Book Review: Burroughs, Edgar Rice—Tarzan and the Forbidden City

ERB usually churned out a Tarzan book a year, on top of his other output. So as you can imagine sometimes they aren’t that good. Tarzan and the Forbidden City, the 20th in the series, is by the numbers Tarzan: relative goes missing in Africa, kidnapping by apes, kidnapping by cannibals, a subsequent carousel of kidnapping, lion stabbing, a crypto-civilization with two warring factions, arena blood sport, and so forth.

The thing that keeps it from sitting at the bottom of the barrel like Jungle Tales of Tarzan or Tarzan Triumphant is that when they finally do get to the titular forbidden city there is some rather imaginative and action packed scenarios. Imagine Tarzan and company in underwater diving suits in a battle to the death with a school of giant carnivorous horned sea horses. Yeah, it's pretty awesome.

Book Review: O'Dell, Scott—Island of the Blue Dolphins

I read this book when I was in middle school. I didn’t remember much beyond the fact that it was lonely and sad.

It is a children’s book so I decided to inflict it upon my children. There are some pretty graphic episodes like people getting mauled by wild dogs. And it is very lonely and sad. One could argue that there is no resolution in the end. It’s not a book about learning to live on your own or finding peace within yourself. Rather every episode seems to sharpen the bitterness of the protagonist’s isolation.

All good lessons for children.

Book Review: Manning, Russ—Magnus, Robot Fighter 4000 A.D., Vol. 3

There are only three comic book series that are any good. The best are Hellboy up until Mignola stopped doing the art and the original TMNT by Eastman and Laird up to and including the “City War” story.

Russ Manning’s Magnus, Robot Fighter 4000 A.D. is in that rarefied air. Written back during the 60s, it was intended as a futuristic Tarzan. It’s way better than the Marvel and DC books of that era.

Magnus is a Luddite with superhuman strength in a fantastically futuristic world where robots do all of man’s drudge work. He relentlessly preaches that by doing so they will make mankind weak and lazy and lead to human extinction.

But the series is full of marvelous paradoxes in addition to the high flying action. Because Magnus has a chip implanted in his skull that allows him to “hear” robot transmissions, Magnus is actually a cyborg. It is a robot that raises Magnus and gives him his powers. Whenever evil robots rise up to destroy mankind, there’s almost always a human hiding in the shadows pulling their strings.

Overall there is a very progressive and positive futurist tone to the books. Sure the future is complex and challenging. But it is also awesome.

Book Review: Aldrin, Buzz—Mission to Mars

I have a fascination with Mars. From Dante’s mystical forays to Kim Stanley Robinson’s terraforming epics, from Burroughs’ pulp to Bradbury’s poetry, I can’t get enough. If the government’s going to spend money on space exploration, it should be with an eye to create a self sustaining colony on Mars. Anything short of that is a failure. I believe solely focusing on unmanned space exploration will lead to waning public interest and minimal funding. The trickle of data will slowly decrease. Scientists may be able to use it to find out a bunch of cool stuff, but it will be increasingly esoteric to the average Joe. We recently did a Pluto fly by, but popular culture has already moved on.

Of course, manned space exploration doesn’t guarantee public interest either. Space has got to be relatively easy and accessible and then it can be profitable. Getting to that point is not easy, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it never happened. But, oh, how I wish it would!

If a pep talk about going to Mars is what you need then Aldrin’s Mission to Mars is the book for you. Unfortunately that’s about all it provides. It’s haphazard, scatter-shot, poorly organized, and poorly argued. It’s three parts raw enthusiasm, two parts self aggrandizement, with a few interesting ideas sprinkled in for flavor.

Among the latter are the “Aldrin Cycler” system of space ships. These are perpetually orbiting ships that never stop. You’d take a shuttle out to the cycler as it comes close to Earth and ride it to Mars. Once there you’d hop off onto a similar shuttle and the cycler continues on it’s way back to Earth.

The other cool idea is his approach to going back to the Moon. In short, he argues that other countries should do that. Instead the US should focus on developing the cycler technology within the Earth-Moon system, and otherwise develop infrastructure — communication satellites, Earth-Moon Lagrange point space stations and fuel depots, etc. — and exchange usage of these resources with other countries that want to develop a presence on the moon. Once the technology is developed we expand it to Earth-asteroid and Earth-Mars systems.

In my opinion notion that this will be any kind of return on investment on space exploration in the near future has to be abandoned.  If space ever become profitable it will be along time from now and will require mining mineral rich asteroids (keep in mind that a space windfall on iron, gold and other valuable resources would decimate the mining economy on Earth) and Helium-3 mining for fusion purposes. But that is dependent on actually creating a viable Helium-3 fusion technology first.

In that sense I think the book is misleading when it comes to economic opportunities.

Mars won’t be a financially profitable excursion. We won’t find extraterrestrial life there. We should go to Mars purely for the thrill of the technical challenge involved. And if we don’t find that challenge worth pursuing, get used to terra firma, because we’ll never leave.

I’ve heard Zubrin’s books about Mars are better. I need to give them a try.