Showing posts with label Steele. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Steele. Show all posts

Monday, August 23, 2021

Steele #3: Killer Steele


Steele #3: Killer Steele, by J.D. Masters
February, 1990  Charter Books

It’s been so long since I read a volume of Steele I almost forgot about the series. Actually I meant to return to it many years ago but just kept putting it off. I rank this one along with The Guardians: a series I have every volume of, but just can’t bring myself to actually read. Like that post-nuke series, Steele is just too ponderous for me, but it’s more frustrating here because ostensibly this series is just a ripoff of Robocop. Only with interminable “is the hero human?” pondering in place of all the dark humor and gore. 

And as it turns out, Steele has something in common with The Guardians: the author of the final few volumes of Steele was Victor Milan, who also wrote The Guardians. This does not instill me with much enthusiams for the later volumes, folks. At any rate, the first six volumes of Steele were penned by Simon Hawke, at least according to sometimes-reliable Wikipedia. And clearly Killer Steele has the same author as the previous two books, with the same writing style, the same focus on internal probing and character introspection at the expense of action – and the same outline-esque treatment of what action does occur. 

So it’s some time after the previous volume, and Steele’s hanging out in his loft penthouse in New York with his teenaged former prostitute girlfriend Raven. Steele’s plagued by a nightmare in which someone else’s memories seem to be mingling with his own; a mere foretaste of the interminable stuff Hawke will deliver in this regard, as once again his focus is on plumbing the metaphysics of whether an archived database of memories can have a soul and whatnot. To which I can only cry out, “Who cares?!” Steele wakes up to be informed of a double-whammy: One, his teen children Cory and Jason have run away from home in Boston, and Two, a fellow cyborg has run amok in the headquarters Steele operates out of and wiped out several of the scientists who created Steele himself. 

Steele’s choppered to the HQ, which is the former UN Building; here in this future, a “bio-war” has wiped out hummanity, thanks to an experimental virus some Muslim terrorists got their hands on.* Here we get backstory on the world in which Steele occurs, where the virus quickly mutated and spread across the population. Boy, I sure hope no one dared to question the government’s handling of the pandemic in this reality! But then there wasn’t a 99% survival rate for this particular lab-created virus, and thus huge chunks of the population died off. After which the US itself broke apart, with Texas forming its own separate republic. All this is relayed in backstory, and by the way we’ve already gotten egregious backstory on Steele’s origin as well. 

While Hawke isn’t much for action, he does have a lot of post-action gore; Steele’s shown around the building and sees the eviscerated remains of the various scientists from the project, their organs ripped out by the marauding cyborg. But this will become an unintentionally humorous scenario, as multiple times in the narrative Steele will just miss the enemy cyborg and come upon the gory aftermath of his destruction. It happens throughout the novel, Hawke clearly padding until having the single – and final – fight between the two cyborgs at novel’s end. Meanwhile Steele gets more bad news: the new cyborg, codenamed Stalker, is his old cop parter, who apparently was killed in Steele #1, but hell if I can remember it. 

So Hawke has the makings of an interesting thriller here. Steele is faced with two problems, both personal – his son and daughter, just finding out that their dad is alive, have come to New York to find him, and two, Steele’s old buddy has been reborn as a psycho cyborg out for revenge. And Hawke takes this setup and…delivers endless scenes in which Dev Cooper, the new doctor on the Steele team, sits around for hours pondering whether Steele’s database of memories has a soul or not. Folks I kid you not. This series is excruciating in that regard. It’s like I said last time – you look at those covers and they promise greatness. I mean they look like the VHS covers for some ‘80s Italian sci-fi action movies that never existed (ie Hands Of Steel). But when you read the books, that’s not what you get…and, as with the previous books, the cover for Killer Steele is something that only occurs at the very end of the novel…and is over in just a few sentences. 

As for the other plot, as these things happen, Steele’s daughter Cory came looking for Steele in the big city and ended up becoming a hooker. Raven, a former pro herself, handily spells out how such a thing could’ve happened, and her blasé attitude toward it all is pretty funny. When Steele finds his son, Jason, the kid’s beaten to a pulp, courtesy a run-in with his sister’s pimp. There’s extra stuff here with backstory on Steele’s wife; a hotstuff social-climber type, she dumped Steele and told the kids he was dead, but when they found out they left Boston to come look for him. There’s a bit of melodrama, again along the lines of Robocop, where Steele reflects back on his pre-cyborg life and marriage and whatnot. 

Hawke has established a small group of recurring characters, so there’s also Ice, hulking black criminal overlord who helped Steele in the previous volume. To continue with my ‘80s action movie comparisons, Ice is essentially Isaac Hayes in Escape From New York. And also there’s the Borodini mob family in play, and eventually they of course get hold of Steele’s daughter. Meanwhile Stalker continues to run roughshod over sundry victims, mauling and ripping with cybernetic aplomb…and Steele consistently shows up too late to catch him. This is the holding pattern that constitutes the meat of the novel – that and more “is Steele human” bullshit from Dev Cooper. Boooring!!! 

