Showing posts with label adventure stories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label adventure stories. 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!

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Pan, 1953)

Found on the "Vintage" table at last weekend's Lifeline Bookfair:


THE LOST WORLD, one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous novels, is the story of four men's expedition to a remote plateau in South America, cut off from the surrounding country by unscaleable perpendicular cliffs.  Here, in an area the size of the English county of Sussex, strange creatures long extinct in the outside world have survived from prehistoric times, including the huge pterodactyl, half bat, half bird; the reptile-headed iguanodon, forty feet high; the terrifying carnivorous dinosaur; and the horrible ape-men.  The adventures of Professors Challenger and Summerlee, Lord John Roxton, and the journalist Malone are breathlessly exciting, and lead up to the climax of their return to London to confound their sceptical critics.
The idea for the tale was suggested to the author by the fossilized footprints of a prehistoric monster found near his home on the Sussex Downs; the then read Professor Ray Lankester's book on extinct animals.  He took the name of Professor Challenger from the wooden ship Sir Charles Wyville Thomson (the zoology professor whose lectures he'd attended at Edinburgh University) had dredged the seas for new forms of animal life; but he gave Challenger the black beard and booming voice of another former Edinburgh professor.  Conan Doyle enjoyed the character whom he thus created so much that he imitated him in real life, and, according to his biographer, Mr. John Dickson Carr, "made Challenger a completely uninhibited version of himself."  The Lost World, first serialized in the Strand Magazine, was an immediate success and was later filmed.
 Pan started publishing paperbacks in 1947, but this is the earliest example of their output I've found so far.    The back cover reads less like a blurb than a mini-essay!

Monday, November 14, 2016

Five Go Down to the Sea by Enid Blyton (Hodder & Stoughton, 1955)


The
Famous Five

Julian, Dick, George, Anne and Timmy the Dog

in their
twelfth exciting adventure

Summer at Tremannon Farm, the mystery of the deserted tower by the sea, the forgotten secret of the Wreckers' Way
Now here's a book I really did love as a child--in fact I pinched and saved to buy all twenty-one books in the Famous Five series!  In Five Go Down to the Sea Julian, Dick, George, Anne and Timmy the dog explore secret tunnels and thwart a gang of drug smugglers between consuming mountains of buns and sandwiches and drinking lashings of ginger beer.  What more could a child want in an adventure?

(This copy predates me by several years.  My own copy as a child was one of the paperback Knight editions published in the 1970s.  The Famous Five adventure stories are still in print, though when I flicked through one in my local library recently it saddened me to see that an editor had "updated" the text to make it more accessible.  There are also now some very tongue-in-cheek Famous Five adventures available for "grown-ups" with titles like Five on Brexit Island and Five Go Gluten Free.  Clearly I'm not the only adult who remembers the series with affection!)

Tuesday, September 20, 2016

What Happened to the Corbetts by Nevil Shute (Pan, 1970)


When war came to Southampton, no one expected it to be like this - least of all the Corbetts.  Their home a ruin without gas, electricity or water, no milk for the baby, typhoid and cholera a daily threat, and bombs from the sky a nightly terror.

In a desperate attempt to save their children, Joan and Peter begin a heart-stirring journey that exchanges the dangers on land for the darkness and waste of the sea...

Written in 1938, this moving and dramatic novel of simple heroism shows a master storyteller and modern prophet at his irresistible best.
This is an oddity--a "future war" story about the Second World War... published a year before the actual war began.  So it's interesting to read this in hindsight and compare it with real life events--which were both better and worse than depicted here.  Better, because British civilians were better prepared for the Blitz and subsequent upheavals when the bombing eventually began.  Worse, because the author clearly didn't imagine how ruthless the Nazis would be and how quickly they'd steamroller over Europe.  (It's quite clear from the text that Europe is not under enemy occupation when the attack on Britain begins.)

One last really strange thing to note--though it's quite clear who the author sees as "the enemy" in this book, they are never named! 

Sunday, May 1, 2016

The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle (John Murray, 1960)

If you take the trouble of searching the dusty shed part of The Green Shed you can find some amazing stuff:


On a high plateau in South America a group of explorer-scientists led by the famous Professor Challenger discovered a huge tropical marsh surviving from prehistoric times inhabited by giant reptiles and the grotesque half-ape forerunners of man.  In the face of fantastic dangers they capture one of the flying reptiles and bring it back to London, where it escapes and causes havoc.  The Lost World was the first of the full-length novels of this kind, and its breathtaking combination of science and fiction and real characters keeps it without a rival.
Everyone knows Arthur Conan Doyle as the creator of Sherlock Holmes.  Less well known are his ventures into writing science fiction and fantasy.  The Lost World (1912) is the first in a series of three novels featuring the bullish and eccentric Professor Challenger: the others being The Poison Belt (1913) an end-of-the-world story, and The Land of Mist (1926) a rather too-credulous look at the claims of spiritualism.

This first novel is literally a "lost world" story, with Professor Challenger and his band of intrepid explorers finding an isolated plateau  in South America inhabited by dinosaurs.  Evidently South America was to the average person of 1912 as outer space is today--a place where anything could happen, and strange things  could be found!