Book Review: Assassins from Tomorrow

Book Review: 'Assassins From Tomorrow' by Peter Heath
2/5 Stars

‘Assassins From Tomorrow’ (1967; Lancer books) is the second of the ‘Mind Brothers’ adventures, the first volume being ‘The Mind Brothers’ (1967), and the third, ‘Men Who Die Twice’ (1968). 'Peter Heath' (sometimes Peter Heath Fine) is the pseudonym of writer Robert Irvine , who has written several mystery novels featuring a private eye named Harry Lake.

‘Assassins’ is really more of a ‘superspy’ genre novel than a genuine SF adventure, not unusual given that such themes were very popular in 1967. The book’s prose style is very much that of the 60s private eye novel, resolutely terse and world-weary:

***

The road north from Houston to Dallas runs long and straight. In fact, it is the Texas version of the superhighway; a four-lane concrete dragstrip for air-conditioned, high-powered cars. Jason had one, too. A rented job from the ‘We Try Harder’ people. He clipped along through the early-morning sunlight at a steady eighty-five miles per hour, listening to a bigot preach the latest word from the radio gospel of true hate. Next to Los Angeles, he decided, the Southwest had more kooks per acre than all the rest of the world combined. Yet most of them weren’t bad people- just out of step with some of the harsh realities of the twentieth century.

***

After you got used to the heat, the first thing you noticed was the smell of Mexico. A greasy pungence that attacked the nose until its membranes were deadened to the odors of poverty, pain, and human sweat. Then the eyes took over. They showed you the difference between the richest country in the world and one of the poorest. They showed you the clean well-paved calle that ran through the center of the tourist district. They showed you the shops full of straw baskets and badly carved Aztec wooden gods and the neon invitations to bars that specialized in vibrating the libido.

***

Jason wandered through the narrow empty streets of Puerto Vallarta with the sun cooking his thoughts into a meaningless batter.

***

Jason walked back to the jeep and sat on the fender. He smoked a cigarette. He smoked another. Then he got inside, started the engine, and turned around. He sat for a long time with the engine running, looking at the sea. It had nothing to say. Nothing at all.

***

The ‘Mind Brothers’ are a young mathematician named Jason Starr; Adam Cyber, a man from 50,000 years into the future who has time-traveled back to the 60s determined to prevent humanity from making the mistakes that made his original home a wreck; and a young genius (and off-hours folk singer) named Mark Brown. The Mind Brothers operate as a sort of three-man U.N.C.L.E. or IMF; independently wealthy, they have access to their own Learjet, the latest in computing technology, and the means to drop their everyday consulting work in order to pursue cryptic events the world over.

‘Assassins From Tomorrow’ deals with a secretive, technologically advanced organization named 'Sutra' that works to prevent people from asking too many questions about the J. F. Kennedy assassination. When Mark Brown ventures to Dallas to ask precisely those sorts of questions, the Mind Brothers soon tangle with the mysterious enemy. Can Jason, Mark, and Adam Cyber expose the nefarious intentions of Sutra and save the earth ?

‘Assassins’ is cheerfully meant to be a short (160 pp), entertaining, but not very deep, adventure. It succeeds in this goal. The narrative moves along at a fast pace; outlandish events take place within a span of just two or three pages; there are all sorts of plot contrivances that dissolve into silliness if one pays too much attention to them. The writing style will probably provoke some eye-rolling from modern readers, but I imagine those familiar with the Travis McGee novels of the same era will feel right at home. Readers looking for a groovy 60s adventure with some SF trappings will like ‘Assassins’, but those yearning for a more sophisticated entry in the genre will want to look elsewhere.

'Heavy Metal' magazine July 1979

The July 1979 issue of ‘Heavy Metal’ magazine featured Richard Corben and Rick Courtney’s ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ as the front cover and Caza’s ‘A Boy Named Sue’ on the back cover.

This was another so-so issue. The final episode of Corben’s ‘New Tales of the Arabian Nights’ finally saw print. Some interesting b & w pieces- ‘Attila the Frog’ by Don Lomax and ‘The Great Trap’ by Sire – appeared, as did a full color tale from Gray Morrow: ‘Stingaree: Eight Belles’. But other entries, ‘Citizens Beware’ by Mark Fisher, or ‘Zooks’ by Vaughn Bode, were underwhelming.

