The Nemesis From Terra (aka Shadow Over Mars)

The Nemesis From Terra, by Leigh Brackett
No month stated, 1961  Ace Books

The copyright page of this Ace Double doesn’t mention it, but The Nemesis From Terra is actually a reprint of a novel by Leigh Brackett originally titled Shadow Over Mars, which first appeared in the Fall, 1944 issue of Startling Stories and was later reprinted in the March, 1953 issue of Fantastic Story.  This was Leigh Brackett’s first novel, and any worries that it might not be up to par with her later work are quickly dashed. Also, unlike
The Secret Of Sinharat or People Of The Talisman, this one has not been expanded or otherwise changed in this Ace reprint, other that is than a few editorial snafus.

Brackett, despite her recent intro to the world of fiction, is as evocative as ever, her fast-moving pulp tale both masculine and poetic. I mean this one covers everything from dewey-eyed love at first sight to a fistfight in which a dude’s thumb is ripped off…and then later he’s bashed in the face by the severed “trunk” of a corpse! It’s also interesting that Shadow Over Mars (as I prefer to call it – doubtless Ace changed the title because they didn’t want to scare away dweebs who’d get upset over the fact that there’s no life on Mars) has elements which would be expanded upon in later Brackett work.

I get the impression that this one is set later in Brackett’s future chronology than the other tales I’ve read; perhaps around the era of the latter stories in the anthology The Coming Of The Terrans. Terran “exploitation” of Mars is more rampant than in the other Brackett stories I’ve read – and just so you know there’s no fooling, the organization actually calls itself the Terran Exploitation Company. There’s also use of the Banning shocker weapon, which featured in the late-chronology (but also early-written) Brackett yarn “Child Of The Sun.” It appears that Brackett’s early stories, coincidentally or not given that WWII was raging when she wrote them, were more concerned with a despotic galactic government than her later material.

Anyway I’m guessing that Shadow Over Mars takes place at least a few decades after, say, “Enchantress Of Venus,” and perhaps around the same time as the beginning and ending sections of The Sword Of Rhiannon. And speaking of which, there are similarities between that tale (aka Sea-Kings Of Mars) and this one; both feature ruggedly virile but hardbitten bastards of protagonists who are, despite their nefarious nature and crime-laden backgrounds, thrust into prophetic positions as saviors of Mars. 

Such is the case with this novel’s hero, Rick Gunn Urquhart, and I have to say, I do love it that the savior of Mars is named “Rick.” He’s a cynical, tough-talking, Bogart-esque brawler who, we learn, was born in space; the first planet he ever set foot on was Mars. When we meet him, like Matt Carse in The Sword Of Rhiannon, Rick is on the run, but in his case it’s from the “black boys” (aka “black apes”!) of “the Company,” aka the Terran Exploitation Company. Another resemblance to Rhiannon is that this future Mars is filled with splinter strains of native life, such as the winged humans who appear in both novels and the Dhuvian snake-men of Rhiannon. But this I think is the only mention I’ve so far encountered of the “black apes,” aka “anthropoids,” which are used as brainless muscle by the Company.

The title of the novel, at least the original title, comes from an ancient Martian “seeress” whose hovel Rick sneaks into while hiding from the apes. She goes into a trance and declares that Rick’s “shadow” will fall over Mars – uniting its people as one and ruling them. Then, as if in denial of her own prophecy, she comes at Rick with a knife and he takes her out with his “blaster.” Speaking of which there’s more blaster-fighting here than in the other Brackett yarns I’ve read, most of which go for more of a Conan vibe with swords and axes and whatnot.

The action opens in Ruh, an ancient Martian city I don’t believe I’ve encountered before; like all the others in Brackett it’s a decayed fossil of its former self, with an Old Town that’s nearly haunted and a New Town filled with strip clubs and bars and the like. In fact, Shadow Over Mars has the first – if brief – sleazy elements I’ve yet encountered in Brackett, as later in the novel Rick walks through the grungy New Town section with its stripper Venusian girls, 3-D cinemas, and various drug parlors. The Venusians don’t come off very well here, mostly used as muscle or as sex objects by the Martians; we also get the mention that they have greenish skin and blue hair.

