Sci-fi writer’s imagination matched by ability

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This article was published 02/06/2012 (5205 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OHIO’S John Scalzi is one of science-fiction’s leading practitioners, a writer whose imagination is matched by his ability to tell a ripping good story.

His latest, Fuzzy Nation (Tor, 355 pages, $10), is, to use the author’s word, a “reimagining” of H. Beam Piper’s classic 1962 novel, Little Fuzzy.

In broad strokes the story is the same: Jack Holloway, a prospector on a far-flung planet, discovers an entirely new life form. To the consternation of the greedy conglomerate that employs Jack, the little creatures are sapient, which means the conglomerate would have to give up its claim to the planet’s vast untapped wealth.

But Scalzi has taken Piper’s story — which he’s using with the approval of Piper’s literary heirs — and remoulded it, adding in new characters and story elements and giving it a more contemporary feel. It’s a new and energetic retelling of an SF classic.

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Michael Feeney Callan’s Robert Redford: The Biography (Vintage, 562 pages, $22), unlike many Hollywood bios, benefits from three things: careful research, access to the subject’s friends and colleagues, and the participation of the subject himself (Callan, who lives in Dublin, Ireland, has worked with Redford on the book since the mid-1990s).

It’s hard to imagine a “movie star” biography richer and more illuminating than this one. The book is full of Hollywood tales, of course (behind the scenes of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, The Way We Were, etc.). But it also looks at Redford from other angles, examining his political and environmental views and exploring his early years as a young student trying to figure out what kind of man he wanted to be.

Redford comes across as a highly intelligent, driven man with a strong sense of personal privacy, and we feel rather privileged to have been permitted such intimate access to him.

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You’re Next (St. Martin’s, 547 pages, $12) is another sterling thriller from Los Angeleno Gregg Hurwitz. Mike Wingate, a contractor working on the biggest project of his career, is being harassed by some dangerous men whose motives for targeting him seem obscure.

But, as Hurwitz peels back the layers of Mike’s mysterious past — he was abandoned at the age of four and raised in a foster home — Mike begins to realize that something from his former life might finally have caught up with him.

Hurwitz, a master at putting ordinary people in deep jeopardy and getting them out again, keeps us on our toes, never quite sure what’s going on, looking over our shoulders in case there’s another surprise sneaking up on us.

The conclusion packs quite a wallop, with a revelation so out of left field (but, at the same time, entirely believable) that it’s hard to imagine any reader seeing it coming. If you like sharply plotted thrillers with well-drawn characters, Hurwitz should be on your must-read list.

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Ontario’s Linwood Barclay, whom you might call Canada’s Gregg Hurwitz if he weren’t his own man, also turns in another winner with The Accident (Seal, 469 pages, $12). Glen Garber’s wife is killed in an auto accident, along with two other people.

Unable to accept that his wife was responsible for the tragedy, Garber plunges into an investigation that, shockingly, reveals that he barely knew his wife at all.

Barclay, who wrote a humour column for the Toronto Star before turning his hand to novel-writing (he did both for a few years), has quickly become one of the thriller genre’s most accomplished storytellers, and this is an especially intricate story from an author who likes his stories full of twists and turns.

 

Halifax freelance writer David Pitt’s column runs on the first weekend of the month.