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Szplug's Reviews > Ice Station
Ice Station (Shane Schofield, #1)
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Why read a book called Ice Station, are you having flashbacks to the days of Alistair MacLean and those commando ops that thrilled with the killing of lousy Krauts, except this one is by Matthew Reilly some wanking Aussie young'un with Coke-bottle specs, an older and more reedy version of Mr. Peabody's Sherman with a shoeblack pomade, it's a nice sleek white and promises cheap merc entertainment so why not, it's not like you have thousands of award-winning, globally-lauded, literature-defining authors on the shelves now, is it, this one should prove a quick one while the brains away, holy fuck this intro is really bad, Reilly sounds like a dingbat, good God, do we really have a squad leader named Scarecrow with knife scars slashed across his beady eyes, fuck right off with this shit Reilly, whoops, here we go, Frog commandos springing a oily trap armed with mega-technological crossbows, that's aces, now Yanks are dropping like flies, take that French-to-Freedom-Fry butt-plugged aresholes, oh, come on, did Reilly just spring some cheesy seal pinging around like a pinniped version of Flipper, now what the hell, mutated walruses and killer whales chowing down on humans like regular bizness, what the fuck are divers and seals doing one mile down in freezing black Antarctic ocean waters, fuck Reilly, your acrobatic seal and SEAL poltroons would implode like my fucking liver did in 2002, why don't you just include a fucking mermaid pleasuring her half-scaly self with a tubular iceberg for Christ's sake, now what, my God a badass Marine she-bitch named Mother who cracks walnuts via clenched butt and clears the shell casings with an impressive rooster-tail, let me guess, she harbors a deep and abiding shemale-manlove for Scarecrow who doesn't know and won't reciprocate and nevertheless secretly dreams of a romantic date with the dude in an Afghan foxhole where they'll dine on grenades and toast each other with gasoline, I can't take this anymore, what, hovercraft colliding and dinging each other with the abandon of the patrons at the Fraser Arms when one o'clock rolls around and only one toilet is functioning while Marines leap back 'n forth killing freckled Tommy SAS chump-change wearing berets and sporting Nietzschean 'staches with a well-placed elbow or frozen penguin carcass, Reilly you blow massive chunks, escapist, brain-dead thrills are one thing but this happy-go-fucky bullshit is an insult to the output of Mack Bolan, I can't take it anymore you cliche-ridden, one-thousand-words-for-machine-pistol-but-only-one-for-a-knife-to-the-throat plagiarizer of Cassell Military Paperbacks OK, Goddammit, I slopped coffee all across this cap-popping deadweight, me and my Maxwell House elbow fucking shaking like a Juan Valdez rummy, damn carpet used to be nice, that does it, this one goes directly into the garbage and NOW finally can we get to something better, well I'll be, here's another on the shelf by Reilly called Hover Car Racer, now that sounds promising...
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Finished Reading
November 5, 2011
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Paquita Maria
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Nov 05, 2011 02:11PM
I drink Maxwell House, too. It's really cheap. (Comment on review, CHECK.)
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We don't have Maxwell House over here: but Kenco is really good I find. Not cheap though.
It's refreshing to see a one-star rating/review from you. Is this run-on sentence thing a parody of the book itself or is it Sastrean stream of consciousness?
I couldn't make it all the way through the review, but I'm pretty sure the rest is just as awesome.
Ah, what a solid weekend, even glimpsed that ever-so-rare November blue sky on the Wet Coast.PM: Yep, up here Maxwell House is dirt cheap—I get mocked at the office for my continued embrace of gas-station coffee grinds, but if it was good enough for Papa Sastre, then by God it's good enough for his middle son.
Knig-o: You aren't missing much, really. It's at a level with other cheaper brands like Folgers and Nabob. A bit oily, a touch coarse, but very easy on the pocketbook.
David: It felt good to dish out a single star after all this time—though this is another of those old reads reworked to sound more recent. It's purely a Sastrean stream of consciousness. Reilly's prose style is more like, well, this:
Scarecrow heard the thump. He turned around.
Turned around quickly.
Turned so fast he almost slipped in his hurry. And his knife-scarred eyes almost popped as wide as they could at the sight.
It was a killer whale.
A giant killer whale.
A giant killer whale mowing down on one of the French commandos.
Mowing down like a giant watery man-eating kid-fish at the fair.
And so on and so forth. Quite dreadful.
MJ: The second half closes out with a nod toward my predisposition for slopping coffee around—my shirts, my poor, poor shirts—so if such travails amuse, it ends very well indeed.
Mike: No. I'll have to settle for because it was there.
Michael: Hey, Michael, long time no hear.
Rather read this anyday than the worthies on your shelf.
No, you wouldn't.
So what's this about imploding liver? A little too intense living somewhere along the line?
As for the old bile belcher, it was once taking a terrible beating—though these days I'm a clean living SOB with a Lamborghini for a liver—but saying it actually imploded is using a bit of dramatic license (lying, in layman's terms). I tend to do that.
As for the Max, I've gotten used to it, but the term dire is not that far off the mark.
Oh, wait...he means a baby piranha right? Did I win?
Sure. Since Reilly apparently spent all of his pre-authorial period researching ironmongery and special forces terminology, and zilch on the characteristics of the actual fauna of the Antarctic, baby piranhas are definitely not out of the question.I don't have much in the way of prizes, though. Virtual fist punch?
