Title: Stealth Planet Author: Ray Blackhall Year: 2006 Publisher: Dusty Spark Publishing Reviewer: Jake Beal The saving grace when reading a truly terrible book is that you can learn interesting things about what it takes to make a good story. If the failure is obvious, then the novelty pales fast, but I managed to sustain myself all the way through Mr. Blackhall's terrible novel "Stealth Planet" by asking myself what the difference was between a story and a sequence of events. It wasn't until about a third of the way through that I put my finger on that failing as the cardinal sin of this book. Until that time, I had been struggling, page after page, maddened by all of the more superficial sins he commits. At times, the book was so unbearable that in order to keep reading, I had to literally hold it out at arms length and give it the finger before continuing. But, pleasant as it would be to simply write off the whole mess and punt it into the corner, Mr. Blackhall has enough going for him that I could never quite do it. Part of the problem is no doubt his publisher. Dusty Spark Publishing is a little outfit---maybe it's a vanity publisher, maybe not, it's hard to tell from its limited online presence. At least one of their other titles has done quite well on Amazon, so they're not a fly-by-night. But they clearly don't have much in the way of editorial resources, else Mr. Blackhall wouldn't have been able to get away with his more egregiously banal failures. Still, they sent us not merely a preprint, but two review copies, and I figured I'd give it a shot. So, let's get back to that big question. What is the difference between a story and a sequence of events? Not an easy thing to nail down. Do you need to care about the characters? Most stories you do, but in Stephenson's "Zodiac" the main character is an ass, and you still get sucked right in. Do the characters need to think and reflect on what's going on? Again, it helps, but there's quite a bit of Golden Age sci-fi where you pretty much just get to watch the space boyscouts doing their thing, and never hear anybody's inner thoughts. Does it require action and world-shaking events? Clearly not, because Stealth Planet tells us straight-faced "mankind had just taken an evolutionary step," and yet it's not a story. The missing elixir is subtle, but so important. My best guess is suspension of disbelief. If you can't suspend disbelief, then you can't enter the author's world. If you can't suspend disbelief, then there is no tension about what will happen, and whether the characters will make it through their close call or not. If you can't suspend disbelief, then you aren't reading a story, you're just listening to a child babble at you. Maybe they're telling a story, but there's just nothing in it to follow. I can tolerate a lot of insult to my suspension of disbelief, and still enjoy the story. Magic and psionics? Sure. Wacky future tech? Sure. Wooden characters? Sure. Hackneyed plot? Sure. Completely different beliefs about the world? Sure. But the author has to at least throw me a bone. Like, I enjoy Weber's "Honor Harrington" novels despite the fact that his prose is practically machine generated, because of the intricacy of his machinations and his determination to show you the rhyme and reason of every cog and gear in the working of his universe. So it's hard to pin down the main thing that makes this such an execrable book because it comes from many sources, each eating away at my ability to distinguish "Stealth Planet" from the febrile ravings of a paranoid schizophrenic. Let me list the main offenses: * Show, don't tell. Mr. Blackhall has clearly never heard of this principle, and abuses it so tenaciously that several of the other offenses I will list are really just elaborations of this basic principle. * Two of everything so the first can fail dramatically. I know that NASA likes backups, but can't at least one thing work properly on the first try? As a corollary, no part of the trip is allowed to be boring and routine, even at the expense of bringing back one of the worst offenses of old Hollywood sci-fi. * Unmitigated adjective abuse. Just because you can add an adjective doesn't mean you have to. Especially when we've read the same adjective applied to the same situation many times before. "Skillful" is perhaps the worst offense, but "amazing" and "dangerous" are close contenders. * Abuse of mystery. "Mysterious" is so badly abused that it gets its own category, especially since Mr. Blackhall so rarely condescends to tell the reader any answers. The worst example of this is the planet itself (whose name is changed from "Enigma" to "Stealth Planet" apparently by authorial decree to the ISS). The book starts with the discovery of a mysteriously hard to see planet; by the end, despite sending an expedition there to learn its secrets, all we know is that it is hard to see for mysterious reasons, but that it may one day give up its mysteries. Sometimes it felt like Mr. Blackhall was deliberately insulting the reader as he wrote about all the amazing things being learned without giving so much as a hint as to what they were. So Norm analyzed the mysterious soot that gave them so much trouble; what did he learn? At least give me some techno-babble! * Making a character monologue a recap of what the reader just finished reading. Speaking of insulting the reader, this odious habit of Mr. Blackhall was the thing that caused me to give the book the finger. Every time he did it (that's right: it happens *often*) it felt like he was deliberately spitting on me. This habit of his was also what first convinced me that there was no editorial oversight on this book. * Everybody's awesome! All of the characters are super-humanly pleasant and heroic, so we keep reading things like "no hard feelings, no bruised egos, and an exceptional camaraderie ... The sense of duty and dedication to the program was the greatest asset of the entire group." Throughout the whole book, no character ever actually screws up---even when they're in the process of passing out from injuries, they do exactly the right thing. * Tension comes from potential danger, not unexpected turns of events. Sometimes it seems like Mr. Blackhall has modelled his plots on a Disney ride. Every ten pages or so, something pops up yelling "surprise!" and frankly, the surprise wears off. Moreover, despite all the characters overly vaunted skills, they never actually manage to head off a disaster in advance---it just pops up yelling "surprise!" and they skillfully skill their way to stop the bleeding before it kills them. * Just because you say it doesn't make it so. This is doubly true if you tell us about a long-time super-important personality trait or policy just so that we can be impressed when it's violated. If you tell us he's a stickler for detail, then have him say screw the forms, then who are we to believe, the author or the character's actions? This applies doubly when the author is trying to tell us why we should be impressed with the scope of his vision. Somehow, I just don't find "the greatest technological creation in the history of the Earth" or "a fitting end to the incredible adventure" very convincing when that's the entirety of the description. * Repetitive deus ex machina. For some reason, Mr. Blackhall decided that he should add a psychic who was "not exactly sure how she had made the crew," despite the fact that his universe doesn't believe in psychics, so that she can act as the crew's dowsing rod and tell them the solution to every puzzle they encounter. To quote Mr. Blackhall: "Her uncanny gift of inexplicable sensory abilities had guided them to a potential escape route." * Matchmaking. Depending on which part of the book you're reading, there are either ten or twelve members of the crew, four of which are women. At the start of the book, nobody's in a relationship. At the end, there are four deeply committed couples emoting deeply at each other every time another danger pops up yelling "surprise!" * Making things up as you go along. Several times, Mr. Blackhall starts adding history in the middle of the book, suddenly telling you about a contingency plan that he's apparently just invented, or a regulation that's totally been there all along, no really, that can make things a bit more dramatic. That's bad enough, but if you're going to make things up as you go along, you'd better not forget what you made up in the last chapter. I could go on, about the pointless villain, the lack of curiosity on the part of the characters, their wooden portrayal, etc, but I've already ranted and rambled for long enough, and I think his prose is trying to infect me. Let me simply close by saying that this is one of the worst books I have ever read, and warning all and sundry to stay away from it.