REVIEW: THE SKAITH TRILOGY

The Ginger Star
The Hounds of Skaith
The Reavers of Skaith

By Leigh Brackett

Leigh Brackett is my favorite Sword & Planet writer. Erik John Stark is like Tarzan, on Barsoom, as re-imagined by Raymond Chandler for a John Ford Western. But like Tarzan and cowboys, planetary adventurers need space. The problem is that in her lifetime Brackett scientific exploration overtook her. Mars rovers made it all too plain that the Red Planet hosted no lost civilizations, no ruined cities on the edge of drying seas, no silver-prowed galleys sweeping through ancient canals.

So Brackett just moved her hero a little deeper into space. The early Stark stories featured colonialist earthmen with spaceships, so why not get out of the solar system altogether? Stark is sent to the planet Skaith, out where Earth’s influence is at its ragged edge. Skaith is a dying planet under a dying sun. The whole dying thing speeds up when the locals piss off Stark.

Just as Stark’s Mars is a distinct take on Barsoom, Skaith owes a certain debt to Vance’s Dying Earth and perhaps to Flash Gordon’s duel with Ming the Merciless. It is a world under a theocracy. The Lords Protector and their enforcers the Wandsmen  enforce a rigid sort of wealth transfer between the shrinking base of producers and the class of wandering parasites called the Farers. Moreover, on Skaith humanity has fragmented, morphing their forms adapted to the environment at the cost of having anything in common with their fellows. Culture is fragmented as well, consisting of isolated and backward city-states. But there are prophecies of a Dark Man who will overturn the world.

Stark does some overturning alright. He’s there to look for a friend who disappeared while helping some of the productive people escape the tyranny of the Wandsmen. The novels are a series of adventures as Stark wanders Skaith giving the Lords Protector hell. It’s a bit like a hard-boiled movie serial.

The real secret is that Skaith is Earth, specifically America c. 1970. The Farers are hippies gone feral, the Wandsmen are the PC police of a decadent welfare state. It’s an interesting take though perhaps your mileage may vary. I rather liked the Skaith novels, though I find the early Stark tales, rooted in nostalgia rather than insecurely clinging to it, better.

-Dave Hardy

REVIEW: THE GRAND WHEEL

By Barrington J. Bayley.

Barington Bayley’s novels are about exploring ideas, in this case its high-stakes gambling. The stakes are high indeed for Scarne, a renegade mathematician working as an undercover agent to infiltrate the Grand Wheel. The Wheel is a consortium of gamblers, part Vegas, part Mafia. They are the alternative to the Legitimacy, the inter-stellar empire.

You’d thing the guys with blasters would have it all over the guys with cards, but the Legitimacy is engaged in a losing war with the Hadraonics. The complicating factor is they are fighting in a region where stars go super-nova without warning. Military commander Hakandra is relying on semi-mystic powers of a youth named Shane to understand when stars will explode.

 Both the Wheel and the Legitimacy seeks  to control the unpredictable, the Wheel the turn of cards in a game where the rules change from second to second, the Legitimacy the forces of nature and the course of war. Underneath the fast-paced space adventure is a meditation on powers that seek to control the uncontrollable and the manner in which they gamble with the lives of others.

-Dave Hardy

REVIEW: A BARNSTORMER IN OZ

By Philip José Farmer

PJ Farmer was obsessed with the history of spec-fic, his stories cheerfully plunder pulp SF, Tarzan, Alice in Wonderland, Doc Savage, and of course Oz. And by Oz, I mean the novels written by L Frank Baum at the turn of the 20th century, not the (justly famous) movie.

A Barnstormer in Oz tells of Dorothy’s son, Hank, now a grown man making a living putting on airshows in the heartland. Then he flies through a green cloud and finds himself in Oz.

Only we’re not in Oz anymore. Farmer knows Baum’s works inside and out, so for those who have read beyond The Wizard of Oz may expect to find a lot of Easter eggs.  Farmer doesn’t stop there though, he creates a mythic past for Oz involving ancient races and migrations of alien life forms from alternate dimensions. He also finds a linguistic basis for Quadling (a language related to Munchkin) in Gothic (it’s a real language, not just a subculture for kids with dyed hair and too much makeup, and in the late Roman empire a Gothic priest, Wulfila, translated the New Testament into Gothic) that would make Tolkien proud.

