Book Review: Year of the Quiet Sun

Book Review: 'The Year of the Quiet Sun' by Wilson Tucker3 / 5 Stars

This edition of ‘The Year of the Quiet Sun’ (1970) is an Ace paperback (252 pp.); the cover artists are Leo and Diane Dillon.

It’s 1978, and the US is still at war in Southeast Asia, having in fact traded local nukes with the Red Chinese. Women wear bathing suits with transparent tops, the Arabs and Israelis have fought yet another war, and archeologist Brian Chaney has released a controversial best-seller that argues that the Book of Revelation was a work of fiction.

When an attractive young woman named Kathryn van Hise accosts him on a Florida beach, Chaney is uncooperative, thinking her to be yet another reporter. However, van Hise is a federal employee and she offers him an unusual assignment: join the Bureau of Standards..... and travel forward in time !

Chaney finds himself stationed at a secret government installation outside Chicago, where a major project is underway to construct a time travel vehicle called the TDV. Chaney is one of three men who will be sent forward to the year 2000, to reconnoiter and determine if the US will be a better place after the social tumult of the 60s subsides…..or not, as the case may be.

Much of the first 110 pages of the book are plodding, and mainly consist of conversations wherein author Tucker demonstrates his ability to have his male and female characters engage in flirty repartee. However, after this protracted meandering our main characters actually do travel forward in time, the plot picks up momentum, and the final sections of the book are an engaging read.

The time travel portions of the novel are convincing because Tucker takes a conservative approach, and avoids introducing paradoxes or other baroque consequences of violating the laws of causality. The mechanics of arriving in a period twenty years from the present, recording information, and then returning to the past are well-conceived, and help keep the narrative grounded in a plausible ‘what if’ scenario based on the social conditions existing in the late 60’s.

I won’t spoil things by revealing the novel’s major plot hinge, save to say that while it may seem dated to contemporary readers, it does succeed in imparting a thoughtful note to the story’s closing pages.

Killraven: 'Amazing Adventures' No. 20 (September 1973)


This issue introduces a story arc involving The Warlord, a former scientist in the employ of the Martians, who was mutilated by Killraven. Re-equipped with a steel arm, the Warlord is anxious to have revenge on Killraven. Marv Wolfman and Herb Trimpe take over the writing and artistic duties, respectively, and they stay true to the wacky, over-the-top spirit of the book. In the sequence I've excerpted here, Killraven and his homeboy M'Shulla trade wisecracks as they take down a Martian Tripod by the use of underwater-assisted unbalancing (?!).

I've also posted a page showing the Warlord in conversation with one of the Martians. Marvel's depiction of what are supposed to be fear-inducing creatures is underwhelming, as their design of the Martians resembles squat, brown versions of Cousin Itt from the 'Addams Family' cartoons and TV show.

Book Review: 'The Blue World' by Jack Vance

5 / 5 Stars

‘The Blue World’ was originally published in 1966; this Ballantine Del Rey paperback edition (190 pp.) was published in 1977, with a cover illustration by Vincent DiFate.

On an unnamed planet where the surface is entirely covered by a shallow sea, the descendants of a crashed earth spaceship have set up a civilization centered on living atop ‘floats’, enormous lily pads hundreds of yards in circumference. Food is garnered from the rich marine ecosystem; the weather is balmy; and life much like that imagined to take place on a tropical paradise.

Complicating this potentially idyllic setting are the ‘kragen’, squid-like creatures that regularly encroach on the sponge farms that constitute a major food source for the humans. In an effort to deter the pilfering of the lesser kragen, the humans have entered into an uneasy alliance with the biggest kragen of all: ‘King Kragen’ is several hundred feet long, and armed with sharp mandibles and formidable tentacles. The price for having King Kragen defend their sponge pens from interlopers is steep, as a significant portion of the crop is allocated to meet his ever-increasing appetite.

Sklar Hast, a brawny but thoughtful young man, brings conflict to Tranque float, where he lives as a member of a signaler caste, by questioning the need to cater to King Kragen. His attitudes spark resentment from the priestly caste of Intercessors, who bear the responsibility of summoning King Kragen to eliminate the lesser kragen when the latter are discovered plundering the sponge pens.

