Farscape: House of Cards by Keith R.A. DeCandido

 

(pb; 2000: television show tie-in. Events in this book take place “towards the end of the second season of Farscape, between the episodes “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and “The Locket.”

 

From the back cover

“The pleasure planet Liantac was once the greatest gambling resort in the Uncharted Territories. Even now, having fallen on hard times, it remains a spectacle of glitz and greed. Astronaut John Crichton and his fellow interstellar fugitives see Liantac as the source of much-needed supplies—except for Rygel, whose boundless avarice is tempted by the promise of easy riches.

“To discharge the debt, and liberate their ship from the planetary authorities. Crichton, Aeryn, and the others must take on a number of challenging assignments. But all is not what it seems, for treachery and deadly intrigue hides within this. . . House of Cards.”

 

Review

House of Cards, an original-story novel inspired by the Rockne S. O’Bannon-created, Sci-Fi Channel show, reads like a genuine, unfilmed Farscape episode, with its character-true and sometimes flinty-humored dialogue and behavior, twisty and tight storyline, and possibly devious new characters who may or may not be using Moya and her crew for their own Liantac-centric ends. A fast-paced and hard-to-set-down book, it’s a worthy addition to the Farscape series, one worth owning.

House is followed by two character-/universe-linked sequels Dark Side of the Sun (by Andrew Dymond, published September 2001, said to be wildly inconsistent with the Farscape timeline) and Ship of Ghosts (by David Bischoff, published January 2002, which also has “better than Dark Side” but “bland” reviews on Amazon).

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. by Michael Avallone

 

(pb; 1965; a.k.a. The Man From U.N.C.L.E.: The Thousand Coffins Affair: first book in the Man From U.N.C.L.E. series, based on the 1964-8 MGM Television/NBC show)

From the back cover

“In Utangaville, Africa, it took two days.

“In Spayerwood, Scotland, it happened overnight.

“In each town, the people suddenly turned into mindless, babbling creatures who thrashed about wildly, uttering weird, half-human cries─and died. Doctors were baffled as to the cause.  A sudden plague, some mysterious virus?

“But to the members of the United Force for Law and Enforcement, there could only be one answer: THRUSH had a deadly new weapon for world conquest.”

 

Review

After the horrible, mysterious death of a fellow U.N.C.L.E.* agent and friend (Stewart Fromes) and an outbreak of similar deaths in two obscure places, Napoleon Solo and U.S. government agent Geraldine “Jerry” Terry jet around the globe trying to stop the biological viral threat of the terrifyingly scarred villain Golgotha, a member of the worldwide terror group T.H.R.U.S.H. (Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity). This leads Solo and Terry to the dangerous German village, Oberteisendorf, where Fromes, screaming and insane, expired. Meanwhile, fellow U.N.C.L.E. agent Illya Kuryakin and their commander Alexander Waverly work elsewhere to further prevent the culmination of Golgotha’s machinations.

Avallone’s U.N.C.L.E.─an often-wry spy spoof, like the 1964-8 television series that inspired his original, one-off book tie-in─is a tautly written, action-oriented and silly (Napoleon is catnip for all women) read, entertaining with its waste-no-words, swift pacing. This genre-true entry, worth owning, set the tone and pace of the twenty-three U.N.C.L.E. novels that followed (none of them penned by Avallone, who felt betrayed when the publisher, Ace Books, did not hire him to write follow-up books in the series).

[*U.N.C.L.E. = United Network Command for Law and Enforcement]

Next book: The Doomsday Affair by Harry Whittington.