Third Innings for Space Captain Smith! (Wrath of the Lemming-men - Toby Frost)

Member Name: andrewl

Product:	Wrath of the Lemming-men - Toby Frost
Date:	03/07/09 (53 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Top-notch romp with ripping characterisation!

Disadvantages: It's all over too bally soon...

The dread armies of Lemming Men of Yull are marching to conquer and enslave the galaxy! Only the British Empire can hope to stand against the combined strength of the insane rodents and the vile forces of Gertie Ghast! The John Pym, crewed by the heroic Space Captain Isambard Smith, his confused M'Lak warrior friend Suruk the Slayer and reprogrammed sex android Polly Carveth, is entrusted with a top secret mission in order to preserve the balance of power in the galaxy and save the beseiged forces of New Luton!

Wrath of the Lemming Men is the third novel about Space Captain Smith, and sees the line still growing in confidence after hitting its stride with the previous God Emperor of Didcot. This is pulp science-fiction with lashings of humour, tea and tiffin, and a staggering body count.

Pastiche is not an easy genre in which to spin out three novels, and it's a credit to Frost that Smith is still a solid and likeable character. With the bearing of Flashman and the bravery of Sharpe, but with a cabin full of Airfix models of spaceships, Smith is effortlessly entertaining without ever being too boorish. His general philosophy that Girls Spoil Everything is straight from primary school and his tireless enthusiasm for 'blasting the crap out of aliens' is constantly amusing.

Suruk the Slayer, an asexual war-obsessed Morlock who gets all the best lines, gets the bulk of the characterisation work this time round, called upon to avenge his father's death and to get a proper job. His straightforward approach to 'corporate headhunting' provides most of the book's body count.

Rhianna, Smith's love interest and a hippy from New Francisco, is probably the most sketchily described of all the characters, comprised mostly of jokes about New Age philosophy. But as she's apparently the product of a 'stoned shag' between her mother and a psychic ghost, perhaps this is just as well.

In terms of the writing, Frost's third novel is as funny as the other two, but things seem to have settled down a bit, with less of the jarring leaps of point of view that I found distracting in the first two novels. The plot is a little tighter and the jokes don't disrupt the narrative. References and in-jokes abound though - the following are just some of the films and books receiving little nods:

Star Wars
Doctor Who
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Alien
Mansfield Park
Watership Down
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
The Invisible Man
Blade Runner / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
War of the Worlds

And of course, the computer game of Lemmings... Some of the allusions are more subtle than others, but it's all excellent stuff.

While God Emperor of Didcot parodied the Dune novels, Wrath of the Lemming Men seems to have Star Wars in its sights. We have a cantina scene, and the rather marvellous George Benson, who doesn't quite get enough to do. The climactic battle scenes owe more than a little to certain moments in The Empire Strikes Back, but still with plenty of Frost's own ideas to make sure that this is a novel in its own right, rather than a mere parody.

Possibly my favourite bit was right at the beginning of the book, where Smith squares up to an unmistakable parody of the BNP. Having an openly imperialistic, patriotic Brit as a hero was always going to invite tiresome speculation about nationalist politics, but Frost forestalls this with the fascists whining about how immigration has squeezed British workers out of the 'raw sewage handling industry'.

Sadly, there is a sense of loose ends being tied up in this third installment of the adventures of Space Captain Smith. Although room is clearly being left for a fourth novel, I suspect this will be the last we'll be seeing of Isambard for a while.

Wrath of the Lemming Men was published a couple of weeks ago, and although it encountered a few distribution problems, it should now be available from all good bookshops. Its cover price is £7.99, but it's obviously available for less online. Thoroughly recommended, as are the first two books in the series.

Summary: An entertaining third outing for Captain Isambard Smith and the crew of the John Pym