Word: novelizations
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Stripped to essentials, Fiasco is simply another novel about earthlings attempting to contact aliens in outer space. Yet those who have read any of Polish Author Stanislaw Lem's numerous books know that even the most timeworn subject can be the occasion for fresh surprises. Lem's international reputation rests on two qualities rarely found together in one mortal: he is both a superb literary fantasist, a la Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, and a knowledgeable philosopher of the means and meanings of technology. Lem, 65, not only builds castles in the air, he also provides meticulous blueprints...
Such ruminations seem more at home in a novel of ideas than in a saga of outer space. Fiasco happens to be both. Lem's plot is full of derring-do, infinite vistas and cataclysmic explosions. Equally engaging are digressions from the action: disquisitions on the development of the computer and artificial intelligence, advances in game theory, methods for reviving the dead after they have been frozen. Scientists may complain that Lem clutters up his theories with events; Trekkies and Star Wars buffs may claim the opposite. Readers in the middle distance will find a popular entertainment that is also...
Local author Robert B. Parker turns to a popular subject in his 14th Spenser novel, the just-released Pale Kings and Princes. A reporter is shot to death and castrated in the process of doing an investigative report on a major cocaine plant in Wheaton, Mass. When Spenser tries to retrace the reporter's steps, he finds himself running into a brick wall--the town's code of silence...
...Spenser-Hawk combination is not used as much in Pale Kings as in previous novels. Instead, Hawk winds up an extra gun when Spenser needs him near the end. But their time together is quality time, with Hawk using his best Kingfisher accent and trading quips with Spenser. What little interplay there is in the novel still works well...
...novel itself is very talky, with more important conversation taking place in it than in any other of the Spenser novels...