Ride Theory reviewed Thunderbirds Ring of Fire by John Theydon (Thunderbirds, #07)
Jeff Tracy and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
1 star
It never rains but it pours on Jeff Tracy. Not only is the World Navy threatening to use his personal tropical island for missile target practice, but now there's a fissure in the ocean, full of magma headed his way. Oh, and Thunderbird 1 is circling the island and cannot land because Brains neglected to order a highly radioactive spare part. (Memo to Brains: set up a Kanban system!) Oh, and Jeff's servant Kyrano just crashed his private jet in the Middle East, because why wouldn't you allow a guy who sporadically has weird fainting spells to pilot your plane? And now, to top it all off, he's got the hiccups, so nobody is taking his orders seriously.
Well, I threw that last bit in, but why not? Author John Theydon threw absolutely everything else at Jeff. I'm surprised there wasn't a sharknado.
After much globe-hopping, Brains gets the part …
It never rains but it pours on Jeff Tracy. Not only is the World Navy threatening to use his personal tropical island for missile target practice, but now there's a fissure in the ocean, full of magma headed his way. Oh, and Thunderbird 1 is circling the island and cannot land because Brains neglected to order a highly radioactive spare part. (Memo to Brains: set up a Kanban system!) Oh, and Jeff's servant Kyrano just crashed his private jet in the Middle East, because why wouldn't you allow a guy who sporadically has weird fainting spells to pilot your plane? And now, to top it all off, he's got the hiccups, so nobody is taking his orders seriously.
Well, I threw that last bit in, but why not? Author John Theydon threw absolutely everything else at Jeff. I'm surprised there wasn't a sharknado.
After much globe-hopping, Brains gets the part to fix Thunderbird 1, and calmly does so, while Scott watches the chronometer tick toward impending doom. The resolution of the World Navy problem lands with a thud, when Lady Penelope simply talks to the World President, and he says "Yeah, okay, I'll countermand the order." (Why didn't someone think of that in the beginning?) The fissure is confusingly and somewhat rapidly dealt with by Virgil. None of these solutions tie together in any meaningful way, except that sufferin' bastard Jeff is relieved as each is resolved.
The Hood's small role is perfunctory, but as far as I'm concerned, the less of that chowderheaded evil "mastermind," the better. His comeuppance is so silly, I heard Barry Gray comic trombones as I read it.
I'm not a fan of Alan, and he's barely in this book (or any of Theydon's novels, for some reason) which is "good" in the way a migraine subsiding to a mere headache is... less bad.
I have a rule about canon for science fiction: If I enjoy it, it's canon. All the Alan Dean Foster Star Trek Log books? Canon. Superman fighting the Klan on an old-time radio show? Canon. The Lady Penelope comic strip? Canon. Thunderbirds Ring of Fire? NOT CANON!
I suppose I have no right to expect very much from a series of potboilers based on a science fiction puppet show, but this novel, out of all the 1960s Thunderbirds novels I've slogged through, is exceptionally awful.