The novel features a small core of characters, as ever graced with those Brackett-esque names which would be sort of pillaged by George Lucas: a chief example would be Jaffa Storm, a Star Wars name if ever there was one; he’s a “Terro-Mercurian” with skin burned black by the sun, same as  Eric John Stark. But unlike Stark, Jaffa Storm is a villain through and through, a 7-foot sadist with a limp who is telepathic to boot. He’s the main villain of the novel, though we start off thinking it will be Ed Fallon, heartless owner of the Company. However Fallon’s sort of anticlimactically removed from the narrative. On the female front, there’s Mayo McCall, hotstuff brunette babe who is a spy for a Martian rights movement led by Earthman Hugh St. John and his Martian pal Eran Mak. (Yes, the name had me thinking of former actresses turned sex-slaving cultists, too!)

In true pulp style, Shadow Over Mars veers all over the Martian map; I’ll forego my usual belabored rundown of the plot. Rick is basically traded around for much of the narrative, variably captured by the inhabitants of Ruh – who want him for murdering the seeress – to being captured by the Company. In this latter sequence he meets Mayo, and it’s a love at first sight thing, but bear in mind Rick is very much in the vein of the later Gully Foyle, of The Stars My Destination (another pulp sci-fi novel with some narrative resemblances to this one), so there’s a lot of hostility and distrust in this particular love. That being said, Rick and Mayo are barely in the novel together. Also, Mayo isn’t one of Brackett’s more interesting female characters, most likely because she spends the majority of the novel off-page.

Actually two women love Rick – there’s also Kyra, diminutive winged gal who latches onto him in a more poignant subplot than the entirety of the Mayo storyline. For Kyra loves Rick even though she knows he doesn’t love her back – indeed he refers to her condescendingly as “kid.” Further, she knows he’s in love with Mayo. But Kyra is young and resents that Mars thinks itself “old” and dying; there’s a part late in the tale where she says goodbye to Rick, brining up reincarnation and the planet’s future, and it’s one of those heartbreaking moments Leigh Brackett does so damn well.

She also does action and violence well, and there are several such scenes throughout the novel. Rick (rather quickly) lives up to his prophecy and unites the Martians against the Company – that is, after he’s been captured and escaped a few times – and leads them in a grand battle against Jaffa Storm’s forces, Storm having assumed control of the Company. However Brackett doesn’t give this sequence as much focus as one would assume. The smaller, more private battles are the ones that make the most of an impression, like the aforementioned climactic brawl, or a cool part midway through where Rick escapes via “flyer” to the other side of Mars, lands in Valkis (familiar from other Mars tales), and is captured by olive-skinned desert barbarians.

This part comes off like a prefigure of the later masterful novella “Beast-Jewel Of Mars,” with a drugged Rick put on display in a pit for a group of bloodthirsty Martians (Rick having been set up as a traitor by Hugh St. John and Eran Mak). They watch eagerly as the Earthman trips out in various hallucinations, mostly involving Kyra and Mayo. There follows perhaps one of the few instances in fiction in which cigarettes actually save life; Rick regains his thoughts due to the cigarette burning into his hands, and sees that he’s about to become part of the soil that feeds these hallucination-causing plants. Further, the smoke wards off the effects of the plants and allows Rick to think clearly. So he fires up a fresh cigarette and starts inhaling away, crawling off to safety!

Overall though Shadow Over Mars gives a great view of Brackett’s Mars; you’ll find here everything from the desolate, haunted ruins of its beyond-ancient past, familiar from the Stark tales, to the decadent sprawls of its Earthling-populated areas. There’s even a somewhat arbitrary trip to the polar cap, an area drenched in mystery, where the legendary “Thinkers” lay in suspended animation, their minds moved on to a realm of pure thought. This part has the haunted vibe of the later Brackett story “The Last Days Of Shandakor,” but gradually builds up to the brutal fistfight mentioned above, complete with thumb-ripping and severed bodyparts used as impromptu clubs. This part also reminds the Brackett fan of The Sword Of Rihannon, as here too our Earthling hero comes upon ancient weapons of mass destruction.

