Dean Ing (1931–2020)

There’s not much going on in the mountain town of San Raphael de Aldama in Mexico. That’s what journalist Alex Germain hears, a lot, when he arrives by bus. That’s what Lilith Eden, who looks strikingly like the famous bust of Queen Nefertiti, tells him at the bust stop. It’s just a colony for elderly foreigners. That’s what Ursula Zavala tells him. And doesn’t Ursula look good? She doesn’t seem to have aged at all since Alex met her in Vienna twenty years ago when he covered a show more conference on gerontology.

And, speaking of gerontology, who does Alex meet in the dining room of Ursula’s Calle Hospicio Number 15? Why it’s Dr. Werner Gottlieb who spoke at that conference. Didn’t think he’d still be around. Interesting dog, Buda, he has. Seems pretty smart.

Yeah, it is kind of a dull place. What kind of hotel has a copy of the Journal of the American Gerontology Society lying around? Jack Fast, the piano player, seems fond of really old tunes. But, then, so are the patrons. Still, the elderly Beaumont couple from Texas tell Alex, you wouldn’t think it would be impossible to rent or buy a place in such a town.

Of course, the reader suspects Alex of hidden motives, and he’d be right. And, right in Chapter One, Reynolds starts giving us “Interludes” where unidentified people in town (though it’s not really hard to guess who they are) indicate they have secret agendas. Things get more complicated for Alex when a mysterious woman enters his darkened room and has sex with him. And, the next morning, Ursula, whom Alex also had a fling with all those years ago, suggests they take a car trip out of town for old times’ sake.

Then Dr. Gottlieb ends up murdered.

This was a surprising and enjoyable work from Reynolds. Yes, politics show up at the end, but a lot of it is a detailed look at lines of actual research in extending human life – some of which still go on. Reynolds throws in various epigraphs at the heads of chapters on how to extend life and arguing how likely or desirable that is. Along the same line, we get lots of explicit allusions to works from Aldous Huxley, H. Rider Haggard, and Robert A. Heinlein that deal with the theme of immorality.

This book reminded me of a longer, more morose, and grander take on the theme: Poul Anderson’s The Boat of a Million Years. Both feature immortals and the practical and emotional problems they face living through the centuries though Reynolds actually uses some historical characters which allows him to work in various mythological and historical references to immortality and how to achieve it. The immortals here, like Anderson’s, really have no idea why they are what they are though several theories are proposed

It's a well-paced thriller though, of course, Reynolds’ characters do a lot of talking and arguing. He mends the science, history, and myth together well. And, even with its short length of 254 pages, some of the characters, especially Lilith, are drawn well.

Reynolds’ novels sometimes end abruptly with future developments implied. That’s not really the case here because the central political struggle is unresolved at the end, but certain characters find emotional satisfaction from events.

I did, I think, detect a slight amount of Dean Ing in how the violent conclusion is written show less

My reactions to reading these two novellas in 1992. Spoilers follow.

“Silent Thunder”, Dean Ing -- I liked this techno-thriller by Ing. It works mainly because Ing knows the cliches of the thriller story and knows his readers are aware of them too. We know Pam Garza is President Harry Rand’s ex-lover and Walter Kalvin’s toadie, and Ing doesn’t try to futily fool us. We know that Laurie Ramsay is going to get kidnapped, so that plot turn is done early. Again, Ing doesn’t try to show more fool us. But Ing does tell a fast-paced, exciting story. The sf element, the Donnersprache, is an interesting device, and I wonder how much reality there is in the background details of German research into electronic and psychoacoustics. Spider Robinson once said Ing wrote moral fiction and that’s true. Here Ing uses the Donnersprache to get in a few truthful observations on the maniputablity of democratic populaces and how not everyone has the right to his opinion if it’s founded on emotion and not fact. (Interestingly, Ing never gets into an obvious application of the Donnersprache. If it can electroincally enhance the credibility of someone’s voice, why couldn’t the same techniques be used to create a very negative impression of a speaker? Perhaps this is what Kalvin does when Rand deviates from the former’s scripts. ) The violent way in which Laurie escapes her captor was surprising, and Ing’s way of showing the error of her former non-violenct stance (a stance fostered by her mother). A child forced into violence to survive is something of an Ing theme as witnessed in his Quantrill books. I liked Ramsay being able to forgive dupe Garza and marry her and how traitor Terrence Unruh tries to kill Kalvin. Ing makes a nice point that a man may sell out for personal reasons (Unruh wants money for his family after he dies) but be unwilling to totally sell out his country. This statement has a counterpoint to Ramsay not saying anything until his daughter is safe. And Rand is furious at being unwittingly manipulated and used by Kalvin. He may be a dopy, repressive preacher, but he’s got integrity that helps save the day. But the very best thing about the story is that America is saved from fascism by a conspiracy of moderate-minded Masons -- who assure a cabinet member that their handshake and promise has been good enough for centuries. It’s nice to see this much maligned group (the villains of many a fictional and alleged conspiracy) being the heroes.