Not that Barnstormer is some dry academic tome. Frankly it has more sex and violence than a lot of novels, and a lot more than you might expect in a tribute to a children’s classic. The pace moves at breakneck speed as Hank helps Glinda the Good with an invasion from Earth in the form of the US Army and all-out war with the Wicked Witch of the North.

Honestly, I enjoyed the book, yet I was a bit put off at the same time. Does one really need to know the details of birth-control in Oz? Or the exact nature of the magic that animates scarecrows? Barnstormer is a gritty tale, with the horrors of war conveyed in grim detail. The quaint folk you saw cavorting on the Yellow Brick Road, are revealed as strange, pagan, and fully capable of cruelty. While Farmer fans and those looking for radical re-casting of classic tales will enjoy this, if you can only bear to see Oz through the lenses of childhood nostalgia, you may want to go cautiously.

-Dave Hardy

REVIEW: NIGHT OF THE COOTERS

By Howard Waldrop

Howard Waldrop is a writer that is a bit hard to define, but I’ll try anyway. If I had to pick two adjectives to describe Waldrop, they’d be playful and weird.

Night of the Cooters is a collection of Waldrop short stories. The stories in Cooters are all introduced by Waldrop and some are even annotated. It’s clear that every tale has its own story rooted in the dreams, frustrations, and pop-culture consumed by the author. And that they are all Howard’s babies.

And what babies! The title story follows the venerable tradition of re-telling H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, this time telling how the invasion ran into a bit of trouble in a small Texas town. “French Scenes” is an homage to the masters of homage, the film-makers of the nouvelle vague. “The Passing of the Western” is a retrospective on the Western genre in a world where rain-making devices really worked. “Thirty Minutes over Broadway” shows a war-weary Jetboy returning to an America he can’t quite come to terms with, except for when he’s battling bad-guys. “Wild, Wild Horses” is perhaps my favorite, recounting an epic bit of smuggling, mythic creatures, and a Roman Empire in decline. “Do Ya, Do Ya Wanna Dance” takes us to a high school reunion that relives the best of the sixties during the worst of the eighties.

To return to the task of defining Waldrop’s writing, perhaps his distinguishing characteristic is to take the collective memory and turn it around. What comes back to us is familiar, yet new, and pretty marvelous. There’s a line in this book that captures the essence of what Waldrop does so well,

Like in Riot in Cell Block 11, when Neville Brand gets shot at by the prison guard with a Thompson, he yells:

“Look out Monty! They got a chopper! Back inside!”

What the Cahiers people heard was:

“Steady mon frere! Let us leave this place of wasted dreams.”

 
Yup, I think that’s exactly what Mr. Waldrop hears. I try to hear it too.

-Dave Hardy

REVIEW: THE STAR VIRUS & THE MASK OF CHAOS

By Barrington  J. Bayley

An early classic from Bayley. Rodrone is an inter-stellar outlaw, not so much a Blackbeard of the spaceways as a ‘60s-style rebel-desperado. The galaxy is controlled by the Streall, a highly conservative alien race. But Rodrone has got his hands on something that threatens their hegemony. It’s a twisty little novel with a mcguffin at once compelling and impossible to pin down. The ultimate question is less about how to get power than asking what it means to have it.


By John Jakes

This Bayley novel was only ever published as part of an Ace Double with John Jakes’ Mask of Chaos. This too fits into the counter-culture motif of the era. Mike is a micropig, a cybernetically enhanced man, who faces prejudice and hostility because of his origins. He finds himself stranded on the planet Tome, a perfectly ordered world where people live behind masks, literally (an interesting touch, reminiscent of Moorcock’s Granbretania). Here he meets Ab, a down-at-the-heels drifter with a rebel-streak a mile wide. They find themselves recruited (rather unwillingly) for a science-fictional reality TV show even more vicious than Real Housewives of Atlanta.

