Imagen del autor

Dean Ing (1931–2020)

Autor de Systemic Shock

33+ Obras 2,205 Miembros 27 Reseñas 3 Preferidas

Sobre El Autor

Incluye el nombre: Dean Ing

Créditos de la imagen: Earlier photograph of the author

Series

Obras de Dean Ing

Systemic Shock (1981) 197 copias
Single Combat (1983) 178 copias
The Houses of the Kzinti (2002) 134 copias
The Big Lifters (1988) 131 copias
Cathouse (1990) 128 copias
Wild Country (1993) 123 copias
Firefight 2000 (1987) 122 copias
Anasazi (1980) 115 copias
Spooker (1995) 105 copias
Pulling Through (1600) 102 copias
Soft Targets (1979) 79 copias
Butcher Bird (1993) 77 copias
The Nemesis Mission (1750) 75 copias
Flying To Pieces (1997) 71 copias
Silent Thunder/Universe (1991) — Contribuidor — 68 copias
Eternity (1984) 51 copias
Loose Cannon (2000) 48 copias
Blood of Eagles (1987) 45 copias
The Rackham Files (2004) 38 copias
High Tension (1982) 38 copias
The Skins of Dead Men (1998) 36 copias
Chernobyl Syndrome (1988) 18 copias
It's Up to Charlie Hardin (2015) 13 copias
Silent Thunder [novella] (1991) 6 copias
Fleas 3 copias
Portions of This Program (1977) 2 copias

Obras relacionadas

Man-Kzin Wars (1988) — Contribuidor — 1,306 copias
Man-Kzin Wars II (1989) — Contribuidor — 795 copias
The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF (1994) — Contribuidor — 392 copias
The Magic May Return (1981) — Autor — 348 copias
The Best Science Fiction of the Year #8 (1979) — Contribuidor — 197 copias
Combat (2001) — Contribuidor — 153 copias
Serve It Forth: Cooking with Anne McCaffrey (1996) — Contribuidor — 142 copias
Tomorrow Sucks (1994) — Contribuidor — 109 copias
The Best Science Fiction of the Year #9 (1980) — Contribuidor — 105 copias
Armageddon (1990) — Contribuidor — 98 copias
New Destinies, Volume 7, Spring 1989 (1989) — Contribuidor — 97 copias
Thor's Hammer (1979) — Contribuidor — 92 copias
The First Omni Book of Science Fiction (1983) — Contribuidor — 91 copias
Visions of Wonder (1996) — Contribuidor — 89 copias
Combat, Vol. 2 (2002) — Contribuidor — 85 copias
Victory (2003) — Contribuidor — 83 copias
The Best of All Possible Worlds (1980) — Contribuidor — 81 copias
Deathwish World (1986) — Contribuidor — 80 copias
The Endless Frontier: Volume II (1982) — Contribuidor — 79 copias
Orion's Sword (1980) — Contribuidor — 69 copias
New Destinies, Volume 8, Fall 1989 (1989) — Contribuidor — 61 copias
Song of the Turtle: American Indian Literature 1974-1994 (1996) — Contribuidor — 60 copias
TV:2000 (1982) — Contribuidor — 50 copias
Analog Annual (1976) — Contribuidor — 50 copias
Victory: On the Attack (2004) — Contribuidor — 46 copias
Astounding Science Fiction 1955 02 (1955) — Contribuidor — 13 copias

Etiquetado

Conocimiento común

Nombre legal
Ing, Dean Charles
Fecha de nacimiento
1931-06-17
Fecha de fallecimiento
2020-07-21
Género
male
Nacionalidad
USA
Lugar de nacimiento
Austin, Texas, USA
Lugar de fallecimiento
Ashland, Oregon, USA
Ocupaciones
professor
aerospace engineer
Organizaciones
Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America

Miembros

Debates

Sci-fi short story: Comic lampoons terrorists en Name that Book (noviembre 2015)

Reseñas

A fun action book, not a lot of depth. Passable but nothing great.
 
Denunciada
keithostertag | otra reseña | Jun 11, 2023 |
The last novel in Ing’s Ted Quantrill trilogy is sort of a western.

