Book Review: 'Berserker Man' by Fred Saberhagen
'Berserker Man' (220 pp.) was published by Ace Books in January, 1980, and features cover art by Boris Vallejo.
For those unfamiliar with the 'Berserker' franchise, it started in 1963 with the publication of the short story 'Fortress Ship' in If magazine. Saberhagen (1930 - 2007) eventually published some 15 books in the franchise well into the mid-2000s, making it one of the more successful such properties in the genre of science fiction.
The Berserkers are robotic intelligences, created eons ago as weapons in some long-forgotten interstellar war. They since have abandoned their initial programming and now seek to eliminate all life from the universe, life being regarded as something of a disease deserving eradication.
'Berserker Man' is set some hundreds of years after the events in the 1975 installation in the series, 'Berserker's Planet.' As 'Man' opens, we learn that (inevitably) the Federation has grown complacent, and the Berserker menace has been renewed, and this time, a victory by the robots seems more likely than ever.
Rather than trying to put together an enormous battle fleet for a final, catastrophic showdown with the Berserkers, Secretary Tupolev, the leader of the Federation military, has elected for a more cerebral strategy. An eleven year-old boy named Michel Geulincx (pr. Joo-links), residing on the idyllic planet Alpine, is to be drafted into Federation service. At a secret facility at Moonbase, he is to be trained in the use of a new weapon dubbed Lancelot, a weapon that has the power to transform a receptive human being into a superpowered entity, capable of defeating the Berserkers.
But the time available to Michel and his trainers is running short, for the human allies of the Berserkers are searching for Michel, to hand him over to the robots. The fate of all life in the galaxy rests on the thin shoulders of a boy who only is beginning to learn what he can do with the power vested in him.........
With 'Berserker Man,' Saberhagen clearly is trying to craft a space opera with a wider scope and intellectual heft than detailing recitations of space battles between opposing fleets (although there are some of these in the novel).
Central to the plot of 'Man' is the existence of that classic sci-fi archetype, the Mystical Space Object (MSO), which is (simultaneously) enormous, yet tiny; sentient, yet inscrutable; beyond human ken, but also familiar; omnipotent, but frail; etc., etc., etc. The reader learns that the fates of Michel and the MSO are intertwined, and this serves as a conduit through which Saberhagen provides considerable discourse, in the second half of the novel, about 'cosmic' events.
Without disclosing spoilers, I'll simply say that these events culminate in an 'Omega Point' meeting with a vast and impersonal artifact, one capable of deciding the winner in any contest between man and machine.
'Berserker Man' features an Afterward essay, by Sandra Meisel, on the themes of the novel and its place in the Berserker franchise. As such things go it's a decent enough essay, although at times it is very earnest in imputing a literary and philosophical significance to Saberhagen's writings (there are illusions to Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, the heroes of classical mythology, etc.).
I was at ease with giving 'Berserker Man' a Four Star Rating. It is a successful effort to bring something a little more imaginative to the franchise, and Saberhagen deserves credit for using a clear and intelligible prose style to relate his cosmic encounters. Many sci-fi novels of the New Wave era that also dealt with this theme relied, almost by rote, on overly figurative language that taxed the patience of the reader. Accordingly, fans of space opera and the Berserker stories will find this novel rewarding.
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