Book Review: Sargasso

Book Review: 'Sargasso' by Edwin Corley

1 / 5 Stars

‘Sargasso’ was published by Dell in 1977 (301 pp.); the cover artist is uncredited. 

It’s the late 70s, and the crew of Apollo 19 are preparing to leave an orbiting Russian space station for splashdown in the Atlantic off the coast of Florida. But something goes very wrong, and the capsule is recovered - with what appears to be the burnt remains of three astronauts - contained within.

Captain Arthur Lovejoy’s deep-sea research vessel, the Lamprey, is near the splash site when suddenly all power aboard ship is mysteriously lost. Do the power failure and the loss of the Apollo crew have anything to do with their proximity to the Devil’s Triangle ? Or did the Lamprey have something to do with the calamity striking the Apollo capsule ? 

The US government thinks so, and within a matter of days, Lovejoy finds himself out of his existing government contract, and his ship stuck in the dock for lack of operating funds.

But Lovejoy and his hard-charging scientific officer Paul Forsythe aren’t about to sit and take abuse from the feds. With some adroit political maneuvering, the team manages to convince a wealthy movie producer to sponsor a documentary trip by the Lamprey to the heart of the Triangle. There, they hope to solve the mystery of what appears to be a highway resting on the ocean floor.

But they’re not the only ones heading to the Triangle; a Russian trawler also wants a close look at the area, for reasons known only to the Soviet government. Add in a famous British sailor on a world-wide cruise, an elderly pilot who once encountered inexplicable events in the Triangle, an ambitious television reporter anxious for an inside story, and a trio of would-be treasure hunters, and the Sargasso Sea is going to be very crowded. But nobody is truly prepared for what the Triangle is about to throw at them…....  

‘Sargasso’ is a pure beach read, made with an eye towards capturing the audience enthralled by the 70s best-sellers dealing with the Bermuda Triangle: Charles Berlitz’s ‘The Bermuda Triangle’ (1974), John Spencer’s ‘Limbo of the Lost’ (1969), and Richard Winer’s ‘The Devil’s Triangle’(1975). 

Unfortunately, author Corley starts more plot threads than he can devote adequate attention to, and the story never really gels into one coherent narrative. The main storyline tends to run out of gas at the end, and most readers will find the final revelations about the fate of the Apollo capsule to be underwhelming. 

Compared to other examples of 70s action / adventure fiction in the Clive Cussler / Alistair MacLean mode, ‘Sargasso’ doesn’t measure up well, and only the most hardcore fans of the genre will want to seek it out.

Killraven Amazing Adventures No. 31

Killraven: 'Amazing Adventures' No. 31

(July 1975)

 

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‘Amazing Adventures featuring Killraven: Warrior of the Worlds’ No. 31 is dated July 1975 (which means it was on stands at the beginning of June). The cover art is by Craig Russell, who also did the interior art. This issue’s story, ‘The Day the Monuments Shattered’, is written by Don McGregor.

This issue saw the page count rise to 18, but the presence of the extra 3 pages didn’t stop McGregor from cramming every panel with excess verbiage of the most purple kind. This is too bad, because artist Russell works in some cool monster battle imagery, equal to what Herb Trimpe was producing in the first few issues of the series.

This time the monster is some sort of mutant amalgamation of reptile, fish, and octopus, and the whole Killraven crew must team up to bring it down….and to make things worse, Martian lackeys ‘Sacrificer’ and ‘Atalon’ both are on the scene, looking for revenge for Killraven’s destruction of their ‘breeding’ operation….

Despite some uneven plotting by McGregor, this is one of the better issues of 1975 - something necessary to keep the franchise afloat until the end of the year, at least.

'Omni' magazine September 1985

'Omni' magazine September 1985

 

Let's return to the 1980s, and September 1985, to be exact, and the latest issue of Omni magazine. 

Published by 'Penthouse' publisher Bob Guccione and his girlfriend Kathleen Keeton, Omni was one of the best-selling SF and science fact magazines, garnering significant advertising revenue, which in turn allowed it to pay high rates to its fiction authors.