Probably the best entry in the issue was ‘…Rears Its Ugly Green Head’ by Michael Hinge and Neal Adams. With its psychedelic art style, ‘Rears’ calls to mind Peter Max and the 60s Pop Art scene. The complex rainbow coloring displayed in the panels must have taken several months to complete, since this was well before the advent of computer graphics. Enjoy !

Book Review: The Warlord of the Air

Book Review: 'The Warlord of the Air' by Michael Moorcock

5 / 5 Stars

…He sighed. “But you know, I think I’m not meant to be here.”

“Oh, nonsense.”

“No, it’s true. This is 1903 – or a 1903 – but it - it isn’t my 1903.”

Thus says Oswald Bastable, Nomad of the Time Streams, in Michael Morcock’s 1971 novel ‘The Warlord of the Air’.

Oswald Bastable is a Captain in the British Army in northern India in 1902. He and his troops are sent to the state of Kumbalari, in a remote part of the Himalayas, to confront a local bandit named Sharan Kang. When a parlay with Kang goes badly, Bastable finds himself lost within an ancient temple, named Teku Benga, filled with mysterious passageways that may lead to other dimensions and other eras. An earthquake releases a strange vapor, which in turn puts Bastable into a deep sleep. When he awakes, it is to find himself alone in the ruins of Teku Benga, his clothes crumbled into dust, and the area devoid of signs of life.

Bastable hears a strange sound approaching his location and is astonished to see a massive airship, bearing the livery of the ‘Royal Indian Air Service’ and the Union Jack. His frantic cries to the airship are answered, and Bastable ascends into the gondola to find a group of puzzled British officers. It turns out the year is 1973, and no one has been seen among the ruins of Teku Benga for nearly 70 years. Bastable realizes that somehow, the vapor that he encountered in the ruins of the temple has kept him in suspended animation for decades, and he is still a young man in a future he would otherwise never have lived to see.

Upon his return to civilization, Bastable is awed by the sight of modern cities, monorails, electric lights, and steam-powered motor cars. The entire world seems safe and prosperous under a benevolent Rule Britannia. Bastable soon obtains a job working aboard one of the large airships plying the skies and comes to relish a life spent traveling from one exotic locale to another in Her Majesty’s service. But then fate intervenes, and Bastable learns that the world’s social and political order is not what it appears, and desperate characters are conspiring to bring about revolutionary change. Will Bastable stand with the anarchists, or against them ?

‘Warlord’ was a seminal novel in terms of promoting and mingling steampunk and alternate world adventures into one book. In its depiction of a parallel world ruled by an ever-enduring British Empire it echoed the theme of Ronald Clark’s earlier proto-steampunk novel ‘Queen Victoria’s Bomb’ (1967), but Moorcock was much better at assembling a fast-paced adventure tale. ‘Warlord’ is instrumental in paving the way for the new genre of alt-future Rule Britannia media, particularly in comics and graphic novels, from Brian Talbot’s ‘Heart of Empire’ series , to the ‘Scarlet Traces’ books by Ian Edginton, and more recently, Alan Moore’s ‘League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ series.

‘Warlord’ is very much a product of the late 60s – early 70s, in that it presents a Rule Britannia in a less than salutary light. Moorcock has always been an ardent proponent of Marxism – it is ever the fashion among European and American intellectuals – and the infatuation with third-world liberation that was rampant among the cognoscenti in that era quite naturally made its way into the underpinnings of ‘Warlord’.

However, Moorcock avoids turning the book into a polemic, instead weaving the Liberation Struggle into the narrative along with sly jokes on the alternate 1973 in which Bastable finds himself: there is a young lieutenant in the Air Service named Michael Jagger; an elderly, cranky Russian expatriate, named Vladimir Ilyich (Lenin), rues his missed chance at leading a revolution earlier in the century; a decadent aristocrat named Count (Ernesto ‘Che’) Guevara wanders the globe as a dilettante revolutionary.

The second and third books in the Nomad of Time trilogy, ‘The Land Leviathan’ and ‘The Steel Tsar’, continue Bastable’s adventures. They all are entertaining reads.

The DAW books edition (No. 291) of ‘Warlord of the Air’ appeared in May 1978 and features a cover illustration of the airship ‘Pericles’ by Gino D’Achille.

