Showing posts with label TV tie-ins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TV tie-ins. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 14, 2017

High Crystal by Martin Caidin (W.H. Allen, 1975)


He's a cyborg.  He's half man, half machine.  He's Superagent Steve Austin.

And he's back--in a new novel combining breathtaking suspense and high adventure in the remote Andes.  Austin, the 'Bionics Man', confronts the most awesome challenge of his career in a race to track down the hidden source of a mysterious laser energy inextricably bound to the centuries-old secret behind the 'chariots of the gods'.

High in the rugged fastness of the Peruvian interior, a lone parachutist, plummeting to survival, makes a remarkable discovery--an unsegmented 'impossible highway', smooth as marble, more than two miles above sea level.  Who built it?  How were such huge rocks lifted by prehistoric peoples?  How could such technology have been possible?  Austin is assigned to uncover the secret behind the highway in the clouds.

High Crystal goes beyond and behind legend, dramatically creating new and scientifically plausible reasons for the myths that seem ever closer to reality than man has dared to dream.
"Bionics man" is not a typo--it's spelt that way on the book!

Many people around my age have memories of watching Lee Majors as Steve Austin, running in v-e-r-y s-l-o-w m-o-t-i-o-n after the bad guys in The Six Million Dollar Man:


It was meant to show he had super speed or something.

Books, on the other hand, can't do special effects (even the fairly limited kind available to 1970s TV shows), so the author of High Crystal has to stop every once in a while to remind us that Steve Austin is a cyborg.  It's a pity these scenes aren't better integrated into the story.  Then again Steve's superpowers aren't particularly relevant to the plot, which is a sort of mash-up of Indiana Jones and Erich Von Däniken.  Indy didn't make his screen debut until the next decade, but Von Däniken was very, very trendy in the 1970s!

Sunday, October 9, 2016

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. No. 6 - The Dagger Affair by David McDaniel (Four Square, 1965)


"Tell us all about Dagger!"

This was the order threw at Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin.  And from each U.N.C.L.E.  agent came the same answer: 'We know absolutely nothing of DAGGER.' 
'You appear to be telling the truth,' said a hidden voice.  'A pity...'
But it was more than merely unfortunate that the U.N.C.L.E. organization had never heard of DAGGER--for the secret behind that name was an insane plot for mass murder of the human race!
Often regarded as the best of the tie-in novels based on the 60s TV series, The Dagger Affair is a fun read.  Good guys must unite with bad guys to defeat a common enemy.  Of course, the bad guys remaining bad guys (be they never so entertaining) the truce comes to an end once the common enemy is defeated.

This is the book, incidentally, where evil organization "THRUSH" gets a fuller form of its name: The Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity!

Saturday, February 6, 2016

Barnabas, Quentin and the Magic Potion by Marilyn Ross (Paperback Library, 1971)

I got this at the "going out of business" sale of one of my favourite bookshops:


Barnabas predicts trouble for Collinwood when Nicholas Freeze, in whose antique shop Carolyn Stoddard works, discovers a centuries-old potion that promises eternal youth.  Soon after, Mr. Freeze's daughter Hazel tricked into taking the serum, dies.  Carolyn is grief-stricken over her friend's death.  Barnabas insists she stay on at the shop to watch Nicholas Freeze and his associates, one of whom Carolyn suspects is Quentin Collins, back at Collinwood in a disguise.

Then Carolyn sees Hazel's ghost.

She interprets this as a warning that Mr. Freeze has marked her for his next victim.  Barnabas still refuses to let her quit.

Has Barnabas made a fatal mistake by deliberately endangering Carolyn's life?  Or will his plan avenge Hazel's murder and put her spirit to rest?
Even the most dedicated fans of Dark Shadows have trouble deciding exactly what is and isn't canon.  That's not so surprising: the writers of the show made it up as they went along, and if they thought of something exciting that contradicted a previously established fact then the previously established fact got tossed out the window.  After all, they were writing for an ephemeral daily soap and who'd notice the contradictions (or even care if they did?)

So it's also not surprising that when somebody decided to commission a series of tie-in novels, they didn't take particular care to see that they conformed to the show.  What they did instead was give a brief description of Dark Shadows to a writer of Gothic romances who had never actually watched the series.  The results are ... interesting, let us say.  The names of most of the characters are the same as in the TV show (though some major characters have gone missing in action) but somehow their personalities are subtly wrong.  Their backstories differ from the backstories of the characters in the TV series and their physical descriptions certainly don't match!

After reading a few of them, I've come to the conclusion that the Dark Shadows novels exist in a parallel universe to the Dark Shadows TV series.  And yes, parallel universes are one of the things that are definitely canon in the Dark Shadows universe (along with time travel!)

(The cover photograph on this book is a still of Jonathan Frid in his role of Barnabas Collins.   Apart from that it doesn't really have anything to do with the story inside the book.)