthquake.

The best thing about the thermite claims are this - AE911 claims that the buildings fell via controlled demolition -- not because of the plane crashes and their effects. There's some talk of "squibs" and flashes and pops here and there, and claims that the buildings came down too quickly. But those are all things that you see from explosives -- and thermite is very much not an explosive -- it is just something that burns hot enough to melt metal.

The alleged evidence becomes a huge circular loop that goes like this:

• We think we have evidence of a controlled demolition
• Things got very hot -- there was molten steel!
• Hmmm, thermite burns hot
• Therefore, there must've been a controlled demolition
• (Repeat as needed)

The problem is, there's no real evidence of molten steel. The evidence for thermite is non-existent. Even if there was thermite, there would've needed to be tons of the stuff -- a lot.

Maybe we should have a international tribunal of some sort to prosecute Bush administration officials

There's one article by Donald Stahl, which discusses several tribunals of the past. It mentions an attempt by Senator Patrick Leahy to start a Bush Truth and Reconciliation Commission -- but Leahy wasn't talking about 9/11. He wants to

investigate abuses during the Bush-Cheney Administration -- so they never happen again. These abuses may include the use of torture, warrantless wiretapping, extraordinary rendition, and executive override of laws.

I don't see "blow up tall buildings" on that list.

This article also talks about the International Criminal Court, although the Court can only prosecute crimes that happened after 2002. And, the US isn't a signatory. There's a picture of Bertrand Russell and some references to his Vietnam-era War Crimes Tribunal. But this is just sad. First, Bertrand Russell is surely one of the greatest thinkers of the last century. AE911 has no claim to an intellectual of that level. Second, the list of participants in his Tribunal is pretty amazing. AE911 will be lucky to get Ed Asner and Charlie Sheen. Charlie Sheen!!

Third, VIETNAM ACTUALLY HAPPENED.

Also, just to obscure things a little more, this article talks about universal jurisdiction, which, roughly speaking, is the idea that some crimes are so terrible that they can be prosecuted outside of the nation where they happened. This is a fairly controversial legal idea, but it's easy to see why Truthers would be interested in it. But then the article states:

The idea of universal jurisdiction is controversial but is gaining increasing acceptance. It dates back at least to the 1945 Nuremberg Trials.

But the Wikipedia article on Universal Jurisdiction clearly states that

Universal jurisdiction asserted by a state must also be distinguished from the jurisdiction of an international tribunal, such as ... the Nuremberg Trials (1945–49). In these cases criminal jurisdiction is exercised by an international organization, not by a state. The legal jurisdiction of an international tribunal is dependent on powers granted to it by the states that established it. In the case of the Nuremberg Trials, the legal basis for the tribunal was that the Allied powers were exercising German sovereign powers transferred to them by the German Instrument of Surrender.

And since this Wikipedia entry is linked in the online version of this story, we can assume that the author read it, and either missed that paragraph (the only mention of Nuremberg), or is just trying to compare the alleged crimes of 9/11 to some other pretty severe crimes.

There's a really delicious sentence in the first paragraph of this article:

Many, for instance, don't trust that the US Congress (which brought us the omissions and distortions of the 9/11 Commission Report) would have the political will or the simple veracity to expose these incalculable misdeeds and trace them to their roots.

Wow, what an amazing use of language. It's so tied up in excess words and weaseling, and yet somehow it rolls right off the tongue.

This story closes with:

There is no greater calling in these times than that of the patriot who steps forward and risks everything to save his country.

Ah, a call to patriotism. That's good. Especially at the end of an article mostly devoted to workarounds to subverting our legal system.

This whole article is perhaps the weirdest part of the broadsheet. It's one thing to have a bunch of articles about your conspiracy theory. Some of this writing is vaguely scientific (even if it's bad science), and claiming to search for the truth in a venue such as this broadsheet is fine. But putting together your plans to prosecute people? That seems a little premature. It's a pretty flat attempt to draw the conclusion that the 9/11 truth movement is so legitimate, and the crimes it is chasing down are so clearly unacceptable, that they feel confident enough to talk about future prosecutions of people complicit in this giant conspiracy.

Send us money

To help fund their activities, AE911 puts out a couple DVDs, sells t-shirts, asks for donations, etc. Richard Gage made over $75,000 last year while travelling all over the world. Almost every article contains some sort of plea for support, but one article titled "Volunteers and Financial Supporters The Foundation for Mission Success." Volunteering is not actually mentioned specifically - it's all about money:

While it's obvious our efforts are working, our reach always exceeds our grasp. We need additional staffing, publicity, information technology and legal support to meet our objectives in support of our mission.

