C'è chi per combinare un'invasione ha bisogno di macchine e congegni inauditi, di mostri extraterrestri, di forze soprannaturali, di arsenali terrificanti. Irwin Lewis, un autore nuovo, originale e spiritoso, sostiene in questo brillante romanzo (già acquistato dalla televisione americana) che si possono ottenere gli stessi effetti catastrofici e spettacolari con mezzi molto più modesti, addirittura banali. Una grande metropoli moderna ha già in sé, come ognuno di noi sa bene, i veleni capaci di basta una piccola spinta, ..
Un professore di storia antica che ama leggere viene coinvolto in una sorta di complotto dove la città di New York rischia di essere paralizzata da dei "comunisti" ribelli che stanno fabbricando dei gettoni falsi della metropolitana e stanno sincronizzando tutti i semafori della metropoli per causare una sola cosa: un caos terrificante che potrebbe portare tutti quanti al collasso.
Ad un certo punto della lettura mi sono chiesto: non è che questo professore si è fumato qualcosa di forte e ha immaginato tutto quanto? Probabile. Peccato, lo stile di scrittura dell'autore un po' riesce a catturarti, ma ti rendi conto che alla fine è tutto fumo e niente arrosto.
I purchased this book because it stated above the title "A terrifying science fiction novel by IRWIN LEWIS." I was expecting a pulp sci-fi tale about creatures invading New York, instead I got a novel about Communists bringing New York to its knees by knocking out all the traffic lights at once and jamming up the subways through faulty tokens. That's right, subway tokens became a plot point.
What a letdown!
The protagonist is a college professor who is so into his subject of ancient Rome that he knows nothing of modern life. He reads for leisure, that's it. No movies, no radio, no television, no social interactions with anyone. He has a cat, but even this pet is barely in the book. He should have been the perfect everyman to be caught up in this sinister plot, but he became so boring with grandiose vocabulary I felt it was too forced. The agent he meets with is a short man calling himself Rumplestein, who refers to the villains as "them." Those are the villains of this book--"them." Having such a generic unnameable foe made this pronoun slinging sad.
This wasn't even enjoyable from a badly written point of view.
It wasn't what I thought it would be, nor was it fun. At least is was only 160 pages, so it was a quick read.
This is another of those older sci fi novels. It also seemed somewhat overly simplistic. Too many characters spent too much time saying, "No! It could never happen!" while all around them... it was happening. But I liked the bumbling idiot of a main character (who had a sweet cat named Winnie). He was a good antihero.
It seems unfair and insulting to the genre to call this "science fiction." The plot is dry and the protagonist is boring; there's little to be salvaged from the writing. A book so horrible it hardly warrants a review whatsoever.