All told, a lot goes down in these 120 pages of small, dense print, and Brackett never lets up – something’s always happening, and it’s always entertaining. In a mid-‘70s audio interview I recently discovered, Brackett makes a few disparaging comments about her early work. Hopefully she wasn’t thinking of Shadow Over Mars, because I really enjoyed it, and would rank it as one of my favorites yet. And that audio interview is highly recommended, if only to hear her voice, but unfortunately the majority of it concerns her screenwriting work, with her sci-fi writing only briefly discussed. (Note how she perks up at the sudden mention of Eric John Stark 54 minutes in! But sadly the interviewer asks no further questions about the character or his stories.) And I have to give the lady props for not only claiming she “walked out” on Kubrick’s 2001, but for saying that she thought the movie was “foolish!” Perhaps the only time I have ever seen that particular word used to describe the film!

Waters Of Death

Waters Of Death, by Irving A. Greenfield
No month stated, 1967  Lancer Books

It appears that Irving A. Greenfield started off as a sleaze writer, one of the many authors serving as Vin Fields, before branching out into sci-fi under his own name, then moving into trash fiction in the ‘70s, and finally writing the many-volumed Depth Force series in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Greenfield’s writing though appears to remain consistent no matter the genre or year – slightly melodramatic, at least when concerning the torrid love lives of his characters, yet curiously threadbare in the description and plot departments, with major events (and the deaths of major characters) occurring off-page.

While Waters Of Death suffers from these same things – and more – it did well enough with the sci-fi readers of the day to warrant a few printings. The year is 2167, and Greenfield only gives us the trimmings of this hellish future society; basically, the Earth is overpopulated and undernourished, and all food is harvested from the sea. Society has broken down into rigid, progressivised hierarchies very much along the lines of that seen in the vastly superior After The Good War. But it’s sort of the same thing – there’s a single global government (the horror, the horror), independent thought is prevented at all costs, and any infraction against the government is dealt with quickly and mercilessly.

This is something our hero of sorts discovered two years ago: Dr. Robert Wilde, 35, of the Institute of Oceanography and Marine Biology. We get some vagueries about “independent research” he conducted a few years ago on underwater harvests or something; when the ruling party discovered this, Wilde was drummed out and cast in a loserville sort of purgatory. But in this hellish future society, being a government outcast is akin to being a social leper; Wilde was not only ridiculed, but his wife turned on him and began openly sleeping around. Wilde only stays with her so as to be with his son, because apparently – Greenfield doesn’t elaborate – children are only raised by married parents. Otherwise they are sent to government foster homes to be raised in a hive mentality setting. 

Not that Wilde, as he’s presented to us in the novel itself, appears to give two shits about his son. Greenfield’s characters are as a norm incredibly self-involved; I think my own son, who is only 14 months old now, is more aware of the feelings of others. Rather, Greenfield sort of goes through the motions that Wilde wants to see his son, yadda yadda, but the kid’s in like three pages of the book and, humorously enough, rarely even referred to again. There isn’t even any regret on Wilde’s part when his wife announces she’s to become a government whore of sorts at the local “sex center” – another vaguery of Greenfield’s, that there are veritable temple prostitutes in this future society – and thus the kid will have to go to a foster center, after all. Oh, and Wilde’s wife is pregnant with another man’s child!

But Wilde’s thoughts are more on the new job he’s been tasked with, one that might bring him back into the prominence he once enjoyed. His old boss at the Marine Institute has called him in and offered Wilde the opportunity to redeem himself; the sea farmers in the Caribbean are apparently revolting, as crops are dying and being destroyed by mysterious means. Leading the revolutionaries is Jessup Coombs, Wilde’s old friend; we’re briefly informed that, fifteen years ago, Wilde spent a tenure with these very same sea farmers. After a big blowout with wife Marion (“If you were a real man you’d hit me”) and son John (who screams “I hate you!” when he catches Wilde finally taking Marion up on her offer of hitting her), Wilde says to hell with it and heads off for the Caribbean.

