TED ROCKSON: ULTIMATE AMERICAN (Barbarian Snark #6)

[Maithanet]

Hmmm. That's not exactly unambiguous. It sounds rather like the vote in CC did not approve his plan quite as enthusiastically as we'd been led to believe, but he's going ahead with it anyway. I do love how the narrative makes all these noises about Yay Democracy! and how it's So Very Important that the military is under the direction of a civilian administration, and yet cheers Rock on every time he grumbles about ivory-tower pen-pushers and (as in this case) completely disregards his instructions and launches his own unauthorised military campaigns anyway.

I can only hope that Rath follows standard American protocol for whenever a military leader starts to encroach on civilian authority: threatens him with execution for treason and then quietly puts him out to pasture in a post with no real authority. Up Next: Ted Rockson is promoted to command the entire Pacific Fleet! As USPACOM, Rockson will be working primarily from his new office in Hawaii.

Earlier this chapter he was reading complicated Russian documents about their communications strategies!

Now now, don't be hasty. It's possible those captured Russian documents were in English.

Is Stacy running through all the cultures in the world (that he can remember, at least)?

If so, what's the next thing going to be? I vaguely remember some ninjas in an earlier book, but at least a bunch of samurai would just be awesome. Or the French Foreign Legion. Stacy's take on France is bound to be unique.

Stacy is absolutely running through all the cultures he remembers, and it's really surprising that Sikh made the cut. Maybe Stacy met one in real life?

The Ninjas were actually generic martial artists, so that indicates that something cool like Shaolin Monks or Samurai are probably out, unless there are a few Samurai who retired to Sweden that Stacy might run into. Regardless, I think that the chance that the French are portrayed as any sort of organized fighting force is highly unlikely. If we see the French, they'll likely be a traveling band of artists who all hide pistols within their paintbrushes or something. I'm still holding out for the British. Whether friend or foe, that's gotta be some good material for Stacy to mine.

[Vampire Squid]

Words fail me. Is Stacy running through all the cultures in the world (that he can remember, at least)?

If so, what's the next thing going to be?

Have we had Aztecs yet? That seems the sort of thing Stacy couldn't bear to pass up.

[MisterOJ]

I've enjoyed these threads a lot.

It may have been mentioned before, but I just found a blog that is dedicated to these type of books and even has reviews of a few of the Ted Rockson books.

[lacuna]

:commie: PROMISES ARE BEING DOUBLE UNKEPT! :commie:

Triple, I say!

[MinDonner]

Fine, fine! I shall drag myself away from the Xbox for long enough to do another update then. Minecraft, it's one hell of a drug.

Chapter Eleven opens with the words that you'd really expect to hear more often, given what we know about the myriad challenges of the terrain:

"We'll have to go around it," Ted Rockson said...

"It", in this case, is neither a beautiful deadly tree-filled meadow, nor a plain of snakes, nor a cannibal camp or octopus-crevasse or any of the other hazards that they've so blithely tried to stroll through in times gone by. It's merely a mile-wide A-Bomb crater, which is but half the size of the one that EIsenhower negotiated without difficulty. Maybe those terribly scary snakes have made him extra cautious, or he's finally learning that maybe avoiding unnecessary peril might be a good idea if he has any care for his mission or his men... but more likely this is just an excuse by the author to dump him into yet another kind of peril. Rockson, you really suck at navigating.

Kim and Rona continue to bicker, with Kim getting the upper hand as she manages to hit on Rona's insecurities about being ten years older than her rival. Hah, take that, Stacy's imaginary girlfriend! If you don't start appreciating him then he'll leave you for a younger model! And then Rock tells them to shut up cos they are in avalanche country now and no-one needs to hear them clucking like two mad hens in a barnyard.

Riding along "about a hundred feet from the base of the crater" (so I guess that "going around it" plan has been forgotten about already?), Rockson is overcome with a sensation of dread and doom. He can feel the souls of all those who died in the blast! And I swear I am not making this next passage up.