-Dave Hardy

REVIEW: KANE OF OLD MARS

By Michael Moorcock

There’s a certain revival of interest in the Sword & Planet genre. For those of you unfamiliar with the term it is the older bother of Sword & Sorcery. Instead of a magical world, the sword-swinging hero is on a planet, generally on littered with the remains of lost super-science-using civilizations. The prototype is Edgar Rice Burrough’s A Princess of Mars, recently adapted for the screen by Disney (a much better film than the moaning about money might have led one to believe). ERB laid out a program for the genre: a daring American hero (John Carter) who relates his adventures including the wooing and loss of a princess (Deja Thoris) to a pseudonymous author (Norman Bean).

Part of the revival is Michael Moorcock’s three-volume series featuring Michael Kane on Old Mars. Paizo has recently re-printed those, though the earlier paperbacks can still be found. Kane is a scientist who builds a device to transport himself to an alternate universe where Mars is verdant world of adventure filled with danger, secrets, lost cites, and beautiful women. The stories are unabashed love-letters to ERB & John Carter. Moorcock even follows the route by interposing a fictional author, Edward Powys Bradbury, as the transmitter of Kane’s derring-do. Although the stories were written in the mid-‘60s, Kane has another parallel to John Carter, they are veterans of Lost Causes. Carter is a Virginian who fought under Robert E. Lee while Kane served in Vietnam, a cause that wasn’t even officially lost. The Kane series is about naïve, romantic adventure, not the world-weary doom-journey of Elric or the philosophical abstractionism of later Moorcock Fantasy novels.

Another classic Sword & Planet hero from Moorock’s pen is Sojan the Swordsman. Sojan occupied a place somewhat in between S&P and S&S, though the distinction is often slight. Sojan is an early creation, and the work seems less a naïve, retro-fantasy than, well the work of a young writer back before that stuff was retro. Sojan has been re-printed many times. I met him in Elric at the End of Time. The title story is a wicked mash-up of  ultra-decadent and ultra-violent Elric with the ultra-decadent and ultra-bored Dancers at the End of Time. I’d advise reading An Alien Heat as well as some Elric stories before reading “Elric at the End of Time” if only to get a feel for the characters in their original state. It makes the party that much better. End of Time also has some essays by Moorcock on the artistic and business stories behind some of his better known characters. The anthology winds up with “The Stone Thing” one of the better Sword & Sorcery parodies I’ve ever read.

-Dave Hardy

 

REVIEW: THE FALL OF CHRONOPOLIS

By Barrington J. Bayley

Another of Barrington Bayley’s swinging philosophical space operas. This is no less than the decline and fall of an empire that rules not only space, but time. Unlike H. Beam Piper’s Paratime worlds, they don’t simply observe and exploit the past, the people of Chronopolis have gone beyond Fritz Leiber’s Spiders and Snakes, they are not content to infiltrate and alter the time stream. In true imperial fashion, Chronopolis just re-makes it, with vast temporal roadblocks keeping their bubble of time pristine and free of any influence save the empire’s. Time exists in nodes, wave peaks and troughs, always marching onward serenely, never interfering with one another.

But no wave can avoid ripples. Imperial princes may form misalliances between past and future selves. The borders are under attack. Within secretive cults seek to spread chaos and fear. Against the rising tide of temporal decay, a hero arises, Aton, a disgraced time-ship commander on a deadly mission to confront the demonic forces at the heart of time.

This is classic Bayley, part science fiction, part fantasy; sharp, to the point, with a headlong pace that has room to offer wild insights into science, philosophy, and human nature.

-Dave Hardy

 

TALES OF PIRX THE PILOT

By Stanislaw Lem

Stanislaw Lem is a forgotten man of science fiction. In the ‘60s and ‘70s he crafted amazing visions of man’s place in his technological world and probed the meaning of artificial intelligence, order in chaos, and even reality itself. Today he’s best-remembered as the guy who wrote the novel Solaris was based on. I never saw the movie, so I don’t know if that’s fair or not, but for sure Solaris is a first-rate novel. Tales of Pirx the Pilot is a first rate collection of short stories!

