Years ago, before eReaders and free video entertainment on airplanes, I travelled every week for work. Usually by air, so I spent lots of time in airports and didn’t yet have a Kindle or iPad. I was wed to actual, physical books. I still prefer to read that way, but there is a downside to printed books.
They can be both big and heavy. If you’re lugging around the latest Brian Sanderson (@briansanderson) it’s a heft. His latest Stormlight Archive is 1200+ pages. Or maybe you’re reading the hardcover Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss (@timferriss) that you got for Christmas. Both are weighty and take up a lot of room in your backpack.
Anyway, I’d look at my itinerary and try to figure out how much reading material I needed to stay sane. Then I’d pack accordingly. Sometimes, the bad thing happened: I’d leave my book in the airplane/cab/hotel and find myself bookless.
By the time I figured this out, I would be at the airport. I’d grow frantic and head to the nearest airport bookstore. Anything to keep from having to make conversation with my seatmate.
It was difficult to find something I thought I would like. If the store had authors I knew, I’d already read what they had on hand. I read the backs of dozens of books. Tentatively, I bought a Brad Thor novel. When I finished it, I tossed it in the trash. Ditto Clive Cussler. Didn’t like the writing and the plots were full of holes. Where were the authors who could put together both a coherent paragraph and a worthwhile story?
Enter John Sandford. The back of the book said that he’d won the Pulitzer.
Ding. Ding. Ding. We have a winner!
Here’s what his website (johnsandford.org) says:
John Sandford is the pseudonym of John Roswell Camp, an American author and journalist. Camp won the Pulitzer Prize in journalism in 1986 and was one of four finalists for the prize in 1980. He also was the winner of the Distinguished Writing Award of the American Society of Newspaper Editors for 1985.
I’ve noticed that they don’t give Pulitzers away to crummy authors. You may have figured this out as well. Anyway, it was one of his Prey series. Bought it. Loved it. Read them all. Murder mysteries and police procedurals, mostly.
Uncaged is his first attempt at Sci-Fi. He and his coauthor, Cook, have turned it into a trilogy which they recently finished: Uncaged, Outrage, Rampage.
The quick summary is that a group of animal rights activists break into a lab and discover some truly horrifying experimentation. They set a lot of animals loose, steal some encrypted thumb drives, and take a dog. One of the activists is killed, and the dog ends up being as valuable as the thumb drives.
The Feral-o-Meter gives the story an 8: The protagonist, Shay Remby, is 16, so the book could be considered a Young Adult novel. It’s less graphic than Sandford’s other series in terms of both sex and violence. The plot shades toward a younger demographic and touches on a lot of social issues along the way: homelessness, foster care, child prostitution, animal rights, immigration, and some peripheral environmental issues. All are deftly done and not slaps in anyone’s face, except for the big, bad corporations. Those get hit hard. Particularly those in the Big Pharma/Med Tech realm.
Science-wise, it’s a harder call. Sandford and Cook push well past existing technology on neurological experimentation and physical augmentation yet set the story in the present or very near future. While I’m certain that experimentation along these lines is being performed both on humans and animals in certain countries, nobody’s anywhere near what happens in Uncaged, so that caused a bit of dissonance for me. There’s no explanation behind most of the tech. Feral gives it a 5 for science.
You could stop after the first novel in the series, but if you do, you’ll have to be content with lots of unanswered questions. Personally, I’m going to give Book 2 a shot.
Next up: Book 2, Fire, first draft is complete!