Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Marvel Tales, May 1940

MARVEL SCIENCE STORIES started as a science fiction pulp, as you'd expect from that title, but after five issues, it abruptly changed to a Weird Menace pulp under the name MARVEL TALES. That experiment last only two issues, then it switched back to MARVEL STORIES, then MARVEL SCIENCE STORIES (again), and finally MARVEL SCIENCE FICTION. None of them were successful, but it wasn't for lack of trying. This is the second and final issue under the MARVEL TALES name, with a cover by J.W. Scott that's certainly worth of a Weird Menace pulp. Most of the authors inside were top-notch, although they tended to use pseudonyms, maybe because of the generally disreputable air the whole enterprise gave off. The lead story in this issue is by Nils O. Sunderland, who was really Jack Williamson, and backing him up are Robert O. Wentworth (Edmond Hamilton), Russell Gray (Bruno Fischer), and a couple of guys using their real names, Frederic Arnold Kummer Jr. and George E. Clark. If you want to check out this pulp for yourself, the entire issue can be found here. 

Review: City - Clifford D. Simak

A couple of weeks ago when I reran my review from 2009 of Clifford D. Simak’s novel WAY STATION, I mentioned that Bill Crider recommended Simak’s novel CITY to me at least 40 years ago and said that I would try to get around to reading it. Well, this may surprise you, but I actually did go ahead and read it. There’s a lot of classic science fiction I’ve never gotten around to, and I’d like to read some of it while I still have the chance. This is as good a place to start as any.

CITY is a fix-up novel composed of eight novelettes that appeared originally in the pulps ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION and FANTASTIC ADVENTURES between 1944 and 1951, plus a short story written for an anthology in 1973. The stories are: “City”, ASTOUNDING, May 1944; “Huddling Place”, ASTOUNDING, July 1944; “Census”, ASTOUNDING, September 1944; “Desertion”, ASTOUNDING, November 1944 (this is actually the first story in the series Simak wrote, although it wasn’t published first); “Paradise”, ASTOUNDING, June 1946; “Hobbies”, ASTOUNDING, November 1946; “Aesop”, ASTOUNDING, December 1947; “The Trouble With Ants”, FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, January 1951 (Simak’s title for the story was “The Simple Way”); and “Epilog”, ASTOUNDING: JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL ANTHOLOGY.

When Simak put the eight novelettes together in a book published by Gnome Press in 1952 (“Epilog” wasn’t written until years later), he wrote notes between each story in the voice of a future historian as bridging material. Even so, CITY reads more like a collection than an actual novel because of the vast sweep of time it covers and the varying protagonists. However, there’s enough continuity between the stories that I think it’s best to read them in this form. They wouldn’t make as much sense if they were read out of order.

As for the tale (no pun intended) itself, even though I hadn’t read this book, I’ve known for a long time what it’s about: a world in which humans have all but disappeared and things are run by robots and sentient, talking dogs. Come to find out, though, that set-up doesn’t really take shape until well past the halfway point of the book. Instead, the stories cover the gradual decline of humanity and its eventual exodus from Earth, except for a few stragglers. Sure, there are some robots and dogs, but humans—to be specific, several generations of the Webster family, who are all doctors and scientists—are the protagonists. Eventually, though, it’s just the robots, led by the nigh-immortal butler Jenkins, and the dogs, and they face the same sort of challenges the humans did. Will they be more successful in overcoming them?

Anybody who knows me very well knows that I love dogs. There are some good dogs in this book, although somewhat oddly, we never get to know any of them very well. Simak does a good job, though, of writing them as dogs, not as humans with four legs and a tail. Some of my favorite parts of this book are the between-story notes, in which academics named Tige, Bounce, and Rover argue about the origins of the stories and whether or not humans really existed or were just made up as some sort of doggish fairy tale. These sections are clever and very funny.

And that humor is welcome, because, man, overall this is a bleak book! Humans make the wrong decisions and things fall apart over and over again. There are glimmers of hope here and there, but mostly I was just left shaking my head in despair.

That’s where my problem with this book lies. There’s very little action, mostly just people sitting around talking or interior monologues (and you’d be surprised how many interior monologues robots can have). The concepts are huge, sweeping, and compelling, but there’s not much to the book other than the concepts. If I had actually read this 40 years ago, or better yet, when I was in junior high or high school, I think the ideas would have been enough to blow me away. As it is, CITY is probably not the best book for a tired old man who’s inclined to gloominess to be reading.

