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Title: Hal Spacejock, Hal Spacejock: Second Course, Hal Spacejock: Just Desserts
Author: Simon Haynes
Genre: Humorous Sci-Fi
Publisher: Freemantle Arts Centre Press
Price: $17.95 US at Powells , $16.45 AU at BookWorm, or free here

I first discovered Simon Haynes while reading comments on Miss Snark’s website- only a few days before she hung up her stilettos. Hm… I hope the two aren’t related.

Anyway, I thought “Heh. Funny comment. I’ll go look at his blog.” Lo and behold, he was a multi published author! Of humorous Sci-Fi no less- one of my favorite genres. So I surfed around a bit, found a contest to win a signed copy, entered, and promptly forgot about it assuming that I never win contests so I wouldn’t win.

Still, I was rather enamored by the fact that there was still humorous Sci-Fi being produced and tried to buy his books at our local Barnes & Noble. No luck. And a few days later, I won. A few weeks after that, I won the whole set.

The basic story line is “bumbling space pilot tries to make a simple delivery, bad things happen, reader pees pants laughing, and delivery gets made”. Now, this isn’t going to be very easy to describe except in writer terms- but since that’s the whole point….

There is minimal character arc for Hal and Clunk (Hal’s trusty sidekick)- this is done on purpose. Each book is able to stand completely on it’s own, no need for back story. Back story makes it better, but it’s not actually necessary. There usually is quite a bit of story arc for the secondary/antagonist characters which gives you the feeling of fulfillment without ever limiting Hal and Clunk’s run in book form.

As for story arc… the books don’t so much arc as they go crashing headlong into walls. Have you ever seen an episode of I Love Lucy? That’s the story structure. Lucy (Hal) wants something. Ricky (antagonist) stands in her way. Ethel (Clunk) is the voice of reason but goes along with Lucy’s (Hal’s) mad scheme anyway. Food fights and embarrassing situations abound, and while the plot is tied up, the story isn’t.

Do you want to know how funny these books are? My husband, who’s response to my squeals of “I won, I won!” was along the lines of eye rolling and “so what?”, picked up the first book to see just how stupid it was, opened it to a random page, read one line and started laughing.

I started laughing at the first sentence.

Simon’s great with little turns of phrase, subtle puns, and sometimes blatant slapstick. It all melds together to make one big raised eyebrow, guffawing, giggle fest. And here’s what I recommend these books to all writers for. There are virtually no adverbs in the entire set (thus far) outside of dialogue.

I noticed it about ¾ through the third book (Just Desserts)- no adverbs. His descriptions are great, dialogue is fluid, and the way he introduces and skims things of an adult nature make the whole situation ten times funnier than it would be if he gave in and went for the jokes that I’m sure he desperately wanted to write.

You can see his growth as a writer through the first three books. The first being funny with some good characters. The second being funnier, and the characters more real. The third is the absolute best so far- I’d even recommend starting with that one if you can only order one book. Though two had a really interesting planet to explore.

I give these books an absolute thumbs up. The rules that are broken are broken on purpose, they’re entertaining, funny, and something you can actually learn from.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 26th, 2007 at 9:29 pm and is filed under What I'm Reading, book recommendations, writer's review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.