... please join the family of sustaining supporters now at ae911truth.org and set up a monthly donation that works comfortably -- or perhaps even a bit uncomfortably -- with in [sic] your budget.

you will help us reduce the hidden costs of repeated, ongoing fundraising efforts.

[emphasis mine where bolded]

What a weird choice of words! "hidden costs" -- what's hidden about it?

Text Changes

AE911 tried to drum up a lot of "excitement" about this broadsheet -- they announced it in advance and timed it to be available on 9/11. There's a couple entries in their blog about it, listing all the articles which were going to be included. One thing I noticed right away is a couple changes in the titles of the articles -- mostly away from being unbelievably tasteless to being vaguely scientific. It's like they got someone with a sense of right and wrong to look at the proofs right before sending them off to be printed.

The main article went from "Incendiary Forensics Fires up Architects and Engineers -- with the word 'Fires' in flamey red -- to "1,000 Architects & Engineers Challenge Official Report of WTC Destruction" -- a much more official-sounding title.

"Explosive Evidence blows away Fire Theory" was changed to "Twin Tower's Evidence Blows Away Fire Theory." -- also less crass.

"Forging a Mystery: Molten Iron found in WTC debris" changed to "High Temperatures, Persistent Heat & 'Molten Steel' at WTC Site Challenge Official Story", and "Finding Truth under the Microscope" went to "Advanced Pyrotechnic or Explosive Material Discovered in WTC Dust." Very Official Sounding!

The most interesting thing is what was removed. One article, which is listed on the blog as part of the broadsheet, but it isn't in my copy, is titled Gross Negligence: DeNISTifying the Destruction of the WTC Skyscrapers. The blog summarizes the story:

This newspaper wouldn’t be complete without directly addressing the culprits of the scientific cover-up – the NIST team. Our exposé dismantles the many fallacies of the NIST Reports and lays the case for why this agency – under the direction of the Department of Commerce itself needs to be investigated.

Why did they chose to not print this? It's right there on the blog. They clearly intended to print it -- apparently the broadsheet wouldn't be complete without it! But nonetheless, for some reason it didn't make the cut.

Propaganda and Media

AE911 timed the release of this broadsheet for 9/11, along with several other media events. They rented out the National Press Club to hold a press conference in Washington DC on 9/9. They had a mock debate as well, but no one other than AE911 supporters showed up. You can see on their flickr photostream that they've held a bunch of press conferences in the last few months -- there's a lot of tight shots of attendees with claims of "packed rooms."

You can see from the masthead, that Building 7 is central to their work:

And since it's so central to their theories, they had a special media event planned for that. Right on the broadsheet is this picture:

WTC7 Light Beam (artist rendering)

With the caption "Should there be a third beam of light? A third building fell on 9/11. WTC7 may be the key to justice for the victms of the Twin Towers' destruction."

On the night of 9/11, AE911 turned on a spotlight to light up the sky next to the two lights for the twin towers. They describe the event on their blog:

Just before 9:11 p.m. on Sept. 11, the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Richard Gage, AIA, founder of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, stood at the corner of Church and Worth Streets in Lower Manhattan with 200 9/11 Truth advocates in eager anticipation of the switch being thrown on what until that moment had been a tightly held secret by the AE911Truth leadership -- a two-billion-candlepower Third Beam of light about to shoot into the NYC skyline representing the controlled-demolition destruction of Building 7 -- the third WTC skyscraper, not hit by any plane, to fall on 9/11.

The purpose of the Third Beam -- championed and executed by Barbara Honegger with the enthusiastic support of AE911Truth core team members, NYCCAN and the BuildingWhat? Campaign -- was to break through the media blackout surrounding Building 7’s fall and its censorship by the official 9/11 Commission Report.

As Barbara pressed the buttons on the high-power spotlights and the Beam ignited the night sky at exactly 9:11 p.m., an AE911Truth press release was simultaneously issued to the 500 mainstream newspapers, TV networks and stations, and radio in the larger New York City area via PR Newswire’s 'NYC Metro' media distribution list. This press release and the release on AE911Truth’s Washington, DC, press conference of two days earlier ranked second and third "Most Read" on the PR Newswire web page. As part of this planned media blitz, Gage distributed a call list which Honegger prepared for attendees at the concurrent INN World Report conference on "How the World Changed After 9/11" being held nearby, asking each to contact a designated mainstream media company with the question, "Why is there a third Beam of light in the New York City skyline tonight?!"

