Tri-Book-A

Though his output volume never matched theirs, Arthur C. Clarke is frequently thought of as one of science-fiction's "Big Three," along with Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein, by the genre's fans and historians. Best-known for writing first "The Sentinel" and then its book-length version, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clarke had a more literary bent than either of his American counterparts. He also had a more literary style than the plain-prose Asimov or the workmanlike Heinlein, although he never overdressed his sentences and his narratives are clearly understandable.

Clarke was also known for thinking about the implications of different scientific discoveries, questions and realities, which he does in his 1986 novel, The Songs of Distant Earth. Clarke suggests that a then-mysterious feature of the sun's radiation actually implies that it will go nova in just a couple of thousand years. Humanity, unable to travel faster than light or make spaceships of any size travel even close to that speed, sends out automated ships with frozen genetic material to land on habitable planets and produce and raise human beings to continue their species. The three islands of the ocean world Thalassa have lived a peaceful and fairly stress-free existence for several hundred years, until an unexpected communication tells them that a ship from Earth's final days has entered their new solar system. A breakthrough allowed high acceleration for high-mass objects, meaning the ship itself carries the bodies of a million people in suspended animation.

Just a few crewmembers leave stasis to prepare for the next leg of the voyage, and Clarke spends most of Songs exploring the differences between the artificially engineered Edenic society of the Thalassans and the harried survivors who watched the Earth burn in a blazing sun. It's kind of interesting, although the degree of interest can vary depending on how much a reader agrees with what kind of society Clarke thinks is ideal. He mostly buys into the idea that people free of all sorts of cultural baggage like religion and traditional sexual mores will be free of jealousy, violence and war, which is probably up for more debate than he would like to admit.

Clarke's best novels always asked questions about humanity and its place in the universe, leaving readers to decide for themselves what answers might suit. Songs does that to a degree, but in a court its questions might be considered too leading to be useful in learning all that much.

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Over the course of a six-book career, magazine writer and sometime comedian Greg Gutfeld has taken on more and more of a role as a social commentator. Self-identified as a libertarian, he hosts the late-night satire program Red Eye and is on the afternoon news roundtable discussion show The Five, both on Fox News.

Not Cool is probably Gutfeld's most "serious" book yet, in that he offers a proposal and develops an argument for it over the course of the whole thing. Since he's a humorist, it's not actually all that serious in tone, and he makes his argument with a healthy dose of jokes, satire and mockery.

That argument is that the quality known in modern culture as "cool" is really a way of turning core values on their heads -- to say that good things are bad and bad things are good. When pop culture defines something or someone as "cool," it arbitrarily assigns them worth that they probably don't deserve. It's hard to notice the number of magazine covers, websites and silly programs that have at least one Kardashian in them and disagree with this thesis. Popular musicians, actors and athletes who leave behind a kite's tail of child-supported offspring are often excused because they're cool, Gutfeld notes, but a dad who sticks out a dull job and a mortgage to help raise his children isn't. Comedian Chris Rock makes a similar observation when he says one of the biggest jobs a father has is keeping his daughter off the stripper pole.

On the one hand, Gutfeld's argument is low-hanging fruit for people who think seriously about things. "Cool" too often substitutes image and affect for examination and discernment. And Gutfeld is still waaaaay to ready to dump in one of his semi-subliminal punchline derailleurs when he should try to limit them and grow the laughs from the absurdity of his subject. But he's still right, and the only real problem is that many of the people who ought to read and consider what he's talking about likely won't. Because he's a middle-aged white guy, and as your present author can attest, it's harder to get less cool than that.

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Tom Clancy's Hunt for Red October started out as a submarine novel that grew into a kind of alternative history in the "Ryanverse," as he brought hero Jack Ryan onto a larger and larger world stage. Hunt took place in a 1984 more or less like our own, but later books diverged widely from real history.

Larry Bond may be heading in a similar direction with his own submariner, Jerry Mitchell. Jerry boarded his first boat in 2005 in Dangerous Ground, again in a world not so different from the 2005 outside its pages. But in 2013's Shattered Trident, he posits a 2016 China Sea war among Asian nations that sends the world on a different path even though it extrapolates from several current actual situations.

China's aggressiveness and need for natural resources have led it to some instances of not-so-hidden conflict with Vietnam and Japan. Those two nations, using a model from a Japanese economist and historian, combine with others to try to forestall a Chinese grab for oil-rich territory. The United States has allies on one side, but a realistic view about the destructive costs of a war with the world's largest nation on the other. Diplomacy seems to offer no paths through the crisis, and even the limited fighting has damaged the world's economy. And Jerry Mitchell, newly in command of the U.S.S. North Dakota, is in the middle of the mess.

Bond and writing partner Chris Carlson do a better job of creating characters than Clancy did and leave out the "Men's Adventure Magazine" style that made Clancy laughable once he left the battlefield. Bond and Carlson spend much more time outside of their submarines as they chronicle the history of their conflict, which weakens Trident to some degree. And they have Jerry be the one to offer the Idea So Crazy, It Just Might Work that helps resolve things, even though they haven't offered much support for him doing so.

If Trident is a step into creating a "Mitchell-verse," it has the advantage of tighter narratives, less laughable dialogue and prose and more storytelling discipline than Clancy's late '80s and '90s doorstops. With its behind-the-scenes governmental maneuvering and examination of conflict causes, it reads more like John Hackett's 1979 The Third World War: August 1985 than a straight-up submarine thriller. Even though it's plenty good enough, that could still mildly disappoint genre fans.