In this issue, cyberpunk stars Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner team up to deliver 'Mozart in Mirrorshades', a classic of the genre. It gets a striking (if not entirely accurate) illustration by Etienne Sandorfi:

Some of the advertisements in the magazine are worth getting nostalgic over. First we have a commemorative 'Mr Spock' plate (obviously for Trekkies only), with our hero looking particularly stylish with his crossed-arms pose:

there is also an ad from Casio, featuring its new line of advanced, SOLAR POWERED calculators !

An ad from Hitachi lets those with handsome back accounts know all about its newfangled Compact Audio Disc player and its hi-tech, '2-head' VHS videotape player :

And finally, buried in the back pages of the magazine, a plain, bare-bones ad for 'micro computer' gear from Elek-Tek in Chicago:

How about some cutting-edge daisy-wheel dot-matrix printers ? Or an internal modem ? A 'DSSD' disk drive for your Apple ? Or a pack of 5 1/4 - inch floppy disks ? 

This was indeed the dawning of the home computer era, and for many folks a PC was simply too expensive and difficult to operate to justify purchasing. Something to think about next time you get exasperated and frustrated at the troublesome functioning of your own contemporary machine...?

Book Review: Starhammer

Book Review: 'Starhammer' by Christopher Rowley

5 / 5 Stars

‘Starhammer’ (Ballantine /Del Rey, 1986, 297 pp., cover art by David Schleinkofer) is the first novel in the so-called ‘Vang’ trilogy; the succeeding volumes are ‘The Vang: The Military Form’ (1988) and ‘The Vang: Battlemaster’ (1990).

I didn’t acquire the Vang trilogy during the 80s, nor do I remember it getting the attention that other trilogies of the era received (such as Harry Harrison's 'West of Eden' series). As the 21st century dawned it looked like the series would be something of a modestly successful example of 80s space opera, if nothing more memorable.

All that changed in November 2001 with the release of the video game ‘Halo: Combat Evolved’ on the Xbox. In short order the Halo games became a marketing juggernaut. When Jason Jones, one of the producers at Bungie Studio, disclosed that some features of the game were borrowed / inspired from the Vang trilogy, it focused new attention on Rowley’s novels and today used copies of the trilogy sell rather dearly on eBay and amazon.com.

In ‘Starhammer’, the far future is a place of limited ambitions for humanity. Despite the arrival of FTL travel and the colonization of thousands of planets, the human race is the de facto slave of the laowon Empire: a race of humanoid, blue-skinned aliens who can be ruthless in suppressing dissent. The regions of space still open to ‘free’ humans are steadily dwindling under pressure from laowon political factions, and Earth itself is ruled by a quisling who answers to the laowon imperial family.

Jon Iehard is a human with mild psy abilities, born on the frontier world of Glegan, and reared as a serf to the loawon administration that governs the planet. Jon experiences firsthand the cruelty of laowon rule, and when he matures, he makes his way to one of the last few remaining free worlds of humanity: the Nocanicus system. Jon finds employ as a detective on the Mass Murder Squad, hunting down terrorists determined to sow fear and disorder among the elites at the top of the economic food chain.

Jon receives a new assignment: find an elderly man named Eblis Bey, a religious fanatic responsible for the detonation of a bomb inside a laowon space station; twenty of the aliens died, including members of the Blue Seygfan royalty. The pressure on the human government to find and turn Eblis Bey over to the vengeful laowon is intense. But as Jon Iehard embarks on his pursuit of Bey, the mystery behind the older man’s actions only deepens. For Eblis Bey is on a quest to reach the planet Baraf, where among the ruins of a long-dead alien civilization is rumored to rest the Starhammer: a weapon of immense power that can turn its wielder into the ruler of the galaxy.

The laowon want the Starhammer as much as Eblis Bey. But access to the Starhammer won’t come easily….for nestled within its depths is another weapon, equally ancient, and just as formidable….