I think this blog post sums up the problem with AE911 and the "9/11 Investigator" broadsheet very succinctly -- they're not actually interested in figuring out what happened here. The media spectacle is everything.

A "two-billion candlepower" searchlight is actually pretty easy to come by. If you search the web for that term, you'll see references to them from the early 1900s. I don't think it's illegal to use on in New York - so why all the secrecy? It seems like if you wanted to get press coverage, you would tell them before you turned on the lights, not after. But instead, they complain about the lack of coverage, in particular attacking Wired magazine of all things:

Wired Magazine, which otherwise covered the 9/11 'Tribute Lights' story, made no mention of the Third Beam, but only of the two official beams. "So far, not one media outlet has reported on the incredible addition of a 3rd beam of light to the memorial on 9/11/10. Can it not be more clear that there is a media narcosis on the matter?" The article further stated, "For a 'science' magazine like Wired to completely ignore the 3rd beam of light, erected by 1,300 architects and engineers to remind and inform people of the destruction of World Trade Center # 7, is absurd."

Anyone who thinks that Wired is a science magazine is an idiot. It's Maxim with less skin.

Judging from AE911's flickr photostream, the reason there wasn't a lot of talk about the third beam is that it was barely visible.

The blog post continues to rant:

Except for the instant success of the Third Beam itself, the most amazing event in NYC on the night of the 11th was the shutting down of the two official beams for the first time in eight years of 'Tribute in Light' memorials, at 11:00 p.m. EDT. Still maintaining the media blackout of the Third Beam, Wired did mention the two official beams and "their interruption at 11 p.m." In that article, "9/11 Memorial Lights Trap Thousands of Birds," the online magazine claimed, "On the evening of the ninth anniversary of 9/11, the twin columns of light projected as a memorial over the World Trade Center site became a source of mystery. The two beams were shut off after migrating birds became trapped and disoriented by the light’s intensity."

With the Third Beam now lighting up the skyline alone, the AE911Truth group decided to shut theirs down. The two "official beams" turned back on within an hour, but only after the activists had left the scene and driven the lights back to their storage location.

The Wired article in question pretty clearly documents the birds, both with pictures, video, and commentary. (Other stories about them here here here here). It doesn't seem like much of a mystery at all. Several of these stories state that contrary to AE911's statement, this happened once before, in 2004, it's always been a concern because NYC is in the path of many migratory birds, and that this year, the beams were turned off for 20 minutes five times during the night. Seems like there was a little story tweaking here on the part of AE911.

It sounds like AE911 decided to go ahead and some money on their spotlight rental fee, and as an added benefit, they get to play the "media underdog" card. Boohoo, no one is paying attention to us. This blog post is simultaneously whining about the press, complaining about media blackout of their crusade, and yet calling their 3rd beam an "instant success."

And that pretty much sums up Richard Gage and AE911. I have no idea what he really believes, or what his real goals are, but his methods are exceedingly lame, and so is the "9/11 Investigator" broadsheet. All Gage has done is combined together a bunch of tired 9/11 conspiracy theories, and turned AE911 into a reasonably lucrative salaried job position -- something unheard of with small mission-driven non-profits. If AE911 really wanted to accomplish something, Gage and his 'technical expert' supporters would do something - they'd do some hard research, write papers in legitimate peer-reviewed journals, and convince their peers in the scientific/engineering community of the truth of their beliefs. But instead, they play games, peddle DVDs and broadsheets, ask for donations, and spin their wheels on so much nothingness.

Resources/Links

• The 911guide has a section devoted to AE911
• AE911Truth.info lists The Top 10 Bonehead Mistakes made by AE911.
• The James Randi Educational Foundation has a busy forum devoted to discussing 9/11 conspiracy theories.
• The Debunking 911 site has all sorts of information.
  Screw Loose Change is a blog dealing with 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Finally, just for kicks, here's a YouTube video dealing with David Chandler's claims. Reading the comments for this sort of stuff is awesome. People are clearly entitled to question the official report, but then you see statements like "You make a convincing case. Now how about the pentagon? Where is the plane? How can the initial hole only be 20 feet wide? What happened to the wings?" LOL

Time for another installment in the series of book reviews which I call "Books That are not Worth Reviewing" -- This time, it's The Space Eagle: Operation Doomsday, a young adult novel from 1967.