I’ve posted another cover illustration, this one by Patrick Woodruffe, depicting Oswald Bastable emerging from the ruins of Teku Benga to espy the Pericles motoring by.

Book Review: Hour of the Horde

Book Review: 'Hour of the Horde' by Gordon R. Dickson
2/5 Stars

Miles Vander is young man pursuing a career as an artist at a university in Minnesota. Vander’s artistic vision is raw and emotional, perhaps reflecting his status as a polio survivor with a paralyzed arm. When the sun suddenly takes on a reddish hue and the entire planet is in the grip of an apocalyptic fervor, Miles simply paints the effect the altered light has on the landscape of the Mississippi River.

It turns out a race of super-powered aliens, referred to (somewhat banally) as the ‘Center Aliens’ have traveled to earth to disclose something troubling: an enormous armada of ships piloted by weasel-like aliens, the so-called Horde of the book’s title, are descending on the Milky Way Galaxy. The Silver Horde has only one intention: to consume all life in the Galaxy.

Against this locust-like attack, the Center Aliens have decided to recruit a representative from each planet occupied by the sentient races in the galaxy, to staff a fleet of spaceships dedicated to repelling the Horde. As is turns out, Miles Vander has the ‘psychic’ temperament the aliens require from their recruits, and he winds up journeying with the Center Aliens to the rim of the galaxy, there to join with a vast battle line of ships poised to meet the Horde. Miles finds himself unceremoniously dumped into a mean little vessel mockingly termed the Fighting Rowboat.

It turns out that earthpeople, like many other biped races throughout the galaxy, are considered little more than primitive savages by the Center Aliens. Along with 22 other crewmembers aboard the Rowboat, Miles Vander is expected to serve as a kind of reserve of psychic energy needed by the Center Aliens to combat the approaching Horde.

Naturally, Miles doesn’t take too kindly to being relegated to REMF status, disregarded by the powerful Center Aliens. He begins a brutal fight in the Rowboat’s pecking order of alien races. Can Miles gain command of the ship ? And if he does, will he be able to wield his alien comrades into an effective fighting force ? And if and when they encounter the Horde, will the Rowboat last more than a few seconds under enemy fire ?

‘Hour of the Horde’ (1970; 159 pp.) is DAW book No. 303, first printed in 1978. The cover illustration is by Greg Theakston.

I haven’t read many novels or stories by Gordon R. Dickson (1923 -2001), who suffered from severe asthma, and often incorporated the themes of men overcoming their physical limitations through force of their will into his works. So what did I think of ‘Horde’ ?

It’s a competent, if unremarkable, space opera. There are more than a few passages of stilted writing in the book, and the various machinations of the Center Aliens border more on magic than on any ‘genuine’ science fictional phenomena. The book is slow-moving at its start and things don’t gather much momentum until nearly the half-way point in the narrative. The psychological revelations that enable Miles Vander to transcend his physical and emotional limitations seem a bit too close to the Scientology-related tropes that Lafayette Ron Hubbard liked to stick in his own novels (‘Battlefield Earth’ comes to mind).

Dedicated fans of Dickson’s works may want to seek out ‘The Hour of the Horde’ , but I suspect most SF fans won’t find it too exciting.

'Killraven' in Amazing Adventures No. 23: 'The Legend Assassins'

I remember seeing ‘Amazing Adventures’ No. 18, featuring Killraven and the War of the Worlds, on the shelf with the other comics at the 7-11 store in Elmira Heights, New York, in 1973.

After looking through it I thought it was an interesting comic, set in a near-future Earth devastated by a successful second invasion of the Martians from the H. G. Wells novel. The opening issue featured the ruins of New York City, mutants, monsters, high-tech weaponry, and an offbeat hero in Killraven. But I didn’t have enough extra cash to purchase it (even though 20 cents seems like a paltry sum nowadays, back then it was a lot of money in terms of allowance; this was when a Fudgesicle cost only 5 cents, and a gallon of gas less than 50 cents). So I wound up buying a copy of Jack Kirby’s ‘The Demon’, and a copy of ‘Conan’.