We meet Pirx in "The Test", a story that manages to be a white-knuckle ride while having a laugh. Pirx starts out a goofy knucklehead trying to pass his cadet training. He is distinguished by little save bulldog perseverance. Lem’s vision of space travel is diametrically opposite the clean, well-lighted comfort of the Enterprise. He’s the sort of author who considers what it’s like to cross the surface of the Moon in a spacesuit that doesn’t quite fit.

Lem was fond of the detective genre and this collection has some gems of technological detection in the stories "The Conditioned Reflex" and "On Patrol". The standout in Pirx is the final story "Terminus". Lem had a feel for robots beyond anthropomorphized kitsch or dry techno-babble. Here he creates a haunting story of a robot bringing messages from the dead. It’s a claustrophobic tale that sends shivers down my spine.

Tales of Prix the Pilot has the high quality that made Lem and internationally respected author. Forget the pretentious hype, he could write stories that held you like a bear trap.

-Dave  Hardy

 

 

ERIC JOHN STARK: OUTLAW OF MARS

By Leigh Brackett

What if Tarzan moved to Barsoom and Raymond Chandler wrote the story? You’d end up with Eric John Stark: Outlaw of Mars (a title that gives a nod to noted fictioneer Otis Adelbert Kline). That’s not to say that Brackett’s work is derivative, rather she absorbed the tropes and styles of pulp icons and turned them into her own unique manner of story-telling.

Stark, aka N’Chaka the Man-Without-a-Tribe, is the eponymous hero of this brace of Martian novellas. He is of Earth descent, but born on the remote frontier of Mercury. His parents died in an accident and Stark adopted by the sub-human aborigines of Mercury. N’Chaka grew up more animal than man. Now he is a hard-bitten soldier of fortune, living by his sword in the dreary Martian canal towns.

That may sound a bit corny, and perhaps it is. But so what? Brackett mined some classic archetypes of modern myth: the Jungle-Boy, the Gunfighter, Dying Mars and put them trough their paces. Her vision of Mars is fantastic, but with a hard-boiled attitude. Brackett began her career writing detective stories (including the screen-play for Chandler’s The Big Sleep). That unsentimental school stood her in good stead.

The first novella, “The Secret of Sinharat”, sees Stark on the run from Earthman law. With twenty years in the tough Lunar prison system hanging over his head, Stark must infiltrate the leadership of a Martian rebellion and prevent a bloodbath. Inter-planetary renegades and gangsters from the Low Canal Martian city-states have joined forces with the barbarian hordes of the Martian Drylands. What seems like a war for power and resources has a dark riddle and an ancient curse at its heart. Stark must resolve that riddle or Mars’ canals will run with blood.

“People of the Talisman” also uses the theme of barbarian hordes and outlaw city-states. Stark helps a dying thief return the sacred artifact he stole long ago from his home city of Kushat. The only hitch is that a barbarian horde is about to overrun Kushat. The only people that will help Stark are the underworld rabble of the Thieves’ Quarter. Returning the artifact is only the beginning of Stark’s arduous quest on behalf of Kushat.

Readers who find themselves wanting more N’Chaka will also want to read Stark and the Star Kings. This omnibus collects two space opera yarns by Edmond Hamilton as well as other Stark stories. The titular Star Kings rule the galaxy thousands of years hence. When earthman John Gordon gets a chance to leave behind his tedious twentieth century life for living as a prince in the far future he gets quite a bit more than he bargained for. The sequel to The Star Kings, Return to the Stars, features further adventures by John Gordon in the stars. The stories are good, but Gordon, like many other Hamilton heroes, is basically a good-hearted, regular guy with a zest for adventure. That style of pulp-hero contrasts strongly with the trend that Stark fits into. Stark, like Conan, Elric, Sam Spade, or Philip Marlowe, is a consummate outsider, iron-willed, and a killer.