I think I’ve gotten shallow in my dotage. Mostly when I read, I just want to be entertained. CITY is an impressive book, very well-written and thought-provoking, but its entertainment value is slight. You might react entirely differently to it. I can certainly see why it’s considered classic science fiction, and I’m glad I read it, but for me, it was somewhat of a disappointment.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Way Station - Clifford D. Simak

Tucked away in an isolated corner of Wisconsin farmland is an old house that dates from before the Civil War, but it’s strangely unchanged in all that time. So is the man who lives there, Enoch Wallace, who fought with the Union Army in that conflict and is now still alive more than a hundred years later and apparently not much older than when he fought at Gettysburg. Enoch’s secret is that inside the house is an intergalactic transport apparatus, and he’s the keeper of Galactic Central’s way station on Earth.

That’s the set-up of Clifford D. Simak’s Hugo-winning novel WAY STATION, first published in 1963 and reprinted several times since. Simak was a veteran of the science fiction pulps dating back to before what’s now considered the Golden Age of those magazines, and as the pulps faded he made a seamless transition to writing well-received hardback SF novels. Although he wrote some Western stories for the pulps and later dabbled in fantasy novels as well, he’s best remembered for what some have called pastoral SF – stories and novels usually taking place in rural settings, with low-key, somewhat unsophisticated (at least on the surface) protagonists. WAY STATION fits neatly into that sub-category and may well be the best example of it I’ve encountered.

Simak was never a flashy writer. His prose style is functional and plain-spoken, like the people he writes about. In WAY STATION, the story unfolds in a gentle, leisurely fashion, with the main elements of the plot never really getting into gear until about halfway through the book. Most writers today couldn’t get away with that, but Simak makes it work. And once things do start rolling, the scope of the story rapidly expands, with the fate of entire galaxies ultimately at stake, even though all the action takes place here on Earth.

When I was younger, I read a number of Simak’s novels, and while I enjoyed them, he was never a particular favorite of mine. I think maybe I just wasn’t ready to appreciate his virtues. WAY STATION is a fine novel and has dated hardly at all. I plan to read more of his work soon.

(I swear, if I had the attention span even of a six-week-old puppy, I might be dangerous. Despite my good intentions, I haven't read anything else by Simak since this post first appeared on January 30, 2009. I still plan to one of these days, though. Bill Crider recommended CITY to me at least 40 years ago. I'll get to it.)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Wonder Stories, Summer 1944

Let's see, we have a beautiful space babe, a stalwart hero, a ray-gun, and an octopus-like alien. Man, I love Earle Bergey's covers. The lead novella in this issue of THRILLING WONDER STORIES is by Ross Rocklynne, an author I've always found to be pretty entertaining, although I haven't read a great deal of his work. Also on hand are two well-known names in the science fiction field, John Russell Fearn writing under his pseudonym Polton Cross and Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, as well as Paul S. Powers, much better remembered these days for his stories about Sonny Tabor and Kid Wolf in WILD WEST WEEKLY. Rounding out the issue are stories by the lesser known Albert De Pina and Frank Ferry, along with an article by my old editor/mentor Sam Merwin Jr. If you'd like to check out this issue, the whole thing can be found on-line at the Internet Archive.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Science Fiction Quarterly, August 1951

The cover by Leo Morey on this issue of SCIENCE FICTION QUARTERLY caught my eye as I was looking through the Fictionmags Index. There's a decent group of writers inside this issue as well: Arthur C. Clarke, James Blish, Frederik Pohl (writing as James MacCreigh), James E. Gunn (writing as Edwin James), Larry T. Shaw (who was my editor, officially, for one issue of MSMM, although I never had any contact with him whatsoever), Morton Klass, and Joe Kennedy (writing as Joquel Kennedy). I'm not familiar with Klass and Kennedy, but I've read and enjoyed work by all the others. This issue is available at the Internet Archive, along with other issues of SCIENCE FICTION QUARTERLY.