I found my copy of this book in my grandparent's house over the winter. I assume one of their kids read it at some point.

The book was published by Whitman Publishing Company, a subsidiary of Western Publishing, which went out of business in 1997. It's a hardcover book, but not especially well-bound. However, you can tell that the publishers had ambitions. This is an 'Authorized Edition' of the book, as if there would someday be unauthorized versions. Also, instead of just listing the author, it says "story by Jack Pearl", and "Based upon characters and settings created by RAYMOND J MEURER and developed by Meurer-Preston-Austin, Inc." Meurer was a lawyer who did a lot of work on the Lone Ranger and Green Hornet TV/Radio franchises. I'm not sure who Preston or Austin is.

Other than the cover and insets, this book has an illustration for each chapter. It looks like the publishers wanted to save some money -- the prints are all in one color, but for a little variety, it's this odd blue instead of black. The book is illustrated by Arnie Kohn, who did a bunch of work for Whitman Publishing in the 60s. Kohn also did some pinups and some covers for Amazing Stories. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that he was under-utilized at Whitman working on gems like the 1965 Munsters Book.

You can see the illustrations from the book itself in the image gallery.

The book clocks in at 212 pages. It starts with this fairly ridiculous dedication from Raymond J Meurer:

To adventure-lovers everywhere, this book is dedicated.

PRO TIP: Adventure lovers don't like the passive voice.

The book takes place not too long after the 1960s, but the world has developed space travel, and many world powers have spaceships. The story starts in Greenland, at a stopover in the World Grand Prix Air Race. International playboy Paul Girard lands his experimental plane, the XY-Fury, having pulled into the lead during the prior leg of the race. We learn right away what a special person he is:

General Walker grunted to himself. "Numerous activities" was an understatement when applied to Paul Girard. Hardly a day went by without the millionaire whiz-kid playboy providing news copy in some endeavor on the national or international scene.

Heir to the world's biggest cosmetic empire, the House of Girard, Paul had not been content to sit back and load on the fruits of his late father's industry. At fifteen, he had been a United States Olympic gymnastics champiion. At seventeen, he had been a war hero in the famous Green berets during the Viet Nam war. At nineteen, he had been elected to the Collegiate All-American football squad. Before his twenty-first birthday, he had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, had been acclaimed a brilliant amateur painter and sculptor, and had won his Black Belt in judo. There were a score of less publicized accomplishments that escaped the general's mind. Two of the more frivolous of these were his being named one of the world's ten best-dressed men and being voted the most eligible young bachelor in international society's jet set.

He's also modest, loyal, and patriotic. In short, Paul Girard is seemingly perfect. General Walker is a close friend of Paul, so they have a conversation during a rest break in the race which gives us an opportunity to learn even more:

Top condition was the word to describe Paul Girard. He was the picture of health and vitality, a lithe, muscular six-footer with the reflexes and grace of a panther. His dark good looks put most of Hollywood's leading men to shame, the general decided. Paul was the kind of man every father hoped his son would grow up to be like -- the kind of man every father hoped his daughter would marry.

What a cheap compliment. As a young person reading this book, you're told that Paul is basically who your parents want you to be, or to marry. Basically, he's James Bond, only smarter, more accomplished, and apparently less of a dick.

They watch the news for a little while, and there's a special bulletin about two vehicles crashing in space. One of the ships, the Pisces, is badly damaged and speeding wildly away from the Earth, with 36 people on board. It seems like there's no hope for rescue. The General expects Paul to return to the race, but he has other plans. He rushes to the Girard Foundation in West Virginia.

There, we meet Julie Girard, Paul's sister. She is the "Director of Experimental Research" at the Girard Foundation, and the source of much of the conflict in the book. Before she even speaks a word, we learn that Paul finds it

[...] always difficult to accept the fact that his young, beautiful, vivacious sister was the possessor of such an eminent title. It was no figurehead title, either. Julie had earned it by her dedicated and brilliant performance in the world of science. Some of the world's most illustrious physicists took pride in the fact that they had worked with Dr. Julie Girard on project developments at the Girard Foundation. Secretly Paul was a trifle awed by his "kid sister," as he jokingly thought of her. Although they were twins, Paul had been born fifteen minutes before Julie -- a fact that he liked to tease her about.

