Mon 25 Jan 2016
JAMES ROLLINS – Amazonia. William Morrow, hardcover, 2002. Avon, paperback, 2003.
James Rollins is a vet who has written several thrillers that don’t pose any serious threat to Clive Cussler but travel the same well-worn path of outsize adventures in tropical/arctic/marine settings, with fantastic elements that include lost races, animals surviving from prehistoric times, and cardboard characters. As you might imagine, I enjoy this sort of flimflammery.
Nathan Rand’s father and his scientific party were lost in the “lush wilderness of the Amazon” years ago and presumed dead. Now a surviving member has made his way from the depths of the jungle but has died, his body acidly eaten away by malignant tumors. The most notable thing about the dead returnee is that he had one arm when he disappeared with the Rand party, |but stumbled from the jungle years later with two arms.
The government quickly forms a search team while a multinational corporation, the company that originally financed the Rand expedition, is secretly fielding its own search team, not to rescue but to retrieve any medical data they might use and destroy the government party.
Add to the mix a mysterious, perhaps legendary tribe of jaguar warriors, and jungle perils that beggar every imagination but that of the author and you have a predictable Rollins’ juggernaut on the move.
The most memorable — and sympathetic — creation is a black jaguar trained by one of the members of the government crew. I’m sure that you’1l be relieved to know that he survives, although not all of the other good guys do. The most striking element is a gigantic, centuries old tree that contains the still living bodies of millennia of animals and humans in its roots, feeding off their vital essences and creating a unique evolutionary record.
Now to track down Ice Hunt, which appears to be the latest in the apparently successful and profitable series. (I say that only because I can’t imagine that anyone would continue publishing these overwritten, implausible but fun novels if they weren’t making money.)
January 25th, 2016 at 8:19 pm
When I looked up James Rollins on Wikipedia just now, I discovered that ICE HUNT was the last of his standalone adventure novels, at least for several years.
After ICE HUNT he starting writing his SIGMA Force series, about which I know nothing (other than what’s on his Wikipedia page), but there are now eleven of them.
He’s also written quite a few other novels, many of them out and out fantasy, seven of them as by James Clemens.
His real name, by the way, is James Paul Czajkowski.
January 25th, 2016 at 8:41 pm
In case I can’t get my old photoshop software working on my wife’s computer (it’s not compatible with Windows 7 on my laptop), I’ve been boning up on how to use Adobe Photoshop 9.
You can see the results on this post and Jon’s SOL MADRID review. I know there’s a learning curve, so it’s been a slow process, but why on earth does it make me 8 to 10 steps to add a border using Adobe, rather than the one or two steps on my old software?
I’m probably doing something wrong.
January 25th, 2016 at 8:43 pm
Walter, I just realized that when you used the word vet to describe Rollins, you meant veterinarian.
January 25th, 2016 at 9:26 pm
The original publication of this review led me to read Amazonia because, like Professor Albert, I like that kind of flimflammery. However, I didn’t like this one enough to read any more of Rollins’ books. Not that he needs me as a reader, since he’s gone on to join the ranks of Cussler as a mega-selling writer and one who now has other writers collaborating on even more mega-sellers. I have a feeling that he might have given up his vet practice long ago.
January 25th, 2016 at 11:59 pm
Looks like no one has noticed that you gave the date of the hardcover as 2020, four years in the future! Way to go!
January 26th, 2016 at 12:36 am
I can’t even blame Walter for that one. He had it right.
January 26th, 2016 at 12:57 am
I read this several years ago. The pages turned rapidly but that wasn’t enough and I haven’t read any more Rollins since.
January 26th, 2016 at 5:21 am
It’s fun to enjoy this sort of thing from time to time, and Walter evokes the spirit well.
January 26th, 2016 at 6:07 pm
Rollins has gotten much better with the Sigma Force books and now compares favorably to Cussler. These early books tend to feature some great ideas like that tree, but the rest rather tepid and repetitious. That is no longer true of his work and the turning point was ICE HUNT, the next book after this, which was one of the better Alistair MacLean wannabes I have read.
Rollins went from a writer I sort of followed to one I don’t miss with the Sigma Force series though. I don’t say they are all equal, but they are one of the better series and generally pay off in all departments.
He really has improved radically since this one was published, and the speculative science in his works has surpassed anything any competitor is doing since the death of Michael Crichton. As this sort of thing goes Rollins is certainly one of the top names if not the top name when it comes to quality.
January 27th, 2016 at 11:15 am
I gave up on Rollins some years ago when I realized that I thought he was better at characterizing animals than humans. I still like this kind of flimflammery but find less of it that engages me these days.
I have been reading a lot of Sherlock Holmes pastiches, which led me to the two volume set of August Derleth’s Solar Pons series that’s been sitting unopened on a shelf for many years. As such things go, they are superior examples of the exercise and I suspect that I’ll be working away at this set for some time.
January 27th, 2016 at 6:15 pm
Walter,
I certainly agree about Solar Pons, a pastiche that inspired its own pastiche as Basil Copper continued the series after Derelith passed on. The Pons stories are superior examples of the art by any standard. I particularly like one where Pons encounters an American lawyer named Mason and a Chinese in Limehouse called Mr. King.