JunkMonkey
Lord High Vizier of Nowt
À la conquête de Kiber is turning out to be a hoot. I'm only about half way through. (I'm pacing myself; there's only so much van Vogtian nonsense a man can stand at a time.)
Our alcoholic hero, owner of an aquarium left to him by his uncle, wakes up in what he thinks is a giant hotel to find he has surgically altered and now has gills and can breath underwater. Turns out he has been kidnapped from contemporary 20th C Earth by someone who wants him to become king of a distant water planet. But he has to kill the current king first so the kingmaker keeps setting up fights between our hero and passing strangers. The giant hotel turns out to be a fantastically large 'skyscraper sized', space ship and, at the behest of the captain, our hero is forced to converse with the ship's engineer - a Scottish android who not only wears a kilt, eats porridge at lunchtime, and speaks in an incomprehensible brogue, but is also (possibly) psionic (on the ship's last four trips he had managed to bring onboard, as part of his personal cargo, exactly the unlikely components required to get the ship out of improbable scrapes. Can he see into the future?) and he has managed to secretly smuggle his Scottish girlfriend on board. She keeps turning up in our hero's bedroom which she enters via a secret tunnel. Our hero has also developed unexpected psychic abilities and is aware of the conversations of agents of the existing king who are plotting to kill him before he can kill their boss - not that he wants to be king of anywhere; all he wants is to get drunk and hope all this stuff is just a dream and goes away.
When they arrive at the planet they are torpedoed below the waterline and start taking on water in the engine room.
Golly! this is exciting! and we're less than halfway through the book!
Our alcoholic hero, owner of an aquarium left to him by his uncle, wakes up in what he thinks is a giant hotel to find he has surgically altered and now has gills and can breath underwater. Turns out he has been kidnapped from contemporary 20th C Earth by someone who wants him to become king of a distant water planet. But he has to kill the current king first so the kingmaker keeps setting up fights between our hero and passing strangers. The giant hotel turns out to be a fantastically large 'skyscraper sized', space ship and, at the behest of the captain, our hero is forced to converse with the ship's engineer - a Scottish android who not only wears a kilt, eats porridge at lunchtime, and speaks in an incomprehensible brogue, but is also (possibly) psionic (on the ship's last four trips he had managed to bring onboard, as part of his personal cargo, exactly the unlikely components required to get the ship out of improbable scrapes. Can he see into the future?) and he has managed to secretly smuggle his Scottish girlfriend on board. She keeps turning up in our hero's bedroom which she enters via a secret tunnel. Our hero has also developed unexpected psychic abilities and is aware of the conversations of agents of the existing king who are plotting to kill him before he can kill their boss - not that he wants to be king of anywhere; all he wants is to get drunk and hope all this stuff is just a dream and goes away.
When they arrive at the planet they are torpedoed below the waterline and start taking on water in the engine room.
Golly! this is exciting! and we're less than halfway through the book!