If atoms can cry, then the Doomsday Warrior heard their moans, felt their invisible tears waft down the slopes in waves of drifting blue fog.

He vows that if President Langford ever takes over the country, his first act will be to lobby for all the craters to be filled in as the number one priority. No wonder the denizens of CC are happy to let him spend most of his time out in the wilderness rather than getting involved with actual politics.

Anyway, they pass by the dark slopes bursting with lost souls glued forever to this one spot, but Rockson still feels uneasy, and his mutant psi-instinct makes him leap off Snorter's back and press his ear to the ground. This tells us not very much.

"I don't know exactly what it is, but something bad is about to happen."

This not very useful insight, which in any case is true for 90% of the time when something bad is not already happening, is nonetheless specific enough for him to yell "Let's get the hell out of here!" and spur the 'brids into a gallop to escape from an as-yet-undefined peril. And not a moment too soon! Could it be an earthquake?

He waited for the cracks to begin opening in the flesh of the planet; for the men, the animals around him to disappear, screaming their way thousands of feet down into a consuming darkness.

Cos that's what happens in earthquakes. At least the ones that don't release giant octopoids into the overworld. And I think Stacy had a rare moment of deja vu at this point, suddenly realising that we've done earthquakes so it's time to up the ante:

Suddenly the ground beneath them seemed to convulse several times as if the earth itself was about to vomit and an explosion of rock and red lava shot a thousand feet into the air from the crater next to them.

Well, as they were only 100 feet away, I guess our Rock Squad are toast. Or at least that would be the case, if Mr Stacy hadn't learned all his geology from cartoons. There's no urgency to it at all; instead of running like fuck, now they all slow down and take the time to rope themselves together so that no-one gets lost in the "clouds of spewing gas and particles" which now envelop them.

. Good luck with your ropes, lads!

[Lummel]

Huzzah! Lets fill in all the craters! :laugh:

[Antonius Pius]

Reminds me of Tairy and his "As Lord Rahl I'm going to cure poison fruit" or "It's time to outlaw fire". :bowdown:

[lacuna]

First: Yay, we're back!

Second:

"We'll have to go around it," Ted Rockson said...

"Riding along about a hundred feet from the base of the crater"

Seriously? How far apart are these two sentences?

[Vampire Squid]

If atoms can cry, then the Doomsday Warrior heard their moans, felt their invisible tears waft down the slopes in waves of drifting blue fog.

This is beautiful. Could we start a religion around this sentence?

Also, he decides to bury all these poor lost souls under tonnes of rock and concrete for eternity. What mercy!

[Jon AS]

More Rockson! Fantastic!

I think Stacy had a rare moment of deja vu at this point

I find this a troubling notion. What if he actually does become aware of his own writing flaws at some point and as a result tries to improve the quality of his writing? Won't that kill these threads? Or can we safely assume that this is as good as he's ever going to get?

This is beautiful. Could we start a religion around this sentence?

I assume Stacy already did, what with all the pseudo-spiritual nonsense we've been fed over the course of the series.

[Antonius Pius]

Or can we safely assume that this is as good as he's ever going to get?

I think we can assume away.

[Lummel]

...I find this a troubling notion. What if he actually does become aware of his own writing flaws at some point and as a result tries to improve the quality of his writing? Won't that kill these threads? Or can we safely assume that this is as good as he's ever going to get?...

Have you ever heard the saying that a camel is a horse designed by a committee? I don't think that Stacey trying to improve his writing is the same as succeeding ;)

[Jon AS]

Well, that puts my fears to rest for the moment. Thank you.

[Gillio]

See what you get if you decide a crater should be filled in? Nature gets right on it! :lol:

[Datepalm]

If atoms can cry, then the Doomsday Warrior heard their moans, felt their invisible tears waft down the slopes in waves of drifting blue fog.

OMG I love this. They are tears but also fog. Which are invisible while being blue.

[Larry of the Lawn]

If atoms can cry, then the Doomsday Warrior heard their moans, felt their invisible tears waft down the slopes in waves of drifting blue fog.