Before long, Sklar Hast’s rebelliousness leads to a violent confrontation, and his exile from the float community. But Hast is undeterred; he seeks to not only establish a new colony, but one devoted to the destruction of King Kragen. Can he and his band of followers devise a method to kill a monster squid when human technology is limited to what substances can be derived from aquatic plants and animals ? Can he deter the resentful Intercessors long enough to give his new colony a chance at survival ? Or will Sklar Hast and his revolutionary movement fall before the wrath of King Kragen ?

The Blue World’ is a fast-moving and well-written SF adventure. As is usual with Vance, the narrative is mainly a platform upon which he can indulge in his goal of crafting ornate passages of dialogue, and adjective-rich descriptions of life within a unique marine environment.

But he takes care to see that the plot holds the reader’s interest, using memorable adversaries, typified by the arrogant Intercesor Barquan Blasdel, as capable foils to Sklar Hast and his band of renegades. The strategies whereby Hast and his followers contrive to deal with the kragens, and later King Kragen himself, have a genuine scientific background and impart mounting suspense to the novel’s last 50 pages. Readers interested in a well-told story that avoids the more indolent pacing of Vance’s other SF novels will find ‘The Blue World’ to be a pleasing read.

'Heavy Metal' magazine August 1979

The August 1979 issue of ‘Heavy Metal’ featured a cover by Mantxo Algora titled ‘Tan, Don’t Burn’ and a back cover by Martin Springett titled ‘Buz’.

This issue had several good stories within its pages. ‘Free Ways’ by Lee Marks, ‘New Ark City’ by Caza, and ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, a visual accompaniment to the Rolling Stones song, drawn by James Waley, were a cut above the usual material. But the best piece in the issue was ‘Mama’s Place’ by Arthur Suydam, which I’ve posted here.

Suydam was arguably the most impressive of the artists and writers featured in the pages of Heavy Metal during the late 70s. Each of his stories was meticulously drawn, colored, and lettered, and featured an original (and genuinely creepy) approach to SF and horror topics.

Suydam is best known to contemporary readers for his covers for Dark Horse comic’s ‘Alien’ titles, and Marvel’s ‘Zombies’ series.

Book Review: 'Second Nature' by Cherry Wilder
2 / 5 Stars

‘Second Nature’ (1982; 254 pp.) is a paperback original from Pocket Books’s 'Timescape' imprint. The cover illustration (the artist is uncredited) depicts what appears to be a Lovecraftian monster; in reality this is one of the ‘Vail’ featured in the text.

Two hundred and sixty-five years after the spaceship Rho Maryland crash-landed on an unnamed planet orbiting the star Delta Pavonis, the descendents of the ship’s crew have managed to eke out a successful, if low-tech, society devoted to agriculture and fishing. The central outpost of the human society is the city of Rhomary, where lives the main character, a scholar named Maxim Bro. Rhomary supports a complex ecology of religious sects and professional guilds, some members of which possess quasi-telepathic abilities. Native herbivores serve as the primary means of overland transport, while wooden sailing ships ply the large seas. There is lingering angst over the departure, decades ago, of the Vail, a race of enormous, benign aquatic creatures.

The stories of their spacefaring ancestors and their wondrous technology are dwindling into mythology, but still there is a mystical hope that other vessels may someday make planetfall. When Maxim Bro learns that red streaks have been seen across the night sky, and meteor fragments of some sort have fallen to the earth, he sets out on a journey to the Gann Station, a community alongside the Western Sea, where a Captain LaMar has recovered what appears to be a chunk of a spacecraft from the water.

Soon an android is recovered from the sea; a religious cult reacts unfavorably to the news. The narrative focuses on the reaction of various characters, including Maxim Bro, to the revelation that contact with Earth and its space vessels may be within reach.

Reading ‘Second Nature’ is a laborious experience. Author Wilder (the pseudonym of New Zealand writer Cherry Barbara Grimm) has a tendency to adopt an elliptical approach to disclosing key features of the narrative. Too often, people, places, things, and historical antecedents are introduced to the reader with little in the way of accompanying exposition. The reader regularly is forced to infer what is taking place from oblique stretches of dialogue and descriptive passages. At the same time, Wilder will lavish an adjective-rich, almost poetic approach to describe things of ancillary importance to the main narrative.

