The Last Ranger #10: Is This The End?

 
The Last Ranger #10: Is This The End?, by Craig Sargent

January, 1989  Popular Library

Well, I just finished Doomsday Warrior, so it’s only fitting that I’m also now finishing The Last Ranger, a sort-of sister series to that earlier (and longer-running) post-nuke pulp, at least in how The Last Ranger was written by Jan Stacy, who co-wrote the earliest volumes of Doomsday Warrior with Ryder Syvertsen. 

As I mentioned many years ago in my review of the first volume, I was a fan of The Last Ranger from the beginning, and not just because – for once! – I got in on the ground floor, having bought the first volume soon after it was published in 1986. No, I was also drawn to the entire setup, of a young man trying to survive in a violent, hellish post-nuke world, driving around on an armored Harley with his faithful pit bull at his back. To this day I still remember so excitedly talking to a fellow young fan of the series in the WaldenBooks store in the Valley View Mall, in 1987, when the fifth volume was published. 

I wonder how long that kid stuck with the series; I believe the fifth volume was the last one I purchased new, and it wasn’t until shortly after I started this blog in 2010 that I decided to go out and pick up all the volumes of the series. Reading it as an “adult,” I can’t say The Last Ranger floated my boat like it once did…but then, that’s really only true for the final installments of the series. It would seem that Jan Stacy lost interest in the series soon after I did, as volumes 6 through 9 weren’t very good, and seemed quickly turned out. 

But then (again), this could be because Jan Stacy had other things on his mind; as we know, Stacy passed away in 1989, from AIDS. As I also mentioned in my review of the first volume, this really brings a “hmmm” element to the nihilistic final volume of The Last Ranger; spoiler warning and etc, but the answer to the title, “Is This The End?,” is most certainly yes. I mean, the entire planet blows up – it doesn’t get much more “the end” than that. 

As with those most recent volumes, Stacy here is more focused on sadism and ghoulish spectacle, again bringing a “hmmm” reading to the books. No exaggeration, a good portion of Is This The End? is devoted to the excessive detailing of post-nuke horrors, horrifically mutated humans and the equally-horrific tortures they put others through. There is a definite nihilistic bent to the book, and not just due to the finale; this is the work of an author who has become sick of life in general and the human race in particular – it is an excessively dark work, with little in the way of the goofy humor that leavened the darkness of earlier books. It’s almost as if hope had run out in Jan Stacy’s own life, and he brought that into his fiction. 

We’re well beyond the opening gimmick of “a young man on his Harley with his pet dog” of the earliest books; indeed, the dog, Excaliber (and yes, it’s spelled with an “er” instead of a “ur”), is insensate for the majority of the book, in a coma derived from injuries in the previous volume, and thus there is none of the goofy bantering between dog and young man in this one. 

As for the young man, Martin Stone, he spends the majority of this final volume being captured by one group or another. Also, I’ll note here for posterity than in this last one Stone does not make a return trip to his mountain-side nuclear bunker retreat; for whatever reasons, those parts were always my favorite when I read these books as a kid. Back then – and even now – I wondered why Stone didn’t just find himself a girl and go live in that place forever. If he had, the world might have survived, but more on that in a bit. 

As with most other volumes, Is This The End? opens directly after the events of the previous volume – indeed, it’s a mere two days later. Excaliber is injured and near death, in a coma that he won’t wake from until nearly the end of the book. Stone is on his new bike and he’s trying to get to Texas, where series villain the Dwarf, an armless and legless sadist who basically controls the world, has taken Stone’s perennially-abducted sister, April. 

Jan Stacy fills pages with abandon; despite being only 168 pages, Is This The End? is a trying read, mostly because Stacy doesn’t really have a plot to hang the sadism on. There is a lot of stalling and repetition; the first quarter of the book has Stone enduring a freak thunderstorm, after which he eventually hooks up with a hotstuff biker chick named Rasberry Thorn, saving her from rival bikers. 

Rasberry takes Stone back to her headquarters, where it turns out she runs The Ballbusters, an all-female biker gang that’s in a constant state of internal warfare. Rasberry casually remarks that Stone must be her prisoner: no men are allowed in the camp, except prisoners who are there for to satisfy the sexual needs of the biker women, after which they’re killed. Stacy is unlike Ryder Syvertsen in that he has not removed the graphic element from his books, thus the Stone-Rasberry conjugation leaves little to the imagination. 

Meanwhile Stacy has served up heaping helpings of OTT gore, courtesy the Dwarf and his retinue of equally-mutated, equally-sadistic fellows. Stacy delivers a whole freakshow of deformed creeps who either serve the Dwarf or rule the world alongside him. The Dwarf operates out of an underground missile bunker in San Antonio, and Stone is captured by the freak’s minions mere minutes after arriving in town. 

Here the novel goes into its main focus: an endless barrage of Stone either being tortured or being forced to endure disgusting acts. The Dwarf plans to marry April in a perverted ceremony, and he wants Stone alive long enough to witness it. It becomes particularly grueling as Stone is treated to “dinner” in which bugs and mutated, still-living creatures are on the menu, and Stone is forced to eat his entire plate. 

Stacy also delights in the freaks created by a former Nazi doctor, one who was pals with Hitler and who now works for the Dwarf, creating human-mutant hybrids. There’s a lot of stuff about the various victims of this character, in particular a hermaphrodite that has been created by anatonomical parts taken from one person and grafted onto another. All told, whole stretches of Is This The End? are very repugnant, with no light to lessen the darkness. 

It’s especially galling because Martin Stone is so ineffectual in this final volume. He really doesn’t manage to do anything, and is shuffled from one captor to another. He’s even caught without a fight by the Dwarf, and so essentially for the majority of the novel Stone is either beaten, tortured, or forced to do disgusting things, all while the Dwarf triumphantly gloats. There’s also an endless part where Stone is put through “the Games,” where he must fight a three-armed mutant monster. 

Stone doesn’t even manage to save himself, but only by the “surprise” appearance of a character who shows up long enough to run amock in the underground base. SPOILER ALERT: And only here, in the very final pages, does Jan Stacy deliver anything relevant; one almost gets the impression the only thing he had planned out was how to end the series, and just winged it for the majority of the book until he got there. So basically Stone hurries to save April from being raped by the Dwarf – an insane bit were the Dwarf is slowly lowered by a machine onto April’s drugged form. 

But the Dwarf has sworn that if he can’t have April, the world will pay; the underground complex gives the sadist access to the Star Wars defense system (ie the satellite system proposed in the ‘80s that would house a ton of nuclear warheads), and the Dwarf, as ever managing to easily escape despite not having any limbs, scurries to the missile-firing area and punches a bunch of buttons with the stubs of his arms. 

I’m still in SPOILERS here, by the way. But man, talk about a loser – Stone doesn’t even manage to kill the Dwarf! That is left to another character, one of the mutated freaks, who strangles the evil bastard. And meanwhile Stone isn’t sure if the Dwarf managed to fire all of the missiles or not. 

The finale of Is This The End? finally sees Stone and his sister April reuinited – they’ve been separated the entire series, with only infrequent and short reunions – and standing above ground as they watch the sky for the raining nukes. But Stone to the end is uncertain if the Dwarf managed to fire all of the missiles at the Earth, hence the last image we see of Stone is his looking to the sky, jumping at everything he sees, thinking it might be the nuclear missiles coming to destroy the earth. It’s interesting that the last image we see of our hero, Martin Stone, he’s afraid, and he’s praying. 

But as demonstrated in the preceding pages of the book, there is no hope in the world of Jan Stacy; we cut immediately to a paragraph in which our author casually informs us that the world is turned into “glowing powder” by the raining nukes: “An intelligent species had made all the wrong choices.” 

In other words, the hero did not save the day, and the Dwarf managed to destroy the entire planet. It occurred to me that Stone himself is responsible for the end of the world; the Dwarf decides to nuke the Earth in spite, because he is unable to have April. I mean, if the Dwarf had never met April, then perhaps he wouldn’t have committed such a horrific act. If Martin Stone had only heeded his father’s warning, and stayed with his mother and sister in the safety of his nuclear bunker, then not only would Stone’s mother not have been raped and killed, and his sister April not adbucted, but the friggin’ Earth itself would not have been destroyed! 

