Review: Decipher

Hello all, man it has been a long time since I updated, almost a month! Sorry for the delay but between Moving all of my stuff into a new apartment, getting married, moving all of Ladywarrior's stuff into the new apartment, getting internet hooked up, starting school, teaching three labs and working full time, well I think I can say with some authority that I've been a little busy. Oh did I mention that I got married. It's kind of a big deal, and I have to say that it was probably the funnest wedding ever. Everybody seemed to have a good time. Well any way on to the review for this month.

Decipher by Stel Pavlou

The Cover:


Ok Ok, I know that the cover of this novel is not very ridiculous... in fact its not ridiculous at all. I was turned on to this book by some of my Co-workers at the used bookstore. They were huge fans of the novel and said I should read it. They did give me a warning though, they said that while the information in the book was meticulously researched and the plot of the book was interesting and captivating the book itself, particularly the dialogue and some of the pacing was a little wacky. I will cover that more in the review of the content. As for the cover, it does actually relate to the content of the book as the glyph on the cover of the book plays a central role in the plot, which features an linguist trying to decipher an ancient language and divert a biblical scale disaster. The cover really isn't that crazy though and for reals... it doesn't fit in with this blog to well.

The Content:

As mentioned above the main plot of the novel Decipher is that some sort of global catastrophe destroyed the civilization of Atlantis about 12000 years ago, and they left us clues indicating that not only same disaster was about to befall us but also how to avert it. The only problem is that those clues are written in an ancient language that no living person can read. Enter the main character and hero of the story Dr. Richard Scott, a man so awesome that he has two first names. Scott is a historian and linguist whose specialty is ancient myths and legends. He also seems to be able to speak every language on earth (except Mandarin, as we find out at a time when speaking Mandarin would really help the progression of the plot.) I am not going to rag on the book too much because its fiction and all, but i could totally believe that Atlantis was destroyed 12000 years ago and that they left us crystals with clues about their destruction written all over them, but it seems a little unbelievable for one guy to speak Egyptian, Phoenician, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin, Cantonese, and god knows how many more languages fluently. (Oh, he can also read all of the written languages associated with the previously mentioned list.) Ok, aside from Dr. Scott, there is also a rag tag team of scientists working to figure out the fantastical technologies left behind by the Atlanteans.

The plot of the novel was actually pretty interesting but the shear amount of data presented in the book made it feel like an almanac sometimes instead of a novel. It is clear that Mr. Pavlou did his research when he wrote this book. He even has a large bibliography citing his references at the end of the novel. I enjoyed the book but I kind of agree with my co-workers, the book could have been a little heavier on plot and character development and lighter on the science and comparative history and religion.

My final verdict is that the book was good, but not great. Definitely worth picking up if you can find it at a used bookstore for cheap, and I happen to know a used bookstore in the Northern Virginia area that will have a copy of it on the shelves later today.

Next Week's Title: Gatling 3 Boarder War

Review: Tower of Zanid

Hello all. This entry shall be necessarily brief. I have moved into my new apartment and do not currently have the internet, and as such am using an open (and unstable) wireless connection that one of the local businesses is so helpfully providing. Onward to the review!

The Tower of Zanid: by L. Sprague DeCamp

The Cover:


This is one of the books that My Special Lady bought for me last time she went to the used bookstore. I really like the combination of science fiction and fantasy elements in this cover. there's a green guy, and a dragon horse and a wizards tower looking thing, and what appears to be some sort of mobile pill box or metal tent in the distance. The picture on the cover of this book is supposed to be the climactic battle towards the end of the novel but.... that's just not what I imagined when I read it. For one thing, the battle took place 4 days march from the town of Zanid, where the eponymous tower is located. So why is it visible in this picture? Well I guess it's too much for me to ask that the cover art of a sci fi book from the 60's be accurate to the actual events in the book.

