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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Photographic Negative,
By
This review is from: After Things Fell Apart (Mass Market Paperback)
In Ron Goulart's novel, _After Things Fell Apart_ (1970) an old man is being questioned by robots at the Nixon Institute of Oral History. He says:
"I'm not Mrs. Silvermine... That is, I am but that was merely a penname. Bertha M. Silvermine, the queen of Spine-Tingling Horror. I was something in those days... Bertha M. Silvermine was the Uncrowned Queen of the Gothics in those days. And I was writing that crap at the rate of three a month." (34) It is hard not to make comparisons with Ron Goulart himself. The sheer volumn of his books is awesome. There are his stories of the Barnum System which include (but are not limited to) his Chameleon Corps stories and his Jose Silva stories. There are his Star Hawk novels (based on a Gil Kane comic strip). There are his stories of Max Kearny, ghost breaker. There are his Vampirella stories, over half a dozen short story collections, several kung fu novels, books in the Phantom and Flash Gordon series, and three Battlestar Galactica books (with Glen Larson). There is an array of nonfiction coffee-table books on comics and pulp magazines. I even recall a short series of stories from _Fantastic_ featuring a time machine and a rotound nineteenth century detective named Plumrose. This is not a complete list by any means. As you may have gathered, the quality of Goulart's writing is uneven. He rarely writes a book that is thoroughly bad, but he doesn't write many that are exceptionally good, either. And because he writes so many books, it is sometimes hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. _After Things Fell Apart_ may be justly considered one of Goulart's very best novels. It is set in the environs of San Francisco during a time in which, well, everything _has_ fallen apart. There has been a guerrila invasion of the Chinese, the government has collapsed, robots and machines are constantly breaking down, there are regular riots on the Golden Gate Bridge, the traditional Mafia is competing against the Amateur Mafia (no Italians allowed), drugrunning and prostitution is normal, back to nature communes are springing up, and Richard Nixon is still alive. The hero is a private investigator named Jim Haley who is hired to track down Lady Day, the head of a band of feminist assassins. Some of my favorite sequences in his quest were those on a ship where a gay western is being planned, that of G-Man Motel run by ex-federal agents who still report to the computers in Washington, and the escapades in the Vienna Woods lunatic asylum. Unlike many Goulart novels, the episodes seem to be planned around more of a plot than usual. In this case, the plot involves the relationship between Haley and Penny, an ex-Lady Day recruit. As the world around them is falling apart, they seem to be developing a love that is stable and solid. Early in the novel, Haley automatically grins at other characters. By the end of the novel, he is smiling at Penny. In his autobiography, _In and Out of Character_ (1956), Basil Rathbone reflects that his first Sherlock Holmes movie, _The Hound of the Baskervilles_, was his best. It was, he says, like a photographic negative. All the later Sherlock Holmes movies that he did were positives based on that negative. One gets the feeling that many of Ron Goulart's novels are positives. But _After Things Fell Apart_ is the negative on which they are based. It is somehow more original, more fresh, and more ingenious than many of his later pieces.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
2.5,
By Brandon Blankenburg (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: After Things Fell Apart (Paperback)
Not bad. A brief detective story set in the future about tracking down the leader of a man-hating group of women known as Mankill Inc.. The focus is on the investigator following leads so there's almost no sequences of Mankill Inc. in action. It has some slightly amusing moments, but it's nothing I'd recommend or read again.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
From cover & first page,
By
This review is from: After Things Fell Apart (Mass Market Paperback)
From the back cover :
The time is a few decades in the future: the place is what used to be the United States of America, now disrupted by internal factionalism as well as a short-lived foreign invasion. Out of this chaotic background, Ron Goulart has produced an imaginative, fast-paced and constantly delightful odyssey through our possible future. Inside front cover : Ron Goulart's incredible vision of the not-to-distant future includes: The Nixon Institute, where aging former rock stars reminisce about the days when they still had hair; The wide-open town of San Rafael, run by the Amateur Mafia (no Italians allowed); Vienna West, a detailed replica of Sigmund Freud's 19th Century city where psychiatric patients live and abreact together; The Monterey Mechanical Jazz Festival, featuring the music of pinball machines, jack hammers and washing machines... All this plus a dozen or two of the oddest characters you're ever likely to meet. After Things Fell Apart is a very funny book.
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