So, once you take all that into consideration, it seems evident that Martin “The Last Ranger” Stone is the lamest “hero” in the entirety of men’s adventure; the dude got the entire planet destroyed. 

Well, end spoilers. Overall I was happy to finally read the entirety of The Last Ranger, but the increasing nihilishm really took a lot of the fun out of it. Compare to Doomsday Warrior, where Ryder Syvertsen also clearly grew bored with everything, but at least Syvertsen delivered a series conclusion that wasn’t so dark and hopeless. 

However, I’m not finished with Jan Stacy; years ago I picked up both volumes of his 1989 Body Smasher series, which is another I’ve been meaning to read for a long time; indeed, Body Smasher #1 was the last men’s adventure book I bought as a kid (well, I would’ve been 14 at the time, but still). However I’m pretty certain I was unaware at the time that the “Jan Stacy” credited for the Body Smasher books was also the “Craig Sargent” of The Last Ranger.

Barbarians on Bikes: Bikers and Motorcycle Gangs in Men’s Pulp Adventure Magazines

Barbarians On Bikes, edited by Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle

No month stated, 2016  New Texture

A big thanks to Bob Deis for hooking me up with a copy of Barbarians On Bikes a few years ago – I seem to recall it was in early 2020, ie right before the world went crazy – and though I read it at the time, I failed to review it. Well, I recently got back on a biker pulp kick, and it was straight to Barbarians On Bikes that I went for my fix. 

This one is a project of Bob Deis and Wyatt Doyle, the fellows who also brought us Cryptozoology, Cuba: Sugar, Sex, and Slaughter, Atomic Werewolves, and so many other deluxe hardcovers devoted to men’s adventure magazines. Unlike those publications, or the Men’s Adventure Quarterly series Bob Deis produces with Bill Cunningham, Barbarians On Bikes is devoid of any reprinted stories and focuses solely on artwork. Thus, the majority of the book is comprised of either full-color reproductions of men’s adventure magazine covers, or black and white splashpages or other interior art from the magazines. 

I recall that when I first read this book, like a total geek I wrote down a list of stories I was hoping Bob would feature in an upcoming book – and ended up listing out pretty much every story in the book! But friends, as usual the titles of the stories are so promising that one can’t help but want to read them…but then again, I’ve read so many of these men’s adventure magazines over the years that I now know that the stories themselves generally do not live up to the promise of the titles. 

Thus, focusing on the art alone isn’t really a bad idea, as the reader is free to use his own fevered imagination to come up with the plot for, say, “Sex Life Of A Motorcycle Mama” or “You Can’t Split From Hell, Chick!” That said, I still hope that someday Bob and Bill do a special “biker” issue of Men’s Adventure Quarterly, or that Bob and Wyatt do a Barbarians On Bikes followup that includes stories in addition to art.  Though to be fair, we did get a few such stories in MAQ #7. 

The appeal of this book is just flipping through the pages and admiring the incredible artwork of the gifted artists who worked on the men’s magazines. Pretty much all of them are represented here, and as usual our editors have done a swell job of reproducing the art – with, as I’ve said before, a lot more care and love than the original men’s mag editors ever displayed for their product. 

For me the biggest effect of Barbarians On Bikes is that it’s made me decide to read more of the old biker pulp paperbacks I bought years ago and never got around to reading. And also it’s made me decide to do another “men’s mag roundup” of reviews, this time focusing on some of the “hippie killer cult” stories that the latter-day men’s mags specialized in – and there was certainly a carryover between bikers and cults, at least in the world of the men’s mags. 

I highly recommend you pick up a copy of Barbarians On Bikes. Looking through it takes you to a long-gone world of virile men, easy women, and leering biker brutes…oh, and I’ve failed to mention the terrific afterword Paul Bishop provides for the book; an exceptional read in which he talks about the time in the late ‘70s when, as a rookie LAPD officer, he pulled over a Hell’s Angel. 

Here are some random pages from the book! 

Contact Info Update

First of all, apologies for not getting a post up this week. But this is a good opportunity to do something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time – let you all know that my email address changed! 

Long story short, but quite a while ago I lost all access to the email address I’ve used for over 20 years, perfectpawn@hotmail.com. This means that all the emails I got from Len Levinson, Stephen Mertz, and so many others are forever lost – unless I can somehow regain access to the account. (Outlook by the way does not offer any help in regaining access…you have to answer a bunch of challenge questions – questions which I must’ve set up back in 2004, and can no longer remember – and there’s no option for a live agent to help you. Their solution for what to do if you can’t regain access? Start a new account!! Thanks a lot, assholes!) 

Anyway, if you click on my “About Me” profile pic you will see my new contact info, if in the case that you might want to write to me. But I just wanted to note here that, if you have written me in the past year or so and did not hear back from me, it’s not because I’m ignoring you – it’s because I never got your email, thanks to being locked out of my account!

Finally, I will have two posts up this coming week.

Neq The Sword (Battle Circle #3)

Neq The Sword, by Piers Anthony

No month stated, 1975  Corgi Books

This final volume of the Battle Circle trilogy by Piers Anthony was only published in the UK, until it came out in the United States in 1978 as part of the collected Battle Circle paperback. It’s curious that it did not receive prior publication in the US, but having read the book I would wager a guess that it was because Neq The Sword is a bit of a mess. 

Sadly, the first quarter of the novel is great, and had me ready to declare this final volume the best entry in the trilogy. But then the book took a dark turn, after which it took a goofy turn, before coming to a close in a very muddled fashion. Given that “narcotic flowers” play a big part in the second half of the novel, my guess is that Piers Anthony was ingesting some sweet leaf of his own, and this translated into the book itself. But then I always prefer to imagine that my pulp authors are messed up on some drug or other – even cheap booze would suffice – because the only alternative is that he just turned in a bad book. 

As with Var The Stick, Neq The Sword can be read separate from first volume Sos The Rope…to a point. As with the previous book, while this one starts off for the most part self-contained, eventually we get a lot of “so this is how such and such a thing happened, and why it happened” sort of stuff, as titular Neq gradually ponders and ultimately deduces everything that happened in the previous two books, at much expense to the narrative. Oh and speaking of which – this one is the longest book in the trilogy, and a lot of it could have been cut. 

As mentioned, the first quarter of Neq The Sword is really good. Neq when we meet him has just turned 14, now a man in this post-Blast world, and he’s chosen the sword as his weapon for the battle circle. After some misadventures he ends up in the empire of Sol, from the first book. Anthony skips through the ensuing years, already documented from the perspectives of other characters in the previous books: Sol’s empire grows, and Neq becomes one of the top “sworders” in the empire, even running his own army. 

But a decade passes and everything falls apart – the empire disintigrates, thanks to the disappearance of both Sol and “The Weaponless,” aka Sos, and Neq ventures off across the blasted United States to start a new life as a nomadic warrior. He meets up with the same “crazy” who briefly assisted Sos, back in the first book, and ultimately goes off on a road trip with the crazy’s twenty-something secretary, a hotstuff blonde who made eyes at Sos back in that first book; we learn here that she was formerly “wild” herself, having grown up in the wilderness and rescued by the crazies at a young age. 

Her name is Ms. Smith, but within a few chapters she will be Neqa, as she takes on Neq’s arm bracelet – a recurring gimmick here, that the bracelet indicates that a woman belongs to a particular man, even if just for one night. But here’s the thing: Neq is a virgin, having been too anxious to take a woman (as was his right, per the battle circle rules) for all these years. And here’s the other thing: Ms. Smith, aka Neqa, is also a virgin, and we have this sort of post-Blast setup straight out of a 1940s screwball comedy where two virgins must travel together via truck across America. 

There are also elements of The Road Warrior here, what with Neq insisting he’s the only chance the crazies have of surviving outside of their high-tech world; long story short, the crazy empire has also been destroyed, which happened off-page in the previous book, and Neq has realized that the setup needs to be reinstated, otherwise the world will plunge into anarchy. So he insists on acting as security for Neqa as she drives a truck to get supplies from Helicon mountain, ie the mountain where Sos went to become a metahuman in the first book. 

This part is all pretty great, with Anthony doing a swell job of building up the rapport and eventual love between the two characters, with frequent action scenes as Neq makes short work of attacking brigands (the novel, however, is pretty anemic on the violence factor). But it ultimately becomes goofy, because despite growing close and spending nights together, these two still can’t get over their hangups and just do it already. 

