The Word is Out!
In yesterday’s post, I shared World Fantasy Award-finalist Michael Libling‘s take on Minute Men: Execute & Run. You can find that review here.
Today, we’ll hear from poet, critic, and novelist Albert Wendland, author of the acclaimed Mykol Ranglen science-fiction series, which includes the novels In a Suspect Universe, Haunted Stars, and The Man Who Loved Alien Landscapes.
Here’s what Albert has to say about Minute Men: Execute & Run:
“To call the book a page-turner isn’t enough—it’s more a page-burner.”
Lawrence C. Connolly’s novel, Minute Men: Execute and Run, based on a concept by Christopher Connolly, reads with the speed of a video game, vibrates with the tension of a movie thriller, and delivers on the pleasures of a superhero fantasy.
At first, its main idea, an independent team of five nano-enhanced special-ops soldiers created by a corporation, might seem familiar. As the back-cover says, “Mission Impossible meets X-Men.” But the concept has a dramatic and unique twist. Each enhanced soldier (with super-intelligence, super-speed, super-strength, or super eye-blasts) can work each individual power for only 60 seconds. And after that minute of flash-bam activity, the soldier is exhausted and becomes near helpless—and thus an easy victim for enemy forces.
So during the action scenes, and you get a lot of them, the ticking clock is literal and crucial. The time remaining rushes down like a landslide in each character’s mind (“40 seconds to go!”), a relentless anxiety that peaks each operation’s intensity, making the sequences as much about the dangers after the superpowers than before.
To call the book a page-turner isn’t enough—it’s more a page-burner.
The story, high-pitched and emotionally serious (all the soldiers have traumatic pasts they need to work out), does have at least one moment of self-parody, or maybe self-identification, just to make sure the concept comes across. A supportive group of internet gamesters is posed with finding solutions for the team’s “impossible” assignments (the online support forming another “twist” to the story), and the team members are given superhero titles like “Sergeant Power,” “Doctor Pulse,” “Z-girl,” and “the Amazing Mesmer.” Thankfully, these names are mentioned only once, but they’re an effective way of acknowledging the superhero trope, and then dismissing it as irrelevant. It implies, “Yeah, it’s a joke, but this story’s more grave.” And it is more grave. The sharpness of the double-edge in having such powers is made clear—they can isolate, alienate, and become, in just 60 seconds, more dangerous than an advantage. The special effects of the fiery super-bursts are transitory and erratic, followed by loss, uncertainty, and weakness.
The writing style, as well as the story’s ideas, keeps the narrative moving. Connolly does an excellent job of making the ticking-clock a component of the narrative itself, which is not easy. Five characters make up the team (four have powers, and the leader feels responsible in giving the team its fatally ambiguous “advantages”—she stays with the team to try to save it from being exploited). And each one has an emotional and defining back-story. So telling all five and maintaining pace necessitates prose that’s spare. Description and scene-setting come in staccato bullets of sentence-fragments—“Sunrise. Dirt road. Scraggly trees. Open-canopy Jeep”; “Dim lights. Glass walls. Panoramic view of the city”). You feel like you’re ducking gun-shots as the words come at you, which is exactly what you want. They make you feel that clock is ticking.
And the point-of-view character constantly changes, making for chapters usually only 2-3 pages in length. So if the sentences are like ticks in a time-bomb, then the chapter breaks are jump cuts, thrusting you forward with near cinematic speed. The dialogue too is rightfully clipped (making for movie-script white-space on pages), and the only character who talks a lot is quickly told to stay quiet, since he usually speaks annoyingly in the middle of the action.
Both these factors, the story-value of the original concept and the narrative decisions of the writing itself, blend seamlessly to make for a swift and compelling experience. Even if the situations might at first seem familiar (unity among military misfits, the weaponizing of scientific research, the marketing and exploitation of trauma “cures”), the novel’s cleverness and razor style grab the reader and never lets go. The ticking bombs lead to explosions but also to personal and sympathetic disasters—the simple failure to do more. The story’s speed, the human lives so inhumanly used and played with, the intensity of the “missions” and how they can go wrong, and often just the wildness of it all (real “fireworks” are included, and one tightly-scheduled heist is thrown out-of-whack by a villain’s constipation), make for a satisfying and near popcorn-downing matinee pleasure.
Bring on the cable television series! The book, and the viewers, deserve the treatment.
Want To Know More?
Below is a video interview I recently conducted with Zoya Zynchenko (aka Z-Girl), one of the characters from Minute Men: Execute & Run.
Based on a sketch by brother Christopher, the animated character was brought to life with assistance from filmmaker Andrew Dymond of Bazooka Bunny, who rendered Zoya through the art of motion capture and digital rotoscoping. Want to know more about the process? You can read all about it here.
And for more about the original music my bandmate Duane Davis and I performed for the video’s concluding montage and credits, you can check out the September 2 installment of the Minute Men Newsletter. Here’s a link.
And now … without further ado: Take it away Z-Girl!
Pre-Order Minute Men: Execute & Run Today!
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And after you’ve read the book, please consider posting a review at one of the links above and/or on social media.
Until next time … make every minute count!
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