Customer Reviews

Men in Black: The Green Saliva Blues

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

While everybody's waiting for MEN IN BLACK 2 to be made (because that cartoon on The WB just don't cut it!), D.W. Smith's book will have to do. The story's decent, with nasty, killer alien trees (Zahurians) slicing and dicing humans up for snacks, with MiB agents Jay and Elle hot on their trails. Smith just didn't fully capture the hip, smart-ass flavor of the movie, and ythat's very important to us MIB fans. This might turn into a decent fiction series, given time.

This is a fun little book, nothing to engaging, but fun none the less. Treelike aliens have come to Earth to enjoy it as a buffet. It's up to Agents J and L to track down these killer trees and put an end to them.

There really isn't too much more to say about this book, that's the plot in a nutshell. It may sound pretty simple, but the author does a great job building it into a real story. There is a great deal of suspense while they track the aliens and the final confrontation with them in a shopping mall makes for a very exciting read.

There is one other similar book from about the same time period, The Grazer Conspiracy, which is also good. I highly recommend them both.

Although I misplaced the volume for a couple of weeks I finally finished THE GREEN SALIVA BLUES by Dean Wesley Smith. This is an original story based on the characters created in the movie Men In Black. Earth is the stopping point for a dangerous alien life form. This alien resembles a flowering plum tree and is capable of quickly killing and eating just about any animal life form in the galaxy.

Jay and Elle (the coroner from the movie) head up the operation to eliminate these killer trees before they begin to breed. To make matters worse it seems that a number of other races have learned that the trees are on Earth. They all have their own reasons for wanting to carry out a vendetta against the trees regardless of how it effects Earth. As the Earth is watched by countless war ships, Jay and Elle work their way through eliminating all of the trees.

This is a fun adventure and is true to the mythos of the movie except in two spots. I can accept Jay continuing to refer to the neuralizer as a flashy thing but I don't accept it from the narration. Smith (Dean Wesley and not Will) also makes a mistake regarding the Centaurian twins that help run the MIB operation. In the book he claims they are referred to as The Twins because no-one can pronounce their names. This worries me because I can't accept an organization where nobody can pronounce "Bob". Kay (Tommy Lee Jones) introduces them to Will Smith in one of the funnier scenes because their names are Sklweebleohp and Bob. Otherwise this book is an enjoyable addition to the movie.

Set after the events of MEN IN BLACK but written before MEN IN BLACK II became available. J and L have been partners for almost a year, and up till now nothing has been as exciting as J's first adventure. Although L (formerly Dr. Laurel Weaver) hasn't been with MiB quite as long as J, she's devoted more time to studying the manuals, so she now knows some things he doesn't (for instance, there's a trick to handling a Noisy Cricket), and thus he's still presented as the more junior of the partners. J, L, and other carry-over characters from the film (such as Zed) don't grow or change much from the film. J's sense of humor is allowed to stray into silliness, though (he's developed a taste for suggesting cover stories that can grow into urban legends). The author has introduced new continuing characters within MiB, though: the containment team, although oddly enough they use normal nicknames rather than their official double-letter MiB identities (for example, everybody calls JE "Pro" because he used to be a golf pro).

Unauthorized alien landings are MiB's most common problem, but the present case is unusual; someone found a gap in the orbiting platforms' monitoring system, and has been regularly slipping ships in and out without detection. When J and L head out to intercept the next projected landing, they naturally go after what appears to be the worst of the containment problem: they concentrate on the ship's crew, elephant-like Pseudolarix, rather than why they're busy loading what look like flowering plum trees onto a truck.

Unfortunately, the Pseudolarix, who'd rather die than suffer the indignity of capture by humans, are the easy part. The treelike Zahurians - meat-eaters with a taste for almost anything that moves - are a danger so terrible that information on them is classified even within MiB: razor-sharp branches, corrosive green sap, and no skill or interest in communication, let alone negotiation. Worse, half the galaxy wants to kill a few Zahurians in revenge for their own losses if MiB can't catch them first.

A good plot, but we don't learn many new things about MiB or its people.

Rookie MiB agents Jay and Elle are still drying off behind their ears when two hundred or so of the dreaded Zahurians (plum tree resembling carnivores) drop in for a snack. Not good. But Dean Wesley Smith's spin-off novel fot the hit movie is, more or less. The author captures the flavor and broad humor of the film fairly well, it's easy to hear Will Smith's voice saying lines like "Drop the shrubbery and come out with your trunks up." But the profanity and gore is of the R rated variety, so the novel may be a tad advanced for the film's younger (but still literate) fans. A fun way to pass the time between Mib 1 and 2. Recommended.

This book picks right up from where the movie left offfrom. "J" and "L" have developed a greatrelationship, almost as good as the one between "J" and "K". They are ultra cool agents with ultra cool weapons and an ultra cool sense of humor. I'm eagerly awaiting the next book in this series (hopefully I won't have to wait too long). The correct way on how to use the cricket from "L" to "J" was very funny. Maybe we could have a guest return from "K" in the future. "J" and "L" blowing away the scum of the earth in this book shows these aliens what MIB is all about, which is that MIB does'nt take crap from anybody. No matter how big and technologically these aliens think they are above us. Did I say how great this book was? Thanks Dean, for giving me another great series to add to my sci-fi reading list.

I really enjoyed the Men in Black movie. I was hoping for the same sort of fun in this book, and that's exactly what I got. Dean Wesley Smith does a good job capturing the feel of the film, and I hope this is only the first of a series.

So why only three stars? Well, in a perfect world, I would have prefered that the characters be portrayed a little more in depth, and that the plot be a little more complex. Of course, I had the same complaints about the movie the first time I saw it, until I decided that wasn't the point. With that in mind, Men in Black fans should get a kick out of this novel.

I know: Dean Wesley Smith can write good books. He proved this with "The Tenth Planet", which are excellent novels. But this one, I don't know. Is it serious? If so it is trashy. Is it parody (which for the sake of D.W.Smith I hope)? If so it is a bore. The dialogues are clichée, the humour is sitcom fastfood, and where for goodness sakes is there a climax, or even a moderate suspense? The book reflects the taste of fast digesting readers in our fast reading societies, where we find this kind of literature that seems prefabricated to exactly satisfy a taste generated by mass media, which - in addition - is accepted without thinking!

I will read another MiB by D.W. Smith, because I think he can be much better. And I hope it will be better.