Fortunately Marvel has released all the first generation Killraven stories in one of its omnibus b & w ‘Essentials’ formats. At more than 800 pages in length, ‘Killraven Vol. 1’ gives you the Amazing Adventures’ run of ‘War of the Worlds’ from issues 18 to 39. There’s also issue #45 of ‘Marvel Team Up’ featuring Killraven and Spider Man (?!) and two one-shot Killraven issues from the 80s.

The Killraven stories are derived from many pop-culture idioms of the early 70s, with perhaps ‘Beneath the Planet of the Apes’ serving as one of the more central idioms. Each issue has the sort of frantic, if unsophisticated, energy that defined superhero comics in the early to mid 70s.

Amazing Adventures No. 23 is a gem in this regard. The story features a mutated, former Secret Service agent (!) named ‘Rattack (!) who lives in the tunnels beneath the ruins of the White House. Borrowing heavily from the film ‘Willard’, already a sci-fi landmark in the early 70s, the plot sees the bucktoothed Rattack and his furry rodent friends commissioned to eliminate Killraven in gruesome fashion (particularly for a Code-approved comic !). I’ve tried to scan a couple of the more gripping pages without breaking open the spine of my yellowing copy of the book (my Canon 4400F scanner lacks a beveled edge best used for scanning bound books).

I won’t spoil the story by posting the finale of the story, but these pages make for great art by Herb Trimpe, arguably the best of the Jack Kirby-inspired artists on Marvel’s staff at the time.

Book Review: Hestia

Book Review: 'Hestia' by C. J. Cherryh
3/5 Stars

'Hestia' (1979; DAW book No. 354) features a cover painting by Don Maitz of an alluring cat-girl in a leather bikini standing knee-deep in a stream. An exemplary PorPor book cover…..!

Sam Merritt is a young and ambitious Federation engineer who decides to participate in a project on the Earth-like planet Hestia. Unfortunately, when Sam arrives he discovers that the dwindling human colony on the planet possesses only a late 19-century level of technology, and what outposts still survive are rustic at best.

Needless to say anti-gravity lifters, nanobots, and laser drills are not available, much less mechanized bulldozers, pile drivers, and front-end loaders. Sam tries to skip out on his contract, but finds himself shanghaied into service by the desperate Hestians: with most of population crammed into a river valley subjected to periodic floods, a dam must be constructed upstream to save the human civilization. Indeed, if the dam is not built within the span of a year, it's possible a flood could convert most of the planet's agricultural landscape into a swamp.

Sam travels upstream to the dam site and gradually discovers something the colonists are reluctant to talk about: there are aboriginal Hestians, referred to as ‘The People’, living in proximity to the site, and they don’t like the idea of constructing a dam on their territory.

As the struggle to build the dam proceeds, Sam befriends one of the natives, Sazhje, the cat-girl from the cover. This does not endear him to the human colonists. Soon the violence between aborigine and colonist escalates, and Sam finds himself distrusted by both sides. Can he prevail with construction of the dam, or will the enmity between the races lead to its destruction and ethnic warfare ?

At 160 pp. 'Hestia' is a quick and (mostly) engaging read. Sam is a likeable (if too altruistic) protagonist. The human colonists come off as thick-headed, stubborn, and not too bright. With the exception of Sazhje the cat-girl, the aboriginal People are little more than primitives obsessed with internecine warfare, sort of like Amerindians of the pre-European contact era.

As is often the case with her novels Cherryh tends to overplay the various psychodramas between the main human characters, and this slows the narrative too often for my taste. And the book’s ending seems a bit too contrived; lots of things are tied up within the span of a few pages and some overnight conversions seem too pat.

‘Hestia’ is something of an offbeat SF novel, in that the SF elements are muted. Indeed, the interactions between Sam and the colonists with the aborigines is modeled on the conventions of the settlers and Indians conflicts of the Western genre. This makes the book worth checking out for SF fans.

'Heavy Metal' magazine June 1979

The June 1979 issue of ‘Heavy metal’ featured a cover painting by Angus McKie titled ‘The Performer’, and a back cover painting titled ‘What Happened to Betty (Page)’ by Marcus Boas.

This was a rather unimpressive issue of the magazine. Yet another installment of Corben’s seemingly never-ending ‘The New Tales of the Arabian Nights, Sinbad in the Land of the Jinn’, as well as another installation of McKie’s ‘So Beautiful and So Dangerous’. In a rarity for Heavy Metal, Serge Clerc’s ‘Captain Future’ b & w comic appears in its entirety, although scattered in chunks throughout the magazine in an effort to force the reader to view intervening material. By this time I was beginning to tire of reading stories in drips and driblets, and I had begun to give serious thought to discontinuing purchasing the magazine.