“Universe”, Robert A. Heinlein -- A true classic. I liked the medievalism of the society in the spaceship: a religious based hierarchy with our hero being hauled up for trial about his views of the nature of the ship and world outside a lá Galileo, storytellers with amazing memories who serve as judges too, and an easy acceptance of slavery under the muties. I also liked mutant Jim-Joes who seems a curious Heinlein character: a learned man with little ambition (but capable of decisiveness). I liked him (them?) unable to realize the difference between fact and fiction in what he (they?) read. show less

In some ways, this is the most conventional of all the Ing novels that were marketed as mainstream works. There is no exotic tech here unlike The Ransom of Black Stealth One, The Nemesis Mission, or Butcher Bird. There are no sociopathic characters like Soft Targets or Spooker. This is a Cold War espionage story.

We open, unusually enough for Ing, in the past with a band of republican Albanian partisans fighting both the occupying German Army and communist Albanians in May 1944. Among the show more guerillas is Elbas Hamid. He helps bury a shipment of gold they discover after ambushing a German Army unit.

The novel’s second part is, stylistically, even more unusual for Ing. Covering the period from August 1944 through May 1985, it tells of Hamid’s further adventures after he leaves Albania. and is hired by the CIA to help run a partisan operation in that now Soviet-aligned country. Through a series of newspaper articles, the reflections of Hamid’s case officer turned college professor, and some undergraduate papers, we learn that operation was blown by Kim Philby and Hamid captured, and the complicated relations of Hoxha’s Albania with the USSR, Tito’s Yugoslavia, and China.

With the third part, set in Gilman, California in June 1985, the main story begins with skateboarding seventeen-year-old Mark Paladino attacked by three gun-toting men. He flees to the auto shop at his high school. There his, shop teacher, Stu Ransome, scares them off. Ransome offers call the police, but, if there’s one thing Mark’s father Justin has drummed into his head, it’s that you don’t call the police.

So, Ransome calls Justin Paladino, Mark’s dad. He’s met the man before and was impressed with his mechanical and model building skills. Justin says bad men are after him and will try to get to him through his son. He asks Ransome, as a friend, to hide his son, suggests how to do that, and gives him some money. Ransome reluctantly agrees but isn’t happy when Justin doesn’t really provide any details about what’s going on. Mark himself thinks his father has some kind of connection to the Mob. It’s not like they haven’t suddenly fled a place and changed their name before.

When Ransome realizes he’s being followed, he hides Mark out at his girlfriend Karen Cavender’s house. She is a librarian and part-time researcher for private eye Wiley Reed.

Ransome’s willing to help out Justin, but, after some Asian thugs try to break into Karen’s house and Justin’s home is blown up – because Justin is the kind of guy who booby traps his own house – his patience with Justin starts to run out. He hires Reed to investigate Justin and confronts the latter. He wants Justin’s story.

That story, of course, ties in with that horde of gold buried in Albania and will end in a shootout in the Sierra Nevadas.

The action is well-done with Ing’s usual blend of chaos and detail. The characters are vivid, especially Justin. The novel evokes the time with the beginnings of Silicon Valley, skateboarding, punk rock, the hippie and druggie past of Karen, and Hindu sex manuals. Ing presents us a few of his social concerns: youth too obsessed with short-term pursuits and Ransome, reflecting on his past as a mechanical engineer in the defense industry, wishing America would concern itself less with offensive weapons and, instead, an-antimissile defense (a major Ing concern).

I found it an enjoyable, page-turning thriller packed with interesting bits of tradecraft and Cold War history. But, because of its relative conventionality, I found it the least memorable of the non-science fiction Ing thrillers I’ve read to date. show less

As Spider Robinson once noted in a review of a Ing work, he’s something of a moral writer. And there’s no doubt about the main moral of this story. It’s right there on the front page quote in the original Ace paperback:

“Governments across the globe ducked for cover. Long-drilled and partly prepared, millions of RUS urbanites sealed themselves into subway tunnels, then slid blast-and-firestorm-proof hatches into place to ride out the blast-furnace interval. Most Americans were asleep, show more and in any case had only the sketchiest notion of adequate shelter. A few city dwellers – the smaller the city, the better their chances – sped beyond their suburbs before freeway arterials became clots of blood and machinery.