‘Starhammer’ takes some time to get underway; the first few chapters barrage the reader with a lot of improvised alien proper nouns and terminologies a la ‘Dune’. Indeed, the main plot doesn’t start to develop until well into the first third of the narrative, as author Rowley methodically spends quite a few pages laying out his world construction of the laowon and their human thralls. But once Iehard receives his assignment to track down Eblis Bey the novel starts to gain momentum, and then the adventures come fast and hard all the way to the last page.

[Readers familiar with the ‘Halo’ franchise will recognize the origins of The Flood and the (rather effeminate) alien robot, 343 Guilty Spark.]

As an example of 80s space opera ‘Starhammer’ comes across very well, and is superior in my opinion to that quintessential standard of the genre at that time period, Orson Scott Card’s ‘Ender’s Game’.

'Free Ways' by Lee Marrs

from the August 1979 issue of 'Heavy Metal'

Book Review: Whispers II

Book Review: 'Whispers II', edited by Stuart David Schiff

2 / 5 Stars

Whispers was a semi-professional zine devoted to fantasy and horror short stories. It appeared irregularly during the 70s and 80s as a labor of love by Stuart David Schiff, who worked full-time as a dentist in Binghamton, New York.

A (somewhat arrogant) account by David Drake of the magazine’s inception, and how submissions were handled / discarded, is available here.

Starting in 1977, mainstream publisher Doubleday began to reprint material from the zine (as well as commissioned new stories) in hardcover, and a series of paperbacks followed suit, appearing under the Doubleday Jove imprint. These are available from amazon.com and eBay for reasonable prices (although original issues of the magazine itself are much more expensive).

The anthologies are representative of 70s and 80s horror and fantasy, much in the same manner as the DAW ‘Years Best Horror Stories’ collections (which often included stories that first saw print in Whispers). 

Although newcomers to the field could see their work appear in the zine, a lot of material was provided by a relatively narrow coterie of fantasy / horror / SF writers of the era, such as David Drake, Charles L. Grant, Karl Edward Wagner, Dennis Etchison, and Ramsey Campbell.

And, like the DAW anthologies, or Kirby MacCauley's ‘Dark Forces’ collection, Whispers sought to publish ‘quiet’ horror; outright grue and gore were considered the purview of tasteless hacks. Later in the 80s, splatterpunks like David Schow were able to get their more restrained pieces into the zine.

‘Whispers II’ was first published as a hardcover in 1979 by Doubleday; this Jove paperback (256 pp.) appeared in November 1987 and features cover art by Marshall Arisman. A brief rundown on the contents, some of which appeared in the Whispers zine from 1973 - 1978:

‘Undertow’ by Karl Edward Wagner: a mediocre 'Kane' story. For whatever reason, Wagner’s early Kane stories featured really, really bad dialogue and adverb- and adjective- overloaded prose. Have a dictionary at hand for ‘corposant’, ‘rubious’, and - ‘cucurbit’ !?

‘Berryhill’ by R. A. Lafferty: a juvenile delinquent investigates a haunted house.

‘The King’s Shadow Has No Limits’ by Avram Davidson: not a horror story, but a philosophical tale about the city of Bella, featuring Davidson’s 'Doctor Eszterhazy' character.

‘Conversation Piece’ by Richard Christian Matheson: the narrative is mediated entirely by dialogue passages; a man who can’t say no to medical ‘research’ tells how he earned his living.

‘The Stormsong Runner’ by Jack L. Chalker: a hillbilly girl and ominous weather. Something of a homage to the fiction of Manly Wade Wellman.

‘They Will Not Hush’ by Sallis and Lunde: more of a fragment than a coherent short story; whatever thin plot is present gets lost under metaphor-encrusted prose.

‘Lex Talionis’ by Russell Kirk: the ghost story component of this tale really is just a device upon which Kirk espouses his conservative, orthodox, Catholicism-driven philosophies. The prose can be ponderous (‘rusticated ashlar’ ?!).

‘Marianne’ by Joseph Payne Brennan: a short-short story of a bad time at the beach, albeit in the off-season.

‘From The Lower Deep’ by Hugh Cave: a flooded island, Lovecraftian horrors, ‘explicit’ gore (by the standards of the Whispers crowd), and one of the better stories in the anthology.