The Content:

The Tower of Zanid by L Sprague DeCamp is about 128 pages long. It should tell you something about the quality of the writing that it took me almost two weeks to read this book. in fact it took me about two weeks to read the first 50 pages and then I seriously contemplated giving up. Instead of giving up, I put on my rally helm and manned up and read the last 70 pages in one day. Plot of this book revolves around Anthony Fallon, the deposed king of the country of Zamba and his quest to make enough money to raise an army to return to Zamba. Note that it is not about him actually raising the army... just trying to make money. You know, there is a story about me trying to make money too. It's called 8 hours of my day every day of my life. I was unaware of how boring money can be until I read this book. That's right. This book was so terrible that I have renounced worldly possessions for fear that I too will be that boring.

I don't want to rag on the book completely so I will say this, the setting of the book, (the planet Krishna) is actually pretty interesting, and it is clear that the author put a lot of effort into creating a believable planet. I will not go into a great amount of detail but basically Krishna is an earthlike planet that has been discovered by humans, humans are free to visit it, but because of an technological embargo they are not allowed to bring any human devices that are technologically superior to devices of the natives. This explains why the dudes on the cover have spears and bows.

Over the course of the novel some Krishnans decide they want to gain respect from the humans (and destroy a neighboring country in the process) so the set about creating a new weapon in the basement of the tower of Zanid. Anthony Fallon is hired to sneak into the Tower and find out what they are making, if he is successful he will make a lot of money which is his goal... as well as every person's ever. He successfully infiltrates the tower... or at least its basement, and suprise, the top secret superweapon the Krishnans are developing is flintlock muskets. Anthony escapes the tower (basement) and promptly gets screwed out of his reward money. So not only is this a story where the characters only motivation is money, he never actually gets any money. I liked Krishna as a setting but I think maybe a better author should have handled it.

I would like to point out that reading terrible books like this is half the fun of writing a old scifi book cover review blarg though.

Next Week: Special not silly cover week,
Decipher (at the recommendation of my co workers)

Two weeks from now: Return to silly covers with special non sci fi book :
Gatling 3: Border War

Review: Fuzzies and Other People

Hello all, Dual book-wielding warrior sublcass rogue here. I am a few weeks into my job at the used book store and I have to say it's pretty awesome so far. I like the folks I work with and I have already bought a few books that will be perfect for the blarg. Sorry it took so long for me to update but the last few weeks have been pretty crazy. I visited SC to see my special lady a few weeks ago, and this week she is up here in VA looking for jobs and apartments for when she moves up permanently. She is also on the look out for books with ridiculous covers and has supplied some really awesome ones.

Anyway for the last couple weeks I have been reading Fuzzies and Other People. Here is what I thought of it.

Fuzzies and Other People: by H. Beam Piper

The Cover:


I found this book at the same time as I found The Devil Wives of Li Fong. When I first found them at the used bookstore in Clemson, all I saw was the spine of the book but I thought that they had such ridiculous titles that they had to be funny. I didn't really think about them again until after I started this bloog.

The cover of Fuzzies and Other People is a scene taken directly from the later portions of the book as some fuzzies flee a Forest fire. The text of the novel doesn't really describe fuzzies too well other than short humanoid, covered with golden hair and with five fingered hands. so I guess the artist did a pretty good job all in all. I do like the HUGE eyes that he gave them. And that knife the one is carrying looks pretty serious.

The tagline on the cover of Fuzzies is "The first publication of the legendary long lost third Fuzzies novel." Thats right. There are two more in this series apparently. And it doesn't stop there. There are two more novels set in the Fuzzies universe ( Probably called the Fuzzyverse by its fans) by authors other than H. Beam Piper. In the 60's and 70's Fuzzies was apparently a science fiction empire. Its really a shame they made those crappy Star Wars movies in the late seventies and not an awesome Fuzzies trilogy. (Can anybody else see the similarities between Ewoks and Fuzzies? I detect a little plagerism Mr Lucas.)