The volume includes the original versions of “The Secret of Sinharat” and “People of the Talisman, “Queen of the Martian Catacombs” and “The Black Amazon of Mars”, the latter is so greatly re-written as to be a different story. There is an adventure set on Venus, the steamy fog-bound alternative to the Martian drylands. “The Enchantress of Venus” is a blend of gothic horror and sword & planet swashbuckling. “Stark and the Star Kings” is a Brackett-Hamilton collaboration that pits N’Chaka against the most clever rogue in all the worlds of the Star Kings. By bringing Stark into Hamilton’s space opera playground, Hamilton and Brackett united the two greatest trends in adventure-oriented science fiction. The result is highly entertaining.

If A Princess of Mars is the naïve infancy of Sword & Planet adventure, Outlaw of Mars is its full maturity. Brackett’s eclectic pulp background mingles styles with a wild abandon. It’s like encountering Caspar Gutman in the Maul of Spider-Haunted Shadizar or riding with Billy the Kid to meet Tars Tarkas. Brackett’s fast-paced action and unique style is one to savor.

-Dave Hardy

PARATIME

By H. Beam Piper

What if you could visit, not another time, but another timeline, a world where things turned out differently? The “alternate universe” story has endless appeal. Consider that it is practically emblematic of the Christmas holidays.

Time travel and alternate universes were a principle interest of H. Beam Piper. Granted they didn’t involve self-sacrificing saving & loan managers (we used to have lots of ‘em in Texas), but something a bit more hard-boiled. Piper created an entire cosmology of them in his Paratime series, it’s not a spoiler to tell you the world we know is just one of them, in fact a rather barbaric and dull one.

This collection leads off with "He Walked Around the Horses", based on the true story of British diplomat Benjamin Bathurst who disappeared in 1809. Piper fills us in on where he went and what befell him.

Most of the stories concern Verkan Vall, a Time cop who keeps order among the various timelines. His universe developed the ability to travel among the timelines and subtly exploit them. Some unscrupulous characters go too far. Often the secret of paratime travel is in danger of being revealed. In "Last Enemy" Verkan has to investigate his ex-wife who has set up shop in a civilization where reincarnation is being developed to an exact science. The rival factions of Volitionists and Statisticalists push the logic of reincarnation in a society deeply divided by class: who gets to reincarnate in a good life? What if your previous incarnation is responsible for a crime? Piper’s conservative libertarianism is at work here, but not oppressively.

Piper walks a fine line between the philosophizing and the action and gets it right in these stories. Sometimes Verkan Vall wins a bit too easily, but there are worse faults. There is also an excellent introduction by John F. Carr that gives background on Piper’s beliefs and the cosmology of Paratime. These stories have also appeared with the tales from Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen.

-Dave Hardy

OTHER DIMENSIONS

By Clark Ashton Smith

This collection from Arkham House showcases short stories by Clark Ashton Smith over a period ranging from the 1910s to the 1950s. The tales are apparently arranged by length with some long space opera yarns up front and shorter Oriental fantasies in the back.

If you are a CAS fan, then this is a must read. The sf tales are fairly basic stuff. They are picaresque shoot-‘em-ups on strange planets. They don’t compare to his much more polished fantasy and horror, though "The Immeasurable Horror" is a good sf-action thriller.

The shorter works manage to pack a punch (not surprising since they lean and mean). The standouts in this collection are "Told in the Desert", "An Offering to the Moon", "Monsters in the Night", and "A Tale of Sir John Maundeville". CAS is rather hard to find these days and relatively little of his work is in print. That’s a pity, but as long as libraries still have copies of his books, you’ll be able to get ‘em on interlibrary loan.

-Dave Hardy

 

 

ONE HUMAN MINUTE

By Stanislaw Lem
Stanislaw Lem is well known for his many reviews of non-existent books. One Human Minute follows in this tradition with two reviews and an essay on the development of intelligent life. The writing is quintessential Lem. His interests with statistics, randomness, and artificial intelligence will be familiar terrain for readers who have read The Cyberiad, The Investigation, or The Chain of Chance. Unburdened by the genre trappings of American sf, Lem is able to roam wherever his mind takes him. It makes for some truly forward-looking sf (though Lem might well bridle at the label).