It is almost laughable to read as they hold each other, and tell each other they want to, but then one of them will chicken out, or there will be a sudden brigand attack to distract them, or whatever. I mean, I can understand the skittishness on Neqa’s part, but come on – Neq is like in his mid twenties, at this point, and still a virgin…how much incentive would this guy really need? Indeed one starts to wonder if Neq just has a whole ‘nother type of hangup entirely, and just doesn’t realize it. 

For that matter, Neqa is even older than Neq, and there follows a humorous bit where Neq can’t get over how “old” she is, what with her being in her mid twenties. (To make it even better, Neq keeps referring to Neqa’s breasts in this part, saying how they look like a younger woman’s.) But at least here Anthony makes clear what was only understood in previous books: the non-crazy world is a world of youth, where boys become “men” at 14 and fathers soon after, and where a 35 year-old woman thinks of herself as a grandmother. 

That said, the prepubescent factor that sullied Var The Stick is not evident in Neq The Sword, but Anthony quite makes up for it by taking the novel in an unexpected and dark direction. In fact it gets so dark that I laughed; but long story short – Neqa does end up losing her virginity, but not to Neq. Instead, it’s to like the 50-some men in a tribe who take their turns with her as a bound Neq watches on helplessly. 

After this insane bit of nihilism, there follows an equally-good part where Neq goes out for revenge. Only problem: the brigands cut off both his hands. Problem solved: Neq finds a crazy doctor who gives Neq a sword for a hand, and also gives him pincers for his other hand. How Neq feeds himself or cleans himself is unstated, but it’s all good – he soon goes out to kill the members of the tribe, one by one, chopping them down with his sword hand. Patrick Woodroffe well illustrates this on the cover; as Neq enjoys cutting off the heads of his victims and staking them as warning to the others that their time will soon follow; note that Woodroffe also gives us the sword for a hand in his artwork. 

The only problem is, Piers Anthony has decided he wants to lecture us on how revenge never solves anything. Fine, but save the messaging for a novel that doesn’t feature a dude with a sword for a hand, okay? So we get all this crap where Neq, at much expense, realizes that nothing can bring back Neqa and etc, and etc. Oh and meanwhile the dude is still a virgin. Well anyway, in another (possibly cannabis-inspired) change of plot, Neq next decides that his reason for being will be to restore order to the post-Blast world by rebuilding Helicon, ie the high-tech underworld that was destroyed in Var The Stick. 

Oh and speaking of Var – SPOILER ALERT – Neq kills him, folks! Seriously. There’s another change of plot as Neq is tasked by the crazies with finding all these people and bringing them to the crazies to help rebuild Helicon, for reasons never adequately explained. So he has to get Tyl the stick fighter, and also Sos, and Sol, and Sola, and Sosa, and even Var – but the thing is, everyone is still under the impression that Var killed the little girl who was sent to fight him…but as readers of the previous book know, she instead ran off with Var, grew up into a teenaged beauty, then married Var and became Vara. 

Well, so much for Var, and now we have another change of pace as Neq is disgusted with himself and wants Vara to kill him – and Vara is quite ready to, given that she’s lost Var due to Neq’s “kill first, regret later” policy. But here comes Tyl, a minor character from the previous books now thrust for some reason into the limelight, who gives a lecture on how revenge doesn’t solve anything…and it goes on and on, with the three venturing across the badlands while Tyl argues with them over whether Vara has a right to kill Neq, and etc. 

Then we get to these hallucinogenic flowers that cause nightmares to be real, and it just goes on and on and on, and it gets even more laughable because soon a flower-maddened Vara is trying to screw Neq, but even here Neq pushes her away (as Arsenio would say, “Hmmm…”), and then finally they do it, and Piers Anthony leaves it off page entirely. I mean Neq loses his virginity in his late 20s and you’d think we’d at least get more than a sentence about it, but we do not. 

But folks, things get even more befuddling, as the crew makes it back to Helicon, and there’s a debate over whether Neq should lead them…oh, and have I mentioned yet that at this point it’s Neq The Glockenspiel? Folks I kid you not. As a way to show how he has sworn never to kill again, Neq has a glockenspiel molded to his sword-hand, and thus goes around singing to people as he taps out a melody on his glockenspiel hand. Like seriously, they had some good drugs back in the ‘70s, didn’t they? I almost wonder if Piers Anthony didn’t make a drunken bet with someone: “Dude, I’m gonna write a book where a guy has a glockenspiel for a hand! Hey, is that Sabbath? Turn it up, man!” 

Then it’s old home week as various characters return to Helicon, some of them characters not seen since the first book, but again it lacks any resonance because Anthony must deliver a lot of exposition to explain where they’ve been for all these years. Oh and SPOILER ALERT, but neither Sos nor Sol return, indicating that they did truly have a heroic sacrifice in the previous book. 

Neq does pretty damn well for himself; by novel’s end he knocks up both Vara and her mother, Sosa, the sultry and built lady from the first book who is now “old” in her mid-30s…folks there’s even a bit where Neq argues with Sosa that lots of men will want her despite her age, because in Helicon women are shared by the men due to the scarcity of women. Neq and Vara even break up, in the most off-handed matter, because Vara too will be expected to, uh, screw every other guy in the place, and Neq doesn’t want to interfere with tradition. 

It’s only just occurred to me that Neq The Sword is a commentary on the turned-on ‘60s generation: the drugs, the rampant arguments against violence, the shared communal women, and of course the narcotic flowers. And let’s not forget the glockenspiel, shall we? I guess looked at from that perspective, Neq The Sword is a triumph. I can’t say I enjoyed reading it, though; the first part was good, yes, but once Neq has achieved his vengeance it’s as if Anthony finished his tale sooner than expected, and so he got some chemical inspiration on what to fill up the rest of the book with. 

All told, Battle Circle really does not work as a trilogy. There is too little connecting the three books, and too much repetition in the parts that do connect with each other. Piers Anthony would have done just as well to leave it at Sos The Rope; as it is, the following two books only served to dilute the mythic impact of that first book. 

Here’s the cover of the Battle Circle book I read, which contains all three volumes; it was published in 1978 by Avon Books. I picked this up around 8 years ago and completely forgot about it until I came across it in my garage, of all places! The cover for this one is also by Patrick Woodroffe, and is taken from the original UK paperback edition of Sos The Rope:

Doomsday Warrior #19: America’s Final Defense

Doomsday Warrior #19: America’s Final Defense, by Ryder Stacy

July, 1991  Zebra Books

Well friends, this is a bittersweet moment – it’s the final volume of Doomsday Warrior! I can’t believe it’s finally come to the end; this series has been part of my life for 14 years, now, and it’s hard to believe I’ve finally read the entire thing. 

Of course, it only took Ryder Syvertsen seven years to write the series, which is half the time it took me to read it, but honesty – as I’ve documented here again and again in the reviews – Syvertsen lost interest in Doomsday Warrior long before it ended. I’m happy to say that he drummed up his enthusiasm for America’s Final Defense; none of the “I’m sick of this” vibe is evident in this last book, and for once Syvertsen doesn’t rip off most recent volumes…instead, he gives a sort of microcosm of the series entire, serving up all the staples of previous installments in this final volume. 

Before writing this review, I went back and read my pedantic, overly-comprehensive reviews of the previous books in the series. And abruptly I remembered why I’d made them so comprehensive in the first place: because I knew the day would come when I got to this last volume of Doomsday Warrior, and I’d no doubt want to refresh my memory on the series before I wrote my review. The prophecy has been fulfilled! 

Seriously though, Ryder Syvertsen clearly intended this to be the finale, as he was gearing up for it in the final pages of the previous volume. Syvertsen has always played fast and loose with the chronology of the series; I see in my reviews that “2089 AD” was frequently mentioned as the date in the earliest books, and then later we were told that “2096 AD” was the date. We’re told in this final volume that the year is now “2099 AD,” and Ted “Doomsday Warrior” Rockson and his comrades often reflect on things that happened “ten years ago.” 

