Pictures at 11

by Norman Spinrad

Overview

It's just another sleazy, smoggy day at KLAX: But today is anything but normal. Green Army Commandos is what they call themselves. They're violent ecoterrorists, they're armed to the teeth, and they haven't just taken over the station - they're hijacking the news itself. The Bad News Is they've wired themselves and the station with enough high explosives to blow a significant hole in the planet they're trying to save - and they're ready to do it unless their entirely impossible demands are met. The Good News Is the KLAX Action News Team has an exclusive on the most explosive story of the decade - their own kidnapping - and the ratings are going through the roof.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780575117303
Publisher:	Orion
Publication date:	02/18/2013
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
File size:	789 KB

About the Author

Norman Spinrad (1940 - )Norman Richard Spinrad was born in New York City in 1940. He began publishing science fiction in 1963 and has been an important, if sometimes controversial, figure in the genre ever since. He was a regular contributor to New Worlds magazine and, ironically, the cause of its banning by W H Smith, which objected to the violence and profanity in his serialised novel Bug Jack Barron. Spinrad's work has never shied away from the confrontational, be it casting Hitler as a spiteful pulp novelist or satirising the Church of Scientology. In addition to his SF novels, he has written non-fiction, edited anthologies and contributed a screenplay to the second season of Star Trek. In 2003, Norman Spinrad was awarded the Prix Utopia, a life achievement award given by the Utopiales International Festival in Frances, where he now lives.

Editorial Reviews

The Green Army Commandos, an ecoterrorist group hoping to save the earth, take over a mediocre Los Angeles television station in an attempt to stop the funding of an offshore nuclear desalinization plant. If their demands are not met, they will detonate the plutonium they are carrying in their vests. After several bizarre events, the hostages help manipulate network executives and government officials into agreeing with the Green Army's demands, which in turn creates high ratings for the station. Spinrad (Russian Spring, Bantam, 1992) gives this novel the impersonal and superficial look of a television news broadcast. Using only dialog and interaction between hostages and captors and the outside world, his story develops without a sense of plot, character development, or suspense. After a disjointed first half, the plot begins to take off, but by then it is too late. Not an essential purchase.-Jo Ann Vicarel, Cleveland Heights-University Heights P.L., Ohio

Library Journal

Spinrad has taken what should have been a tired and hackneyed plot, that of ecological terrorists taking a Los Angeles TV station hostage in order to publicize their message, and applied to it enough twists to make it look like the path of a mongoose on crack. Crisis follows crescendo follows climax as the usually sure, formulaic ground of a thriller is shaken like a California quake. Along the way, Spinrad gets beyond the cliched faces of his characters and even beyond the conventionally unconventional faces behind them. The characters turn into real people, able to carry the action where it's going. Spinrad has shown his mastery of this genre as well as his preferred haunts along its edges yet again.

Dennis Winters