‘The Fourth Musketeer’ by Charles L. Grant: the obligatory C. L. Grant entry. A middle-aged man experiencing angst finds himself in his old neighborhood. Most readers will see where the story is headed well before the (typically for Grant, oblique) ending.

‘Ghost of a Chance’ by Ray Russell: short-short story; a skeptic meets a True Believer in ghosts.

‘The Elcar Special’ by Carl Jacobi: a reasonably good 'haunted car' story

‘The Box’ by Lee Weinstein: Weinstein, a new writer, delivers a short story that is less about horror and more about manifestations of bereavement. Unremarkable.

‘We Have All Been Here Before’ by Dennis Etchison: The mandatory Etchison entry. A psychic assisting with a murder case may have her own agenda. The horror elements are predictably muted and failed to impress me.

‘Archie and the Scylla of Hades Hole’ by Ken Wisman, and ‘Trill Coster’s Burden’ by Manly Wade Wellman: two folk tales with supernatural themes.

‘Conversation Piece’ by Ward Moore: this story's urbane leanings would have been more at home in the pages of The New Yorker. In 1805 Gotham, a dandy meets a mysterious family of Russian aristocrats.

‘The Bait’ by Fritz Leiber: unremarkable short-short tale featuring the Gray Mouser and Fafhrd.

‘Above the World’ by Ramsey Campbell: the obligatory Campbell entry. A distraught man embarks on a hike in the English countryside. To call Campbell’s prose turgid is an understatement; witness the description of a stream that “….pursued its wordless water monologue.”

‘The Red Leer’ by David Drake: avaricious farmers poke around an ancient Indian burial mound. One of the better stories in the collection, featuring a unique sort of monster.

‘At the Bottom of the Garden’ by David Campton: an entry in the genre of fantastical children’s tales exemplified by the British author Roald Dahl. In this story, a little girl’s mysterious playmate provides very unusual medical aid.

Summing up, there are too few good stories in this iteration of the 'Whispers' anthologies to make this volume a must-have. Still, if you are a dedicated horror fan, and you can find a copy with an affordable asking price, you might want to pick it up.

'Slow Death' comics No. 11

This version of 'Slow Death' No. 11 was printed in 1992 and features a cover illustration by Greg Irons, who also contributed (posthumously) several strips. Also included are 'Panic in Year Zilch' by Graham Manley;'Overture to Armageddon' by Warren Greenwood; and 'Super Cosmic Comic Creator Comix' by Wally Wood. One of the better stories in this issue is 'Cold Snap' by Alan Moore and Bryan Talbot (of 'Luther Arkwright' fame). Talbot's black and white artwork is, as always, very good.

 

For a nice gallery of selected 'Slow Death' stories from issues 1 - 9, including many I don't post for reasons of Adult Content, try the 'Golden Age Comic Book Stories' blog.

Book Review: 'Earth Lies Sleeping' by Laurence James (Simon Rack No. 1)

3 / 5 Stars

The ‘Simon Rack’ series comprised five short novels released in 1974 – 1975 by the indefatigable British writer Laurence James (1942 – 2000). In the UK the Simon Rack paperbacks were published by Sphere Books, while in the US they were issued by Zebra  Books. ‘Earth Lies Sleeping’ was published in 1974 and this Zebra edition features a cover by Vincent DiFate.

Simon Rack was something of a mix between James Bond and Perry Rhodan. As an operative in the Inter-Galactic Security Service, Rack is routinely dispatched to handle the toughest assignments. Joining Simon for his adventures is his right-hand man, Eugene Bogart.

In this first of the Simon Rack series, we learn that 500 years into the future, Earth is not the hallowed Mother Planet, but rather, a destitute world still recovering from the effects of the Neutronic Wars centuries previously. Society is sputtering along at a medieval level, with feudal lords ruling lands occupied by hapless serfs. Earth remains valuable to the Federation for its ability to supply the precious element ‘Pheronium’, used to power starships. When GalSec gets word that a conspiracy may be afoot on Earth to control the supply of the precious element, Simon and Bogart are sent to investigate.