Steele’s poor daughter is passed around; she ends up working for one of the stables owned by the Borodini clan, who of course plan to use her as bait for their long-simmer vengeance on Steele. But then Stalker wipes out a bunch of the clan and takes the girl for himself. This leads to the long-delayed confrontation between the two cyborgs, which is of course the incident depicted on the cover. Which occurs over just a few pages. It follows the same outline-style treatment of action with minimal violence, Hawke even here going for “the humanity” of it all with Steele trying to reason with his dead cop friend. Oh and Stalker fires “plasma” beams, but even that’s not treated cool enough. 

Really Steele is just an exercise in tedium, and it befuddles me that something with such a great setup (and such great covers!) could be so boring. I mean just imagine if they’d hired someone like John Shirley or David Alexander to write this series. By far the best thing about Steele is the Brady Bunch parody graphic at Gellaho

*I imagine featuring villains like that could get you cancelled these days – today’s narrative is “They seem friendly,” even if they’re literally chanting “death to America” right behind you!

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Steele #2: Cold Steele


Steele #2: Cold Steele, by J.D. Masters
November, 1989  Charter Books

Two weeks after the first volume and Lt. Donovan Steele is still in shutdown mode, being repaired and partially rebuilt after suffering so much destruction in the previous book. And while he’s given new cybnetic accessories with which to kill people, Simon Hawke (aka “J.D. Masters”) is once again more focused on plumbing the depths of the human soul and turning out a piece of “intelligent sci-fi” rather than the men’s adventure the great cover painting promises.

Hawke opens the tale from the perspective of Dr. Dev Cooper, a Texas-born psychiatrist with a specialization in cybernetics. Dev’s here to replace Dr. Susan Caromdy, who as we’ll all recall was blown away in the finale of Steele #1; Dev is understandably shocked to discover that Dr. Carmody was in a romantic relationship with her patient Steele. Dev Cooper takes up a goodly portion of the narrative, as he serves as the medium through which Hawke obsesses over his favorite topic for this series – Can a man with a cybernetic brain truly be human?? Yes my friends, the exact same conundrum obsessed over so endlessly in the previous volume is obsessed over again in this one!

In fact this scientific/metaphysical/”what makes us human??” pondering takes up the brunt of the novel, just as it did in the previous book. Meanwhile Steele is hooked up with all kinds of new tech, mostly I’m guessing in accord with the publisher’s request – I’m betting that cover painting was commissioned before Hawke wrote his manuscript, or at least at the same time. Because the weaponry Steele’s given seems to come from the mind of a publisher who wanted to capitalize on the Terminator or whatever, but Hawke really doesn’t do much with it.

Anyway, Steele now has detachable hands which he can hook on his belt and replace, Evil Dead style, with various weapons. But also built into each arm he also now has internal weapons – a “10 m.m. gun barrel” in his right forearm and “ten 45 m.m. nysteel rocket darts” in his left. If he bends his hand back, the barrels will poke out of little holes in his palms. He’s also got a laser-locking system in his eyeballs, so they glow red (again, per the cover) when he’s targeting something. Finally, various parts of his body have been reinforced, so he can take more damage than previously.

But wait…Steele’s still human!! We must not forget this. But really there’s no danger of forgetting, as Hawke ponders the question throughout the entire friggin’ novel. This obession does lead to an interesting area; Dev, realizing that Steele is reluctant to fully open up to him, gets hold of Steele’s full consciousness, which was downloaded to software in the previous volume. Now all Dev has to do is boot it up on his PC and he can ask Steele whatever he wants, and “Steele” will answer him. This by the way proves to be Dev’s full interraction with the novel; once he gets this software Dev just sits in his room, becoming progressively frazzled over the unethical nature of it all as he continues to plumb the depth’s of Steele’s separate psyche. 

But hold on…is Steele still human or not?? Seriously though, at least Steele himself has mostly come to grips with his new life. He also seems to pretty quickly move on from the death of Susan Carmody; revenge is his new focus, as he’s determined to bring down Victor Borodini, the New York-based kingpin who not only caused the death of Susan but also ordered the hit which destroyed Steele’s human body in the previous novel. Steele wasn’t the target of that failed hit, though; it was Ice, the muscle-bound former boss of black inner-city street gang the Skulls.

As introduced in the last page of the first volume, Ice is now going to be Steele’s partner; this per Higgins, the shady operative who commands Steele. This entails the usual banter between the two, as Steele doesn’t want to work with Ice and etc. Ice of course gets to prove himself in the first of the novel’s few action scenes, though again Hawke dispenses with the action quickly and they’re almost written in an outline format, barely given any depth or description – like, “Steele fired at the two men and they fell to the ground.”

