Literature Too over-the-top for my tastes
(Review of the first book)
This is a book in which a man - who happens to be a brilliant scientist, fluent in many languages, have rippling muscles that Schwarzenegger would be jealous of, and has a massive laboratory, his own private jet and Cool Car, and the police happily ignoring all his traffic violations - throws his son out of a window while armed with climbing equipment and tells him to go catch an alien frog and bring it back for study. And the reason he did that? His son wanted to go. He argued with his sister that it was his turn.
It only gets more absurd from there.
Basically, this is a parody of Doc Savage, but with Tagalong Kids added. If Doc Savage was "raised from birth to be the pinnacle of human physical and mental achievement", then Doc Wilde is even more so, and is raising his kids the same way. 10-year-old Wren quotes books back and forth with one of Doc's friends, then drops everything to help her dad and brother fight off mutant frog men. The gadgets the family owns are simply insane: 12-year-old Brian looks for a missing companion and wears shoes that automatically eject "crumbs" that give off powerful ultraviolet light that can only be seen with a special visor... that Doc has, of course. The survival skills shown are outrageous. Wren gets lost in a pitch black cave, so she uses echolocation - that's right - to find her way around, making clicking noises in her throat and then determining where everything is based on them.
To put it another way - if Doc Savage can be considered over-the-top, then Doc Wilde somehow tops even that.
This is not the type of book to read if you're looking for a straight adventure with genuinely exciting suspense and threats and action. Instead, every single aspect of the pulp adventure has been ratcheted Up To Eleven. The sheer hyperbole of how smart, how skilled, how Crazy Prepared and just how -everything- the characters are is just impossible to parody. It's like trying to parody a Bad Ass by creating a Badder Ass. Eventually, how can you?
Unfortunately, the sheer ridiculousness - albeit intended for humor - of it all brings up the adage that "if anything can happen, then nothing is interesting." And sadly, that's just how I feel about this book.
Literature A Smart Pulp Adventure For All Ages!
Tim Byrd's "Doc Wilde" book is a great pastiche that outgrew pastiche. In ways it outgrew the material that inspired it. I love all the old Doc Savage stories, but Byrd captures the things that make those stories awesome but adds characters that seem more realistic (or at least more human), and writes better than Lester Dent ever did. That might not be fair though since Byrd benefits from a much longer writing/editing cycle than Dent, who had to write one of these a month.
The villains are clever sendups of the creatures in Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth." I enjoy Lovecraft, but I'm no scholar of his work. I enjoyed Byrd's playful reworking of Lovecraft's tropes. Oddly, in spite of the lack of nihilism and the overall optimistic feel of the story, the creatures in still manage to be surprisingly scary.
The book is full of pulp allusions that any pulp fan will enjoy. I really liked how Byrd took tropes not only from Doc Savage stories but all sorts of other tales and seamlessly wove them into a story that zips along at lightning speed. He also took tropes and made them his own. For instance, in the old Doc Savage stories, Doc had a weird tic in which he made a strange "trilling" sound when he was excited. It's an odd and, I've always thought, stupid feature of the stories that I always thought shouldn't have been there. There's a scene in Byrd's book, however, that uses that "trilling" in a way that makes complete sense in the world of Doc Wilde, and offers a reasonable explanation for what that trilling sound actually is. It's very cool.
Byrd also manages to not only fill the book with literary allusions (without slowing its runaway train pace), he works in some amazing science, ranging from Doc Wilde's reasons for using an autogyro rather than a plane or helicopter, to humans using echolocation like bats or dolphins (which seems impossible, but if you do a bit of research on the topic "Human Echolocation" you'll find it's fascinatingly real).
Tim Byrd's book definitely needs to be read by anyone who loves pulp adventures. It's sold as a kids' book but I enjoyed it as much as any "grown up" pulp adventure I've read in years, and a good deal more than most. It's smart and witty and fun. I'm looking forward to the next one.