Julie and Paul are twins, and even though she's a brilliant scientist, Paul is constantly questioning her value as a person. And he wins every time, and makes her feel like an idiot. Julie just happens to be working on a new super-fast spacecraft -- the SWIFT -- a vehicle designed to travel at the speed of light. Paul wants to use it to rescue the damaged spaceship. SWIFT stands for Space Warp Infinity Finity Transport. The SWIFT is made of "high-impact, nuclear-forged, fossilized plastic" and can withstand any damage "short of a direct hit by a hydrogen bomb." It's hull has something called "molecular glide" which basically eliminates friction. But most importantly, it has an antimatter drive, developed by Julie, which is capable of putting out force exceeding "250 billion electron volts".

Unfortunately, the SWIFT isn't quite ready for flight. With only 100 hours until the Pisces runs out of oxygen, Paul convinces Julie to work nonstop to finish the SWIFT. She isn't happy with the danger that Paul will face, but he convinces her that it's worth it. The closing of the chapter where he convinces her perfectly sums up their interaction:

Julie managed a brave smile. "You're right -- as usual. All right, Paul, let's go down to Top Security Three and get to work."

"That's my girl," he said, laying a strong arm across her shoulders.

This book sets out to undervalue a woman who's a fucking rocket scientist and overvalue her playboy brother. And, it basically succeeds. Paul loves to grab his sister whenever he needs to really get his point across. It happens several times in the book.

Paul and Julie spend 96 of their 100 hours getting the SWIFT ready. The last thing Julie needs to do is install a governor on the engine, so that Paul doesn't go too fast. As they work, we learn a little more about the SWIFT, and also about Einstein and the Theory of Relativity, which must've been hard to put into a novel for young adults. After a long talk about the theory, and the possible dangers, Paul submits to the governor, which will keep the ship to a pokey one million miles per hour.

The drive is powered by an extremely rare (and fictional) element called "spartanium" -- only a gram of it has been refined. The Girard Foundation received it from a Russian scientist who was defecting to the USA. This element of the plot is a little vague, but it seems like the only spartanium on the planet is in Russia, but the Russians didn't even know that they had it, and maybe even what it was. But if they learned about the SWIFT, they would "solve the riddle as Julie Girard has solved it," and be able to build a fleet of powerful spacecraft. So, Paul and Julie decide that they need to keep the ship a secret, and not tell anyone about it, or what they are doing.

Blastoff! Paul rushes towards the Pisces for two hours. But by the time he finds the ship, and gets it in tow, there's not enough time to get back to Earth before the Pisces runs out of oxygen. Damn that speed governor! Luckily, Paul realizes that he can short-circuit the governor, and exceed the one million mile speed limit. He pushes the SWIFT to 1.5 million miles, and makes it back to Earth in time. Poor Julie feels awful about her second misjudgment:

Julie paled. "What a fool I was to put on that governor! It could have meant the death of all those people." She hung her head. "I'm ashamed of myself for not trusting your judgement. I might have known you wouldn't do anything foolhardy."

He laughed. "Like trying to break your so-called time barrier? [ed note: Paul has some doubts about the limits of the speed of light] No, not when thirty-six innocent people's lives depended on me." He tipped up her chin with one hand and said firmly, "But next time watch out, my girl."

Having saved the day, Paul and Julie suddenly realize that the survivors all saw the ship, and can probably figure out that it wasn't a normal rocket. Meanwhile, the President is wondering who saved the ship. It's actually not too hard to figure out that the ship landed in the vicinity of the Girard Foundation lab, and the President just happened to be college roomates with Paul and Julie's father. So, Paul finds himself sitting in the Oval Office, and it doesn't take long before he breaks his vow to Julie to keep the SWIFT secret. Luckily, the President agrees to keep everything secret. They come up with a cover story for the rescue -- the survivors were all hallucinating from oxygen deprivation.

Now that he knows about the ship, the President enlists Paul to be the head of the new "Spatial Intelligence Agency, to protect our growing interests within the solar system." Paul doesn't want the job. He's too busy with all his Girard empire responsibilities, and besides, he's an international playboy! But the President points out that this is the perfect cover for the job and takes a couple minutes to review/embellish Paul's resume:

Paul Girard offered a dozen reasons why it was impossible for him to accept the great honor. There were his countless responsibilities and burdens as chairman of the House of Girard Cosmetics and Chemical Company and its worldwide chain of beauty salons, Glamour Unlimited, as well as the Girard Foundation. He pointed out, too, that his reputation as a polo-playing, scuba-diving, speed-racing member of the international jet set hardly went with the dignity required by the important government post the President was offering to him.

