::READERS REVIEWS::

McCrumb's second SF-fan mystery -- 3.7 stars. - [quote] In the 1950s, a group of young science fiction writers, dreaming of literary immortality and calling themselves the "Lanthanides", buried a time capsule with their stories and relics from the time. Now, in the 1990s, when several of them have become famous, the surviving Lanthanides are having a reunion to dig up the capsule and open it. But the reunion is startled by the appearance of a writer who was supposed to have died thirty years ago. Then murder materializes to throw the agenda further into chaos. Now, Jay Omega, author of Bimbos of the Death Sun, and his significant other, Dr. Marion Farley, must separate science fact from fiction -- and unearth a killer with a story of his own to tell.
-- book description cribbed from somewhere

I read the prequel to Zombies, Bimbos of the Death Sun, years ago, and found it rather mean-spirited, and just not very good, though it had moments. So Zombies sat on the to-read shelf for years. Turns out the sequel is a much better book than Bimbos, imo. The characters are well-drawn, and (mostly) sympathetic, the SF & fandom trivia are fun, and the mystery is twisty. On the downside, the plot and characters, at times, dance to the author's tune a bit mechanically. There's a clear setup for a sequel at the end, which has never appeared.

Naturally, I immediately wondered who these SF characters are in real life. Enquiring minds have delved here before -- Google if you're curious. Hint: look for a discussion started by Dr. Abigail Ann Young, 5-94 (Google Groups).

Anyway, the short answer is, the characters seem to be fictional composites, not identifiable writers. You'll recognize bits & pieces from various 50's/60's writers... And, as you'll see, opinions on McCrumb's two SF-fan mysteries are decidedly mixed. Including mine. I'd say, if you want to try one, start with Zombies, which works fine as a standalone. But opinions seem pretty equally divided as to whether Bimbos or Zombies is the better book -- and there's a sizeable minority who think both books are mean-spirited. Fortunately, both are short, and readily/cheaply available, so the cost of bailing out is low. Your call.

Happy reading--
Peter D. Tillman

A pleasant and amusing work. - I really enjoyed this novel. It was a fun book with a lot of humor, but with a bit of hard edge toward the end. The novel has some great characters and a pretty interesting plot that held my interest and kept me turning the pages at a pretty rapid clip. Another of McCrumb's initial works, it shows that she already had quite a lot of skill early in her career.

A patronizing, but still somewhat insightful look at Science Fiction fans - This is a sequel to McCrumb's Bimbos of the Death Sun. The former was a dead-on, if somewhat patronizing view of the Fen, but this story combines the science fiction world with a wistful look at the destruction of Appalachian towns to build the dams that power so much of our modern world. I would have suggested doing one or the other - they are not meshed too well. Bimbos was a funny and witty look at science fiction fandom, in this book, too many sad and serious things are going on in this book to work with the same light-hearted style of parody.

The one flaw with Bimbos, and it is much worse in this book, is the extremely judgemental attitude of Marion Farley. Oh, it is fine to poke loving fun at eccentrics and employ stereotypes in this sort of satire. I simply get tired of Marion's huffing and puffing as if these people were somehow impinging on her rights, were personally offensive. She really ought to take her own advice and get a life. If she doesn't like them anymore, she shouldn't go to conventions. If McCrumb meant for us to take Marion as just another passenger on the ship of fools, or an amusing crank in her own way, it didn't come across to me. I thought she was to be taken very seriously as one of the few sane commentators on a crazy world. Jay is rather bemused himself, but he doesn't take the goings on so personally. Donna Andrews has much funnier takes on these sort of things in We'll Always Have Parrots (A Meg Langslow Mystery) and Revenge of the Wrought-Iron Flamingos (A Meg Langslow Mystery).

I do at least applaud McCrumb for letting us understand the costs of our electricity. I had always naively supposed that wilderness areas were used, not that families were torn from long established homes. One cannot help but wonder just how well they were rewarded for this involuntary sacrifice.

A Good, but Slightly Disappointing, Follow-up to Bimbos of the Death Sun - Zombies of the Gene Pool is a sequel to the author's Bimbos of the Death Sun in that it follows the two leads--Jay and Marion--as they stumble into another murder mystery in and around science-fiction circles.

It's a decent murder-mystery. The reading goes fairly quickly, the characters are sufficiently developed to carry the plot, everything about the book is fine, if not great. Fans of Bimbos might be slightly disappointed in the read as Zombies takes itself much more seriously than did Bimbos. Bimbos was happy to present caricatures in place of people in order to better skewer "the fen"; Zombies, on the other hand, features more rounded, realistic characters and less parody/satire.

All in all, I thought it was alright. Honestly, I had hoped for something a little more along the lines of Bimbos in terms of humor, because there are tons of good murder-mysery fic, but what made Bimbos stand out was its absurd fantasy-con parody universe. Jay and Marion don't get developed at all--they're the same from page one to the last and only hang around, seemingly, to solve the mystery in the last fifteen pages. Also, it should be mentioned that, whatever one thinks about the rationale to name the original Bimbos of the Death Sun, this book has almost no justification for its title. It's part of the "parody" of the whole thing, of course, but the prospective reader should know that there are fewer Zombies in this novel than Bimbos in the last.

Sharon McCrumb, a writers' writer - Unbelievable talent, old-fashioned command of style, grammar and sentence structure. Not her best book, but great character development and story