Ah, sorry 'bout that, Michael. It's a pretty grim bit of outside business where I'm at, too. The sun has run, it's now do-or-dire.The most unbelievable thing is that 1016 people gave this five stars. I mean, I'm no book snob by any means, but come the fuck on...
Chris wrote: "Virtual fist punch? "I'll take it.
great review and fun reading everyone else's comments too
I actually bought Alistair Maclean's "Ice Station Zebra" a long time ago because I heard good things about this one and got the two confused... best mistake I ever made, apparently!
Yeah, Maclean was a master of his genre. I think the first book of his I ever read was HMS Ulysses, and its Barents Sea cat-and-mouse, tense as a looming iceberg, was freaking amazing. You certainly lucked out on that one...
Today's crop of military/espionage fiction writers clearly aren't any match for the previous generations where you could count on them to actually have been in the military and know what they were writing about.
Although I wouldn't know about that, Simon—due to the fact that I haven't read anything in the espionage thriller department more recent than Games of the Hangman by Victor O'Reilly—I have no reason to doubt that you are correct. The postwar cadre of British and American writers penned a slew of top notch material. Le Carré, Deighton, Maclean, Forsyth, Ludlum, Fleming, Follett, just to name those that pop into my head.
There are some newer military fiction writers who actually know their shit, though, Duncan Falconer is probably the first who comes to mind... they're just now the exception rather than the rule.
Unfortunately, I wouldn't know, as that genre hasn't tugged at my reading attention for quite a spell. I'm not sure why, as I've enjoyed all of those authors I mentioned above. Perhaps it's that, with the Cold War over, and the prominent attention-grabber of the day being Islamist Fundamentalist terror, its appeal has been severely diminished. One author I do have on my radar is Alan Furst—espionage in the interwar years of the thirties, and who is supposed to be top notch; a Graham Greene for the new millennium.
It's a good question. I do wonder if the new rivals of NATO like the People's Republic of China or the Russian Federation doing everything they can to avoid a Cold War of the variety that drove the USSR to economic ruin might have something to do with it as well.On the other hand, I think you can still write interesting spy novels about the new and different conflicts, it just requires different genre paradigms.
(by the way, hasn't Le Carré adapted his style pretty well to the post-Soviet era?)
Oh, I agree that the world is still perfectly configured for espionage tales—I just believe that the structure of the Cold War, the assumed professionalism of two differing, world-spanning and -competing ideologies dedicated to refraining from allowing things to escalate unto fully hot status, was so perfectly enabled for that type of fiction that the interregnum we are amidst hasn't found the next equilibrium point.My last Le Carré read was The Night Manager, which, while beautifully written as always, impressed me as the least of his corpus that I'd partaken of. But I should catch up on his most recent—African Aid and International Banking as the motive themes, no?—and see how the old master is tackling the new global environment...
I actually think the "multi-polar" world order forming now would make for more interesting espionage literature than the Cold War did... or at least more morally complex stuff. Like you imply, much of the appeal of Cold War spy fiction comes from the two superpowers being more or less evenly matched.
I don't think I've ever read a review I disagree more with.
I don't think I've ever read a review I disagree more with.And that's fair enough. It's my opinion that Reilly is a dreadful writer, but he's energetic in plot, explosive in action, and to the point in his [highly stereotyped] characters, and that a large number of people like that, and what he writes, is something I get and appreciate. I just can't share it.
Troll...
In this particular instance of reviewing, yes, you could make that case—with the caveat that, were you to have read more of my reviews, you'd soon grasp that trying to provoke inflamed reaction against is, more or less, the very last thing I set out to do. I'm Canadian, for Chrissakes....
I totally disagree with your entire review. Loved this book.
Amazing review. Though what you hated so much I actually loved.
Amazing review. Though what you hated so much I actually loved.
Well... this was the longest single sentence I've ever read in my life. And it is not even ending with a simple period :)Nice thoughts, though. I'll read the book anyway.
Spot on review. Has to read on to see how bad it got and then a submarine was destroyed single handed, stealth plane destroys a bunch of f22s and all the while carrying a civilian piggy back! Total and utter garbage from what could have been an intriguing storyline.
That is such a good synopsis of the 600+ pages I just inflicted on myself.
The best thing about Ice Station is that it made it clearly unnecessary to every read another of Reilly's books...
It was much more enjoyable to read than your illiterate whinging!
This is the worse review I've ever read in my life.
But surely the most accurate, Chuck?
My thoughts exactly, though I threw it on the floor at Chapter 1.5!
This review has convinced me to read this.
What a awful insulting person you are
Great review, actually. I know what the book is and it was ludicrous, escapist nonsense yet - though at times a bit gross - fun. It was like The Hunt for Red October meets Knives Out at Carrie’s house. I think Reilly made the observation you don’t need a special fx budget to write a book. Not every book is a Dostoevsky classic, meet your enemies where they are. And try to enjoy the ride
Maaate what a great review! Would you right a book ? It would be a showstopper. I smelled a rat about this bloke reilly. The herald booklist in Sydney was spewing propaganda about his pulp fiction. Now I know to avoid him like covid
Wow. I mean I didn’t like the book but I think your review is more than exaggerated 😳
