A Book A Week - Week 37: TekWar

This week's book:
  TekWar   by William Shatner  (really Ron Goulart)

Grade:  D+

Here's all you need to know about TekWar to make an informed decision about the kind of book it is.  The main character's name is Jake Cardigan.
   Cardigan.   Like the sweater Mr. Rogers wore every day.  That cardigan.  They could have picked any other last name - it's fiction, after all - but they went with Cardigan.  How about Jake Pullover?  Or Jake Necktie?  Or Jake Waistcoat?  If you're not going to take naming your main character seriously, why take anything seriously?
   Another name minus:  there is a character named Warbride.  I'm not lying.

This was such a truly, astonishingly awful novel that it's really hard to know where to start.  Is it the cardboard characters?  Is it the terrible dialogue?  Is it the horrible mechanics?  Is it the miserable excuse for a story?
   I will tell you one thing, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  Or worse, depends on the direction you're coming from.  As a singular work, TekWar is exponentially more awful than its transgressions.

None of it's good, but let me pick two of the worst parts to expound on:  the dialogue and the setting.
    Dialogue:  unless you pick up the book and read it yourself, it's hard to convey how terrible this is.  No one speaks the way the characters in this book speak.  Now, realistic speech is not necessarily a requirement, City of Bohane demonstrates that, but the dialogue in TekWar wasn't a stylized, made-up patois.  The characters in TekWar used the English we're familiar with, but the execution is just awful.  It's clear that the author - not really William Shatner - did not read this dialogue out loud.  If it were just one character with an odd way of speaking I might be able to excuse it as a failed experiment in dialect.  But they all speak like they're sitting behind a typewriter, planning what they'll say in the next paragraph.  Practically every page includes needless exposition, and Jake Cardigan, Two-Fisted Detective, has the annoying habit of commenting on the narrative as if it were coming from his own head.  It's not a first-person point of view.
   Setting:  there's no reason for this to be a sci-fi novel.  This is a cop story, and not a very good one.  There's a lot of mention of sci-fi type materials, an awful lot of those, like someone went to a Home Depot and tried to think of what they'd call aluminum in 200 years.  And there are flying cars, and Los Angeles now includes 'Sector' after every city name, like 'Pasadena Sector.'  And there are robots. And androids which are robots who look like people.  And Tek, which is a kind of psychoactive drug delivered by microchip.  But the story doesn't really depend on these, all the sci-fi stuff is window dressing.  Replace 'tek' with 'cocaine' and this could be a story from Miami Vice in 1987.  It speaks to a lack of understanding of the genre, the sci-fi elements should enhance and amplify a contemporary conflict, allowing the author to explore real-word consequences in a fantastic setting.  This is just TJ Hooker with flying cars.

Quite possibly the worst sin?  It's boring.  Dull, dull, dreadfully dull.  I can excuse a lot of bad stuff if the author takes me on a ride.  This wasn't a roller coaster, this was a plodding donkey-ride with an old, tired donkey.  It takes over 100 pages of a 300 page book to get things going, and when things did start happening I found I didn't care.

 Who should read this book?  No one.  I took the bullet for the rest of you, please, for the love of Spock, do not try this at home.
    One plus:  at least it wasn't set in Florida. 

Next week:
 The Princess Bride   by William Goldman
It was a book before it was a movie.  Years before.  1973, in fact.