Customer Reviews

Slanted Jack (Jon & Lobo)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Jon is having dinner at swish restaurant when his meal in interrupted by an old partner of his - Slanted Jack - a professional con man who wants Jon to do him a favour. Jon knows Jack never does anything without an angle but he finds it impossible to refuse his request to help with security needed by a small boy with a meeting he has to have with local religious leader.

For me, after reading ONE JUMP AHEAD this book was a disappointment. It doesn't have any real action sequences and by the second half of the book it felt like I was simply reading about one meeting after another. The nanos - in many ways one of Jon's most interesting features - don't play much of a part in this story at all. What we do find out about however is more interesting information on Jon's home planet of Pinkleplonker and how Jon was healed by his sister.

I'll still read the next book in this series, but the author seems so intent on keeping these novels as stand alone stories that so far you don't actually see much character development in either Jon or Lobo.


One Jump Ahead (Jon & Lobo Series)

I very much enjoyed the 1st book in this series "One Jump Ahead", but didn't like this book at all, and, in fact, couldn't finish it. The author takes WAY too long to tell his story with way too many words, asides, uninteresting background information, unnecessary scenes. The relationship between the man and the boy is completely unbelievable (he only met the boy once for 15 minutes, and the boy could have been a con artist); then he becomes devoted to the boy's welfare. There is one scene in which Jack buys a kind of flying sled where the author tours the entire town and tells everything about the store and the salesman except what he ate for lunch today. I wanted to scream "Just buy the !@#$% sled already!!". I think he needed to pad the words to make the book meet the page count. Finally I gave up and just threw the book away.

I loved the first book in this series but this one is not up to snuff. There is very little that separates this from most other military science fiction.

Mostly a large number of meetings with unbelievable results. No use of the unique characteristics of Jon and Lobo. Lobo becomes a nag and a bore. Maggie is totally one dimensional and a pain in the story. Jon's relationship with the boy is unbelievable.

Skip this one and hope Van Horn returns to form in the next one.

I must admit some prejudice in that I thoroughly enjoyed the first Jon and Lobo book (One Jump Ahead), so I was expecting good things from the latest book.

The team of Jon and Lobo are well matched in that Jon could give himself over to the sarcastic artificial intelligence of his ship, Lobo, but instead he allows his essential human self to guide them both, and usually into the heart of a storm.

The book introduces the con man Slanted Jack, but also Maggie who joins the adventure with an eye to protect the young boy at the heart of concern. But she brings out an emotional side of Jon that satisfies and explains much of his interactions.

I found the story fast paced with wonderful inventions and a great new sport that I want to see out on the market sometime soon.

This new universe carries many of the quintessential human problems forward without making the future a dreary and sad place, allowing for beauty and excellence.

I recommend it highly.

Remember the Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison ? He was a loveable character who stayed barely on the right side of the law (most of the time) in a far future where human civilizations had spread over multiple star systems. There were villains and dictators of all varieties and a former cat burglar/con-man wandered through all of them bringing them down a peg, or unseating them totally by starting a revolution that wonderfully reminded the reader of the only successful revolution in modern history: the American.

As you can see from the plot synopsis elsewhere on this page, Jon Moore is back in a sequel to One Jump Ahead (Van Name's first novel). This time Jon (and his highly intelligent ship/assault vehicle named "Lobo") is caught up in an elaborate con game with a former partner-in-crime who is (quite deservedly) known as "Slanted Jack."

Jon didn't want to work an elaborate three-way con involving two sets of crooks and a semi-dictatorial multi-system government. (For the latter, think of a the government cops who were the bad guys in the TV Series "Firefly.") However, he decided that it was morally obligatory to save a child who may be one of the few links to the home-planet that Jon lost about 150 years before. (Yes, he is that old - remember the nano-machines in his body?)

The moral dimensions of Jon's predicament are what give the story some depth. Jon wants to do good, but he also wants to survive and not be captured as a human test subject, imprisoned in a government laboratory for the rest of his life. His decades of life on the edge has involved a lot of killing. So much that he schemes on how to win any conflict and escape from any trap without having to blast innocent and not so innocent humans into constituent atoms.

If you liked the series "Firefly" or the movie "Serenity," you will probably enjoy this series. If you are old enough to remember the SF novels of Harry Harrison or Keith Laumer, then you will cheer the author on as he brings action back into hard SF.

This paragraph is awful and totally wrong as any skydiver could tell you or any physicist for that matter....

Slanted Jack - Chapter 25 - excerpt

A chute rippling in shades of white burst into view in the overhead display, and in the same instant we leapt skyward, the ground suddenly dropping away as the force vectors collided and the chute yanked us upward. My stomach seemed to stay behind and then catch up all too quickly, as if it were outside my body and hooked to me only by elastic tethers. Fear clawed at me as my brain, which knew it was a good thing that the chute had opened, fought for control with my instincts, which screamed that something was terribly wrong, that I should not be shooting up into the sky. Before either side could win, we stabilized, hung for a moment at the peak of our trajectory, and then we fell.

Many people have not found this book to be as enjoyable as One Jump Ahead. I think you have to care about the characters to like this book. Van Name makes you care about the characters. For me, something that has always distinguished Laumer's Bolos from Drake's Hammers Slammers tank action is that I care about what the tank THINKS! I find the interaction with machine intelligences fascinating and the food interludes entertaining and interesting. I care about Jon, I care about Lobo, and I want more of both. I am eagerly awaiting the next installment.

This was a fun sci-fi book. Not often serious, but no filler fluff. I, like the main character, wanted to throttle Jack more than once, but things would not have gone as well without his mind-boggling "help." The plot moved at a nice pace with a smattering of relationship angst and bits of science everywhere. Not an epoch work, but fun escapism. I hope Jack has more adventures for us.Slanted Jack

This series is developing nicely and could be one of those series that stays fresh for years to come, as we all find out more about Jon's past and his quest to find his sister, if she survives, and what happened on the planet of his birth.

I'm not going to write any spoilers here to ruin it for those of you who haven't yet read any books of this series. I do highly recommend starting with the books in order. I have just received the third book in the series and will begin reading it this week. I have to say that Baen seems to develop new sci-fi authors better than any other publisher does right now.

Jon and Lobo are hoodwinked into a bad situation to help a boy. A mediocre sequel to "One Jump Ahead" that was worth reading but unremarkable. Hoping Van Name develops the main character better in future sequels. Didn't feel like the characters evolved much past the first book.