What’s curious is that Syvertsen frequently refers to those earliest books, but jettisons most all references to recent things – for example, in the previous volume we were told that Detroit Green was the official representative to the USSR, and Schertantsky had returned to live in the USSR. Also, Archer had retired to live in the countryside. All of that stuff is never mentioned once in America’s Final Defense; the “series reset” that ran through the series is here, too; when the novel starts, the entire Rock team is operating out of Century City, same as they were way back in the the first volume. No mention is made of Detroit having been a rep, or Archer having been retired. In other words, nothing has changed – even though everything changed in the most recent volumes. 

Well, one thing has stayed the same – Syvertsen, around the ninth volume, decided he was sick of the “USSR invading the USA” storyline of the earliest books and decided to focus on other things. Reading my reviews of the earliest volumes, I was surprised to see how many subplots were dropped as the series progressed, like for example the political stuff between Zhabnov, the depraved ruler of the conquered US, and Killov, the KGB personification of evil. All that stuff was brushed aside, as were the frequent cutovers to Russia where we could read about supreme ruler Vassily and his Ethiopian manservant/best friend. 

Another thing, which I copiously noted in my reviews, was the removal of all the goofy, purple-prosed (but exceedingly explicit) sexual material. The earliest Doomsday Warrior novels were ultra-detailed on both the sex and the violence fronts, but gradually both of these factors withered away…for reasons I’d love to know. I wonder if Syvertsen realized that kids were reading his series and purposely decided to make the books less explicit; or maybe he himself had a kid and didn’t want junior to start reading them and think his dad was a psychotic pervert. Or maybe the sex and violence had been forced on Syvertsen by the publisher and later on they had an editorial change…who knows. 

Whatever the reason, the removal of the dirty stuff is one of the things that remains consistent with this final volume; in other words, Syvertsen did not pay true hommage to his own series in that regard, as he did with practically every other aspect – seriously, America’s Final Defense is essentially every volume of Doomsday Warrior rolled into one, save for the lack of XXX sex, gory violence, and appearances by any Russian villains other than Killov. 

It also features a big return of the psychedelic aspect of the series; indeed, this is the most psychedelic volume since #3: The Last American, which I believe was my favorite volume of the series. As with that early volume, there are parts of America’s Final Defense that are like a blacklight poster in literary form – one can only imagine the incredible illustrations gifted modern-day artist Alexis Ziritt could do with this material. 

Another thing I noticed in my pendantic reviews is my frequent declaration that Doomsday Warrior was essentially an R-rated Saturday morning cartoon. Again, this is entirely true for America’s Final Defense, which brushes reality to the side with the same eagerness that previous volumes did. I mean folks in this one Rockson and team go up to space, again, and end up fighting ancient alien gods that have lurched out of Erich von Daniken, during the course of which Ted Rockson is imbued with ancient wisdom that makes him “a million times smarter than before.” 

As mentioned, Syvertsen only picks up a few things from the finale of the previous book – despite which we learn, fairly late in the game, that all this is occurring one year after the events of American Dream Machine. Otherwise the series reset is in full force, and after an incongruous prologue, in which the setting for the series is established for us – as if we haven’t been reading the previous 18 damn books – we have an action opening in which Rockson and his forces try to finally take out Killov in a running battle.  Another interesting thing is that Syvertsen describes all of the main characters, for the first time in who knows how long; topical details on what Rockson looks like, and etc.  Again, quite strange, given that this is the 19th volume! 

A lot of important series stuff is mentioned in passing – like how America has worked out an agreement with Vassilly in the USSR which sees both countries destroying all of their nuclear warhead stashes(!). In other words, the entire impetus of the series is over and done with, and Syvertsen didn’t even cover any of it in the narrative, which indicates how little invested he was in Doomsday Warrior at this point. Indeed, one gets the impression that he was more into his concurrent series Mystic Rebel (which I collected years ago but held off on reading until I finished this series), what with the focus on New Agey concepts. Oh and speaking of which, there are all these random asides in America’s Last Defense, like how shunning fat in your diet could have health implications, and also a big part of the finale involves Rockson’s understanding that both science and mysticism should be embraced – very, very New Age stuff, and I’m assuming the Mystic Rebel series is rife with that sort of thing. 

Rockson is nearly killed in this opening, and Killov wasn’t there anyway (it was an imposter!), and Rockson is flown back to Century City’s hospital…where Syvertsen introduces an entirely new character to the series, for some reason: Charity Birdell, a “buxom beautiful nurse” in Century City who hero-worships Rockson and sees this as her opportunity to screw him. We get a refreshing return of that ‘60s vibe, gone for so many volumes, when Charity has Rockson smoke a “chi-stick” as part of his healing process. Indeed, Rockson is instructed to take “two tokes twice a day!” 

But brace yourself: the Charity-Rockson conjugation happens off-page, despite Syvertsen dropping kinky details before it occurs, like for example “[Charity] nearly came in her panties” when Rockson smiles at her, and whatnot. (Also we get the goofy tidbit that Charity has tattoos of “all forty-six presidents” on her body, with one of them hidden, and of course Rockson finds it…!) Actually, Syvertsen was doing this in the most recent volumes, too, so it appears that he was fine with writing ribald dialog and such, but when it came to the actual tomfoolery he decided to cut to black…a decided change from the early books, which left nothing unexplored. 

This is especially strange as, again just like in the most recent books, Rockson gets laid a lot in America’s Final Defense. Shortly after being with Charity, Rockson hooks up with his “girlfriend” Rona, the statuesque mutant redhead babe who was the main female character in this series once upon a time, before being shunted off into the narrative woodwork. I think the last volume she actually featured in was #6: American Rebellion, where she was worshiped as a post-nuke Eva Braun, a sequence that is actually mentioned here in America’s Final Defense; again, Syvertsen (and his characters) frequently reminisce about previous volumes, all the sign you could need that the author intended this to be the final story of the saga. 

But ever since then, Rona has been shunted aside, only given a line or two of dialog and having off-page sex with Rockson…and the same is true, here. Rona has more off-page lovin’ with Rockson, then the two are dancing to Judas Priest in her room (we’re told a Judas Priest CD was “recently unearthed” and is now all the rage in Century City), but Dr. Schecter comes along to take Rockson away, and that’s all we see of Rona. 

As for Rockson’s other “girlfriend,” Kim, she doesn’t appear at all in America’s Final Defense. This is especially galling, as my fellow sleazebags will recall the awesome premise upon which previous volume American Dream Machine ended: Kim and Rona had agreed to “settle their petty jealous differences” and, just as the novel friggin’ ended, they went together to Rockson’s room to double-team him(!). Well, fellow sleazebags, this little incident is not mentioned at all in America’s Final Defense, and we are told that Kim is off in some other city, handling business for her father, the newly-elected president of the (Re)United States (and he doesn’t appear in this volume, either). 

I’ve long suspected that Syvertsen had no interest in Kim – perhaps she was a creation of Jan Stacy, Syvertsen’s writing partner on the first four volumes – and her lack of appearance in this book would indicate that. Looking back on my reviews, I see that, even in Kim’s infrequent appearances, she’s barely had any dialog and has not contributed much to the overall storyline. But at least she’s mentioned this time around. 

That’s it for Rockson’s love life – at least in Century City. As America’s Final Defense continues, he has sex with many other women, from an Amazonian queen (a recurring series staple character) to a French space-babe. This is all standard for the series; I only mention it so as to confirm that there is no resolution whatsoever to the Rockson-Rona-Kim love triangle, which was so important to the storyline many volumes ago. Again, Syvertsen has moved on and lost interest, so reading this 19-volume series in one go would no doubt make for a bumpy ride. 

Not to mention a repetitive one; it’s been clear for a long time that Syvertsen is totally aware that his books all follow a template, and by god he’s sticking to that template, and he does so here again in this final volume. So we have the inciting incident: Schecter informs Rockson that a massive asteroid was just discovered, and it’s headed right for Earth and will destroy Earth in three weeks…headed right into Earth’s orbit due to Earth’s orbit being affected by the nuke blasts a century before. 

There follows that annoying mainstay of Doomsday Warrior: the interminable “democracy in action” bit as the Century City council argues for and against Rockson and team going out to save the day. It’s all just so time-wasting, but Syvertsen goes on and on with it regardless, leading to the inevitable conclusion in which the vote is “No” (due to political infighting reasons), but Rockson goes off anyway. From there to the other staple: surviving the mutated flaura and fauna of this post-nuke world. 