The Content:

Since Fuzzies and Other People is the third in a trilogy of novels it was a inaccessible to me especially because the author does absolutely no reintroductions. From the get go you are expected to know who everybody is, what they have been doing and why they have been doing it. He does give a very brief recap of who the fuzzies are and why people are helping them out so much. apparently in the previous two novels fuzzies were discovered and, there was a lot of debate over their sentience (their language registers in the ultrasonic so they seemed like silent animals to us humans you see). Eventually they were declared sentient and thus became citizens of the interplanetary alliance or some such nonsense. Later some kind of valuable gemstone was found on the planet making it economically important for the previously mentioned alliance. some bad people decided to kidnap some fuzzies and train them to rob a bank vault full of the gem stones but they got caught.

The third book starts off with the bad folks from the second book about to stand trial. apparently in the Fuzzyverse humans have created a device that can tell truth from lies with 100% accuracy, the only problem is that it can not be proven to work on fuzzies because well... nobody has ever witnessed a fuzzy lie. In fact humans even have a hard time explaining how to lie to fuzzies. Fuzzies aren't very smart you see. well the novel then takes kind of a detour and talks about a band of fuzzies that live far to the north of the human colony and are unaware of the human presence on the planet. One day they see some humans shooting some predatory birds that like to feed on fuzzies and their leader decided that they need to find the "Big Ones" that "Make Thunder Death" and make friends with them. Along the way to finding the humans some of the other fuzzies get impatient and start arguing with their leader about why they are traveling so much and if finding the humans is really such a good idea. The leader fuzzie comes up with a completely ingenious way to placate their worries. He invents lying, and tells them a series of lies to get them to follow him. This of course is a big deal when he gets to the human colony at the end of the book because he can lie while attached to the lie detecting machine and prove that the machine works for fuzzies and therefore the fuzzies that got kidnapped can testify in court.

I Think I would have enjoyed this novel a lot more if I had read the previous two, because I really didn't feel like I knew the human characters at all. The fuzzies were pretty cute though, especially in scenes where they try to curse like the humans they have observed. Also the author of this book seems to be obsessed with hunting, as that is what the fuzzies do for the majority of the to book. It seems that detailed lists of exaclty what fictional aliens killed and ate that day was really interesting in the 70's.

It should also be noted that I am pretty sure that this book was originally intended for children or young adults but there is a tremendous amount of drinking, smoking and violence in it. I found one passage particularly awesome. The author described one of the characters as dying by "allowing his body to stop one too many submachine gun bullets." I thought it was a funny way to describe it.

Over all I didn't hate Fuzzies and Other People but It really wasn't as much fun to read as some of the other books I have reviewed have been. The cover is still pretty funny to me when I look at in though.

Next Weeks Title:
Tower of Zanid

Review: The Devil Wives Of Li Fong

Hello all, There is good news to report in Warrior Land. I have a job! I bet you didn't know this but up until last week, I was an unemployed warrior. I recently started working at a local used bookstore here in Northern Virginia. It's pretty awesome, and I like all of my coworkers. Also it's a really awesome place to find novels with ridiculous covers. Actually I've been discovering that adventure novels, westerns and Historical romances have some pretty silly cover art as well, and maybe sometime in the future I will depart from my strict Sci-fi/Fantasy only rule and have a special month where I review westerns or romance novels or something.

Any way, this week as promised, I read The Devil Wives Of Li Fong. Lets get to the review.

The Devil Wives Of Li Fong: by E. Hoffmann Price

The Cover:


The cover of this novel won me over at first sight. The generic vaguely Chinese-esque lettering of the title perfectly compliments the generic vaguely Chinese-esque cover art. This is a pretty old book and I know that America wasn't the most culturally sensitive place in the 1970's (when this book was published) but the cover of this book looks like what a teenager would draw if you asked him to illustrate what a typical day in China looked like. I don't know much about China or Chinese culture at all, but judging from the cover of this novel it is awesome. I do find it a little confusing that a novel called The Devil Wives Of Li Fong only has one female on the cover. Also the dragons on the cover look a little too western for my tastes. Aren't Chinese dragons those long snake-y looking dudes that you see tattooed on the lower backs of strippers? The dragons on the cover of this novel look like the King Arthur fighting kind of dragon, not the Chinese parade type. It might be a little hard to tell from the small sized image above but the woman on the cover seems to be packing quite a bit of junk in her proverbial trunk. This is especially noticeable when you compare the size of her waist to the width of her hind quarters. I think I know which piece of fried chicken the artist who painted this cover goes for. (hint: it's not the breast or the leg.... its the butt.)