The book’s Prologue is an example of the drawbacks of Wilder’s too-stylized writing. It relates an early encounter between a human colonist and one of the Vail. The first-person narrator is in fact a Vail, while the ‘minmer’ it mentions is its wary human contactee. This information is related to the reader with little in the way of explication; to make things worse, sections of italicized text inserted into this Prologue deal with an independent story thread with dim relevance to the main narrative. I had to re-read this section several times in order to finally figure out exactly what was taking place.

I suspect few readers, when confronted with this rather inaccessible start to the novel, will be willing to push on. If they do, they will find a novel with flashes of adventure, but on the whole, suffering from too diffuse an approach to storytelling.

'Slow Death' Comix No. 6 (1974)

‘Slow Death’ No. 6 (1974) features on its cover President Nixon, aboard an alien spaceship and negotiating with its crew – drawn with care to call to mind the classic EC SF comics of the 50s - for access to their oil. In the background, some aliens are dining on something suspicious.

Most of the stories in this issue (‘The Long Sleep’ by George Metzger, ‘Raw Meat’ by Rand Holmes, and ‘White Man’s Burden’ by Jaxon) cannot be posted to a ‘G’ or ‘PG’ rated blog site, but Charles Dallas’s ‘Call of the Wild’ should qualify. I’ve posted the story in its entirety; it’s a creepy tale of caged animals getting a chance to even the score.

The depiction of ‘Miss Miller’, the elderly woman who manages the ‘nature museum’, brilliantly resembles the nasty old WASP shrews and spinsters I encountered growing up in a small town in upstate New York. Outwardly, paragons of virtue; upstanding citizens of the community; members of the DAR and the Shriner's Lady Auxilliary; inwardly, vicious and bitter towards small things like animals and children.

Killraven: 'Amazing Adventures' No. 19 (July 1973)

‘Amazing Adventures’ No.19 (July 1973) is the second installment of the ‘War of the Worlds’ narrative. This issue’s story is the ‘Sirens of 7^th Avenue’ by Gerry Conway, with art by Howard Chaykin. Chaykin’s art still has a rushed quality (he was assigned to the book with short notice – not an unusual occurrence for the Marvel staff during the 70s) but he manages to draw the Sirens with a sufficiently groovy, early 70’s fashion-rich detail.

Unfortunately for the Sirens- Earth women genetically engineered to manipulate rogue males into ready submission to their Martian overlords – Killraven is immune to their charms. So a squadron of mutants, including what seems to be a canine-human cross, is let loose with orders to rend him limb from limb.

With this issue the frenetic pacing that marked the series becomes more prominent. Within the span of just twenty pages there are battle with a monster lizard, a Martian Tripod, and a Super-Mutant all within the ruins of what used to be New York City.

Book Review: 'The Starless World' by Gordon Eklund

2/5 Stars

By the mid-70s Paramount had finally begun to realize that the pop culture phenomenon that was Star Trek had only begun to be harnessed for profit. When Bantam exhausted the novelizations of the show scripts in its bestselling series by James Blish, Star Trek – Star Trek 12, new content was clearly necessary. Thus the ongoing juggernaut of novelizations began, and continues to this day. ‘The Starless World’, by Gordon Eklund, is one of the early novelizations and appeared in 1978. The cover artist appears to be Vincent DiFate.

The Enterprise is on a routine survey mission to map black holes within the vicinity of the Galactic Core when it is approached by a shuttlecraft affiliated with the Rickover, a starship that disappeared from Starfleet records 11 years previously. The pilot of the shuttlecraft is a deranged man named Thomas Clayton, a former friend and student along with Captain Kirk at the Starfleet Academy. Clayton babbles nonsense about a Sun God named Ay-nab.

Soon after its encounter with the shuttlecraft, the Enterprise finds itself trapped by an immeasurably powerful tractor beam, which pulls the ship into a Dyson Sphere: an enormous artificial globe that harbors within its interior an Earth-like planet named Lyra. Lyra is the size of Jupiter, with artificial moons, and a sun, orbiting its bulk. The Enterprise takes up orbit around Lyra and Kirk and company Beam Down to the surface to investigate.