It’s just as juvenile as previous volumes: there’s an unused spaceship not too far from Century City, so Rockson and his usual team plus a few redshirts are to go there, fly it into space, and then blast the asteroid so that its path is changed. So like I’ve said in every previous review, total cartoon type of stuff. And meanwhile Killov, in the Inca ruins where he’s worshipped as a god, comes across ancient documentation of this very asteroid, which once upon a time visited earth and imparted some of its alien knowledge here – there was a high-tech city on the asteroid – and he plans to go into space himself and get this ancient alien technology. All so he can kill Rockson, of course. 

The only loose ends Syvertsen is bothered with tying up concern the Glowers, those superbeings who have infrequently appeared in the series, most notably in the third volume. Rockson eventually learns that the “main” Glower, Turquoise Spectrum, has died, and after a very psychedelic “astral commune” bit, Rockson teams up with a new Glower pal, not to mention an “interdimensional being” named Pruzac Ephedrine, a “full-figured” and beautiful half human/half Glower hybrid. She features in a lot of very out-there, psychedelic stuff in the novel, particularly the finale. 

Rockson and team suffer one setback after another, with Syvertsen clearly just winging it as he goes along – I mean, the old NASA spaceship is surrounded by Amazons, who insist on the Rock team banging five women each in one night, but Rockson himself is chosen by the beautiful, green-haired Queen – cue more off-page sex. (“The green-head was hellfire in bed,” and etc.) But the spaceship is in poor state and can’t fly; no problem, because the Glowers whip up a new spaceship for Rockson, and with it they head into space! 

Syvertsen here really ties back to #14: American Death Orbit, with Rockson again hooking up with the “space Frenchies” he met in that earlier volume. And once again we get a lot of mention of those “space Nazis,” without actually seeing any of them. Rockson here gets laid again, courtesy a French space girl “barely out of her teens;” this is Rockson’s last conjugation in the entire series, and again Syvertsen leaves the sleaze vague: “[they] made passionate, gravity-free love” being the extent of it. 

The asteroid is called Karrak by Schecter, and Rockson lands on it in the finale, propelled by visions he’s been given by Turqoise Spectrum, who appears Obi-Wan Kenobi-style to Rockson when Rockson needs him. But Killov is here, too, leading to a bizarre bit where both Rockson and Killov deal with ancient alien technology, one of them to save Earth, the other to destroy it. In the process Killov transforms himself into a nine foot tall, three-eyed ancient alien warrior called Mu-Temm, and he also has an ancient alien device that allows him to “think away” any weapons that are used against him. 

There follows an endless battle between Rockson and “Mu-Temm” that just goes on and on, like the Rockson-Chrome battle back in volume #9. But Rockson gets the shit beaten out of him by this transformed Killov, to the point that Rockson actually weeps in frustration. It’s all very much in a Biblical motif, with Rockson the slingshot-baring David getting the better of Killov’s Goliath.  But it is clear again that Ryder Syvertsen was a fan of Total Recall; previous volumes indicated that he was inspired by the Schwarzenegger film, but this one really brings it home.  From visions involving a pyramid on an alien planet to even the image of Killov’s eyes bulging from their sockets due to the pressure of space, it is clear that Syvertsen was influenced by that movie. 

Then we get the most psychedelic sequence yet in the series, with Rockson going into an ancient pyramid, again following Glower visions, and being imparted with all that knowledge – his memory now even “going back billions of years.” When he comes out of it, he starts talking in mystical phrases that are so profound that Chen insists on recording them. It’s all kind of cool but just totally unlike what one might have expected this series to conclude on. SPOILER ALERT, but the finale of Doomsday Warrior sees Rockson, recovering from his sudden knowledge and intelligence increase, telling the others to leave the dead Killov on the asteroid (Rockson having strangled Killov to death)…and that’s it. We are not told of the voyage home; the story – and series – ends right there, with Rockson declaring that the asteroid is a dead place for dead things. 

Actually, it sort of ends there. We are treated to an epilogue in which Syvertsen strives for a sort of quasi-metaphysical vibe, but it instead comes off as vacuous. It’s a thousand years in the future and a nameless woman attempts to become one with an apple tree, then there’s some gibberish about “the man from the sea,” and the gist seems to be that the two characters are reborn, immortal enemies. It has nothing to do with anything that came in the series before, but then it’s possible I just missed the profundities Syvertsen was trying to bestow. 

And that, folks, is that – the 19-volume saga of Doomsday Warrior comes to a close. What a weird trip it was, too. To be honest, I’d forgotten most of the earlier volumes, so I’m glad my reviews were so pedantic. I can’t say I’ll ever read these books again, but you never know. In the end, I will think of this series in a positive light; it’s just too goofy – and the earliest volumes so outrageously violent and explicit – that you can’t help but like it. Yet at the same time, Ryder Syvertsen’s disinterest in the series was very pronounced in the later books, and one gets the feeling he should’ve ended it many volumes ago.  But clearly he realized that more effort was needed for this final volume; I particularly appreciated how he gave each member of the Rock Team a moment to shine. 

Next I need to get back to the C.A.D.S. series, another post-nuke pulp Syvertsen was writing at the same time. And also I’ll now get to his Mystic Rebel books, which judging from these final volumes of Doomsday Warrior, with their focus on New Age concepts, was probably more the sort of thing Syvertsen wanted to be writing. So maybe he was a little more invested in that series than he was in Doomsday Warrior.

SOBs #8: Eye Of The Fire

SOBs #8: Eye Of The Fire, by Jack Hild

September, 1985  Gold Eagle Books

Not sure why I took so long to get back to SOBs. Eye Of The Fire is another strong entry that again proves that this series was the unsung jewel of the Gold Eagle line; as I’ve mentioned before, I got a copy of SOBs with every Gold Eagle shipment, and would place each volume side-by-side on my bookshelf, but I never read a single one of them. 

I think I tried to, though, and the cover of Eye Of The Fire (by Ron Lesser?) is so familiar that I’m certain I had it as a kid; I also seem to recall trying to read it and giving it up after a chapter or two. Likely at the time SOBs seemed too slow-going for me, and I probably just wanted the more action-focused stuff typical of the Gold Eagle imprint. Reading the books now, as an “adult,” I appreciate the series a lot more than I ever could have as a kid; the small group of writers who handled the series clearly were working together to retain a sense of continuity and vibe, and there’s a focus on characterization that isn’t as evident in the other Gold Eagle publications. 

This volume was handled by Robin Hardy, who I believe wrote the majority of the books in the series. Hardy also wrote the previous volume, but there’s not much pickup in this one; indeed, it mostly picks up from #6: Red Hammer Down, if only in how we finally get pickup on what’s going on with Billy Two. As we’ll recall, in that earlier volume the American Indian Sobs member was captured and mentally tortured and whatnot, and he’s been out of the series since then; now he’s back, and he’s in full-on “Billy from Predator” mode. 

It seems very suspicious how similar the two Billys are; one almost wonders if the movie character was inspired by Billy Two. Just as Billy became increasingly spaced-out and “Indian” as Predator progressed, up to putting on warpaint, so too is Billy in SOBs; he spends the majority of Eye Of The Fire in facepaint with feathers in his hair, and is prone to talking to visions or hallucinations. 

In short, Billy Two is by far the most interesting character in the series, and the most entertaining, to the extent that “series protagonist” Nile Barrabas is sort of lost in the shuffle. Occasionally Hardy will give us scenes from Barrabas’s perspective, and we learn he’s a no-nonsense, taciturn leader of men and whatnot…but he’s just not very memorable. Same goes for most of the other Sobs, but at least the series authors strive to make them somewhat identifiable: Nanos is the ladies man, Beck is the computer guy, and Claude is the, uh…well, he’s “the black one.” 

The back cover will tell you that the plot of Eye Of The Fire concerns the Sobs rescuing “Colonel D” from a Cuban prison, and while that’s sort of true, it takes a goodly portion of the narrative to get there. Rather, the main thrust of this 222 page installment is the Sobs trying to track down young Tony Lopez, 17 year-old brother of former Sob Hector Lopez, who was killed in action in #4: Show No Mercy. 