"I think it's the perfect background for the chief of a secret intelligence agency," the President disagree. "Think of the camouflage it will give you. No one would suspect that you were a government agent. Your playboy activities give you a chance to jet to all parts of the world on missions for the United States, and no one, especially the Russians, will ever be the wiser."

[... Paging Ian Fleming ... ]

The President pressed on. "Paul, you are a very special man, physically, athletically, intellectually. Your special talents, your social position, make it possible for you to make a vital contribution to the security of this nation. You might be the one man who can tip the scales in our favor in the cold war with the Communist world. The stakes are high, Paul. Freedom!"

Any mention of freedom or liberty seems to be enough to get Paul to agree to anything. So, he agrees to the job. Once that's settled, they need to pick his codename. One of the survivors of the Pisces described the SWIFT as a "looming up out of the darkness of space like a great eagle" -- that's fairly descriptive, even though the SWIFT doesn't even remotely look like an eagle. The Space Eagle is born!

Back at the Foundation, Julie is pretty angry with her brother. She sees his new job as a "fancy excuse for you to indulge your childish whims and to ignore your responsibilities to the business and the Foundation. Imagine, a grown man playing cops and robbers in space!"

This whole book is basically a series of events where Paul gets to prove his sister wrong over and over again. Here goes:

Usually when Julie was in one her moods, Paul would wait until she ran out of steam. Then he would tell her how pretty she looked when she was angry and joke about her terrible temper scaring away all of her boyfriends. The two of them always ended up laughing like children.

This time it was different. Paul was in no joking mood. He walked over to Julie, who was standing by the big window behind her desk, and gripped her arms firmly.

"Now, you listen to me, little sister," he said with a severe voice. "When you talk about responsibilities, just stop and think for a moment what is the biggest responsibility that you and I have as Americans. Our first responsibility is to our country. It's been that way since 1776, Julie. I didn't accept this job because it sounded like fun. I accepted it because it was my clear duty."

Their hazel eyes locked, and abruptly all the anger drained out of the girl's pretty face. She looked ashamed.

And of course, she apologizes, and her brother forgives her once again. Then she shoos him off to the family vacation estate in Kentucky while she puts together the equipment he needs for his new job.

The estate is on 1,000 acres, and naturally, they breed the world's finest racehorses there. This trip seems to happen mostly so that the reader can get a glimpse of the domineering matron of the Girard family, and so that Paul and his mother can spend a little time insulting Julie.

Emilie Girard, well in her fifties, was a living testimony to the wonders of the Girard cosmetics and its Glamor Unlimited beauty salons.

"You get lovelier every time I see you, Mother," Paul said as he kissed her cheek upon his arrival at Paradise Valley. "All it would take would be some gaudy makeup and one of those new dresses the young girls are wearing these days, and you could pass as a jet-set debutante."

"That's very flattering, Paul," Emilie Girard said with a smile. "But I have no desire to look like anything but what I am, a fifty-five-year-old mother of two wonderful grown children." She pretended to frown. "Only I'd think they were even more wonderful if they would settle down and let me become a grandmother."

If it stopped there, it would just be cliche. But Paul keeps going.

Paul laughed. "You're the wonderful one, Mother. Don't worry, one of these days our little Julie is going to surprise you. She'll meet some dashing scientist with a brain that's even bigger than hers, and they'll live happily ever after and raise a family of little computers."

"Oh, Paul, you are awful to tease your sister like that." Emilie Girard laughed heartily, nevertheless.

It's really amazing how poorly this book treats Julie. She's obviously a brilliant scientist, she's described as being attractive. But even while describing her with those terms, the book constantly portrays her as a pitiful wreck.