Most of it is set in Texas on the border with Atlan Mexico with some brief excursions to Oregon (Ing lived in both Texas and Oregon) and Norman, Oklahoma. There are bar room fights, chases on hovercycles instead of with horses, a poor woman who doesn’t want to sell her spread to a rich landowner, and final showdown between two gunslingers.

And we have the old cliché of the gunfighter who may be running out of time as his reflexes slow, and he still faces men gunning for him.

The gunfighter is Ted Quantrill, now a deputy U.S. Marshall in the Wild Country. President Young’s administration ended after the events of the preceding book, Single Combat. Street, the leader of the resistance, is now Attorney General in the new administration though he mostly operates out of Alice, Texas. (Not, as I can tell you from visiting it, a major urban area.)

Being a deputy doesn’t pay that well, so Quantrill also works part time for Marrows, a former bull rider turned veterinarian. He tells Quantrill that one day he will get a “sign” that he’s not up to his marshall job just like Marrows got a sign when a bull mauled him.

And Sandy Grange isn’t going to marry her long-time sweetheart Ted until he quits being a marshall. Lufo aka Sabado steps out of his relationship with Quantrill figuring he owes Ted since it was Sabado that recruited him to be a forced government assassin.

And we’ve got a band of outlaws running drugs from Mexico into Reconstruction America. They have ties with Jur Garner, member of the rich Garner family that wants Sandy’s ranch. And Jur wants Sandy too.

The lead trafficker is Sorel, a formidable man with the reflexes of an international soccer star, intelligence, and trained in tradecraft by Cuban intelligence. He hates America and loves his rich lifestyle.

One of the three great gunfights in the book occurs in Oregon when Sorel meets with New Israelis from their L-5 colony and is presented with a complex scheme to curtail worldwide opium production to put pressure on the uppity Turks whom the Israelis lease land from for their launch facilities

It’s here Ing does a bit of paring on the cast of characters with Boren Mills from the previous novels. Mills did a “vesco” after the last book and joined the New Israelis. As Ing disdainfully says when Mills is killed, “Like many an intellectual before him, Mills assumed he needed no lethal hardware.”

But Ing’s plotting is very pixallated indeed in this novel.

Using a plot device he would later use in The Ransom of Black Stealth One and Spooker, there’s a mole, here working for Sorel in Street’s organization. His identity is revealed at the end, and Ing makes what could be cheap device work.

And there’s a bit of sexual kink here as in Ing’s Soft Targets and Spooker. Sandy and Ted play a hooker-and-John game, and Ing’s humor doesn’t quite work in it. Sorel is bisexual. Nothing, however, is as strange as Eve Simpson’s mad attempt to mate with Baal the boar in Single Combat.

And, speaking of Baal, a military officer from England visits Wild Land Safari, where Marrows works, and decides he wants to hunt Baal the old-fashioned way: lance and horse.

The showdown between Quantrill and Sorel occurs in the ruins of London during the Blitz – or at least the part of a new amusement park that recreates it. One part of the park is dedicated to the Old West and reminiscent of the Michael Crichton movie Westworld right down to android gunfighters. One is even based on Ted. (He did get royalties.)

But that’s not the end of strangeness. The final page of the book is titled “After Games” and has several short paragraphs. They are not so much epilogues to the characters’ lives as either notes for a never done sequel or an invitation to fanfic.

And, in this novel, we get both maps and engineering diagrams. The tech of this 2006 has holovision, microfiche maps in cars, and Sandy has finally revealed she has a working prototype of a matter synthesizer.

Finally, and I haven’t seen anybody else mention this, this novel ties in with the Ing short story “Malf” from 1976. Its narrator, Kevin Ames, is the man who races the injured Marianne (who worked with Sorel as did her corrupt judge father) to the hospital after Sorel leaves for dead. It’s clearly Ames since we are told of his past experiences which match the plot of “Malf”, and we also get a passing reference to machines similar to the ones central to the plot of “Malf”.
… (más)
 
Denunciada
RandyStafford | Sep 27, 2020 |
The world has settled down in the second book of Ing’s Ted Quantrill trilogy. The Fourth World War ended about five years ago. Nations are picking up the pieces. Technology has advanced. There are even plans for New Israel – now on leased land in Turkey – to build L-5 colonies.