Tony takes up a goodly portion of the narrative; he’s run away from home now that he’s a “man,” determined to look up these bad-ass mercenaries his big brother hung out with. Instead Tony nearly gets blown away by Nanos and the others when he sneaks into the temporary Sobs headquarters in Tampa, then later he’s kidnapped by this right-wing group calling itself X Command, which reports to the senator who has been a recurring character in the series – a never-named senator who has a grudge with the Sobs and is constantly plotting to get them killed on a mission. We are reminded how this guy was crippled in the fourth volume (another Hardy installment), but we still don’t know why he hates the Sobs so much…or maybe we were told but I forgot. 

The Colonel D stuff only comes and goes sporadically, but basically he’s a sadist known for training death squads in Latin America. Now the Cubans have him and are interrogating him, and Walker Jessup – the fixer for the Sobs – wants Barrabas and team to slip into Cuba and exterminate Colonel D, to keep his mouth shut. “I’m not an executioner,” Barrabas angrily states, making one wonder if Robin Green were slyly taking a dig at Gold Eagle’s most popular series. 

It seems that the schtick with SOBs is that each volume goes for the slow build; Barrabas and team in their normal life as they prepare for the mission, with the mission itself taking up the final quarter. That is certainly true here, with action sporadic in the first three-thirds of the book; perhaps a reason why I was never able to get into the series as an action junkie kid in the ‘80s. 

But when Billy Two enters the narrative, the game changes big time. First we have a great psychedelic bit where he’s meditating nude in the desert, and approached by the ghost of Hector Lopez, who tells Billy that the team needs him. So Billy, still naked, walks off. When he shows up later he’s in full-on “mystical Indian badass” mode, making profound, spaced-out statements before killing guys with his bare hands. There’s a great part where he dives into the ocean and takes on a pair of frogmen. 

The cover art is not a lie, as this is very much a scuba-based mission for the Sobs. Colonel D is in an old fortress, and the only way the team can get in is by swimming underwater for a mile and then infiltrating from the ground up. This is a tensely done sequence that reminded me of a similar sequence in the never-published The Baroness #10. Robin Hardy ups the ante with not only the Cubans after the Sobs, but X Command as well; the busy plotting has these right-wingers using Barrabas to do the heavy lifting of freeing Colonel D, so that they can take Colonel D from Barrabas. 

When the action does go down, it is competently handled if not super gory. Also, there’s hardly any of the excessive gun-detailing Gold Eagle books could get mired in. That said, Robin Hardy has an annoying tendency to deliver clunky writing in the action scenes, often resorting to stuff like “Ka-blamm!” and also relying hugely on single-line paragraphs. I know this is to make things seem punchy and tense, but when you have several single-line paragraphs per page, the effect is a little squandered. 

Overall, though, Eye Of The Fire keeps moving for the majority of its 222 pages, though the stuff with teen psycho “The Kid” is a bit much. Hardy uses this in the finale as the opportunity for Barrabas to exposit on how he’s no hero, but he’s no killer, but all of this seems a bit too “deep” for a men’s adventure series. But then, stuff like this is what separates SOBs from the Gold Eagle line; as stated, there is more care to the characterization and the narrative structure. The highlight is Billy Two – if the series had been published in the ‘70s, he would have been the main (and perhaps only) protagonist – and if anything I look forward to seeing how the other SOBs writers handle him. 

I’ll let you all know if I win that 1986 Jeep they’re running the sweepstakes for on the cover. I just mailed in my entry!

Var The Stick (Battle Circle #2)

Var The Stick, by Piers Anthony

December, 1973  Bantam Books

I didn’t mean to read this second installment of the Battle Circle trilogy so soon; in fact I meant to post a review of a Sobs novel this week. But I started reading Var The Stick and ended up finishing it first. Piers Anthony continues on with his post-Blast storyline, world-building but at the same time moving away from the post-nuke Iliad vibe of the previous volume. 

It’s curious that the Battle Circle trilogy seemed to resonate more in the UK than here in the US; Var The Stick was first published there in hardcover in 1972, a year before this Bantam paberback original was published in the US. And final installment Neq The Sword (1975) was only published in the UK, not coming out in the US until it’s inclusion in the 1979 collection Battle Circle. 

It’s a year or so after the events of Sos The Rope and everything is essentially status quo; Sos, now known either as “The Master” or “The Weaponless” (and never referred to as “Sos” in the narrative) rules the empire he was supposed to dismantle in the previous book – the empire that was ruled by Sol, who went to suicide mountain with his daughter Soli at the climax of the previous book. Now Sos has everything he ever wanted, in particular Sola, the busty babe who married Sol in the previous book but really loved Sos (and also, uh, had a child with him), but a Piers Anthony protagonist can never be happy, and thus Sos finds his crown heavy. 

Piers Anthony has written Var The Stick so that it could be read as a standalone; reading it in the collection Battle Circle, immediately after Sos The Rope, one encounters a lot of repetition. This is because titular Var the Stick spends a lot of the narrative wondering over – and gradually learning – things we readers already learned in Sos The Rope. It does not add to the mythos nor inject any drama into the proceedings, and instead just comes off like a bunch of repetition of material that was handled better in the previous book. 

The shame of it is, Var The Stick has a wonderful opening. One of the tribes in Sos’s empire is under attack by a beast in the cornfields; The Master himself is called in to look into it. The cyborg master of karate soon deduces that the beast is really a mutant boy. There follows an unexpectedly touching (but in a masculine way, of course) scene in which man and mutant boy start off as hunter and prey before turning to each other for survival in the radioactive badlands. 

The effective opening only continues as we pick up four years later and the mutant boy – Var – heads back into that same tribe to test himself in the battle circle and thereby earn a name for himself. Despite winning, Var finds no willing women to take him, due to his mutant looks…until none other than Sola, “middle-aged” and “old” at 25, gives herself to Var that night in the tent they share; Sola, married to Sos but in love with his previous, pre-cyborg version and not the current model, reveals that the Master cannot have children, so once again the poor girl hasn’t gotten any in a while (a recurring theme for poor Sola, whose first husband, Sol, didn’t even have a dick). 

Anthony handles this sequence with more of a touching tone than a sleazy one, but we are told without getting too explicit of Sola’s ripe curves and whatnot; again we are firmly reminded that Sola has a kick-ass bod, but unfortunately she is barely in this novel. Same goes for Sos, and same goes even more so for Sol, who only shows up in passing. Even small-natured karate gal Sosa, whom Sos really loves, only appears in passing. As mentioned, Var The Stick is essentially a standalone tale. 

Instead of building on the storyline in the previous book, Anthony this time delivers a long chase sequence that encompasses the majority of the narrative. But still, it starts off seeming to pick up from the previous story; Sos, it develops, is planning to wage war on Helicon Mountain, aka the mountain he climbed to commit suicide but in reality is staffed with tech-loving “crazies” who live underground and who gave Sos his cyborg augmentations. Sos wants to wage war on them, certain that Sol and little Soli (who is actually Sos’s daughter, given Sol’s aforementioned lack of a dick) are being held captive there. He also wants to hook up with the little karate woman, Sosa. 

The only issue is, all this is relayed through the perspective of Var, a mutant kid of 15 or so who has no idea who any of these people are – and, what’s more, is so new to society that he has a hard time relating to anyone at all. This means there is a lot of obsfucation and vaguery, with Var only belatedly figuring out what is going on – figuring out stuff that would be dealt with posthaste if the tale had been told from Sos’s perspective, as the earlier book was. 

But Sos has become a remote figure now, and rarely do we enter his thoughts. It’s like the star of the trilogy has been reduced to a supporting character, and I can’t say we got a better character with Var. If I was prone to lame puns, I’d say we were given the short end of the stick. Well anyway, Var fights with sticks, and after a belabored battle sequence where Sos’s army attacks the mountain – a scene which is mostly told in summary, robbing it of any drama – it’s determined that Var will represent the empire and Hellicon will choose another hero to battle him, a hero-vs-hero match for control of the mountain. 

I’d write “spoiler alert,” but we’re still fairly early in the book; the champion turns out to be eight year-old Soli, aka the daughter of Sol (but really the daughter of Sos)…who, per tradition, fights in the nude. Not to sound like one of those perennially-aggrieved Goodreads reviewers, but this set off my “ick!” radar…only compounded by the fact that little Soli, who again is only eight years old, talks and acts like a regular adult. 