The team extends to three people when Raven is brought into the fold – a 22 year-old hooker who looks much younger, Raven exudes a “trashy sexuality” and is in the process of being raped by several members of Ice’s old gang when Ice and Steele drop in on the scene. Saving the girl (who later brushes off the gang rape, saying it wasn’t really anything new for her!), the trio repair back to the opulent skyscraper/fortress which serves as Steele’s home, Ice now living there as well.

Steele has Raven stay with him while she recuperates, eventually leading to an unusual arrangement where the hooker (who of course has a heart of gold) ends up living with him. Raven’s sob story has it that she once dated Tommy Borodini, son of Victor, and after Raven got sick of his shit, slicing his face after his latest attempt at beating her around, Tommy had Raven tossed on the streets and forced into prostition.

It’s this past relationship with Tommy Borodini that allows Raven to stick around, as she implores Steele to let her help, as she wants vengeance on the bastard. While the narrative heads in this direction at first, Tommy B. himself soon puts things in a different gear by abducting a congressman and issuing his demands to the government (which is now based in New York). The abduction is really a gambit to kill Steele, as Tommy B. puts Steele on a wild goose chase, running around the city and getting to certain phone booths at the right time to answer his calls, or else the congressman dies.

But thanks to a handy gizmo which allows a CIA agent named Sharp to mimic Steele’s voice, our protagonist is able to suit up in riot gear and go solo into Borodini’s enclave. Another outline-style action sequence ensues, with Ice and Raven helicoptering in to join the festivities. Hawke gets a bit lurid here, with the revelation that Victor Borodini is in an incestual relationship with his son, Paulie! Meanwhile Tommy Borodini still holds the congressman captive, and even after his father demands that he give up, Tommy refuses, ending up being bumped off by another of the Borodini boys.

For the most part, though, Cold Steele is made up of long dialog exchanges, or static scenes in which the characters plumb the depths of their own souls. Plot takes second place to character, and the action scenes are few and far between. Given this, I’m still willing to bet that Simon Hawke was the author behind the Psycho Squad series, which shared the same weaknesses. Again, I don’t mind any of the above stuff, but we’re talking about a volume of an action series with a cover showing a gun barrel-handed cyborg with glowing eyes. Given this, I don’t want to read endless debates on the nature of humanity.

I often wonder about how publishers made these writer choices. I mean, it’s obvious from the cover that Charter intended this series to be a violent cash-in on Robocop and the like. And yet, they hired a dude who could care less about writing action scenes…and when he did write them, he dashed them off quickly and moved back into the soul-searching stuff. I can’t help but feel that Steele would’ve been a lot more enjoyable if Charter had gotten a writer more suited to the men’s adventure genre.

Thursday, January 31, 2013

Steele #1


Steele #1, by J.D. Masters
July, 1989  Charter Books

Very much inspired by Robocop, the Steele series is a late-era example of the men’s adventure genre, bringing in elements of sci-fi and post-nuke pulps. It ran for quite a while, racking up eight volumes. The first six books carried the “J.D. Masters” byline, which apparently was a psuedonym of author Simon Hawke; the final two volumes were credited to “S.L. Hunter,” but supposedly these too were by Hawke. I’m not sure on this, and can find no other name connected to either psuedonym.

The series takes place midway through the 21st century; the world has been ravaged by a series of cataclysms. First and foremost terrorists unleashed a biological virus a generation ago which did more damage than even the terrorists expected, knocking out half of the world population. Years later and the virus now manifests itself in “screamers,” ie people affected by the virus who lose all sense of control and go into fits of rage, destroying everything in sight.

Also there was a limited nuclear engagement due to the biological warfare, but the series is not a post-nuke pulp, despite the nuking and the mutants. The country has already gotten back on its feet, with people going on about their normal lives; the nuclear and biological warfare background exists mostly so that Hawke can present a sort of ravaged future, one where inner-city warfare wages in the blasted ruins of cities.

Our hero is Donovan Steele, a 43 year-old Lieutenant in the New York City Strike Force, a sort of Delta Force SWAT team. Steele’s been patrolling the blasted streets of Midtown for two decades, watching as Manhattan and Long Island and other New York areas have been taken over by warring gangs and mobsters. DC was destroyed in the nuclear engagement, so now NYC is the seat of what still exists of the US government, despite which many of the surrounding areas are cordoned-off Escape From New York-style hellholes.