‘Earth Lies Sleeping’ gets started with an intense flashback sequence, as we witness the graphic execution of a peasant family who are caught poaching on Baron Mescarl’s hunting grounds. Events then move to the present-day, and the arrival on Earth of Simon and Bogart as undercover operatives. In short order our heroes come to the attention of the Baron and his ruthless lieutenant, Henri de Poictiers, and the first of many scrapes that will test their ingenuity, resolve, and ability to withstand pain….

As a straightforward SF adventure, ‘Earth Lies Sleeping’ delivers. Author James knows he has to keep the narrative moving at a rapid clip, while providing just enough exposition keep his characters from becoming too-thin caricatures. The action is violent and brutal, the villains are genuinely villainous, there is torture aplenty, and a rousing finale involving access to a particularly gruesome type of weapon. But there is never too little time for Simon not to go shtupping a comely wench – although the  70s flavor surrounding these activities may not be to the liking of contemporary audiences.....

An interesting interview with Laurence James is available here. 

'The Bus' by Paul Kirchner

Book Review: 'Flashing Swords 4: Barbarians and Black Magicians' edited by Lin Carter

 4 / 5 Stars

The ‘Flashing Swords’ series, published by Dell, was an interesting experiment in providing a forum for novelette-length fantasy, and sword-and-sorcery, tales for the increasing audience this literature was garnering in the mid- to –late 70s. Edited by Lin Carter, most of the submissions came from established genre writers, and all were written specifically for the 'Flashing Swords' imprint.

‘Flashing Swords 4: Barbarians and Black Magicians’ was released in November 1977 and features a stylish cover (of Elric of Melnibone’) by Don Maitz. I purchased the book at that time, and found it reasonably entertaining.

How do the stories stack up more than 30 years after first being read ?

The anthology leads off with an entry by Jack Vance in his ‘Cugel the Clever’ series. Our hero must, as always, rely on his wits to get him out of a scrape involving a rival magician and a short-tempered Prince. At the time I first read ‘The Bag of Dreams’ I was exasperated by Vance’s use of eccentric adjectives and his habit of giving his characters studiously ironic dialogue; but over time I’ve mellowed, and this story, with its emphasis on humor, is more rewarding the second time around.

‘The Tupilak’, by Poul Anderson, is an entry in his series about Scandinavian-flavored mermen. The brother-and-sister pair of Tauno and Eyjan get caught up in a violent feud between Norse and Eskimo. Anderson’s prose is overly labored in its effort to imbue his narrative with a ‘folklore’ flavor. But the bleak, depressing setting of squalid camps in the Arctic Circle, and a formidable monster as an adversary, make ‘The Tupilak’ an effective horror story.

‘Storm in a Bottle’, by John Jakes, is an entry in the 'Brak the Barbarian' saga. This time our hero is held captive in a drought-stricken kingdom ruled by one Lord Magnus and his creepy ally, Ool the magician. Somewhat against character, Brak has to use his brains, rather than his brawn, in order to solve the do-or-die task set to him by Magnus.

Katherine Kurtz provides ‘Swords Against the Marluk’, an entry in her 'Deryni' series. King Brion, his brother Prince Nigel, and Squire Alaric are confronted by the said Marluk, the King of the Elves. Although uneasy about the use of magic, Brion realizes that it is the only means by which he can hope to defeat his enemy and retain control of Wales. Kurtz’s stories have more deliberate pacing than the usual examples of the heroic fantasy genre, but this tale holds together well.

Michael Moorcock provides a story from the Elric saga, in this case ‘The Lands Beyond the World’, which eventually appeared in the book ‘The Sailor on the Seas of Fate’, the second entry in the Elric series. ‘Lands’ is one of the better Elric tales, offering adventures with pirates, decadent mystics, vengeful heroes, and a strange landscape sited in another dimension.

All in all, ‘Flashing Swords 4’ is one of the better fantasy anthologies of the mid-70s, and worth searching out.