My son happens to be eight years old, and granted he’s a boy and also he wasn’t born after the nuclear Blast, and also he’s not a karate master, but still…I think from him I have a fairly good understanding of how well an eight year-old can communicate. Soli sounds nothing like this; she evidences logic and understanding well beyond her years, hell even at some points she’s beyond an adult of our own era (which, granted, isn’t really saying very much), to the point that it really drew me out of the book. I mean, I’m good with post-nuke pulp, and societies built around formalized battle in a circle, and even mutants…but too-intelligent and too-communicative eight year-olds is where I can no longer suspend my disbelief. 

It gets even harder to believe, as Soli is such a great fighter that her battle with Var, waged atop a cliff where hardly anyone can see them, goes on for hours, to the point that they call a temporary truce so they can each take a piss off the cliff! Then Soli – who, again, acts like the adult throughout – realizes that due to the fog no one can see them anyway, so they decide to sneak down the cliff and get some food. 

Anyway, let’s just cut to the chase…for “chase” is essentially all Var The Stick soon becomes. Piers Anthony jettisons the post-nuke love triangle meets Homer vibe of the previous book in favor of an endless sequence where Var and Soli head off together into post-blast America, with Sos chasing after them – and Sos is chasing them due to a harebrained subplot in which Var lies that he killed Soli on the clifftop, and thus has no idea why Sos would suddenly be so angry at him. Again, this novel is a very frustrating read for anyone who read the previous book, because the protagonist has no idea what happened in that previous book, while readers on the other hand do know, hence you spend the entire novel wishing Var the Stick had stayed in the cornfields and never gotten involved with the storyline in the first place. 

And this chase goes on for like a year or more, too! Things finally pick up when Var and Soli make it to the Pacific, where they run afoul of a Queen and her army of armored amazons, and here we have a strange bit where the mega-fat Queen wants to have sex with Var, given that all the men in her empire are eunnuchs. Fortunately, though, Anthony has refrained all this time from exploiting little Soli too much; my blog should be a testament to how much I love the lack of boundaries in ‘70s pulp fiction, but at the same time I believe that there are some boundaries that should not be crossed. 

Unfortunately, Anthony does cross those lines in the final quarter. Keeping up with the overall Greek myth vibe of the trilogy, Soli is at one point lashed up naked to a large rock by the ocean so as to be devoured by the god Minos. It’s all very Clash Of The Titans, and all this occurs on the island of New Crete after Var and Soli have been traveling together for some time; indeed, Soli is held captive in a temple for around two years while Var bides his time, working odd jobs and trying to figure out how to save her. 

There is, I’ve dicovered, always an oddball sort of vibe to a Piers Anthony novel, and such is certainly true in Var The Stick. I mean, it’s a post-apocalypse and the gal’s about to be sacrificed, but there’s literally a two-year interim where Var goes to work so as to make money for himself! Just not the sort of thing you’d expect to read in a post-nuke fantasy. Even odder, Minos is a bull-headed man who is capable of intelligent speech, as he’s been augmented by the crazies, same as Sos was, and he has a casual and friendly conversation with Var. 

Anyway, to keep Minos from ravishing Soli – we’re told the pseudo-god’s dick is so big it rips his victims apart – Var and Soli have sex on the rock, as Minos’s violent lust is only aroused by virgins. If my math is correct, Soli is only like twelve years old here. Anthony does not get explicit, leaving it as an “embrace” the two have, there on the rock, giving vent to their feelings for each other…but still. The “ick” factor returns in force when Minos comes back with a couple female corpses, girls “about the same age as Soli,” and it’s made clear that he’s raped them to death. 

And then we’re back to the oddball stuff; Var and Soli, pretending the moment on the rocks never happened, make it all the way to China, where Var suddenly decides Soli would be better off without him, and thus puts her in a “posh” school, paying her tuition by getting a job as a trash collector. I mean seriously, WTF? I’m not making any of this up. Two years pass, after which Soli is about to be given over to the emperor’s harem or somesuch, and Var has to act fast, as he’s finally realized he loves Soli…but how does she feel about him? 

At this point, the cool, “augmented warrior in a post-nuke wasteland” vibe of Sos The Rope is long, long gone. As even more of a slap to the face, we learn – in passing! – that Sos and Sol have been traveling together all these years, looking for Var and Soli. If you’re taking notes, this is the story we should’ve gotten in the sequel! But as mentioned, those two are supporting characters now – Sol, actually, is even less than that – and the reader can only wonder over the better novel this could have been. I mean we’re even told, again in passing, that Sol destroyed Helicon mountain in his wrath…like, couldn’t we have read about that instead of Var getting a job as a trash collector in China?? 

The finale sees Var and Soli (now named Vara, as she’s the wife of Var, even though she’s only like 14 or 15 now) heading back to America, to spread the word that “American society is the best.” Who would’ve expected a proto-MAGA sentiment at the end of a novel titled Var The Stick? 

I think this time I truly will take a bit of a break before finishing off the Battle Circle trilogy; next week I’ll have that Sobs review up. Actually one of these days I’d love to get back to a twice-weekly posting schedule…I’m working on it!

Sos The Rope (Battle Circle #1)

Sos The Rope, by Piers Anthony

October, 1968  Pyramid Books

Sos The Rope started life as a three-part serialized novel in The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction (July-September, 1968), before being published as this slim paperback. Then in 1978 it was collected with its sequels, Var The Stick (1972) and Neq The Sword (1975), as a fat mass market paperback titled Battle Circle. It was the collected edition that I read, but I’ll review the titles separately because I’m just that kind of guy. 

I recall picking up Battle Circle sometime in 2017, and recently discovered it in a box in my garage, of all places. Indeed, I discovered it on the very same day I (re)discovered my copies of The Virtue Of Vera Valiant (those were in a different box in a different room, though; I guess I’m just a hoarder at heart). 

While he is incredibly prolific, the only Piers Anthony novels I have read are the Jason Striker series and the Total Recall novelization. Thus I cannot say I am an expert in the style of Piers Anthony, but Sos The Rope reads very much like those other books: a somewhat formal tone to the narrative, with a somewhat lurid feeling (this is a good thing, of course), but nothing too exploitative or explicit (this is a bad thing, of course). 

The biggest comparison to Jason Striker is the dumb-ass protagonist. As we’ll recall, Jason Striker was this tough judo master who happened to be a ‘Nam vet, but he blundered like a fool from one situation to the next. The same holds true of this novel’s protagonist, the titular Sos The Rope, who basically gets his ass handed to him again and again in the battle circles of this post-nuke America. And like Striker he makes one poor choice after another, usually a victim of his own nature. 

Anyway, we know from the outset that Sos The Rope is set in a post-nuke world; or, post “Blast,” as the characters refer to it. In the first pages we have references to plastic, a refrigerator, and even television, yet at the same time it is clear this is a primitive society, with men wandering around on foot and challenging one another in the formalized, ritualized practice of battle-circle dueling. 

It’s worth noting however that this is not a bloodthirsty post-nuke society by any means; the battle circle fights are rarely to the death and are more so ritualized ways of settling differences or matters of honor. Brawny men choose their names, specialize in one of the weapons allowed in the battle circle (swords, staffs, knives, etc), and roam the post-nuke country like nomads. What sets off the course of Sos The Rope, and the ensuing trilogy, is a meeting between two men who have the same name: Sol. 

I’ll admit, the first several pages were a bumpy read. There’s nothing like trying to make sense of a post-nuke pulp from decades ago in which two muscular men, both named Sol, challenge one another in a battle circle on the windswept plains while a nameless young woman (with a “voluptuous body”) watches on. I had a helluva time keeping track of which Sol was which, but basically one of them has long black hair and a beard, and the other one has long blonde hair and no beard. 

The bearded one is Sol The Sword, because that’s his weapon; the beardless one is Sol of All Weapons, and he carries around a wheelbarrow or something with all his fighting gear. The two men meet at a hostel – a place, we’re informed, that was set up by “the crazies” and is used as lodging for the nomadic warriors – and they have a friendly disagreement over who “owns” the name Sol. They decide to settle their differences in the battle circle by the hostel, all while some busty chick who works at the hostel watches on, ready to give herself to the winner. 

