Pajiba

I fucking LOVE this book (it's so god awful I actually had to buy it, just to prove to disbelieving friends that it actually exists). It's best enjoyed whilst drunk, preferrable read aloud to equally drunken friends. The finest line this author has ever written (although I think it may occur in another of his novels) is : "Holy exploding humvees, Batman!" said Mother.

Ice Station is only the start for Matthew Reilly - you can't read Ice Station and then not pick up Area 7 and Scarecrow - they get crazier and stupider as you go - but damn are they a good fun read! Ice Station and Contest are two of my favs. What really is a shame is apparently the only books picked up for a movie are the Hover Car Racer series by Disney!
I want my Alien massacare (in a library no less) on the big screen!

If you liked this one, you really have to read Seven Deadly Wonders also by Reilly. It makes Ice Station seem quiet and restrained.

Man, I think I got stoopider just reading the review, I can hear the IQ clicker running backward ... I can't imagine what sublevel of moronitude the actual book would produce.

Buuuuut .... I think I'd like to find out.

Thanks for taking me right back to 8th grade, asshole!

Not to endorse anything terribly illegal, but I love this book for all the reasons listed. It has two sequels, though, and the third in the series is actually, if you can believe it, more ridiculous and more awesome. Shooting down jet planes with pistols, tying sports cars to helicopters and smashing them together, the main character of this book does some insane shit. He jumps through the front window of an airliner's cockpit while it's IN FLIGHT. Scarecrow is the name of the third book and it's Ice Station on speed. I got high and a little drunk a couple weeks back and read this out loud to a friend of mine in the same condition, and it was the most awesome reading has ever been.

For the same rush of camptastic glee you get from this, try James Rollin's Sandstorm. I pride myself on having a high tolerance for the ridiculous, but even I couldn't handle that one.

I read once in an interview with Reilly (Ice Station is truly one of my favourite books OF ALL TIME) that he writes his books as precursors to their film adaptations. He writes them to be as visual as possible, in the hope they'll get picked up and turned into movies.

Hence the immense stupidity of the plot; the story isn't important, but the incredible action sequences are.

Honestly though if you think this is stupid, read the books that follow, Area...some number or an other, Scarecrow(the lead character Shane Schofields call sign, just btw) , then the new series dealing with Jack McAustralian, the semi cyborg Australian ...dude, who has a pet hawk he uses as a weapon/recon gatherer and the adopted daughter born as part of an ancient prophecy regarding the end of the world.
Yeah, no trying to explain it hurts my HEART, because while i love Ice Station, I too love it because its the stupidest fucking book in the entire fucking world (though it'd make a fucking awesomely ridiculous film, specially if Bay directed while Bruckheimer funded)

Slightly better books are The Contest and Temple, they're ever so teenily less stupid while still as expansively visual and epic in the pimply fourteen year old talking about boobs sense of the word.

These books are incredible. They actually include, in terms of character- Shane Schofield who was a pilot until he crashed in some enemy country, was captured and HAD HIS EYES CUT OUT, only to be replaced on the militaries dime enabling him not to become a pilot again (any trauma to the eye grounds you for life) but to join the Marine Corp and work his way up through the ranks.
There may also be a hyper efficient assasin named Snake. Seriously. A genius little girl with an adopted pet seal named Wendy.
A character named Mother( as in'fucker'), who SPOILER, gets the lower half of her leg bitten off by one of those killer whales, survives this, and is given a bionic replacement in the next books and utters the absolutely incredible line 'Holy Exploding Humvees Batman!' a phrase which has entered into my daily vernacular as my standard expression of surprise or awe.
If this film doesn't make you want a Maglight grappling hook gun, and like...your very own crack squad of marines who can survive being shot, set on fire(no seriously) dropped into a pool of THE ARCTIC OCEAN filled with killer killer whales, battered around in hovercraft and being betrayed by THEIR OWN GOVERMENT...then nothing will.

as for his '...' chapter endings, and the exclamation points? Baby, it ONLY gets worse from here, by the second book about Jack the Australian cyborg he's averaging a dozen every paragraph, sometimes when he isn't even describing action. I sort of think Matthew Reilly is on some sort of awesome crack.

I did a double-take when I saw this on the Cannonball Read list! Awesome, awesome ridiculously stupid book. I like to think of it as an action movie in book form.

You guys never heard of the cultural cringe did you? We're so fucking terrified we don't MATTER down here in our little nation a gazillion miles from anywhere (okay - big land mass, but there's only 21 million of us, which is what, a couple of your bigger cities) that Matthew Reilly choosing an American protagonist is completely understandable (if somewhat bloody irritating) to me.

Having said that, you HAVE to read the interviews he did on this book: basically he said he was bored with plot and character development and suchlike crap: why not replace that with more! action! and lots and lots of punctuation!!!!! Also lovingly detailing each and every piece of weaponry used...yeah, he's a weapons geek. Oh we got them here too.

And having said *that*, I'm with Chugga: Ice Station was the perfect book to take on a four-hour inter-city train ride - I finished it just as we pulled into Melbourne and it was FANTASTIC - total entertainment, not a brain cell exercised the entire time I was reading.

They get sillier as you go along, too. The complete stinker is Hover Car Racer. That's the one where he started believing his own hype, conveniently forgetting *he was the one who started it*.

What i find fascinating about him is, in a ot of action franchises, the first boooks immense because it's pure, its a bunch of grown ups kicking shit out of one another and blowing crap up and swearing and just being hilarious and awesome...then the second and third tend to suck because they add a kid (or grown teen daughter who resents her dad for no apparent reason but is JUST LIKE HIM and ends up kidnapped but spunky enough to knock a few bags of sense into her captors) who is wisecracking and adorable and softens the protaganists cold, whithered heart;

Reilly jams the kid into the mix from the very beginning often wildly implausibly.
But still the books are FuckinAwesomeCredibleDiculous.

I desperately want him to right more Schofield books, or at least give Aloysius Knight, the ragingly bad ass character introduced in Scarecrow, his own deserved followup. The Jack The Australian, thats right Australian did i mention HE'S AUSTRALIAN, character is nothing like as funny as Schofield and Knight, nothing to do with his nationality, just the character as it is...needs sorting boyo. Git on it

And I thought my vampire books were stupid...