The June issue featured another ‘Pyloon’ tale by Rae Rue and LeoGiraux, and I’ve posted it here. Like the other Pyloon stories appearing in Heavy Metal, it features drawings cribbed from the pop culture archives, in a deliberately cheesy sort of tribute to the originals.

Book Review: From the 'S' File

Book Review: 'From the 'S' File', by the editors of 'Playboy' magazine
2 / 5 Stars

Playboy regularly published a lot of SF stories, many by well-known authors in the genre. As one of the so-called ‘slick’ magazines, it paid high rates and represented a coveted outlet for short fiction throughout the 50s, 60s, 70s, and even the early 80s, after which the advent of video porn, and later, DVD and internet porn, severely curtailed its circulation.

There were some drawbacks to being published in Playboy; there were of course restrictions on story length – after all, no one really bought the magazine for the ‘articles’ – and the SF content had to be dialed down in order to appeal to the magazine’s hedonistic-oriented readership. Both of these drawbacks probably influenced the tenor of the stories appearing in this anthology.

‘From the “S” File’ (1971) contains stories published from 1956 to 1970; as the book’s title indicates, all the authors have surnames beginning with the letter ‘S’.

The editor(s) in charge of purchasing SF tales seem to have liked Robert Sheckley a great deal, since 5 of the 16 the entries in this anthology originate from that author. I myself have never been all that enchanted by Sheckley’s writings, which tend to focus on satire, with the SF themes merely serving as a sort of painted backdrop for the author’s efforts at critiquing social mores. Of his stories presented here, only ‘The World of Heart’s Desire’, about a man seeking an extended bout of escapism, is really all that impressive. The other Sheckley tales: ‘Can You Feel Anything When I Do This’, ‘Triplication’, ‘The Same to You Doubled’, and ‘Cordle to Onion to Carrot’ all come across as underwhelming efforts to meld SF tropes with a Cheever-esque styling.

Theodore Sturgeon contributes ‘The Nail and the Oracle’; like Sheckley’s work, it’s a lackluster effort at social and political satire.

‘Control Somnambule’, by William Sambrot, deals with an Apollo astronaut and a mysterious lapse in his recollection of the period his spaceship spent traveling on dark side of the Moon. Well-written and effective despite an understated style, it’s one of the better tales in the anthology.

‘The Man From Not-Yet’, by John Sladek, deals with an encounter between the famous 18th century English philosopher Samuel Johnson, and a time-traveler from the future.

Henry Slesar is represented by ‘Melodramine’, in which a near-future narcotic gives hallucinations of a too-pleasurable kind. ‘Victory Parade’, is a short, mordant tale of the celebration of a war..... in which everyone loses. ‘Examination Day’ is a somewhat clichéd account of a very important test administered by an authoritarian regime, while ‘The Jam’ is a brief but quietly effective story, and will undoubtedly make for uneasy thoughts when one is next in a traffic jam on a hot summer's day. ‘After’ is a collection of vignettes, set in a nuclear war’s aftermath, infused with a dark sense of humor.

Jack Sharkey contributes ‘The Pool’, a moral fable about conquistadors and the fabled fountain of youth; and ‘Conversation with a Bug’, a comic tale about over-reaching one’s grasp.

The final entry is Norman Spinrad’s ‘Deathwatch’, a succinct tale that relies on a shock ending. It’s one of his more effective stories.

The verdict on ‘From the ‘S’ File’ ? To some extent the stories suffer from having to be coherent to Playboy’s audience, as opposed to targeting, say, contemporary SF magazines like Analog or If. But the inclusion of too many tales in which the SF content is subordinate to social satire makes it hard to recommend this volume to fans.

Slow Death comix Number 9

'Slow Death' Comix No. 9 (1978)

‘Slow Death Funnies’ was the first title produced by Last Gasp, a small press outfit started by Ron Turner in Berkeley, California. ‘Slow Death’ was a b & w eco-conscious comic book produced to coincide with the first Earth Day celebration in April, 1970. Throughout the 70s a total of 10 issues were produced; in 1992, an 11^th issue appeared, which is still available from the contemporary Last Gasp catalogue.