Anthony, given his martial arts background, is pretty good with hand-to-hand fight description, as proven with Jason Striker. But still, it’s hard to know which Sol is which, let alone which one to root for. Not that it matters, as neither is killed and indeed they become lifelong friends: but, for what it’s worth, “our” Sol, ie the supposed hero of this novel who will become “Sos,” gets his ass kicked and loses – which, of course, sets the tone for the rest of the book. 

The fight was for the name of Sol, and now that this Sol has lost, he needs a new name. Eventually he will become “Sos.” As for the busty girl, she gives herself to Sol, the winner, and so she becomes Sola – in other words, women don’t even have a name until a man has taken them, a sign of how male-dominated this post-Blast society is. If you listen closely, you can hear the piteous wailings of the ever-indignant wokesters over on Goodreads: “How dare Piers Anthony stoop to such misogyny! His female characters have no agency!” And etc. 

An interesting thing is that Anthony works his world-building into the narrative, never shoehorning us with info; eventually we learn that there is no rape in this post-Blast world, where the men actually respect the women. Indeed, there is a later part where Sos sleeps in a hostel that is occupied by a girl who has expressly come there to find a man, and since Sos is not interested in her (not suprising, given his overall lameness), she sleeps by him without concern of being raped. 

The nomadic warrirors wear metal bracelets, and the women they choose – whether for life or just for the night – wear the bracelet when chosen. Gradually I realized this was Anthony’s post-nuke spin on a wedding ring. But this is how Sola becomes Sola, wearing the bracelet of Sol – and she, Sol, and Sos will prove to be the three main characters of Sos The Rope. 

The trio venture into the Badlands, ie the still-radiated wastelands around the countryside, and encounter all kinds of brutal flora and fauna. The latter is evidenced by a rat swarm that might raise the hackles of more sensitive readers (as if sensitive readers would be reading a book titled Sos The Rope!). The bigger threat however is the love triangle that develops: Sola belongs to Sol, but Sos and Sola have a thing for each other. 

Sadly, it develops that Sol does not have a, uh, thing; left comatose from the bite of a mutant moth, Sol is dragged to safety from the rats and loses his clothes in the process, and Sos discovers that Sol is castrated; something Sola was already aware of. So basically she’s “married” to a guy who cannot give her the goods, yet still – for reasons of honor and such – Sos won’t give Sola what she clearly wants. 

I forgot to mention: Sos as a child was reared by “the crazies,” ie the tech-savvy overlords who run things behind the scenes. They are the ones who stock the high-tech hostels and whatnot, and have all the learnings of the pre-Blast world, and Sos has not only learned to read but knows a fair bit of history…though he is uncertain how true those ancient books really are. 

Piers Anthony does a good job of keeping the story moving while doling out small bits of background about the post-Blast world. Meanwhile the main narrative has Sos becoming Sol’s best buddy and sidekick; Sol dreams of starting an empire, but he knows he isn’t smart enough. Sos, meanwhile, is smart in all those ways, so Sos agrees to serve Sol for one year and help him gather men into an army. 

Meanwhile Sos and Sola become an item while Sol is off gathering men, but Anthony leaves it off-page. About the most us sleazehounds get are random mentions of Sola’s “voluptuous” build and pretty face…not much. But Sos manages to knock her up, though this tidbit is left off-page; curiously, Anthony leaves many important events off-page…most notably, a part where Sos challenges Sol in the battle circle for Sola and her newly-born daughter. 

Yes, Anthony cuts immediately to some time later, and we learn that Sos has once again had his ass handed to him. So much for the “rope” he’s learned to fight with; all this is after the empire has been started, and Sos has gone back to the crazies to learn what to fight with now that he’s lost the right to use a sword. A rope wouldn’t be my first choice, and anyway Sos still can’t beat Sol, so whatever. 

Here’s where Sos The Rope gets real interesting. It’s some time later and Sos has decided to end his life by climbing this big mountain that people go to when they’re ready to commit suicide. He climbs up and up, then “dies,” then wakes up in this high-tech “underworld” that is run by the crazies. He will eventually hook up with a lithe young (and small-statured) lady with major karate skills (again, the hanky-panky occurs off-page), but most importantly Sos here is augmented into a sort of cyborg warrior so as to be sent back out into the world to kill Sol and topple his empire. 

My assumption is Piers Anthony was influenced here by Achilles in Homer’s Iliad, and this sequence – where Sos dies and then goes to an underworld where he has plastic armor embedded beneath his skin, and his muscles augmented, and etc – reminded me very much of the Neoplatonist readings of The Iliad. 

Simply put, the Neoplatonic reading of the Iliad goes like this: when Achilles’ best friend/lover Patroclus is killed in battle by Hector while wearing the armor of Achilles, the idea is that Achilles himself has died. After Patroclus dies, Achilles stops eating the food of mortals and instead eats ambrosia, the food of the gods. He goes to his mother, who happens to be a minor-grade goddess, and she in turn goes to Hephastus, aka Vulcan, and asks this major god to forge divine armor for Achilles. Dressed in this divine armor, Achilles is unstoppable when he goes back to the war at Troy, eventually killing Hector. The Neoplatnic reading here is that Achilles the mortal has died, reborn in his divine armor – ie his divine soul. 

That’s all very basic, and I’m sure I missed quite a bit, but that’s the essential idea, and more importantly for the goal of this review – that is what Piers Anthony has happen to Sos the Rope. It was at this point, around a hundred pages in, with Sos transformed into a sort of walking tank, with armor plating beneath his skin, that I realized Sos The Rope was a post-nuke Iliad. 

At this point I was very much into the novel; it was just that sort of late ‘60s/early ‘70s sci-fi I love, with a metaphysical and slightly psychedelic edge, but again it was slightly undone by the blunderings of Sos – or, “The Nameless One” as he is now known, a giant who towers over the average men. Piers Anthony again gives us a doofus protagonist who can’t make up his own mind; Sos has carried a torch for Sola all this time, and indeed he decided to climb suicide mountain over his loss of her. But, despite only thinking of the little karate lady as a casual lay in the underworld, Sos realizes, after leaving her forever, that he was truly in love with her, not Sola! Actually, now that I think of it, Piers Anthony might understand male characters better than any other sci-fi writer. 

Seriously though, this kind of gets to be a little much, and takes away from Sos’s post-death meta-human makeover (we’re told his hair has even gone white, like he’s some sort of super-deformed anime hero). But even in his superhuman state Sos blunders, outing himself on his first night back in the real world and inadvertently letting one of Sol’s men know who he is – the idea is, see, that Sos takes the job from the crazies to kill Sol, but really he plans to sneak into the empire and tell Sol to end his empire, so that Sol doesn’t have to die. 

This entails a lot of fights with Sol’s underlings so Sos can prove himself – again, the fighting is for the most part bloodless (save for one fight where Sos accidentally kills someone), but it’s cool how Sos has essentially become the post-Blast Hulk. Even here Piers Anthony does a curious skipping of important parts and suddenly has Sol and Sos confronting each other, though Sol apparently doesn’t realize this huge cyborg creature is actually his old buddy, Sos (or maybe he does; Anthony leaves this vague). 

The finale of Sos The Rope is quite curious, with the two characters arguing with Sol’s chieftans over whether or not Sol’s empire should be disbanded. SPOILER ALERT: The finale is rather downbeat, with Sol himself deciding to head on up suicide mountiain, his little girl demanding to go along with him – and Sos sadly watches his old buddy stalk off, kicking himself that Sol will no doubt make it up the mountain alive and end up banging the cute little karate girl that Sos has only now realized he’s in love with. In other words: wash, rinse, repeat – Sos now has the woman he wanted, Sola, but again he is jealous of Sol, who will no doubt soon be giving the little karate girl some good lovin. 

Well, all this no doubt is covered in the next volume, Var The Stick, which I’ll be reading soon. I have to say, I quite enjoyed Sos The Rope, especially the unexpected eleventh-hour jump into a sort of meta-human Iliad riff. I hope Piers Anthony continues with this vibe in the next books; one can only imagine the surreal, over-budgeted, psychedelic mess of a film Alejandro Jodorowsky might’ve made out of it.