littlemissattitude
Super Moderator
It is the 1930s. The sun never sets on the British Empire. It isn’t yet clear exactly how much damage Hitler and his Nazis are capable of wreaking on Europe and the rest of the world. And the Americans are sitting on the other side of the Atlantic, still an unknown quantity in world affairs.
But it isn’t the 1930s, exactly, that you and I learned about in our history books. For one thing, King Edward isn’t about to abdicate his throne in order to marry the woman he loves, even though she is an American divorceé. For another, the British have discovered the remains…and the technology…of lost Atlantis, putting it to work for them in new technologies of their own that will serve to cement their position as the rulers of a large portion of the world.
Or so they think. A surprise attack in Glasgow at the dedication of a new battleship takes the lives of not only many subjects of the Empire but of the king himself. It looks as if the attack came from the Germans. A counterattack is prepared, carried out. But it looks suddenly as if it were the Americans and not the Nazis who did the dastardly deed. Or was it? And where did whoever did launch the attack against the Empire get the technology to challenge the mighty dreadnoughts of the air and sea that the Empire believed were invincible? Why was the attack launched in the first place, and what did the perpetrators intend to accomplish? Or start?
These are the questions that drive the plot of A Gathering of Storm Clouds, by C. Craig R. McNeil, a neat, compact alternate history/adventure novel that, while it borrows conceits from a variety of places, makes those ideas its own. There is a dash of Jurassic Park there, and a little bit of The Island of Doctor Moreau. And in the theatre of my mind, the story took on much of the look of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. The dreadnoughts of the air reminded me a little of the wonderful airship in 1961’s Master of the World, while the submarine dreadnoughts echoed Jules Verne. This is not to say that McNeil’s novel is derivative. It isn’t, any more than any other novel, which will bring up associations and memories of other, much loved literature and films.
To be honest, I found that the story took a little while to really start moving, but once it did it really moved, going from one crisis to another, one mystery to another, one discovery to another at an efficient and effective pace. It became impossible to put down, imperative to know what was going to happen next. While the characters were stock characters to some extent: Captain John Riley, the steely-jawed special forces man; John Murdoch, the stiff-upper lip government operative; Jane Archer, the eminently qualified, no-nonsense archaeologist in a man’s world, they were still characters you could care about and root for.
If I have a real quibble with the novel, it has nothing to do with the story or the characters or the writing. And it isn’t just a problem with this book; I have found it to be a general problem among self-published and small-press published books and even a growing problem among books out of the established publishing houses. It is a pet peeve of mine, from the time I spent copy-editing a student newspaper, or I might not have noticed the problem at all. The stumbling block for me was more technical, a seeming deficit in the proofreading and copy-editing. There were a number of typos and other technical problems that would have been eliminated easily with the addition of a good, thorough copy-edit. It is, in fact, a tribute to the ultimate strength of the story that I didn’t just throw the book across the room, as I often do with books that don’t seem to have had the benefit of a good copy editor.
So don’t, I repeat do not, let this quibble stop you from reading A Gathering of Storm Clouds. It is a good effort from a good writer. After all, how could anyone resist a book that contains this evocative passage:
But it isn’t the 1930s, exactly, that you and I learned about in our history books. For one thing, King Edward isn’t about to abdicate his throne in order to marry the woman he loves, even though she is an American divorceé. For another, the British have discovered the remains…and the technology…of lost Atlantis, putting it to work for them in new technologies of their own that will serve to cement their position as the rulers of a large portion of the world.
Or so they think. A surprise attack in Glasgow at the dedication of a new battleship takes the lives of not only many subjects of the Empire but of the king himself. It looks as if the attack came from the Germans. A counterattack is prepared, carried out. But it looks suddenly as if it were the Americans and not the Nazis who did the dastardly deed. Or was it? And where did whoever did launch the attack against the Empire get the technology to challenge the mighty dreadnoughts of the air and sea that the Empire believed were invincible? Why was the attack launched in the first place, and what did the perpetrators intend to accomplish? Or start?
These are the questions that drive the plot of A Gathering of Storm Clouds, by C. Craig R. McNeil, a neat, compact alternate history/adventure novel that, while it borrows conceits from a variety of places, makes those ideas its own. There is a dash of Jurassic Park there, and a little bit of The Island of Doctor Moreau. And in the theatre of my mind, the story took on much of the look of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. The dreadnoughts of the air reminded me a little of the wonderful airship in 1961’s Master of the World, while the submarine dreadnoughts echoed Jules Verne. This is not to say that McNeil’s novel is derivative. It isn’t, any more than any other novel, which will bring up associations and memories of other, much loved literature and films.
To be honest, I found that the story took a little while to really start moving, but once it did it really moved, going from one crisis to another, one mystery to another, one discovery to another at an efficient and effective pace. It became impossible to put down, imperative to know what was going to happen next. While the characters were stock characters to some extent: Captain John Riley, the steely-jawed special forces man; John Murdoch, the stiff-upper lip government operative; Jane Archer, the eminently qualified, no-nonsense archaeologist in a man’s world, they were still characters you could care about and root for.
If I have a real quibble with the novel, it has nothing to do with the story or the characters or the writing. And it isn’t just a problem with this book; I have found it to be a general problem among self-published and small-press published books and even a growing problem among books out of the established publishing houses. It is a pet peeve of mine, from the time I spent copy-editing a student newspaper, or I might not have noticed the problem at all. The stumbling block for me was more technical, a seeming deficit in the proofreading and copy-editing. There were a number of typos and other technical problems that would have been eliminated easily with the addition of a good, thorough copy-edit. It is, in fact, a tribute to the ultimate strength of the story that I didn’t just throw the book across the room, as I often do with books that don’t seem to have had the benefit of a good copy editor.
So don’t, I repeat do not, let this quibble stop you from reading A Gathering of Storm Clouds. It is a good effort from a good writer. After all, how could anyone resist a book that contains this evocative passage:
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