Ted Quantrill is no longer a teenager trying to survive and find a place in a post-holocaust world. He’s found his place. It’s killing people for the government.

The secret group of assassins, called T Section, he works for is at the center of the book. It hides behind the cover of Streamlined America’s Search and Rescue organization which goes out and helps people in the still devastated areas of the country. From Systemic Shock, there’s Sabado, the unarmed combat instructor who recruited Quantrill out of the Army; Seth Howell, political instructor; Marty Cross, an expert at covert pursuit; and, Mason Reardon, a master at surveillance. Most importantly, there is Marbrye Sanger, the first trainee Quantrill met, and the two have a relationship. It’s sexual with much unsaid because things can’t be carried further when your every conversation is monitored, and, if your lover goes rogue, they’ll end up dead – maybe at your hand. Any intimate discussion or thoughts of rebellion has to be in notes and sign language.

But, at a T Section briefing, Quantrill learns that resistance to President Young’s Streamlined America has gone beyond guerilla actions into a more organized phase. There are even rumors some T Section members have gone rogue. Perhaps, he thinks, the regime can be changed after all.

And, when it’s discovered Quantrill has faked the assassination of a labor organizer, the elite team of Cross, Howell, and Sanger set out to bring Quantrill in for questioning and execution.

That leads to one of two very good extended pieces of combat and chase in the novel. (An excerpt from it in Survive magazine was my first exposure to Ing.)

This being Ing, though, there’s a lot of other stuff going on.

Boren Mills, the treacherous naval officer of the first book, is now one of the most important men in Streamlined America, head of the Federal Broadcasting Network and chairman of the entertainment and industrial conglomerate IEE. Mills skills at media manipulation and his claim that he has a new process for extracting raw materials from seawater have won him a place at the highest councils of government. But he’s really hiding a bit of very high tech he retrieved from a Chinese mini-sub during the war (and killed to keep secret): a matter synthesizer. That part of the plot eventually involves Sandy Grange and her giant boar protector Baal by way of Eve Simpson in a truly bizarre bit of plotting.

No longer a very attractive teenager but a bloated woman resorting to drugging men for her sexual appetites, Simpson still is cunning and an expert in media manipulation and knows the secrets of her one-time lover Mills. That includes the covert lab where Mills has blackmailed scientists trying to copy and scale up his Chinese tech.

And we get a lot on the resistance forming around Texas Governor Street with its own media being beamed into Streamlined America from the Wild Country on the Atlan Mexico border.

Ing the engineer is on display here with several spec sheets and drawings of various future tech: exotic aircraft, a hovercycle, and the chiller – the special sidearm of the T Section.

And Ing also give us, in a few asides, perceptive glimpses at how power politics works and how bureaucracies can sabotage their putative leaders.
… (más)
 
Denunciada
RandyStafford | otra reseña | Sep 26, 2020 |
As Spider Robinson once noted in a review of a Ing work, he’s something of a moral writer. And there’s no doubt about the main moral of this story. It’s right there on the front page quote in the original Ace paperback:

“Governments across the globe ducked for cover. Long-drilled and partly prepared, millions of RUS urbanites sealed themselves into subway tunnels, then slid blast-and-firestorm-proof hatches into place to ride out the blast-furnace interval. Most Americans were asleep, and in any case had only the sketchiest notion of adequate shelter. A few city dwellers – the smaller the city, the better their chances – sped beyond their suburbs before freeway arterials became clots of blood and machinery.

“The American public had by turns ignored and ridiculed its Cassandras, who had warned against our increasing tendency to crowd into our cities. We had always found some solution to our problems, often at the last minute. Firmly anchored in most Americans was the tacit certainty that, even to the problem of nuclear war against population centers, there must be a uniquely American solution; we would find it.

“The solution was sudden death. A hundred million Americans found it.”

But this isn’t a Third World War fought with nukes. It’s the Fourth World War fought with nukes.

This is a geopolitical sequel of sorts to a popular book of the late 1970s: Sir John Hackett’s The Third World War: August 1985 which pitted NATO against the USSR and memorably culminated in a the nuking of Birmingham, UK and Minsk, USSR in a chapter which I. F. Clarke’s Voices Prophesying War considered the ultimate point in the evolution of the future war story. It’s not necessary to read Hackett’s book before Ing’s.