Review: Guns of Mars - Chuck Dixon

If you don’t count all the Tarzan movies I watched on TV as a kid, my introduction to the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs was the novel A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS. My sister’s boyfriend loaned me the Ace shorty edition of that book sometime in the early Sixties. I loved it and became a lifelong Burroughs fan, especially the Mars series. Or Barsoom, to use the proper Martian name.

I haven’t been a fan of Chuck Dixon’s work for quite that long, but he’s still one of my favorite authors. So when I heard that Dixon was writing a novel set on Burroughs’ Mars, I was thrilled and looked forward to reading it.

GUNS OF MARS did not disappoint me. In the least.

This novel is set on Barsoom approximately a thousand years after the era of Burroughs’ hero John Carter. Mars, already a dying planet in Carter’s day, has become even more inhospitable. Water is scarce and the most valuable commodity on the planet. As the novel opens, Kal Keddaq, a fugitive Thark (the four-armed warrior race created by Burroughs), is trying to reach the northern pole where the ice still provides a source of water. But a human bounty hunter is on his trail, and so is a mysterious figure whose identity and motivation Dixon plays close to the vest for a while.

The bounty hunter captures Kal, who escapes but then is captured by the other member of our trio of main characters. In this back and forth, Kal and the bounty hunter discover a clue to the location of a hidden source of the best water on the planet, and that becomes the prize that everybody is after, including a number of other enemies and untrustworthy allies they encounter along the way.

If this is starting to sound familiar, it should, because GUNS OF MARS is very much a Spaghetti Western set on Burroughs’ Barsoom in its latter days. And it’s hugely entertaining, told in vivid, fast-paced prose that takes advantage of Burroughs’ creation while at the same time cleverly adding to it. The characters are all interesting, the action is plentiful and suitably gritty, and I just had a great time reading it. This is a Front Porch Book for sure, like so many of those other great adventure yarns I read back in those days.

GUNS OF MARS is available on Amazon in an e-book edition at the moment. I believe a print edition is in the works. I started my reading this year with Max Allan Collins’ RETURN OF THE MALTESE FALCON, a superb variation on another old favorite of mine, and now I’ve followed that up with Chuck Dixon’s visit to Barsoom. I don’t expect the rest of the year to live up to that, but it’s a spectacular beginning, for sure, with both books strong contenders to be on my Top Ten list at the end of the year.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Wonder Stories, Summer 1945

This issue of THRILLING WONDER STORIES has a great zero-g cover by Earle Bergey and a few writers inside you may have heard of: Edmond Hamilton, Henry Kuttner, Jack Vance, Murray Leinster, and Frank Belknap Long (twice, once as himself and once as Leslie Northern). That's just a spectacular lineup. If you want to read this one, you can find it here, along with a bunch of other issues of THRILLING WONDER STORIES.

Review: Goddess of the Fifth Plane - William P. McGivern

I really enjoyed that William P. McGivern science fiction novella I read a while back, so I tried another novella of his from the pulp FANTASTIC ADVENTURES. This one falls more into the fantasy category, or at least science-fantasy, since it does have a sort of science fictional element to it.

“Goddess of the Fifth Plane” appeared in the September 1942 issue of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES and earned the cover painting by Harold W. Macauley. It’s a good cover, too. Not exactly how I pictured the title character but relatively close. And Macauley did a great job on her sidekick.

The protagonist of this yarn is Vance Cameron, a wealthy American explorer and adventurer who is in London as the story opens because he’s volunteered to use his aviator skills as a fighter pilot for the R.A.F. He doesn’t stay in London long, though, because a mysterious painting shows up in his flat, depicting a beautiful young woman and a fierce creature resembling a horned lion. Wouldn’t you know it? The painting is actually an interdimensional gateway, and Vance finds himself in another realm, up to his neck in a civil war between a deposed queen and the bad guy who has seized his throne. There’s a little political intrigue, but mostly two-fisted, swashbuckling adventure ensues as Vance fights to help the beautiful queen reclaim her kingdom. He finds a novel but very effective way to do it, too, as the plot takes a twist or two that are at least slightly surprising.

I really enjoyed this colorful, well-written yarn. It reminded me of some of the science-fantasy stories by Henry Kuttner that I’ve read. The action barrels along in a very pleasing fashion that would have had me enthralled if I’d read it when I was a kid sitting on my parents’ front porch. Reading it now as an old geezer, I was still very much entertained. If there’s still a ten-or-twelve-year-old in you who loves this stuff as much as I do, I highly recommend “Goddess of the Fifth Plane”. It’s been reprinted in the e-book THE WILLIAM P. McGIVERN FANTASY MEGAPACK. I plan to delve into that collection again soon.

Review: Safari to the Lost Ages - William P. McGivern

After reading William P. McGivern’s grim and gritty crime novel SHIELD FOR MURDER a couple of weeks ago, I got the urge to try one of his science fiction stories. “Safari to the Lost Ages”, a novella that appeared originally in the July 1942 issue of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, seemed like a good bet. It’s about a trip 30,000 years into the past, and I like a good time travel yarn now and then.

The first thing to know about this story is that there’s almost no science to it, not even any handwavium to explain how time travel exists. It just does, that’s all, and it’s so commonplace that there are companies rich people hire to take them into the past as a vacation. One such company is run by two-fisted adventurer Barry Rudd and his assistant, the burly McGregor.

Barry and McGregor are hired by beautiful Linda Carstairs to find her father, a scientist who went 30,000 years into the past but never returned to the present. Linda insists on going along on the expedition, of course, and so does her fiancé. Barry doesn’t like this, but Linda is paying for the trip, so he reluctantly agrees to her presence.

Well, naturally, things go wrong. After an encounter with a dinosaur, Barry is captured by some beautiful winged bird-girls and winds up the prisoner of some cavemen who have a village inside an extinct volcano. McGregor and the others are also taken prisoner by the cavemen. (Yes, this is one of those stories where cavemen and dinosaurs exist at the same time.) We get human sacrifice, desperate battles, treachery, noble gestures, and nick-of-time escapes. All the stuff of classic pulp adventure yarns, in other words.

And a pulp adventure yarn is really all this is, despite the minor science fiction trappings. It might as well have taken place in the Africa that Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote about, where there’s a lost race around every corner. Of course, that’s fine with me. I read to be entertained, so the only question is whether or not “Safari to the Lost Ages” is entertaining.

Let me put it this way: If I had read this when I was ten years old, I would have thought it was one of the greatest stories ever written. As it is, reading it at a considerably older age, I still galloped right through it and had a very good time reading it. This is Front Porch stuff for sure. McGivern’s prose is colorful, breakneck fast, and heavy on the adverbs (I love adverbs, even though I know I’m supposed to hate them in this day and age). Barry Rudd is a stalwart hero, the villains are suitably despicable, the bird-girls are an intriguing concept I wish he had done more with, and the whole thing just raced by. If I had read this story without a by-line on it, I never would have guessed it was written by the same guy who did the bleak, low-key SHIELD FOR MURDER.

From what I’ve written about it, you ought to be able to tell whether you’re the sort of reader who would enjoy “Safari to the Lost Ages” or think it’s the stupidest thing ever. So proceed accordingly. The novella is included in THE FIRST WILLIAM P. McGIVERN SCIENCE FICTION MEGAPACK, which is available as an e-book on Amazon. I definitely plan to read more of McGivern’s science fiction and fantasy. By the way, McGivern also wrote the story under the house-name P.F. Costello that's featured on the cover of that issue of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, and it's included in THE WILLIAM P. McGIVERN FANTASY MEGAPACK.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Planet Stories, Spring 1949

This is actually a fairly sedate cover by Allen Anderson on this issue of PLANET STORIES. There's a good group of writers inside, too, including Ray Bradbury (with a reprint from MACLEAN'S), Damon Knight, Alfred Coppel, Henry Hasse, Basil Wells, Stanley Mullen, and the less well-known (at least to me) Robert Abernathy and George Whitley. I don't own this issue, but it's available on-line here if any of you want to check it out. (With all the pulps that I own and all the ones that are on-line, I swear I could sit and read pulps all day, every day, and never even come close to reading all the ones I'd like to. It's a frustrating state of affairs, but what're you gonna do?) 

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Amazing Stories, June 1945

Is that a great big cat, or are those little-bitty spacemen? I don't know, but it's a striking cover by Robert Gibson Jones anyway. Several of the usual suspects are on hand in this issue of AMAZING STORIES, including Richard S. Shaver, Chester S. Geier, Berkeley Livingston, Frances M. Deegan, Don Wilcox, and surely the best-known name in the issue, at least as far as we remember them today, the great Edmond Hamilton. There's also a short story by William Hamling, who would go on to be the publisher of the Fifties digests IMAGINATION and IMAGINATIVE TALES, as well as hundreds if not thousands of pseudonymous soft-core novels by Robert Silverberg, Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, Evan Hunter, and many other authors who became famous in other fields. It never hurts to recall that Hamling was a science fiction guy starting out.

Review: The Tripods #3: The Pool of Fire - John Christopher (Samuel Youd)

THE POOL OF FIRE is the third and final book in the Tripods Trilogy by British science fiction author John Christopher, whose real name was Samuel Youd. You’ll remember from the previous two books, THE WHITE MOUNTAINS and THE CITY OF GOLD AND LEAD, that aliens known as the Masters have invaded and conquered Earth, mentally controlling everybody over the age of 14 and regressing society to a vaguely medieval state. But there are pockets of resistance, one of them joined by our narrator/protagonist, young Will Parker from England.

Will is one of the few agents of the resistance to infiltrate one of the Masters’ cities and find out anything about them. In the previous book, he discovered they’re working on something that will put all of humanity in mortal danger. In THE POOL OF FIRE, the humans come up with a plan to fight back while they still have a chance, and once more, Will is in the thick of things, despite the fact that he’s still a teenager.

This volume of the trilogy drags a little in the middle while that plan is being developed, but it kicks in and rushes to not one but two big climaxes, both of which are well-written and quite moving with several stand-up-and-cheer moments. However, the wrap-up after that feels a bit rushed to me, and the ending is not especially satisfying.

It seems like I’ve given mixed reviews to all three of these books, but don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed the Tripods Trilogy and am glad I read them. I especially like the fact that Christopher told his story in three relatively short novels instead of eight or ten (or more) 150,000 word behemoths like you find so often in modern science fiction and fantasy. The Tripods Trilogy is a very well-loved series, and I think I might have responded more positively to it if I had read the books when I was a teenager. Some books are just better if you encounter them at the right time. But even so, if you’re a fan of classic science fiction, I think these books are well worth reading. THE POOL OF FIRE, like others in the series, is available on Amazon in print and e-book editions.

Happy Fourth of July!

 

The art on this cover is by Robert Gibson Jones, who did a bunch of covers, most of them excellent, for FANTASTIC ADVENTURES. William Brengle, author of the lead novella, is a house-name, and the actual author behind this one is Howard Browne. Also on hand in this issue are William P. McGivern, Robert Bloch (twice, once as himself and once as Tarleton Fiske), Don Wilcox, Harold Lawlor, and Leroy Yerxa. That's a pretty good line-up. I don't own this issue, but you can find a PDF of it here, along with a bunch of other issues of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES. In the meantime, Happy Fourth of July to everyone reading this in the United States, and I hope it's a great day for you and everyone elsewhere in the world, too.

Review: Greylorn - Keith Laumer

Recently a friend mentioned the science fiction writer Keith Laumer to me, and I recalled reading quite a bit of Laumer’s fiction with enjoyment back when I was in high school. But I hadn’t read anything by him in many years, so I checked to see what’s available. As it turns out, there’s a free e-book edition of GREYLORN, a novella that appeared originally in the April 1959 issue of the digest AMAZING SCIENCE FICTION STORIES. It also happens to be Laumer’s first published fiction, according to the Fictionmags Index. So I thought sure, why not give it a try?

This is set in the future, naturally, when Earth is ruled by a one-world government and has sent colony ships out into the universe, none of which have ever been heard from again. Some sort of mysterious ecological catastrophe called the Red Tide has struck the planet and wiped out most of civilization except for North America. The government sends out ships to search for their lost colonies, hoping to get help from one of them, but these expeditions fail. As a last ditch effort, one more ship is sent out, equipped with a newly discovered faster than light drive, to try to find the last of the lost colonies. Its captain is Commander Greylorn, who invented the FTL drive and who narrates most of this novella.

Laumer raises the stakes even more by including a mutiny and the first contact with an alien race, a contact which quickly turns perilous. Greylorn has his hands full just surviving this trip, let alone succeeding in his mission and saving Earth.

GREYLORN is cleverly plotted and Laumer keeps things moving along at a nice pace. In some ways, such as the rather shallow characterization and the lack of female characters, it's reminiscent of the science fiction from the Twenties and Thirties, but I like the SF from that era so that doesn’t bother me. This isn’t a lost classic or anything (it’s actually been reprinted in numerous collections of Laumer’s stories), but I enjoyed reading it and it makes me think I should read more of his work. I own several of his full-length novels and maybe will tackle one of them in the reasonably near future.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Starhaven - Ivar Jorgenson (Robert Silverberg)

I seem to remember reading an interview with Robert Silverberg in which he talked about reading stories by “Ivar Jorgenson” when he was a kid and later growing up to be “Ivar Jorgenson”. I can certainly understand that feeling, having been lucky enough to write as “Brett Halliday” after reading many, many books under that byline when I was younger.

STARHAVEN is Silverberg’s only novel under the Jorgenson name, originally published by Thomas Bouregy in 1958 and reprinted a year later by Ace as the other half of Edmond Hamilton’s THE SUN SMASHER, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. It’s the story of Johnny Mantell, a beachcomber and bum on the resort planet Mulciber, who has to flee from his peaceful existence because he’s unjustly accused of murder. He steals a spaceship and heads for Starhaven, a giant metal-enclosed sanctuary world where criminals of all sorts, even murderers, can find, well, haven. Naturally enough, on a world populated by criminals there aren’t any laws, so Johnny may have his work cut out just surviving on Starhaven.

Once he gets there, however, he finds himself taken under the wing of the benevolent dictator who runs the place. Unfortunately, he also finds himself attracted to the dictator’s beautiful girlfriend, and then there’s this sinister conspiracy in which he gets involved . . .

This is a pretty simple plot and could probably work as a straight crime novel or a Western with a few changes. But then about halfway through, Silverberg pulls a nice SF-nal twist. It doesn’t come as a big shocker, but it’s still effective, and there’s another good twist later on. And of course, being Silverberg’s work, the prose is very smooth and readable.

I’m going by memory here, but it seems to me that “Ivar Jorgenson” started out as a personal pseudonym for Paul W. Fairman but eventually became a house-name used in the Ziff-Davis science fiction magazines edited by Fairman, as well as a few other places. STARHAVEN may well be an expansion of one of Silverberg’s yarns for the SF digests; I haven’t been able to find out about that. I believe it’s gone unreprinted since this Ace edition.

I’m one of those oddballs who likes Silverberg’s early novels as well or better than his later ones, but that’s because I prefer my science fiction more action-oriented. STARHAVEN is an entertaining yarn, and taken in tandem with THE SUN SMASHER, they make this one of the better Ace SF Doubles I’ve read.

(This post originally appeared on June 11, 2010. STARHAVEN doesn't appear to be in print under either the Ivar Jorgenson name or Silverberg's real name. Which kind of surprises me. Reasonably affordable copies of the Ace Double containing this and Edmond Hamilton's THE SUN SMASHER are available from various sellers on-line.)

Review: The Tripods #2: The City of Gold and Lead - John Christopher (Samuel Youd)

A couple of weeks ago I read the first book in British science fiction author John Christopher’s Tripods trilogy, THE WHITE MOUNTAIN. As you probably recall, giant machines inspired by the Martian fighting machines in H.G. Wells’ THE WAR OF THE WORLDS have invaded Earth and subjugated humanity by means of mesh caps they place on people’s head to control them. The world has devolved to a medieval, feudal society ruled by the Tripods. It’s unknown whether the Tripods are intelligent machines or simply vehicles for another race of invaders. Here and there are pockets of uncontrolled humanity who harbor dreams of fighting back against the invaders. One such group is located in the White Mountains (clearly the Alps) and the first book finds our heroes, narrator Will Parker and his cousin Henry (from what used to be England) and their French friend Jean-Paul, a.k.a. Beanpole, escaping to this enclave.

The second book, THE CITY OF GOLD AND LEAD, centers around an espionage mission in which Will, Beanpole, and a new character,  Fritz, infiltrate the Tripods’ stronghold, the title city, which seems to be located somewhere in Germany near the North Sea. Beanpole has to be left outside the domed city, but Will and Fritz make it inside. Once there, they discover the true nature of the invaders and learn of a sinister plan that threatens all of humanity. Then it’s up to one of them to escape and carry this vital intelligence back to the resistance in the White Mountains.

I enjoyed the first book quite a bit, although I had a small issue with the ending, and this one is even better. It does bog down a little in the middle, venturing into travelogue SF as Christopher (whose real name was Samuel Youd) provides an abundance of information about the city and the invaders who inhabit it. At the same time, there are some genuinely creepy scenes that are very effective, and Will is such a thoroughly human protagonist that you can’t help but root for him. There’s one more book in the trilogy, and the story expands to such an epic scope in this one that I’m not sure how Christopher is going to wrap it up in a single volume, but we’ll see. I should be reading the third book soon. (There’s also a prequel volume, but we’ll have to wait and see if I decide to read that one.)

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Sun Smasher - Edmond Hamilton

The opening of this novel reminded me a bit of the sort of set-up that Cornell Woolrich used in many of his stories. A young man named Neal Banning, who works as a publisher’s rep in New York City, pays a visit to his Norman Rockwell-esque hometown in Nebraska – but when he gets there, he finds a vacant lot where the house he grew up in should be. Not only that, but the neighbors are different and insist that there was never a house on the lot, that they don’t know Neal, and that the aunt and uncle who raised him never existed. Naturally, with his world upended like this, Neal goes to the police and tries to get to the bottom of what he thinks is a conspiracy, only to be locked up because everybody thinks he’s crazy.

Of course, in the hands of the master of space opera, Edmond Hamilton, things play out a lot differently from there than they would in a Cornell Woolrich story. Veteran readers won’t be surprised when a mysterious man shows up, breaks Neal out of jail, and tells him an incredible story about how he’s really the Valkar, the former leader of a galactic empire whose enemies captured him, had his brain wiped clean, and implanted false memories of his life as Neal Banning. Neal’s rescuer is one of his former followers who has finally tracked him down and now wants to return him to his home planet so his memory can be restored and he can lead a rebellion against the New Empire and restore the Old Empire to power. How’s he going to do that, you ask? Simple. Even though he can’t remember it at the moment, Neal is the only one in the cosmos who knows the location of a super-weapon called the Hammer of the Valkar, which will give whoever possesses it the power to rule the galaxy.

If all that doesn’t get your heart pounding . . . well, then, you probably didn’t grow up reading and loving this kind of stuff like I did. There were few authors better at it than Edmond Hamilton. Super-weapons, beautiful haughty empresses, spaceships with fins . . . sure, there’s a certain degree of silliness to it all, but I don’t care. I hadn’t read this novel before, and I found it highly entertaining. Hamilton was never much of a stylist. His prose is simple and direct and very fast-moving, although there are definite touches of poetry here and there, especially when he’s describing things like the vastness of space. This novel rockets (no pun intended) along to a twist ending that probably won’t surprise very many readers but is still quite satisfying.

The thing is, they still write stories like this, only now it would be a 500,000 word trilogy stuffed to the gills with back-story, angst, political intrigue, sex, and realistic-sounding science. Hamilton spins his yarn in less than a tenth of that wordage. You pays your money and you takes your choice, and I know that many modern readers would rather have the fat trilogy than the 110-page Ace Double. As for me, I’m gonna go smash some suns with Ed Hamilton.

(This post originally appeared on May 21, 2010. Since that time, there's been an e-book reprint of THE SUN SMASHER that's still available on Amazon. I need to read more by Edmond Hamilton.)

Review: The Tripods #1: The White Mountains - John Christopher (Samuel Youd)

I’ve been vaguely aware of John Christopher’s name for quite a while and had heard of (but not read) his famous science fiction novel NO BLADE OF GRASS. I’d also seen mentions of his young adult series known as THE TRIPODS. Those three books are available now as e-books, so I decided to give the first one, THE WHITE MOUNTAINS, a try. The trilogy was published originally in the late Sixties, and I tend to like most of the science fiction produced during that era, other than the New Wave stuff, most of which I never cared for.

Anyway, it quickly becomes apparent that THE WHITE MOUNTAINS is set during a time after an alien invasion has conquered Earth. Machines known as the Tripods, towering things that stomp around on three legs, rule the world. The humans left alive have no idea if the Tripods are sentient or simply machines in which the true invaders ride around. When humans reach the age of thirteen, they are taken by the Tripods and implanted with a brain control device known as a Cap. Human life under the Tripods has devolved into a medieval, feudalistic society. Christopher, whose real name was Samuel Youd, does a great job of conveying all this background to the reader in a clear, fast-moving fashion that avoids infodumps.

It helps that he gives us a very likable narrator/protagonist named Will Parker, a young village boy who is still a year or so away from the Capping ceremony that will put him in thrall to the Tripods. Then a stranger comes to the village, and Will learns from him that there’s a mysterious place somewhere far to the south known as the White Mountains, where people live free from the control of the Tripods and even fight back against them. Will runs away from his village (which is obviously in what used to be England) with his cousin Henry, who is also Will’s enemy but wants to get away, too. They wind up in what used to be France and make friends with another young misfit they dub Beanpole (his actual name is Jean Paul). After some adventures, and making some friends and enemies, the three boys wind up on the run with the Tripods pursuing them.

All this is great. Christopher writes very well, and while there’s really nothing here we haven’t read in other science fiction novels, he does a fine job with it and I really enjoyed reading the book. And then we get to the end.

Well, I knew going in that this was the first book of a trilogy, so I didn’t expect much resolution. But even so, I found the ending much too abrupt and jarring, a real “Wait . . . what?” moment totally lacking in drama. It threw me so much I wasn’t even sure I was going to read the other two books. I’m going to, because I had a great time for most of this book and I want to see what’s going to happen, but man, talk about a letdown.

Despite all that, if you’re a fan of vintage science fiction, I give THE WHITE MOUNTAINS a pretty high recommendation. It reads fast, it has a real sense of wonder, and the characters are excellent. I’m hoping the next two books will redeem that ending.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1940

There may not be any Space Babes of the sort he's known for on this THRILLING WONDER STORIES cover by Earle Bergey, but it's pretty eye-catching anyway. And the lineup of authors inside is more than enough to spark the interest of a science fiction fan: Edmond Hamilton, Manly Wade Wellman, Ray Cummings, Sam Merwin Jr., G.T. Fleming-Roberts, and Gordon Giles (Otto Binder). Those guys were dependably entertaining pulpsters. If you want to check out their work, this issue and many other issues of THRILLING WONDER STORIES are available here. 

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Long Midnight - Daniel Ransom (Ed Gorman)

We all know that Daniel Ransom is really Ed Gorman. This novel was published originally by Dell in 1992 and went unreprinted for many years, but it's available now in e-book and trade paperback editions.

The prologue takes place in the 1940s, an era which Gorman recreates well, much as he does the Fifties and Sixties in some of his other books. Richard Candlemas is a lonely high school student with some sort of mysterious special powers that are vaguely sinister. Jump ahead to the Nineties, and Candlemas is the former director of the Perpetual Light Orphanage, an establishment that closed down years earlier after a tragic car wreck claimed the lives of one of its staffers and several students. I use the word “students” because Perpetual Light, ostensibly an orphanage, was actually a school where Richard Candlemas and the people who worked for him tried to find children with psychic powers and help them develop those powers.

When one of Perpetual Light’s instructors is murdered in Chicago, a former student (the sister of one of the girls killed in the car crash) is drawn into the investigation and develops a romance with the police detective handling the case. Someone starts stalking the woman, there are more murders, the scope of the case expands to include some shadowy operatives who claim to be working for the government, and the woman finds evidence that her sister may still be alive after all, as impossible as that seems.

Gorman weaves all these plot strands together with an expert hand, bringing in a number of surprising twists along the way, but as usual in one of his novels, the characters and the little touches of humanity are the real highlights. Everybody in THE LONG MIDNIGHT seems to be carrying his or her own load of melancholy, which is not to say that the book is without hope or even an occasional bit of humor. This is a novel that’s difficult to classify. It’s part thriller, part horror, part science fiction. Mainly, though, it’s a great yarn that races along, inhabited by characters the reader cares about. That makes it well worth seeking out and reading. Highly recommended.

(This post was published in a somewhat different form on January 15, 2010. My admiration for Ed Gorman and his work remain unchanged since that time. I miss the guy and always will.)