This novel also has a pretty awesome Tagline; "No man could be happier than Li Fong- until he discovered his lovely wives were really serpent-demons!" I kinda like this tagline because it uses unclear pronouns. I was really hoping that this novel would be about a really happy guy name Li Fong, and how no man could be happier than Li Fong unless that man discovered that his wives were serpent demons (which apparently makes you happy). Re-read the tagline and you will see what I mean. It's poorly written.

The Content:
The plot of The Devil Wives Of Li Fong is pretty much what you would expect. Two serpent demons are granted human form by a monk who recognizes their good Karma. It is worth noting that demons in this novel aren't necessarily evil but they are driven by compulsion to do things which usually create large amounts of bad karma, such as killing their loved ones and devouring children. By fighting these compulsions Mei Ling and Meilan have been allowed to take on human form. At the start of the novel they are not completely human though, and must continue to generate good karma for themselves to transform completely into human beings. In ancient China I guess the best way for a woman to generate good karma is to be a good wife. And that brings us too Li Fong. Mie Ling and Mielan randomly decide that he would be a good husband because he is relatively physically attractive and wears the clothing of an apprentice scholar. After sucessfully seducing him and marrying him they are robbed by two bandits who reveal that not only are Li Fong's new wives super hot and totally horny, they are also loaded with silver. The novel never really explains how they got this silver. Li Fong deals with the bandits by creating a potion that makes them lose their memories, a useful little trick he learned in apprentice scholar school I guess. After that they decided to get the heck out of town and they resettle in a new town named Soochow and use some of that silver to purchase an herb shop for Li Fong to work in. Li Fong and his wives soon become the talk of the town because of how powerful his herbal cures are. This arouses the anger of some local holy men because Li Fong is cutting into their healing people for money business. A lot of wacky stuff happens and in the end the good guys win.

This novel surprised me in a couple of ways. One is that (at least to my untrained eye) it appears that the author did quite a bit of research about ancient China to make this novel at least seem authentic. I don't know a lot about Chinese philosophy but all the talk of Buddhas and karma was pretty interesting, assuming that the author didn't just make it up. I was also surprised by how the novel really couldn't decide what genre it wanted to be. It bounced from Chinese sword and sorcery, to philosophy, to romantic comedy, to trashy sex-scene-centric novel, sometimes over the course of a single chapter. It also had a weird habit of leaving out pieces of plot that I felt were really essential, like how exactly his wives came into possession of all that silver. Finally the novel had a bad habit of presenting info at the beginning of the novel that kinda took the thunder out of later events. For example, within the first 30 pages of the book they mention that there is an herb that you can put into wine, and that if a serpent woman drinks the wine, she will revert to her snake form. This piece of info is revealed before Li Fong has even met Mie Ling and Meilan. It really seems kinda heavy handed. This also happens later in the novel when Mie Ling is explaining some of the peculiar aspects of Chinese magic to Mielan, as a matter of fact it kind of gives away the ending of the book.

Despite being a silly adventure novel at heart, the book does seem to carry a little of the authors personal views along with it. Namely he seems pretty anti organized religion. His protagonists seem pretty devout in their beliefs, and certainly the aspect of karma plays heavily in the book, but all of the villains in the book are clergymen from either the Buddhist or Taoist religions. The author even makes it a point to say that they man who does evil but thinks he is honestly serving his God is way more dangerous than the man who willfully does evil. This is a little to heady for what is essentially a book about kung fu and banging hot Chinese ladies.

