I grabbed Johnny Rockett and the Beautiful Six completely on a whim because I saw it was being offered for free on Amazon, and I have to say, it was a pretty solid little pulp adventure. You can kind of think of Johnny Rockett as a Han Solo type rogue, who gets involved quickly with the wrong sort of people, and then things inevitably escalate from there. He has problems with his sort of girlfriend, problems with the crew of high heeled vixens that hire his freighting services, and even more problems with the crime lord husband of those vixens who the vixens are planning to assassinate. All in all, it’s everything you hope for from a space adventure.
K. R. McClellan writes with a quick, easy style that is liberally splattered with one liners and smart ass remarks. This isn’t the kind of book that endeavors to make grand comments on the human condition, which is fine. This book seeks only to entertain, and it does a darn good job of it. I found it a lot easier to carry on through the end of this book than I have while reading the celebrated works of more famous authors. Actually, there are a lot of books out there which basically beg for you to give up on them before the end, so it’s fun to find one that’s a pleasure to finish.
Really, having said that Johnny Rockett is Han Solo-ish pretty much sums it up. If I had to quibble, I’d probably say that Rockett feels a bit younger and less self assured. The book starts on a truck stop on Earth and then has some nice space portal scenes with effective enough technobabble involving passing through “gates” etc. What I liked about these sequences was that they passed along quickly, as McClellan seems to be aware that this sort of thing is just table garnish in a Sci-fi book, and doesn’t need to be elaborated on. If we wanted boring tech speak that didn’t go anywhere, we’d have picked up Kim Stanley Robinson.
Things get more interesting when Rockett and his constantly flirtatious band of high heeled passengers land on a world inhabited by massive flying whale/fish called wargons that are the subject of futuristic Nantucket dirigible harpooning. Circumstances eventually conspire to get Rockett out hunting these deadly flying beasts, and there are several glorious battles involving people plunging to their deaths, people being burned alive, people being eaten, and people being shot. There’s also a cat that blasts noxious fumes so terrible it makes people vomit.
This is the kind of book I like to stumble upon as you can probably tell from my interview with Keystroke Medium. Give it a look if you value supporting the works of independent authors who are better than you think they are… or if you’re just tired of major corporations putting out garbage. But don’t take my word for it, have a look at the sample chapter below:
