Tune in tomorrow morning (April 17) for FULL APOLLO 13 SPLASHDOWN COVERAGE!!!
by Victoria Silverwolf
The author is better known around these parts for his sword-and-sorcery yarns about Brak the Barbarian, firmly in the tradition of Robert E. Howard's tales of Conan. This new novel is a horse of a different color.
Cover art by Richard Powers
The planet Missouri had a revolution some time before the story begins. Advanced technology and a bureaucratic form of government were replaced by nineteenth century ways of doing things and fierce individualism.
In other words, the place now resembles Hollywood's fantasy of the Old West. There are some so-called savages who play the role of American Indians. Towns are full of outlaws and dance hall girls. There are sheriffs around, supposedly to maintain law and order, but they aren't very effective.
Our long-suffering hero is Zak Randolph, a minor government worker who ekes out a living by supplying souvenirs (such as miniature outhouses) to tourists and staging phony shootouts to entertain visitors from other worlds. He also arranges to have local badmen sent to more civilized planets to amuse those who hire them.
This latter function gets him in trouble. One of the leased gunfighters heads back to Missouri before his contract runs out. Zak has to track him down or risk losing his position. (What keeps him on the wild-and-wooly planet at all are his girlfriend and the presence of native plants that supply minerals that can be made into jewelry. Otherwise, he's a peaceable sort who hates the shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later culture of the place.)
Along the way, he has to deal with ruffians who despise him as a coward. There's also the mystery of a legendary gunfighter called Buffalo Yung. Zak isn't sure this terrifying figure really exists. Then he gets reports from various places that he's been shot dead, apparently more than once. And what does this have to do with the disappearing bodies of lawmen killed by Yung?
Jakes makes use of typical characters and situations from Westerns, often with tongue firmly in cheek. You've got the town drunk, the traveling merchant, the local undertaker, and so forth. It's no surprise that it ends with a showdown between Zak and Yung.
The author also has something serious to say about pacifism versus the law of the gun. Zak changes personality drastically over the course of the novel, and not in a nice way.
The plot moves along briskly, even if some of the events seem arbitrary. You'll probably be able to figure out Yung's secret pretty quickly. Fans of horse operas should be able to appreciate this space opera.
Three stars.
by Winona Menezes
Ice Crown, by Andre Norton
Cover art by Lazlo Gal
Millennia ago, the human race's push for scientific and technological achievement culminated in a proud interstellar empire dominated by the Psychocrat regime. They settled human colonies on habitable planets and wiped completely all memory of their provenance for the purpose of observing the development of civilizations, but some unknown force toppled their hegemony before they could see their experiments come to fruition. The Psychocrats left behind primitive human colonies with no knowledge of their origins, and ancient artifacts that held knowledge of extraordinary technological achievements — invaluable bounty to the intrepid explorers who comb the galaxy in search of them.
Roane Hume has been selected by her uncle, one such explorer, to accompany him on an expedition to the planet Clio, where a seeded colony of humans has spread over thousands of years into several feudal kingdoms ruled by monarchs. Roane and her team are forbidden by interplanetary law to reveal themselves to the people of Clio, but Roane becomes swept up in the royal interests of the kingdom of Reveny when she intervenes to rescue a young girl being kidnapped, only to discover her to be the Princess Ludorica, heir to the throne. The princess is in a desperate search for the lost Ice Crown, a crown which supposedly holds mystical powers and is the only way to legitimize her rule, lest her kingdom fall to squabbling nobles and bandit lords. Despite Roane's oath to secrecy, she feels herself drawn to the Princess, and at every turn disregards her responsibility in order to help Ludorica restore her kingdom.
Norton continues to excel at intermingling elements of both sci-fi and high fantasy. The heady science fiction concepts introduced in the beginning — intergalactic treasure-hunters, technologically advanced weapons and survival gear, as well as a colony of brainwashed humans unwittingly transplanted onto another world in the service of a long-abandoned experiment — are vivid and imaginative. I especially enjoyed that the unfolding horror of a race realizing that their proud history and religion were the result of enslavement to technology indistinguishable from magic did not go understated.
But I also love an epic fantasy, and I do feel that Norton delivered with her courts and castles and enchanted crowns and a princess determined to save her people at any cost. The aesthetic of the story was reminiscent of a fairy-tale, with enough court intrigue and subterfuge to ensure that those fantasy elements did not feel hastily grafted onto a story about spaceships and astronauts, but rather that astronauts and spaceships had unintentionally landed in the middle of an epic. I would have thought that the magic of Clio turning out to be the lingering effects of a technology so advanced that it apparently did not even warrant explaining to the reader might disenchant the epic, but it had the opposite effect on me; high-tech science became enchanting in a way that very few hard sci-fi novels can achieve from meticulous technical explanation alone.
Lastly, the relationship between the two protagonists, Roane and Ludorica, was so unique to this sort of pulpy sci-fi that it can't go unmentioned. How sadly rare it is for an intelligent, resourceful, defiant leading duo to be two teenage girls. Their instant camaraderie was so strong that their duality, one an astronaut and one a princess, allowed each of them to step into the world of the other in a way that I feel contributed greatly to the seamless melding of the genres. It was a sweet moment for space-hardened Roane to know how it feels to wear a gown and have a lady-in-waiting, and after her endless ordeals Princess Ludorica absolutely deserved to get to shoot someone with a blaster.
Five stars out of five.
Recall Not Earth, by C.C. MacApp
Cover art by Jerome Podwil
Recall Not Earth by C.C. MacApp was published in January, so I'm a little late to the party, but it intrigued me enough to want to include it this month. The people of Earth, in their hubris, decided to assert their interstellar superiority over the other races of their spiral arm in the Milky Way by picking an ill-advised fight with the Vulmoti Empire. Obviously, they lost.
The Vulmoti punished the earthlings by stamping out all life on Earth and leaving it an irradiated husk. The only living humans left were the cadre of spacemen led by Commodore John Brayson. But suddenly finding themselves the last survivors of their species, they scattered in despair across the galaxy to eke out a pathetic living as hired mercenaries for other alien races. Brayson himself retreated to the backwater planet Drongail to while away the rest of his life numbing himself with the highly addictive dron.
Brayson is coaxed out of his stupor and convinced to attempt one last mission when his old friend Bart Lange finds him to deliver news that seems too good to be true: that somewhere in the galaxy, a colony of living human women are in hiding. With this newfound glimmer of hope, Brayson and Lange reassemble their team and agree to hire themselves out to the leader of the Chelki, a race enslaved by the Vulmoti. The Omniarch of the Chelki promises Brayson knowledge of the location of the women in exchange for his help in the Chelki's struggle for freedom. Having nothing to lose, Brayson agrees to lead his men in battle one last time, all the while fighting the mind-addling effects of his drug addiction.
Going into this one I expected a sweeping space opera replete with different alien empires locked in battle for survival and dominance, and that's exactly what I got. Lots of spaceship dogfights, alien diplomacy, and pages upon pages of militaristic strategizing. I'll admit that last one is not my thing, but MacApp belabored the reasoning behind each maneuver and the minute differences between each imaginary weapons system so thoroughly that I have to commend the amount of thought that went into the details, even if it did make my head spin. Combine all that with the ever-present smaller human struggles like loneliness and addiction, and I think MacApp could have had enough material here to span a trilogy of novels.
The thing which most distinguished this book to me from others like it was the extent to which MacApp divorced himself entirely from the known laws of science, instead preferring to come up with laws of physics so profoundly unlike our own that I can only describe it as writing scientific fanfiction. Don't get me wrong, enough jargon and justification was given for his new laws of physics, such as the many pages dedicated to explaining how gravity is actually a force which repels matter, that in some places it felt as convincing as though I was reading a physics textbook dropped from some alternate dimension. I was fascinated by this brazen, meticulous rewriting of physics for little discernible reason. It’s a fun reminder to those of us who tend to get tangled up trying to understand how made-up technology fits into our understanding of science that it's not that serious, it's fiction and you can do whatever you want as much as you want to do it.
There were many parts of this book which did feel rushed, but that's unsurprising given how dense the story is and how much wonderful science nonsense we have to get through before the battles can commence and the damsels can be rescued. It was executed well, with almost no wasted space, and though all the militaristic babbling did hurt my brain a little, I'm going to give it…
Four stars.
by Tonya R. Moore
Junk Day, by Arthur Sellings
Cover art by Richard Weaver
Junk Day was my first encounter with the written works of Arthur Sellings. Published, thanks to the efforts of his widow, posthumously in 1970, following Sellings’ untimely death in 1968, there is some poignant irony in knowing the author’s final work portrays a world in ruins; the death of human civilization itself.
Junk Day begins with a man on a journey through the treacherous wilderness of post-apocalyptic London. At first, Douglas Bryan, a former painter, doesn’t seem to have a specific goal or destination in mind. He simply pushes forward, determined to defend himself from the grim realities of the violent hell-scape devoid of law, order, and morality the scorched earth has become.
When Bryan encounters a lone woman, the former nun-in-training, Vee, his initial reaction is suspicion. He cannot fathom that a woman could survive on her own following the collapse of human civilization, without a Man around to help her survive. Byran immediately shacks up with Vee. This relationship of convenience with Vee, who–it turns out– was formerly a man, leads to the pair setting off on a journey to find a more livable abode.
Homo-erotic tensions stir when Bryan brings Vee to his previous shelter where Eddie awaits the former painter’s return. While never said in so many words, one gets the distinct impression that Bryan’s relationship with the clingy , trauma-ridden younger man was more intimate than platonic. Though dismayed at having been replaced with Vee, Eddie swallows his anger, jealousy, and the last vestiges of his pride. He begs to join Bryan and Vee on their journey to find greener pastures. Bryan coldly rebuffs the desperate younger man, revealing the true callousness of his nature. Eddie gets left behind to spiral more deeply into murderous madness.
The protagonist, Douglas Bryan, is not likable. He is strangely dispassionate for a painter. Where are the high emotions, the romanticism, and thirst to pursue his craft? Where is his artistic passion, his sense of justice? He merely seems to go through the motions of being human and is far more concerned about the persona he is building up for himself than righteousness or caring about the fate of humanity.
The absence of growth in the main character is jarring. When Barney, a megalomaniac and dictator-in-the-making, attempts to engineer his own twisted version of society, Bryan pushes back, but his motivations seem more clinical than heroic. He refuses to bend to the machinations of the mysterious entities pulling the strings behind the scenes, but merely for the sake of being non-conformist. Junk Day ends with London gradually getting swallowed up by a new order, leaving the reader with more questions than answers. The ultimate fate of Douglas Bryan remains uncertain.
The faults in Bryan’s character may lead one to question Sellings’ skill in character development, but one can’t deny the possibility that this is deliberate. Douglas Bryan’s questionable character aside, Junk Day is a brilliantly written book; one I will happily revisit. Sellings was clearly a master of story craft. The images he painted of the dystopian remnants of civilization are vivid and arresting. It has made me quite eager to read his earlier works.
Five out of five stars.
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
I've been meaning to read Junk Day… 1st edition copies are not cheap.