This Guy's Such an Ass He Makes Me Ashamed to Be a Geologist!
Amazon says:
Banes & Noble thinks:
Author: Jack du Brul Title: Havoc Genre: thriller
The willing suspension of disbelief is required in many fictional genres, wherein readers voluntarily ignore their sensibilities in exchange for entertainment. Were this not the case, Ian Fleming would never have published a second Bond thriller, and the Fantasy/SciFi section of libraries would be empty. We know that fictional heroes aren't capable of the godlike physical and mental feats described by their creators. Still, we allow ourselves to briefly inhabit a fantasy world where good guys are bulletproof geniuses with nerves of tantalum and bad guys inevitably pause to gloat before delivering the killing blow, thereby allowing the hero the critical opening. All we ask in return is that the authors create internally consistent stories and transition between truth and fantasy as smoothly as possible. Some authors can do it - some can't. Take the case of Jack Du Brul's Havoc:
Globetrotting geologist Phillip Mercer - simply Mercer to his friends - thought Cali Stowe was a CDC egghead when he met her in the jungle of the Central African Republic. He also thought the lissome redhead had the most kissable lips he'd ever seen... but he digressed. When the two of them stumbled upon a long-abandoned mine complex, Mercer's extrageologicalsensory perception informed him that radioactive elements had been extracted. That was precisely why Cali - actually a NEST (Nuclear Emergency Support Team) agent - was on the scene. They were, however, seventy years too late: the site's native plutonium had been removed by a brilliant scholar of Greek history, and shipped to Albert Einstein's labs at Princeton. It never got there...
With not only a hundred pounds of refined plutonium but also tons of plutonium-bearing ore missing from the site, NEST swung into high gear. Ofcourse terrorists had learned of its existence and were desperately searching for the ore to make dirty bombs. But the missing ore's destructive power paled alongside the potency of the Alembic of Skenderbeg; a mysterious weapon used by Alexander the Great to conquer the known world twenty-four centuries ago.
A classic struggle between good and evil ensued as Mercer and Cali - aided by the frequent dues ex machina intercessions of a mysterious, ancient military order called the Janissaries - fought to keep the missing plutonium (which they found in record time), two caches of unrefined plutonium ore (both of which they found in record time), and the fabled alembic itself (the finding of which - in record time - required location of the tomb of Alexander himself, missing these two-plus millennia) - from falling into the hands of the evil terrorists-to-be. Said Al-Qaeda-trained (of course) zealots were led by the gigantic one-eyed Bulgarian mercenary, Poli Feines - a guy with a bad attitude, to be certain.
As Mercer and company flitted from continent to continent on the multiple radioactive trails, they found their skills as divers, warriors, skydivers, puzzle-solvers, and all-around renaissance masters taxed to the limit. Rest assured, however, that all emerged (mostly) unscathed and that the boy got girl in the end. There - don't you feel better now?
Now, personally, I'm as good as anyone when it comes to suspending my disbelief - I was reading Bond novels back when 007 still smoked (a habit he relinquished in 1989). I've read copious amounts of scifi as well, and even fantasy (before burning out on the ever-longer "-logies" that have become Fantasy's standard fare). Yet Jack Du Brul's Havoc snapped the gargantuan cables by which I suspended disbelief long before reaching the middle of the book. There were simply too many masses of doubt to hang off that belief - and this from a guy who's willing to accept that Bond could ski down an avalanche while dodging missiles fired from a chopper and - upon reaching the fabulous chalet at the base - strip off his camo whites to reveal an unwrinkled, unstained tuxedo.
Simply put, Dr. Phillip Mercer would have to be Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, John Elway, and Evander Holyfield rolled into one to pull off some of those stunts. Sorry, Jack - that's simply pushing it too far.
Granite (not dark) [Dake / wikimedia commons]
I'm not normally one for reading jacket blurbs, but there was one on this book that certainly gave me pause: "Jack Du Brul... writes action that is vivid, clear, and founded on fascinating firsthand research." This came from well-known thriller author John Jakes... need I say more? Okay, I'll say more: as a scientist - and, more to the point, a geologist (Mercer's fictional profession) - let me say that it's been decades since I encountered a "scientific" book with more misstatements than Havoc. Here are a few:
"...the far bank of the river was primarily dark granite while this side contained intrusive basalt..." Basalt is by definition extrusive igneous rock; granites aren't usually "dark," either.
"It reminded Mercer of Lake Powell in Utah where the Columbia River had been penned behind the Glen Canyon Dam." Shouldn't that be the Colorado River?
The tramp steamer bound from Africa with a load of plutonium ore that sank in Lake Erie in 1937? How'd it get to Buffalo, when the St. Lawrence Seaway wasn't completed until 1959?
A character states that gamma rays cannot penetrate skin and that alpha and beta particles are the deadly forms of radiation - oops: alpha particles can't penetrate a piece of paper, but gamma rays will rip through half an inch of lead.
Even given the scientific illiteracy of many Americans, it's a travesty that Du Brul can publish books with so many errors of fact (not to mention a much larger than normal grammatical error count involving apostrophes). Since he also likes to trumpet a rather reactionary view of world politics, it's likewise a shame that he can use his fiction as a bully pulpit for ideas that are as ill-researched as his science.
Overall? fiction aimed at hormonal teenage boys, Havoc ends up giving them an education in bad science and bumper-sticker politics. Give this one a wide berth.