JIm Geraghty’s Dueling Six Demons – Terrific Action With Some Creepiness

Book #30 of 2024

Jim Geraghty has just released book number four in his Dangerous Clique series, and it continues his winning streak. The series began with Between Two Scorpions, continued with Hunting Four Horsemen and Gathering Five Storms, and now we have Dueling Six Demons (don’t ask me why there is no “Three” title; I have no idea!).

The Dangerous Clique is led by CIA agent Katrina Leonidivna, a deadly assassin, and it includes her husband, FBI agent Alec Flanagan, ex-Army Ranger Ward Rutledge, computer hacker Dee, and fellow FBI agent Elaine.Kopek. What sets Geraghty’s books apart from the typical action/thriller yarn is his humor. Alec is always making wisecracks, usually based on his vast knowledge of pop culture. There are plenty of edge-of-your-seat covert operations in the books, but they are leavened by the humor and humanity of the clique members.

If you haven’t read any of this series, I highly recommend you start at the beginning with Between Two Scorpions. There are lots of references to earlier events and characters that, while it’s not absolutely necessary you’re familiar with, really help make sense of what the Clique is battling. And that brings us to another unique quality of Geraghty’s series – his incorporation of supernatural elements. What was merely hinted at in the earlier books is now out in the open: there is a tangible evil force opposing the Clique, and it seems to have roots in some sort of pagan religion.

This force, when it manifests itself, takes the form of a giant humanoid/insectoid – a cockroach, centipede, termite, etc. – and it desires nothing except human pain, suffering, and chaos. Early on in Dueling Six Demons, the Clique begin to see parallels between all of the terrorists they have fought, primarily references to “The Voices”. Suffice it to say, things are getting very creepy in the world of antiterrorism!

The threat in Dueling Six Demons is the sudden hacking and leaking of every superpower’s most sensitive information. It turns out, a quantum computer has been successfully built, and it can overcome any cybersecurity measures with ease. The entire economy of the West, not to mention all utilities, GPS, etc. is on the line. Banking will collapse if transactions aren’t secure. The Clique’s efforts to stop the further development of quantum computing takes them to Ukraine, the Maldives, Libya, Argentina, and Taiwan. There is lots of fun action, and the bad guys definitely get stomped.

I only have one quibble – in my Kindle edition, Geraghty writes, “…most Westerners knew the ‘Malvinas Argentinas’ by another name, the Falkland Islands, the contested territory that was the focus of a ten-week undeclared war between the United Kingdom and Great Britain in 1982.” (p. 143-144). I don’t think there was a civil war in the British Isles in the early 80s!

Finally, a long-running thread concerning a possible CIA mole is exposed, but not resolved. That’s a good thing, since it means we’re guaranteed at least one more book in the series! Kudos to Mr. Geraghty for creating such a likable group of protagonists, and I can’t wait to read the next installment.

John Wyndham’s Planet Plane, or Stowaway To Mars

Image from https://vintagepopfictions.blogspot.com/2015/01/john-wyndhams-stowaway-to-mars-planet.html

Book #23 of 2024

As long as I can remember, I’ve been a completist. If I find a musical artist I like I have to hear all of their albums – which, thankfully, is not so hard to do in this age of streaming services. If I find an author I like, I have to read all of his or her books, whether they’re all good or not. It’s a blessing and a curse – a blessing when the author is as wonderful as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, or Charles Portis. A curse when they are as inconsistent as Iris Murdoch or Frank Herbert.

Anyway, a novel I’ve enjoyed a lot is John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, and when Delphi Classics made all of his works available in ebook format, I jumped at the chance to read them. His first effort, The Secret People, is a not very good tale of a race of humans who live below the surface of the earth and enslave anyone who stumbles upon their world. His second, Foul Play Suspected, I reviewed in an earlier post. It is better than The Secret People, but still far from a classic. His third attempt, Planet Plane, is a marked improvement over the previous two. It was published in serial form as Stowaway to Mars in 1936, under the pseudonym John Beynon. Later that year it was published in book form.

It is set in the far future of 1981(!), where Dale Curtance, daredevil and millionaire manufacturer of the Gyrocurt – an affordable flying car – has decided to go for the Keuntz Prize: five million dollars to the first person who can make it to a planet and back safely. He gathers together a team of four men in addition to himself: the young co-pilot Geoffrey Dugan, the irascible engineer James Burns, the older and milder Doc Grayson, and journalist and gadfly Froud. Soon after they take off for Mars in Curtance’s custom-made rocket, the Gloria Mundi, they discover there is a stowaway, a young woman named Joan Shirning.

She has snuck aboard, because she and her father had made contact with some sort of alien machine that seemed to be sentient. Her father spent months studying it and came to the conclusion that it must be Martian. When he finally decided to go public with his discovery, it dissolved into a puddle of liquid metal. Everyone mocked and rdiculed him, so Joan took it upon herself to restore his good name by proving that Mars is populated by machines.

So far, so good, if formulaic. What makes Planet Plane interesting are the first stirrings of Wyndham’s dystopian vision. There are several lengthy conversations about technology and humanity’s uneasy relationship to it. Do machines serve humanity’s needs, or does mankind adapt itself to technology’s demands?

Women are creators; The Machine is a creator; in that they are rivals. They are afraid of it, too. What is it they fear subconsciously? Is it that man may one day use The Machine to create life? To usurp their prerogative? (p. 100, Delphi Classics Kindle edition)

When Curtance and his team land on Mars, they soon run into machines similar to the one Joan and her father encountered back on Earth. These, however, are misshapen and hostile. As they prevent the Earthlings from returning to the Gloria Mundi, Joan is kidnapped (or rescued?) by a machine who takes her to an ancient Martian city. Joan meets a Martian, Vaygan, one of the last of his dying race. He explains that for his civilization, machines are simply the next evolutionary step:

Our minds will not die yet. The machines are as truly children of our minds as you are the child of your mother’s body. They are the next step in evolution, we hand over to them. (p. 153)

Planet Plane ends up taking some unexpected twists and turns, and it is a lot of fun. Wyndham’s next novel, The Day of the Triffids, is a bonafide classic, and one can see how Planet Plane sets up some of his overarching themes: what makes civilization possible, and how durable is it? While reading Wyndham’s first novels, I have enjoyed seeing him develop into a mature writer with a distinctive style. That said, they certainly aren’t essential. For someone curious about his work, I would recommend starting with The Day of the Triffids, and if you like that one, continue with The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos, and Chocky. Those titles are all deservedly considered sci-fi/speculative fiction classics.