“The American public had by turns ignored and ridiculed its Cassandras, who had warned against our increasing tendency to crowd into our cities. We had always found some solution to our problems, often at the last minute. Firmly anchored in most Americans was the tacit certainty that, even to the problem of nuclear war against population centers, there must be a uniquely American solution; we would find it.

“The solution was sudden death. A hundred million Americans found it.”

But this isn’t a Third World War fought with nukes. It’s the Fourth World War fought with nukes.

This is a geopolitical sequel of sorts to a popular book of the late 1970s: Sir John Hackett’s The Third World War: August 1985 which pitted NATO against the USSR and memorably culminated in a the nuking of Birmingham, UK and Minsk, USSR in a chapter which I. F. Clarke’s Voices Prophesying War considered the ultimate point in the evolution of the future war story. It’s not necessary to read Hackett’s book before Ing’s.

But, in August 1996, it’s the Sino-Ind alliance versus the Allies which include Russia and the United States.

Our hero is Ted Quantrill, fifteen years old when the novel starts. If the name Quantrill sounds familiar, it was the surname of infamous Confederate guerilla leader William Quantrill who led a massacre of civilians in Lawrence, Kansas during the American Civil War. It’s an entirely appropriate name given that Ted will become a killer in this series, including a killer of innocents. (Ing seems to like surnames with associations. The eponymous protagonist of his last novel, It’s Up to Charlie Hardin shares a surname with gunfighter John Wesley Hardin.)

Quantrill is out on a scouting trip when war breaks out, but it isn’t just the war that molds the man he’ll become. His education on the way the world works starts out with a dispute among the Boy Scouts which Ing explicitly presents as sort of a smaller version of the global conflict about to let loose. Intervening to help a friend being bullied by older scouts, Ted learns those in charge aren’t always interested in learning the truth, that the weak invite bullying, and gratitude isn’t to be expected.

We also, in a fight Ted has with those bullies, learn that he is what we might term a sociopath today though Ing doesn’t use the term. He’s calm in combat, strong, able to analyze tactical options quickly, and has what will later be called “gunsel” reflexes or, as the horrified scout leader notes, “all wire and ice-water”.

But his killing doesn’t start until later after he meets a woman fleeing from the paraanthrax already loose on the Eastern Seaboard. He helps her evade checkpoints and ambushes on the road as they flee from near Raleigh, North Carolina to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory where she works and lives part time. It’s with her he’ll have his first sexual experience. And, to avenge her death at the hands of the survivalists that have taken over the facility, he first kills.

The novel follows his journey from Tennessee to Texas and his joining the army of the new “Streamlined America”, the new name of a country that has lost everything east of the Mississippi to bioweapon plagues, some of its northern tier states to a Canadian protectorate, and some of its southern lands to Alta Mexico. His talents are recognized as too valuable to waste as cannon fodder in an invasion of China. He’s recruited into an elite intelligence unit that is, in effect, a hit squad operating under the cover of the government’s Search and Rescue organization. In the words of its head, it will “need to search out treason and rescue the system”.

Streamlined America is, in effect, a Mormon theocracy since Mormons, given their teachings on self-reliance and building communities, survived the war best. Some of Quantrill’s targets are dissident Mormons.

And lest any of the agents of the T (as in “terminate”) section of Search and Rescue get any qualms or ideas about defecting, there’s the “critic”, an explosive mastoid implant in all its agents that overhears all their conversations, provides real time advice, monitors their vital signs, and can be detonated remotely.

This being Ing, the plotting of the trilogy is strange, but it’s fairly standard in this book.

Quantrill intersects with several other characters who will play parts in the following books. Nine-year-old Sandy and her strange protector -- a huge, fiendishly clever Russian boar named Baal tended by her father who worked at an agricultural research station before dying from radiation -- have their parts to play. Like Quantrill, Banton Mills is a sociopath though with no great physical gifts. A US Navy officer, he’s not above betraying his country for personal gain no matter how many people die. There’s Eve Simpson, a very attractive teenager and nymphomaniac who, like Mills, happens to be an expert in media manipulation. And, of course, there are the other agents, leaders, and trainers of T-Section.

But Ing doesn’t just focus on the personal stories. There are several wide-screen chapters about the war around the world with individual set pieces including an old P-43 of the Confederate Air Force tangling with a modern Indian fighter above the skies of San Marcos, Texas.

It’s interesting to see, from the perspective of 1981, what geopolitical and technological developments thought plausible by Ing, a high tech enthusiast and engineer, in 1996

I’ve read most of Ing’s novels, and this is my favorite despite its dated aspect. I’ve read it at least twice, maybe three times, and I rarely re-read novels.

The Fourth World War is mostly over by 1997, and Ted Quantrill has begun his career as a government assassin. It will continue in the next book, Single Combat. show less