‘Slow Death’ was part and parcel of the eco-catastrophe consciousness that was in fullest flower in the late 60s and early 70s. Many of the better-known underground comix artists had stories in the book, including Jack Jackson (‘Jaxon’), Richard Corben, Charles Dallas, Fred Schrier, Dave Sheriden, and Rand Holmes. Some issues of the comic have explicit content and bear an ‘Adults Only’ notification on the cover.

‘Slow Death’ No. 9 (August 1978) was devoted to exposing the dark side of nuclear power. The cover illustration is by Greg Irons, who also did the first story in the book, ‘Our Friend the Atom’. The other content is ‘Faustus II’ is by Michael Becker, ‘Beyond the Wall’ (posted here) by Dennis Ellefson, ‘Lights Out’ by Errol McCarthy, and ‘Close Encounters with a Blurred Mind’ by Tim Boxell.

I can’t say that No. 9 was one of the better issues. The stories are rather pedestrian, and lack the overtly horror-oriented content of the entries in other issues. But this was considered edgy stuff back in the days before non- Comics Code books were a staple of the store shelves.

Book Review: Gate of Ivrel

Book Review: 'Gate of Ivrel' by C. J. Cherryh 3 / 5 Stars

‘Gate of Ivrel’ was published in 1976 as DAW book No. 188. The cover art for this printing is by Michael Whelan. 

This was author Carolyn Janice Cherryh's first published novel. Succeeding volumes in this ‘Morgaine Trilogy’ include ‘Well of Shiuan’ (1978) and ‘Fires of Azeroth’ (1979). Cherryh produced a fourth book in 1988, ‘Exile’s Gate’. The first three volumes are available in the DAW omnibus ‘The Morgaine Saga’ (2001).

My review of 'Well of Shiuan' is here.

My review of 'Fire of Azeroth' is here.

The Gates are portals to wormholes capable of mediating instantaneous travel not only from one locale to another, but, via use of the ‘major’ or ‘universal’ Gate, to other planets. Built long ago by a humanoid race called the qhal, the Gates also permit travel back in time; this is fraught with danger, as a careless journey can lead to interference with causality and the triggering of a ‘time-quake’. 

One or more of such time-quakes have led to the destruction of qhal civilization. The humans who have descended from the qhal Empire have decided that the remaining Gates must be destroyed to prevent further catastrophes.

'Ivrel' takes place on the planet Andur-Kursh, which has a medieval level of technology. Vanye, an outcast tribesman, finds himself forced into the service of a mysterious woman named Morgaine, who vanished a century ago after an effort to destroy the Gate of Ivrel, the universal gate on this world, failed. Awakened from suspended animation by Vanye, Morgaine renews the quest to destroy the Gate of Ivrel.

The novel is one long chase sequence as the hapless Vanye accompanies Morgaine on her single-minded journey to the northern reaches, where lies the kingdom of Hjemur, and the Gate of Ivrel.

En route, there are various violent encounters with clans of superstitious, but cunning, characters, and much of the book’s adventures revolve around the efforts of Vanye and Morgaine to overcome one batch of pursuers after another.  

The bulk of the narrative is devoted to chronicling the various psychodramas that arise between Vanye and his sometime allies and adversaries. These psychodramas are rendered in lengthy passages of rather opaque dialogue, which tries the patience of reader. It doesn't help matters that Vanye is remarkably dumb, and prone to doing things that lead to all manner of obstacles for Morgaine and her quest.

Morgaine plainly is modeled on Michael Moorcock’s ‘Elric’ character, what with her bouts of self-abnegation, doomed sword ‘Changeling’, pale complexion, and white mane of hair. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, 'Gate of Ivrel' is devoid of the dark humor that makes the Elric novels stand out as sword and sorcery adventures.

‘Gate’ suffers from some stilted writing: tree branches ‘writhe’ against the night sky, the clopping of horses’ hooves sounds ‘lonely’, and no one ever employs contractions in their dialogue, making many conversations wordy and rather pretentious. 

However the novel features some entertaining characters, a well-realized world, an interesting quest, and, unlike many contemporary fantasy novels, its short length (191 pp.) means it can be read in a few day’s time. And if you like it, three more installments await.