Who better than a brilliant paranoid to expose the devious plots of others?

Who indeed, agrees Sigmund Ausfaller, one of Earth’s few remaining “natural” paranoids. His bosses feel likewise. Sigmund Ausfaller is the ace up the sleeve of ARM, the Amalgamated Regional Militia, whose Bureau of Alien Affairs on Earth employs a group of paranoid agents, most of them drug-induced, to ferret out the secrets of the Citizens, an alien race known unaffectionately by humans as the Puppeteers. Ausfaller sees conspiracies within conspiracies and his fearful distrust of everyone, most notably the Puppeteers, makes him the ideal agent to seek out the location of the Puppeteer homeworld.

Niven and Lerner’s series of prequel novels to the seminal classic Ringworld began with Fleet of Worlds, an excellent blend of interesting scientific concept and engaging adventure story, and continues with Juggler of Worlds.

This second novels builds upon the first by examining events of Fleet of Worlds largely from the viewpoint of a handful of key characters centered in and around Earth’s solar system. Intrigue and espionage viewed through the eyes of a brilliant paranoid agent makes for an exciting ride in which the reader quite naturally finds him/herself looking askance at every twist and turn in the plot.

Continue reading Juggler of Worlds ~Larry Niven, Edward M. Lerner →

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6 Men–against 400,000,000

So the dramatic language of the back cover states, a battle against impossible odds, “the adventures of a handful of soldiers of the future, fighting to save America from a deadly invasion”.

Major Ardmore has just arrived at the secret location of a small scientific enclave as the news is broken that the United States has been summarily defeated by a combined Japanese/Chinese force referred to in this undisclosed future as the PanAsians. In an effort to stay protected from the spread of communism in Russia the United States had spent decades essentially ignoring the world outside its borders only to see Europe fall and the red menace coalesce the Asian and Indian continents into a juggernaut of world power. The PanAsians look upon the Americans as a lower species and with superior forces occupy and enslave the American people, creating a system in which the citizens of the United States are by and large an impotent and cowed populace.

Ardmore arrives to find that this group of scientists has discovered, through an accident of testing, a weapon that may provide the key to the return of freedom to the nation. That is, if Major Ardmore can marshal this 6-person team into a strategic force to infiltrate and reclaim America.

Robert A. Heinlein’s tale, originally published in serialized form in the early months of 1941 as a story entitled “Sixth Column”, could be accused of being a racially insensitive jingoist tract or is quite possibly one of the most eerily prescient stories ever written. Given the complicated nature of Heinlein and the curious origins of this story, I suspect that both are fair assessments of what is a compelling and highly readable novel, especially when considered in the light of the time period in which it was written.

Continue reading The Day After Tomorrow ~Robert A. Heinlein →