Over all in spite of some of its short comings I did kinda like the book. It was silly, fun, and the only other Chinese themed book I have ever read was The Good Earth. I can say with some authority that The Good Earth was a "better" book than The Devil Wives Of Li Fong. But The devil wives were more fun to read about. The cover of the novel does a pretty good job of reflecting the content, although It might have been wise to sex up the cover a little bit since so much of the novel dealt with the doing of "The Nasty." All in all I give The Devil Wives Of Li Fong a medium to semi high awesome rating. It was really fun, but some of the plot holes and way to early revelations keep this book from a higher score.

Next Week's Title:
Fuzzies And Other People

Review: Of Godlike Power

Hello all, it is I, your friendly local Warrior. I have had a pretty fantastic weekend. I spent it down in the deep south with my lovely fiance and my friends. It's nice to get out of Northern Virginia sometimes. Any way, this weeks book is "Of Godlike Power." I found this book a while back in a big pile of free books that my university's library had thrown out. I thought the cover was pretty funny and it was pretty short so I figured that even if it was bad I wouldn't waste too much time reading it. The flip side of that coin is that if it was really good I would have an awesome book and a pretty cool story of how I found it. Well how did it fare? I'll tell you, in what I hope will become my standard format.

Of Godlike Power: by Mack Reynolds

The Cover:

The cover of this book has several things that I think make it an excellent candidate for my blog. It has futuristic spacecraft, flames, and what appears to be a 1000 foot tall Charles Manson. He seems to be standing in front of the wreckage of an old suspension bridge and he is raising his fist defiantly in the air. This cover has another great hallmark of ridiculous sci fi and fantasy covers (one that was unfortunately absent from Tuf Voyaging) the tag line. Tag lines are supposed to make you want to read a book and as such they really should be pretty sensational. This books tag line certainly is: "His unearthly power could destroy the world-- was there no one to stop him?" Thats a pretty effective tag line if you ask me. What is this power he has, how can it destroy the world, who is he, and how will he be stopped? The cover is pretty good, but how does the content stand up too it?

The Content:

Of Godlike Power is a pretty unique story, I had never read anything like it. And thats not necessarily a good or bad thing. The main character of the story Ed Wonder is so uninteresting and plain that I actually forgot his name and had to look it up before writing this review. The basic premise of the book is that Ed is the host of a TV show where he interviews experts of paranormal subjects. Ed himself is a skeptic but tries to keep an open mind. Eventually Ed is asked to go to a circus tent where a local cult is having a revival and interview the cult leader. The cult leader supposedly has some kind of power that allows him to manipulate people and preform miracles. Ed suspects this is just a case of mass hypnosis but decides to interview the cult leader, named Tubber, anyway. What follows are a series of increasingly unexplainable events that eventually lead Ed and the reader to realize that Tubber does in fact have some mysterious power. Actually by the end of the book Tubber seems pretty much all powerful, capable of preforming miracles on the global scale (such as destroying every peace of recorded music on earth).

The tag line of the novel is misleading though because in the end of the novel nobody really stops Tubber. The ending of the novel is actually pretty anti climatic. In my reviews I will try not to reveal the endings of books, but I will say that the ending of this one did take my be surprise a little bit because of how little actually happened. Basically the book just ended.

Was it a good or a bad book? Well I certainly enjoyed reading it. especially the chapters where Ed Wonder talks to his two friends, one a skeptic and one a believer. those chapters where definately the high points of the novel for me. but all in all I would say that the book had as many misses as it had hits. If i rated things with five stars I would give this book three stars. It wasn't good, it wasn't bad, and worst of all, it was nowhere near as ridiculous as its cover would have you believe.

That does it for this weeks review.

Next Week's Title:
The Devil Wives of Li Fong!

First Post (of hopefully many)

Hello all, My "Blogger" name is Wachapreague Warrior. This blog that I write is really more for my own amusement than for any other reason. I suspect that it will not be read by many( if any) people. The basic premise of my blog is to go out to find the books with the most ridiculous covers, read them and post a review for both the cover of the book, and the content. This will be done hopefully about once a week and will test that old adage that you can't judge a book by its cover.