Steele’s a tough bastard, just as you’d expect. His backstory has a ring of dark comedy to it, as Hawke relates that, when Steele was 16, his mother became infected with the virus and became a screamer, coming home to eat her children; it all ends with everyone in Steele’s family dead, capped off with a bit where his dad, also infected, blows out his own brains, and I’ve gotta say, despite the grim tone it all really came off as sort of funny due to the outrageous factor. Anyway, Steele became a cop soon after and is now basically the star of the Strike Force.

A unique quality about Steele, at least so far as men’s adventure protagonists go, is that he’s married and has two teenaged sons. However Steele’s wife Janice is only mentioned in backstory, and Hawke paints a nasty picture of her…she sort of loves Steele but also hates him, mostly because of his job, and is carrying on “a few” affairs behind his back. Hawke has his reasons for doing this (most likely so he can get rid of her once Steele has his Robocop-esque experience midway through), but still Janice amounts to a pretty despicable character.

We know from the cover that Steele is going to become some sort of robot cop, but it takes over a hundred pages for this to occur. First Steele is assigned to work with Project Download, a government initiative run by a shady guy named Higgins that’s looking to “download” the combat insticts from Steele’s brain via software and store it into the brains of draftees and whatnot. Here Steele meets Dr. Susan Carmody, who comes on cool but is eventually throwing herself at him (not that Steele takes advantage of the situation).

After a gangland ambush leaves him mostly dead, Steele awakens several months later to find that he’s now a cyborg. His arms and legs have been replaced by android steele, as has been his skull and, most importantly, his brain is also now a computer, one that holds all of his downloaded memories. This serves to take up a huge portion of the narrative, as Steele constantly asks himself and others if having a robot brain means he is no longer human. Hawke makes it clear that he is, though, and also Steele still looks human, synthetic skin covering his robotic ligaments. In fact he looks identical to how he did before his accident, much to the confusion of his comrades, all of whom are now unsettled in his presence.

Steele’s relationship with Susan Carmody deepens, with her constant assurance that Steele is still very much human. As she often reminds him, he can procreate (his naughty parts survived his “death” unscathed), but for some bizarre reason, despite building it up so much, Hawke skips over the eventual sex scene between Steele and Susan. I only say it’s weird because another big concern of Steele’s is if he can still have sex, and when the moment arises Hawke just flashforwards to after the fact. Purple prose aside, it would’ve been a good opportunity for Hawke to again show us that Steele is human despite his cyborg makeover.

Just like Robocop, Steele is eventually sent back on the streets to patrol and kick criminal ass. Unlike Robocop though Steele still retains all of his faculties and makes his own decisions; again, Steele is pretty much identical to the person he was at the novel’s start, only now moreso…he can take all sorts of damage, can mete out horrendous punishment, and can run faster, jump higher, etc, etc. In other words the series wants to have its cake and eat it too; Steele is inhuman while still being human.

A mafioso named Borodini has united the various gangs (most of them split along ethnic lines) under his rubric, and Steele wants to crush the bastard, mostly because Borodini was behind the ambush that turned Steele into a cyborg. The ambush however was launched against a black gangster named Ice; Steele just got caught in the crossfire. Now Steele attempts to find Ice again, so that the two can work together against Borodini. Here we have several battle sequences, Steele testing out his new body against a small army of gangmembers.

But where Steele #1 fails is in the action department. Hawke delivers the few action scenes in an almost outline format, such as, “Running down the stairs, Steele fired, killing them all.” Dammit, I want exploding guts and blasted-out brains! But the gore and violence factor is minimal here (as is the sex factor), despite the number of gangmembers Steele kills. In other words, the book would easily rank a PG-13. It’s odd because Hawke will often go into gun-porn detail on the weapons Steele carries, but when it comes to showing what those weapons will do to a human body, he doesn’t elaborate.

By novel’s end Steele has been “discovered” by the local media, who exploit his feats on the news, thus putting Steele (and those he cares about) on the radar of the crime lords. After suffering more damage in another outline-style action scene, Steele is about to undergo another round of “updating” when the novel comes to a close, with nothing resolved, Borodini still alive, and the implication that Ice is about to become Steele’s partner on the streets.

This is one of the better-written men’s adventure novels I’ve read, but this first installment is more focused on world building and scene setting, and very focused on characters and their emotional arcs. I mean, there’s even a long subplot all about Steele’s friendship with Father Liam, a local priest who goes drinking with Steele and listens to Steele’s soul-baring confessions over endless rounds of beer. You could easily be fooled into thinking this is just a “regular” novel and not the first volume of a series. I’ve managed to get the entire series at a very nice price, and looking through future volumes it appears that the storylines get more pulpy and action focused, but then that might just be the customary back cover hyperbole.

So while it doesn’t offer much from the standard men’s adventure department, Steele #1 is still a very good read, compelling and gripping in its own way, offering more characterization than any other series I’ve yet read. It just needs more exploding guts and blasted-out brains!