Not only do the Enterprise crew discover that the planet contains a small city, Tumara, but it is populated by furry little humanoids who utter the sort of enigmatic banalities that all simpleton aliens habitually make in Star Trek stories. This of course makes Kirk’s job of finding out what it going on harder than usual. Add into the mix some stranded Klingons; some zombie-like wayward Rickover crew members called ‘Strangers’, and the fact that sooner rather than later the Dyson Sphere and its contents are going to collide with a black hole, and you have what seem to be the ingredients for a memorable drama.

Unfortunately, ‘The Starless World’ disappoints. Its 152 pages really fail to offer much in the way of excitement or suspense. To be fair to author Gordon Eklund, plots for a franchised property like Star Trek need to follow strict guidelines (this isn’t Slash Fiction, after all) but much of ‘World’ revolves around themes that are derived from several of the series’ original episodes (‘The Apple’, ‘For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky’, and ‘The Paradise Syndrome’ come readily to mind). The narrative tends to expend its energies meandering from one puzzling encounter to another, all the while trying to set things up for a closing Revelation that is more than a little contrived.

I can’t recommend ‘The Starless World’ to general-audience SF readers, and I suspect that even Trekkies will find it underwhelming.

Comic Review: 'The Thing From Another World' (PartTwo) Dark Horse Comics (1991)


In the second issue of this two-parter features another stellar cover by John Higgins.

In the pages I've excerpted, MacReady meets up with Nauls, the other survivor from the American Antarctic Research station ravaged by The Thing. The problem is, MacReady can't tell if Nauls has been infected or not...and to complicate matters, representatives of an Argentine research station have decided to enter the picture....

This two-part series is one of the better handlings of a licensed property by Dark Horse comics (something they do not always do with their other licensed properties), with superior art and story, and well worth searching for in the used comic marketplace.

Book Review: The Last Wish

Book Review: 'The Last Wish' by Andrzej Sapkowski 3 / 5 Stars

I don’t usually pick up contemporary fantasy titles, but I decided to get ‘The Last Wish’ (originally printed in 2007; this Orbit books paperback, 359 pp., was released in 2008) after having played the computer game ‘The Witcher’, which is based on the character created by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski.

Geralt of Rivia has been raised from a young age to be a Witcher: one who tracks and kills monsters for a fee. He plies his trade in a medieval world where humans are the dominant race, and dwarves and elves are relegated to eking out a living in the slum districts. Magic is carefully rationed and primarily the responsibility of the Wizard caste, although Geralt can use certain spells if needed. While his Witcher training has given Geralt superhuman powers of combat and endurance, his pale complexion, mutant eyes, and cynical disposition often lead other humans to regard him with suspicion and mistrust.

The Last Wish is a collection of episodic adventures, linked by an overarching storyline (‘The Voice of Reason’).

The first episode, ‘The Witcher’, introduces Geralt and sees him tasked with eliminating a woman transformed into a striga, a bloodthirsty monster from Eastern European legend. 

In ‘A Grain of Truth’, Geralt encounters a beast with refined manners and a violent girlfriend. 

‘The Lesser Evil’ pits our Witcher against a vengeful bandit girl, and ‘A Question of Price’ deals with the fulfillment of vows spoken in extremis. 

‘The Edge of the World’ takes place in a remote rural district where a demon has been harassing some peaceful farmers. The final story, ‘The Last Wish’, involves a genie loosed from a bottle, with fateful consequences.

Overall, ‘The Last Wish’ offers well-written, if slow-paced, tales that depart from the fantasy clichés that so dominate the publishing market these days. Sapkowski demurs from siting Geralt in a ‘traditional’ fantasy landscape driven by Epic Quests involving the Fate of the World. Rather, The Witcher’s adventures take place in mean small towns, ruins crumbling along the sides of little-used dirt paths, and castle dinner parties hosted by conniving royalty. The confrontations Geralt finds himself involved with are small-scale, never involving legions of Orcs facing off against squadrons of Heroes, but nonetheless bitter and intense.

I intend to read succeeding volumes in the Witcher Saga; I hope that the Eastern European mythology and culture that make understated appearances in the first book will expand over time, as they help give the novel a bit of unique flavor. Readers looking for a fantasy character and setting that stand apart from the formulaic material displayed on the retail shelves may find ‘The Last Wish’ worth investigating.