The title review looks at One Human Minute (J. Johnson & S. Johnson, Moon Publishers) a statistical compendium that provides a snapshot of human existence in an average minute. Some of the comparisons are unsubtle: eg the First World spends more on clothes for sex-dolls than the Third World spends on clothes for people. While this is part satire on global poverty and oppression and part satire on human knowledge, it is also forward looking in its own way. After all, couldn’t you look up this information on the Internet?

The Upside-Down Evolution begins with one of those jabs at sf that made Lem such a controversial figure. Lem asks, what better way to hide a dangerous message from the future than as idiotic science fiction junk? The book in question recounts the development of weaponry and the 21st century rise of gnat-sized robot warriors and the revolution in warfare and politics that followed. It’s a conceit that has an eerie echo of truth in a world where nano-technology is in development and Predator Drones make critical war decisions. 

The World as Catastrophe is science writing, not science fiction. Lem explores attempts to quantify the likelihood of intelligent life arising and asks where the boundaries of a statistically calculable (and hence repeatable) event and an un-guessable, random occurrence lie.

This is late Lem, beyond the sf trappings of his early work. Here he is pure intellect, beyond storytelling. For those who found the ideas that underlie his early work interesting in their own right, One Human Minute is worth exploring.

-Dave Hardy

 

THE MOON POOL

By A. Merritt

Since its publication in 1919 The Moon Pool has repeatedly come back (most recently in 2004). It is truly a classic of early American SF.

The tale concerns a search for a lost group of scientists that leads to Nan Matal, the basalt ruins of Ponape. Things get really weird when the Shining Devil of the Moon Pool shows up and a disparate band of adventurers end up in a lost civilization. The narrator is a stuffed-shirt scientist, backed up by a romantic Irish airman, a Norwegian sailor who acts as a modern-day Viking, and a shady Bolshevik agent.

Honestly the first half of this novel is slow, rather more so than I usually recommend. Merritt spends a little too much time building his palace of wonders. But they are grade-A, USDA approved wonders. When I got to the battle of the Frog-warriors against the dwarves of lost Lemuria on the shores of the crimson sea where float the flesh-eating moon globes, I could see why this one keeps coming back!
 

-Dave Hardy

 

THE LEGION OF SPACE

By Jack Williamson

OK, this is so totally a guilty pleasure! I am just a sucker for old-time space opera, the broader the better. Jack Williamson is one of the diamonds in the crown of science fiction, but he took some polishing.

Originally published in 1935 as a serial, and released as a novel in 1947, The Legion of Space tells of young legionnaire John Star’s crusade to prevent monarchists inside the Legion from overthrowing the democratic "Green Hall" government. Star has to defeat the monarchists and their allies the Medusa, a race of predatory beings perpetually searching for new planets.

This stuff is bad, really bad. The hero is called John Star even though his name is John Ulnar, because he changes his name at the end of the story. If you just said, “Huh?” that would be what I said when I read it. John Star has a crew of legionnaires to help him, among them is Giles Habibula, who is supposed to be an interstellar Falstaff. After he’d whined about how “poor mortal me is starved to skin and bones and worn out in the service of the Legion” for about the 325th time in maybe 6 pages I really wanted to pull out my hair.

But I kept on reading, because Williamson knew how to keep up the suspense, the action, and the interest. He had the ability to create a sense of wonder. There is the mysterious AKKA, a process that can destroy anything in line of sight, even a planet. The trek through the black jungle on the lost planet of the Medusa drew me in. The image of the city of black metal on the shore of a dying sea is a bizarre and haunting one.

So if you like your sf cheap & cheerful, this sure fits the bill.
 

-Dave Hardy

 

JUDGMENT NIGHT

By C.L. Moore

From out of the Golden Age of sf comes C.L. Moore’s Judgment Night, a novel and four novelettes. Five stories, complete without an ounce of fat in 344 pages. Nowadays authors are just getting warmed up to drop you off for the second half of volume whatever of the Snoreosphere Quatrology by page 344. Gnome Press could deliver the goods.