I suppose that a few of you reading this may be interested in my personal life. I will now satiate your interest. If you are not interested (understandable, for I am not very interesting) you can skip this paragraph. I lived most of my life in the south eastern United States. I attended college in South Carolina. (please do not hold me up as an example of the writing prowess of other S.C. college graduates, I am aware of how awful my spelling and grammar are.) I graduated with a B.S. in Biology and worked on a farm for a while. I currently am working on my Environmental Science M.S. at a University in Virginia.

I got the idea for this blog when I was visiting a local used book store and noticing how ridiculous the covers of old science fiction and fantasy novels are. I am not the fastest reader in the world so I will really try to focus on shorter works, I am aiming for things between 150 and 350 pages. This will insure that I can post about once a week. I know that some of the "Songs of Fire and Ice" novels had pretty ridiculous covers back in the day but I just can not take on an 800 page novel and keep the schedule I have laid out for this blog. I hope this blog is pretty entertaining, but the real reason for me writing it is to kinda force myself to read more, and therefore play video games, watch TV, and generally vegetate less. Well any way, lets get down to the first entry!

Tuf Voyaging: by George R. R. Martin

The Cover:

As you can see the cover of this work is a masterpiece of the science fiction novel covers world. The bald man seems to stare directly at the viewer while he idly strokes the cat in his lap. Other cats dance around him in what I assume to be zero or low gravity. Outside the window of his space ship (or space station perhaps?) you observe a large planet that seems to be made entirely of lava lamp material. The block letters of the title call to mind the works of Roy Lichtenstein or perhaps the pop art of Andy Warhol.

The Content:

The Bald Man on the cover of the novel is named 'Haviland Tuf.' In the novel he is described as kinda fat, bald, and pretty much harmless looking. On the cover of the novel he looks pretty... well... tough, so I don't think the artist really did a good job there. The character does have a love for cats though and he does travel around in a space ship, so I guess those elements of the cover are accurate.

Tuf Voyaging is a collection of short stories all centered around the main character of Haviland Tuf. In the first story Tuf ends up in control of a seedship called the Ark. The Ark is the last remaining seedship in the Galaxy and has been drifting through space derelict for several hundreds of years. Seedships were designed long ago as a sort of powerful bioweapons platform that, through the use of bioengineering and time distortion effects, can in a matter of minutes clone pretty much any creature you can imagine in its adult from. Haviland decides he wants to use the power of the seedship for good instead of destruction so he begins traveling around the galaxy looking for planets with ecological troubles and using his seedship to correct them. The problems he encounters are varied and interesting and his solutions to them are usually pretty clever. (although I have to say as an environmental scientist in training, I don't like that almost every one of his solutions involves introducing some new invasive species to the environment). Haviland uses the power at his disposal to solve all different sorts of problems from a planet who's population is growing faster than its resources will allow, to an ocean planet that is plagued with sea monsters. Over the course of the novel the seedship is shown to be a source of almost absolute power, and as we all know (and are reminded by one of the characters in the novel) absolute power corrupts absolutely. At the start of the novel Haviland seems to be incorruptible and in fact seems like one of the few honest men left in the galaxy. By the end of the novel, you start doubting Tuf's incorruptibility though as the choices he makes to solve the problems of one particular planet become more and more ethically nebulous.

So, how was the content of the novel compared to its cover? Well to say that the novel was not ridiculous would be untrue. The concept of a starship captain flying around the galaxy cloning T rexes to solve the ecological problems of poorly terraformed planets is inherently wacky. But in my opinion it is just the right kind of wacky to make for a really fun read. I enjoyed the book and feel that it does the awesomeness of its cover justice. And its nice for once to read a Sci fi book where the main conflict is environmental issues and the problems all can't be solved with well placed photon torpedoes. I should also mention that if you do an image search for this title there is an alternate cover that I think is even more ridiculous that the one I posted, but my copy of the book has the above cover.

Next Weeks Title:
Of Godlike Power!