After a couple days of R+R, Paul returns to the Foundation. Julie has cooked up some new equipment for him. It includes:

• Laser cannons on the SWIFT, strong enough to penetrate "three feet of cadmium steel" -- this is sort of funny because while cadmium is used to coat steel sometimes, I think it's just to prevent corrosion. It doesn't add any strength. On a somewhat unrelated note, cadmium shows up in Godzilla lore -- he is vulnerable to cadmium-tipped missiles. So, it's odd to see it referenced here as well, although this usage predates usage in Godzilla.
• The SWIFT also has a rocket launcher, which can shoot armor-piercing, heat-seeking missiles which are filled with anesthesia. This is just kind of odd. Maybe the writer didn't want to espouse violence? Maybe so, except that the book definitely has a body count.
• A small gas-powered pistol which shoots tranquilizer darts. The darts look like the eagle talons. Nice touch! Of course, Paul makes fun of his sister for coming up with it, telling her that "underneath that mask of graph paper and transistors and higher mathematics, there is a real, live girl."
• Paul adds in an "instant plastic surgery" kit developed by the Girard Foundation. It's a pill and some ointment, and after you take it, your "muscles, flesh, and bones [...] can be molded and reshaped much as a sculptor shapes a clay figure." There's also pills to change your skin color, and some sort of compound which causes "the human body to burn off calories at an enormous rate in a short time" -- so you can drop 100 pounds at once.
• He has a miniature radio hidden in his ear which he can use to summon the SWIFT at a moment's notice, and also to communicate with the President.

So, Paul essentially has everything -- he's smart, physically adept, talented, he has unlimited funds, an industrial powerhouse and research lab, decent weapons, he can disguise himself perfectly. He has a super-fast spaceship, waiting in orbit Short of being bulletproof, he's an unstoppable force. He meets with the President to update him on all of this. Check out the sexism in this exchange:

"You are truly an amazing young man, Paul," the President complimented him.

"Thank you, sir" Paul said modestly. "But most of the credit for this has to go to Julie."

"A remarkable girl."

Paul smiled. "Mother would consider it more remarkable of her if she found some nice husband and settled down."

ARGH

After this meeting, we fast-forward seven weeks. Nothing has happened, there haven't been any missions. He buries himself in work and other responsibilities to the point of exhaustion. His sister convinces him to take a break, and he decides to fly to Switzerland to go skiing. Julie tells him "That's a wonderful idea. I only wish I could join you." Why is she left behind? Paul has just complained about all of his responsibilities -- is his sister even busier?

As you might expect, while he's rushing down the ski slopes (in a blizzard incidentally), Paul finally gets his first mission. In the span of a week, four CIA agents have been murdered in Hong Kong. The last one had a message hidden in a hollow tooth -- "On December twenty-fifth, Muta will wipe out the United States... maybe the world!" The note apparently refers to Dr. Lachesis Muta, a brilliant scientist who had defected to China a few years prior. But they don't really know what he might be plotting, or really anything else. The chapter ends with an awesome paragraph:

The more he thought about it, the more angry and indignant Paul grew. His fingers itched to get hold of Lachesis Muta. Only a low snake could plot such horror for what should have been a very merry Christmas day!

In Greek mythology, Lachesis is the second of the Three Fates, the one who gets to decide how long everyone lives. So, we can safely assume that Muta is up to no good.

Paul determines that the best way to get to Muta is through his son Addison, who lives in San Francisco. He reasons correctly that if Muta is plotting some sort of utter destruction of the US, he probably will try and get his son out first. He decides to get the FBI to snatch Addison and hide him somewhere, while he uses his disguise kit to look exactly like him. Conveniently, he speaks fluent Chinese, and he is a superb actor, having turned down contracts with major movie studios during college. He also has a photographic memory and a thorough knowledge of Addison's past. The plan works. Two weeks before the 25th, a couple of thugs capture him, thinking he's Addison, and fly him to Muta's secret base in Tibet.

Muta has a huge underground base hidden in the mountains of Tibet. Since he's so deep underground, Paul can't use his radio to summon the SWIFT, or to call the President. After he arrives, Paul is escorted to Muta, who falls for the disguise. His diabolical scheme is pretty basic. He has a dozen ICBMs -- half are US missiles, and the other half are Soviet. He's going to launch them at each nation, and they'll assume they each came from the other one, and nuke the hell out of the entire planet. Once they do that, Muta will gather up the survivors, and start a new society -- with him in control. Can't fail! "Was there no limit to this man's brilliance? It was a tragedy that such a brain was dedicated to evil instead of good."