But, in August 1996, it’s the Sino-Ind alliance versus the Allies which include Russia and the United States.

Our hero is Ted Quantrill, fifteen years old when the novel starts. If the name Quantrill sounds familiar, it was the surname of infamous Confederate guerilla leader William Quantrill who led a massacre of civilians in Lawrence, Kansas during the American Civil War. It’s an entirely appropriate name given that Ted will become a killer in this series, including a killer of innocents. (Ing seems to like surnames with associations. The eponymous protagonist of his last novel, It’s Up to Charlie Hardin shares a surname with gunfighter John Wesley Hardin.)

Quantrill is out on a scouting trip when war breaks out, but it isn’t just the war that molds the man he’ll become. His education on the way the world works starts out with a dispute among the Boy Scouts which Ing explicitly presents as sort of a smaller version of the global conflict about to let loose. Intervening to help a friend being bullied by older scouts, Ted learns those in charge aren’t always interested in learning the truth, that the weak invite bullying, and gratitude isn’t to be expected.

We also, in a fight Ted has with those bullies, learn that he is what we might term a sociopath today though Ing doesn’t use the term. He’s calm in combat, strong, able to analyze tactical options quickly, and has what will later be called “gunsel” reflexes or, as the horrified scout leader notes, “all wire and ice-water”.

But his killing doesn’t start until later after he meets a woman fleeing from the paraanthrax already loose on the Eastern Seaboard. He helps her evade checkpoints and ambushes on the road as they flee from near Raleigh, North Carolina to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory where she works and lives part time. It’s with her he’ll have his first sexual experience. And, to avenge her death at the hands of the survivalists that have taken over the facility, he first kills.

The novel follows his journey from Tennessee to Texas and his joining the army of the new “Streamlined America”, the new name of a country that has lost everything east of the Mississippi to bioweapon plagues, some of its northern tier states to a Canadian protectorate, and some of its southern lands to Alta Mexico. His talents are recognized as too valuable to waste as cannon fodder in an invasion of China. He’s recruited into an elite intelligence unit that is, in effect, a hit squad operating under the cover of the government’s Search and Rescue organization. In the words of its head, it will “need to search out treason and rescue the system”.

Streamlined America is, in effect, a Mormon theocracy since Mormons, given their teachings on self-reliance and building communities, survived the war best. Some of Quantrill’s targets are dissident Mormons.

And lest any of the agents of the T (as in “terminate”) section of Search and Rescue get any qualms or ideas about defecting, there’s the “critic”, an explosive mastoid implant in all its agents that overhears all their conversations, provides real time advice, monitors their vital signs, and can be detonated remotely.

This being Ing, the plotting of the trilogy is strange, but it’s fairly standard in this book.

Quantrill intersects with several other characters who will play parts in the following books. Nine-year-old Sandy and her strange protector -- a huge, fiendishly clever Russian boar named Baal tended by her father who worked at an agricultural research station before dying from radiation -- have their parts to play. Like Quantrill, Banton Mills is a sociopath though with no great physical gifts. A US Navy officer, he’s not above betraying his country for personal gain no matter how many people die. There’s Eve Simpson, a very attractive teenager and nymphomaniac who, like Mills, happens to be an expert in media manipulation. And, of course, there are the other agents, leaders, and trainers of T-Section.

But Ing doesn’t just focus on the personal stories. There are several wide-screen chapters about the war around the world with individual set pieces including an old P-43 of the Confederate Air Force tangling with a modern Indian fighter above the skies of San Marcos, Texas.

It’s interesting to see, from the perspective of 1981, what geopolitical and technological developments thought plausible by Ing, a high tech enthusiast and engineer, in 1996

I’ve read most of Ing’s novels, and this is my favorite despite its dated aspect. I’ve read it at least twice, maybe three times, and I rarely re-read novels.

The Fourth World War is mostly over by 1997, and Ted Quantrill has begun his career as a government assassin. It will continue in the next book, Single Combat.
… (más)
 
Denunciada
RandyStafford | Sep 24, 2020 |

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Estadísticas

Obras
33
También por
30
Miembros
2,205
Popularidad
#11,631
Valoración
½ 3.6
Reseñas
27
ISBNs
64
Idiomas
3
Favorito
3

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