OMG I love this. They are tears but also fog. Which are invisible while being blue.

Thousands of aspiring poets and authors have just flung their collective pens, typewriters and laptops across the room in recognition that literary perfection has already been achieved.

[Maithanet]

He vows that if President Langford ever takes over the country, his first act will be to lobby for all the craters to be filled in as the number one priority.

Forget rebuilding roads, bridges and schools. Forget providing basic sanitation and health care. Forget even national defense against those innumerable commies. Instead, we should embark on a national hole-filling campaign.

Even the intermittently vegetablized President Langford know this is a dumb idea.

[Hereward]

Can the ULTIMATE AMERICAN really be a Keynesian?

[Lummel]

Can the ULTIMATE AMERICAN really be a Keynesian?

It is a disturbing thought...the cognitive dissonance...must lie down...

[MinDonner]

Well then, let's get back to escaping this terrible yet not especially deadly volcano.

Rockson, at the head of the rope, leads all his crew through the clouds of smoke and soot, a little worried because "the gases of volcanoes, Rockson knew, were often poisonous". No shit. Though in this case apparently not very hot? And the visibility is still pretty good; he has a view of half a mile away where the rivers of lava are starting to run down over the edge of the crater. I'm really not clear on what type of volcanic eruption this is. One minute it's a hundred-foot high tower of flame, the next it's just a runny upwelling and a lot of inconvenient smoke.

Anyway, lucky they have the 'brids along, as these superhorses have speshul nostrils that can filter out deadly particles, and also Shecter has performed blindfold tests on them so Rock knows that they can find their way around obstacles even in the dark. That's Science! Very much more sciency than the volcano money-shot that we get as soon as our gang get far enough beyond the smoky clouds to make a dramatic run for it:

A tidal wave of lava, sweeping forward, setting ablaze every tree, every cactus, every scurrying plains creature that it encountered. A wall of searing mud and molten rock five feet high, burning across the landscape from every side of the crater, its molten stone glowing like some immense beacon a thousand feet high, a light that could have been seen from the moon. And it was coming straight toward them at a fast clip, faster than they were moving, bubbles and hellish foam licking along the tops of the red waves.

Rockson, master navigator, again has no idea which direction he should be running in, and scans the horizon for something - anything! - that might be of use. Luckily, he spots a thin blue line - a river! Which, in these barren desert wastelands, might be a geographical feature worth making note of for future daring expeditions out into the wilds, hm? Has seriously no-one from CC ever thought to make a map of the surrounding area? Or were they too busy building that mountaintop restaurant and the baseball pitch? (and filling in craters)

This river, in fact, is "a hundred feet wide", so you'd think someone might have noticed it in the past. It's also raging like a wildcat and full of rapids...

...but there was no time to go looking for a nice comfy spot to cross - not with a grinding wall of incendiary mud coming at them with the speed of a racehorse.

Still, there's time for Ted to get Archer to shoot a cable into a handy oak tree on the far bank, so that they now have a sort of handrail to help them across before the "throbbing wall of white-hot slag" turns them to toast. Ted heroically crosses first, while hordes of random animals join in the swim - beavers, gray foxes and desert armadillos, none of which seem notably dangerous. One by one, the team all follow, except for Unfortunate Redshirt of the Week (Karston, the siege expert, who has popped into existence briefly for this requisite cameo) whose cable breaks and he is swept to a gruesome death amid the "grinding jaws of white" downstream (just the river in this case, I don't think there was a surprise monster waiting).

Not even Rockson can be bothered to mourn these guys any more.

Knowing the man was dead, Rockson turned his gaze back to the living.

Everyone else makes it, including all the spare horses, yay! And then the lava hits the water, sending up a superheated burst of steam, which nevertheless has no ill effects whatsoever on our heroes. A river can protect you from all harm! Ted makes sure they continue riding "for a good ten minutes" to make sure they are far enough away, and then they turn back to appreciate the beauty of the 800-foot lava fountain and the hypnotic rainbow effects of all the poisonous gases. Aaahhh.