The novel is worth the price of admission. Judgment Night is Space Opera. Empires totter, old gods awake, scores are settled, super-weapons are deployed, the fate of mankind hangs in the balance, but the tale is told on an intimate, human scale. Moore’s hero is Juille the princess of the Lyonesse Empire. Juille ain’t no girlie-girl, she is all woman. Juille is what would normally be the femme fatale, all boots and arrogance, though she can still fill out the galaxy’s best evening dress. She could teach Kimball Kinnison a lesson in militarism and show Conan what steely resolve really is. In routine fiction Juille would be the villain, but Moore makes her the HERO! With precise and deft literary judo she makes you root for the bloodthirsty princess too!

Judgment Night isn’t just furious plotting, Moore has time to explore the nature of a woman’s role in a violent world, to look at the nature of leadership, and the urges that lead man to his destruction. Moore isn’t simply on a fascist rant, her kung-fu is too good. Galactic war has a price, Moore’s genius is to show us how easily we can forget the butcher’s bill until it’s due.

 

-Dave Hardy

 

 

INTERSTATE DREAMS

By Neal Barrett, Jr.

At Armadillo Con 2005 in Austin, Texas, I listened to a panel on “The Weird Tale”. Someone defined that type of story as something Neal Barrett, Jr. wrote. Well, fair enough.

Interstate Dreams follows Dreamer, a slacker war-vet who lives in Austin. He sells tropical fish and is a professional thief (thanks to a bullet stuck in his head that gives him surreal, prophetic dreams and allows him to circumvent locks and alarms). Alas, people from Houston intrude, the slimy scientist/white-collar crook Halloran Horn, millionaire Gus Brauweiler, and gangster Mako Binder.

They prove less of a strain on Dreamer than the mysterious, angelic, infinitely desirable hitchhiker he just saw. It’s not so much the girl as the way Dreamer’s lust is all too apparent to his ambitious lawyer-girlfriend, Eileen.

This is really the tip of the iceberg. There is enough stuff here to make about six novels. Any sane, sensible, NY Times bestseller author would have filled out a 627 pager and have gotten an advance on the sequel. Barrett fits it all into 225 pages, and you know what, it never feels forced. Much of this surreal Austin-Houston landscape zips by like scenery on the interstate, glimpsed but impossible to get at, but it doesn’t get dull or sluggish. Maybe that’s why Barrett gets published by MoJo Press and is widely respected by other writers, rather than being a bestseller wallowing in bloated self-indulgence. Just a theory.
 

-Dave Hardy

 

REVIEW: ECHOES OF VALOR III

Edited by Karl Edward Wagner

This is a set of fantasy and adventure tales by various pulp authors. The lead tale is "Shadow of the Vulture" by Robert E Howard. It is one of his best historical adventure tales and feature Sonya of Rogatino, the Cossack sword-woman who was the precursor of Red Sonja of the comics. It’s a ripping story set at the siege of Vienna in 1529.

There is a marvelous Jack Williamson yarn, "Wolves of Darkness", with a brilliant mix of science-fiction a horror that pre-figures the novel Darker than You Think.

While there are some decent tales by Manly Wade Wellman and Henry Kuttner, the real discovery here is Nictzin Dyalhis. Now nearly forgotten, Dyalhis was a regular contributor to Weird Tales. His work has a true sense of wonder with stories that could almost be fairy tales, gentle and dark at the same time.

Echoes of Valor III is definitely worth adding to one’s collection.

-Dave Hardy

REVIEW: THE BEST OF EDMOND HAMILTON

By Edmond Hamilton

Edmond Hamilton is one of the forgotten pioneers of science fiction. His career began in the pulps back in the 1920s and carried on for over fifty years. This 1977 anthology, edited by Hamilton's wife, the multi-talented Leigh Brackett, brought his best short stories between one set of covers.

It seems Hamilton was at his peak in the 1930s and 1940s since that’s when most of these stories date from. In truth that’s an illusion since by the ‘50s the pulp markets for short stories had greatly diminished and Hamilton was concentrating on novels. For me it’s a bonus that this anthology focuses on the early stuff since I find that naïve and sometimes crude sf can pack more of a punch than much more polished recent work.