Muta has a robot bodyguard named Mozzo, who he controls telepathically. There's guards outside the missile control center who will kill anyone who tries to enter, except for Muta, and they're under explicit orders to even shoot him if he's not with Mozzo. The missiles are already programmed to launch on Christmas. So, even if Paul kills Muta, the missiles might be launched. Paul sees no way out of this:

Paul wiped the perspiration from his forehead with a sleeve. It was diabolical. The mad genius had thought of everything. From the looks of things, it was nearly impossible to stop him from carrying out his plans.

Paul's disguise has seemingly fooled everyone, and he's given the run of the base, although everywhere he goes, he is followed by Mozzo. But clearly Muta has suspicions, because one of his underlings stages an accident that involves a nasty scratch on Paul's hand, and while they bandage him they take a blood sample to find out that he's really not Addison Muta. Paul knocks out a couple guards with his kung-fu skills, but Mozzo captures him before he does too much damage. Paul is locked up in a cell and left to wait for Doomsday. After feeling glum for a little while, Paul remembers when he was the quarterback of his college team, and nailed a 100 yard pass as the clock ran out to win the game. Inspired by his own victorious past, he decides to try and fight his way out.

Suddenly, the real Addison appears. Luckily, he thinks his father is insane and agrees to help Paul. Paul shoots Muta with the dart gun, and it knocks him out. Mozzo gets knocked out too -- he goes into 'rest mode' whenever Muta is asleep. Now's their chance! Paul and Addison make their way to the missile control room. Addison is shot and killed in the process. Paul just happens to have some Space Eagle medallions with him so he puts one in Addison's hand as he dies, naming his "first deputy" -- incidentally, his sister had asked to be deputized, but I guess she didn't make the cut.

Unfortunately, Paul is too late - he stops two of the missiles, but the rest have launched! The missiles will hit their targets in 28 minutes!

Paul rushes to the surface via a ventilation shaft and summons the SWIFT. Before the ship arrives, he calls the President to let him know what is happening, and to get him to try and convince the Soviets not to start a nuclear holocaust.

By the time Paul is in the SWIFT, there's only 5 minutes left. He drops the hammer, and in a couple of minutes, he's travelling almost at the speed of light. As he accelerates, he sees the effects of Relativity. Suddenly, there's a crazy explosion, he spins around, and he's travelling at 187,000 miles per second -- faster than the speed of light. Nice!

By this time, the missiles should have hit their targets. But there they are, suspended in time, since Paul is travelling at the speed of light. From Paul's reference, time is standing still. He decides to do a couple experiments -- "It was the least he could do for Julie after all she had done for him and for the whole of mankind." -- This it by far the most credit she gets through the entire book.

Anyway, Paul seems to discover that time reverses itself when you exceed the speed of light. This is a little confusing, but the science in this book is pretty novel at best. After all, he just accelerated from zero to 187k miles per second in a couple of minutes -- I'm sure that's a lot of G-force. The funniest thing about this part of the book is that it keeps mentioning that Paul is orbiting the Earth, taking pictures of the missiles the next time they appear, doing things on each orbit, etc. The diameter of the Earth is about 8,000 miles. If he's travelling at the speed of light, he's orbiting the Earth at least ten times a second. With the pressure off, Paul takes his time destroying the missiles. On each pass around the planet, he shoots another one. So, he's done in maybe two seconds. Success!

Paul goes back to Muta's base, and manages to nuke the whole place by heating up one of the remaining nukes with his laser. Then, he heads for home.

And that's basically the end of the book. Paul gives his sister the data he recorded beyond the speed of light. Of course, she can't publish it, so it's somewhat useless. Paul gets an invite to attend a "buffet supper" at the White House. The President pulls him aside to thank him, and tells him to be ready for his next mission.

This book was published to capitalize on the space race in the 60s, but it wasn't much of an effort. There's not much of a conflict between villain and protagonist -- Paul has no flaws, and any time he faces a challenge, they write the skill he needs into his background. The only real conflict, and only real relationship in the book, is between Paul and his sister, and he is utterly awful to her almost all the time -- even by the standards of the time. The book has one sequel "Operation Star Voyage," and that's it. There's no reviews of the sequel that I can find, but I've tracked down a copy of the book, and hope to give it a detailed review right here. Maybe Paul's treatment of Julie will improve some -- we'll see!

The very last page of the book, after the story is over, is "The Space Eagle Pledge to America" -- It's not mentioned anywhere in the story at all. The qualifiers in the second paragraph are pretty amusing.

The Space Eagle Pledge

Space Eagle: Operation Doomsday