Three Books Read

Though technically retired, former U.S. Navy SEAL sniper Gil Shannon finds he's still on the payroll of the U.S. government, which still has enemies that need to be dealt with from a long distance away, without anyone knowing, and permanently.

In his third outing, Gil finds he's been betrayed by someone in the secret corridors of the powerful, and now he's in someone else's crosshairs. Only by teaming with some Russian special forces soldiers who have no great reason to care whether he lives or dies can he find out who's on his trail, how to stop the enemy before the enemy stops him, and how to stop the terrorists who've got a plot several layers deeper than Shannon initially knows.

McEwen co-wrote the Chris Kyle biography American Sniper, and uses some real-world scenarios as the framework for Shannon's mission and exploits here. He takes Shannon into full he-man mode in Wolf, removing the inconvenient domestic life that might have kept him from chasing new targets and new dangers every few months. McEwen and co-author Thomas Koloniar craft great action and combat scenes and a good yarn to set them in, but Shannon himself is losing dimension as the series progresses rather than gaining it. Gil Shannon is indeed a badass hero, but he's on his way to being much more of a "cipher elite" than the "sniper elite" of the series title, blending in to the world of beach-read tough guys instead of standing out as his own man with distinctive flavor and characteristics.

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Clive Cussler usually limits the world-saving to Dirk Pitt, his carbon copy Kurt Austin and Corporation head Juan Cabrillo. Isaac Bell and Sam and Remi Fargo seem to work on smaller scales most of the time, which is probably to their benefit.

Russell Blake follows up on his initial outing as Cussler's co-author with The Solomon Curse, a yarn that find our favorite anthropologist/archaeologist/multi-millionaire adventurer couple assisting a friend diving on a possible new find at Guadalcanal. The area is rumored by native villagers to be cursed, and just enough bad things happen that the Fargos and their friend lose all local help. But as they conduct their own dives and learn more about the potential discoveries of the site they're exploring, they realize they may uncover long-buried historical secrets -- that not everyone wants found, or at least not found by the Fargos. Civil unrest on the islands makes their situation a little more hazardous, and allows their enemies excellent cover should the interloping Americans suddenly disappear.

Blake builds on his decent first outing, He sketches the turbulent political background of the Solomons quite well and uses it equally well to backlight his story and add danger for Sam and Remi. He tones down the couple's banter to more acceptable levels -- banter is good when well-done, but Blake is not yet the one to push those boundaries -- and makes several of the native characters more than just the  equivalent of indigenous extras in a Tarzan movie. His main story about the treasure hunt and learning the possible secrets behind both its discovery and later attempts to hide it moves well, but the medical subplot stuffed into the corners makes little sense except as someplace to hide a villain.

But he is improving, so there's no reason to let the Fargo series sail on its own way just yet.

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Gene Roddenberry's different Star Trek series featured at least one character who sharpened the show's frequent pondering of the question, "What does it mean to be human?" In the original series, Leonard Nimoy's half-alien Spock was often the focal point of that kind of narrative, and in Star Trek: The Next Generation, the android Data took the role. This situation placed him at the center of many of the series' storylines, which was unfortunate because next to blunderkind Wesley Crusher, Data was the most annoying character on the show. The only positive development of the awful Star Trek: Nemesis movie was his death.

The different Trek novels, though, proved that in space no one can keep you dead, to riff off another franchise's tagline, and so a 2012 novel brought him back and allowed him to try to also resurrect his constructed daughter Lal. Data no longer serves with Starfleet, but instead tries to keep himself hidden so he can continue to explore his humanity and raise Lal. In The Light Fantastic, his secret is discovered by the hologram of Dr. James Moriarty, who had been tucked safely away inside a memory module since TNG's sixth season episode "Ship in a Bottle." Unfortunately, the destruction of the Enterprise-D in Star Trek Generations wiped out part of the memory cube and erased the daughters he and the Countess had, and he is now desperate to escape the data-storage reality for real reality so they can make real lives for themselves -- including, apparently, real children. Being as he is a villain, Moriarty has managed with tricks of technology and plot contrivance to kidnap Lal until Data provides him and his computer-generated paramour Countess Regina Bartholomew with real bodies.

Got all that? And we haven't even mentioned the appearance of original series character Harry Mudd and references to at least one other episode, as well as some one-and-done characters from TNG. The overwhelming level of continuity familiarity required is one of Light's major problems, although it brought several friends. Also troubling is that Lal's development presumes the adolescent illogic, tantrum-throwing and immaturity of 21st century suburban American youth to be a universal pattern. All of that continuity isn't put to any actual use beyond name-checking almost every artificial life-form Star Trek episode of note. And all of Lang's sympathetic descriptions of Moriarty and of his noble character overlook the fact that his original creator wrote him as an evil person. Sure, he's fictional, but he stepped onstage as a villain and not a Charming Misunderstood Anti-hero Awaiting the Right Circumstances to Show His Innate Nobility.

Light is a great example of a Trek novel written not simply as fan service, but as deep-weeds high-learning-curve meandering in the minutia in order to try to gin up some kind of point about something -- in this case, the precarious status of artificial life forms in the Federation universe -- and connect it to something in the real world. Though made and not born, they have been invested by the narrative with real feelings and dreams (and so are pretty much like every other character in every fictional narrative) and so they stand nobly awaiting the recognition of their agency and right to exist by their makers. We readers are meant to understand how important it is that we accept People We Don't Understand as well, in spite of how different they are.

But TNG had a whole series run to toss this question around with the character of Data, and it did so now and again despite his regularly exceeding the maximum allowed level of dilithium-powered annoyance. Lang's conglomeration of a bunch of the series' other artificial life forms adds nothing to that discussion, and it does so very confusingly. There isn't really a lot of light in this story at all, nor is it fantastic so much as it's, "Huh?" "Wha?" and "Meh."