Some real standouts here are "The Monster-God of Mamurth", a story about an explorer trapped in an invisible city and stalked by an invisible monster (it's an interesting example of the influence of The Arabian Nights on early sf), and "Exile", a very simple short-short about a writer and the imaginary world he is trapped in. "A Conquest of Two Worlds" tells of an earthman so disgusted with the hypocrisy and cruelty of Earth’s conquest of the backward races of Venus and Mars, that he throws in his lot with the rebellious BEMs of Jupiter. This is very much an upside-down version of the typical “alien conquest” tale. "Thundering Worlds" is Hamilton at his wide-screen planet-smashing best, a trick he was pulling off well before Doc Smith got in on the act. "He That Hath Wings" is a take on bad boys, the girls who love them, and what happens when they try to pull them back to earth.

As I said, in many ways this is NOT the most polished work of Hamilton, but perhaps it is the most representative. As a time capsule of early pulp sf, it hits the spot.

-Dave Hardy

THE EARLY LONG

By Frank Belknap Long

I’ve always been a sucker for collections like this. Anthologies of tales from the pulps are the lands I go prospecting for fiction gold. Sometimes I strike pay dirt and sometimes I find rocks. There is a bit of both in The Early Long.

Although he is often recalled as HP Lovecraft’s friend, Frank Belknap Long had a very long career in science fiction and fantasy writing. This collection begins with some of his earliest sales to Weird Tales in the 1920s and winds up with stories he sold to Unknown in the mid-1940s.

It’s an interesting set, particularly regards the aspect of watching a writer develop. While never a Lovecraft clone, his early work shows some affinities with HPL’s style and preoccupations. The "Hounds of Tindalos" is one of Long’s best known tales and is generally considered a part of the larger Mythos cycle of stories. It is a good example of cosmic horror deployed effectively, although Long was still polishing his writing style. It’s not everyday one finds a tale in which a character writes his death-scream.

Later tales manage to combine science fiction with fantasy to create a modern type of horror story (much as HPL’s critical theory called for) but on a human scale. Long’s tales from the ‘40s are memorable and polished. "Grab Bags are Dangerous" is a fine exercise in dark-fantasy leavened with humor and "Step into my Garden" mixes fantasy, myth and fear for a memorable tale.

If you come across this one, it’s well worth a read.

-Dave Hardy

 

 

DESTINATION INFINITY

By Henry Kuttner

Henry Kuttner was a prolific and popular sf writer, his career spanned from the 1930s to the 1950s when he died young from a heart attack. Destination Infinity is one of the many books he wrote under a pen name, most likely in collaboration with his wife CL Moore.

The tale is classic ‘50s science fiction, set on a Venus covered with roiling seas, and jungles full of man-eating plants. The conflict isn’t exactly about the best means to prune gigantic Venus fly-traps though. It concerns Sam Reed, an illegitimate child of a family of wealthy immortals and his rise from lowly outsider to savior of mankind. Sam is a consummate anti-hero, deliberately abandoned by his father and full of angst and ambition in an uncaring world. The tale follows Sam as a gangster, land-speculator, pioneer, and military dictator.

What Kuttner writes here is sociological science fiction, part speculation on society and part soap opera. Earth was long ago destroyed by nuclear war and mankind lives in undersea habitats on Venus. A few families have developed a hereditary trait of immortality, and live for centuries, aging little if at all. The mass of mankind has stagnated, allowing the immortals to do their thinking for them. Sam Reed blows it all apart in his relentless drive to make it to the top.

This is a book I liked despite itself. The opening is overlong and is basically a lot of exposition to set the story for the rest of the novel. Judging from the names (Reed, Harker, Hale, Delaware, Nevada, Plymouth) and dialog (‘50s Middle American) the only survivors of Earth’s nuclear wars are a bunch of WASPs from North America. I’m not sure I buy the sociology either, immortality is an advantage, but it is practical bribes and threats that keep a society in line, not spiritual intimidation. Just take a look at Eastern Europe in the ‘70s or Medieval Christendom’s struggles with heresy to find examples of orderly, stultified societies. But Kuttner pushes his logic to the end and spices it with soap opera of great verve. Overall, I wasn’t disappointed when I got to Sam Reed’s Destination.

 

-Dave Hardy