First though he bangs the secretary of his old Institute boss – there’s a lot of secretary banging in Waters Of Death, in fact. As with most sci-fi, this novel is more about the era in which it was written, thus this 2167 is run by straight white males who drink and smoke and keep leggy secretaries in their office, mostly for sexual services. But curiously Greenfield keeps the sex off-page, and even the expected exploitation of the female characters is kept to a minimum; at least, it’s nowhere as explicit as the material he wrote in Depth Force, or another books of his I have from 1973 titled The Pleasure Hunters, which is filled with graphic screwing.

As mentioned, Wilde and Jessup were friends back in the day, but anyone expecting some “how’ve you been, you old so and so?” camaraderie between the two has never read an Irving Greenfield novel. Indeed, Jessup barely even remembers Wilde, and the fact that Wilde once worked beside these sea farmers is a simple plot contrivance that is never expanded upon. Jessup himself fades into insignificance; he’s built up as a revolutionary firebrand, but instead he’s more interested in picking up the wallflower secretary of the local government official. Yes, here’s another secretary prime for the exploiting, though Greenfield builds up a growing love between the two…then doesn’t do much of anything with it.

In fact Wilde’s time with the sea farmers itself is glossed over. What exactly he’s doing here isn’t much detailed, nor is the daily life and tools of the sea farmers. We do learn they are at the lowest strata of society, with precious few rights, something adding to their growing hostility. Jessup claims the farmers are not destroying the crops, and we readers know he speaks the truth, as we’ve seen the perpetrators: a shadowy cabal of government officials who have banded together in the hopes of starving the populace, killing off a large portion of it, and then swooping in to take control of the entire world. They are led by Zahn, global government Security Chief; one of the plotters is named Ahura Mazda, and whether it’s the ancient Zoroastrian god come to life Greenfield doesn’t say. I liked to pretend it was.

So much stuff is unexplored. Before leaving for the Caribbean, Wilde is given this proto-cyberpunk data dump into his brain, the government not only feeding him sea farming data but also secretly implanting pro-government propaganda. This doesn’t go much anyplace. Instead, we have yet another spawning romantic subplot, as Greenfield realizes that Loraine, the young brunette daughter of a sea farmer widow, is a mega babe, with “full breasts” and everything, though again Greenfield curiously leaves the sleazy a-doings off-page.

Action scenes are as outline-esque as those in Depth Force; a bunch of “renegade sharks” attack the crops late in the novel, and Jessup rounds up some sea farmers to hop in their underwater vessels to go fight them, armed with “high-intensity sonic beams.” Here Greenfield proves the sloppy execution he’s sometimes known for, as Jessup is killed – just like that, folks. He goes down to save a comrade, radios to the others that he can’t make it out, and that’s it. I kept expecting him to show up again, sharkbitten but alive, or for Wilde to go to his rescue, but it doesn’t happen. He’s dead, Jim, and that’s that. For that matter, Wilde thereafter leaves the sea farmer community, and we aren’t even properly informed of the fact until he’s already back at the Institute, doing studies on his findings underwater (whatever the hell they were).

The climax is particularly rushed. The shadowy cabal gets their hooks on the new leader of the sea farmers, spurring him to start a revolution, and soon scads of people are dying off-page. In fact, this new leader himself is perfuntorily killed off-page, us readers only informed of the event in passing. This after we’ve gotten a few scenes from his viewpoint which imply he’s going to be a major character. Jessup’s secretary girlfriend is never mentioned again, and we learn, again in passing yet mercilessly so, that Loraine too has been killed (and probably even raped) in the rioting.

Not that Wilde bats so much as an eye. Instead he takes his “findings” to his old Institute boss; he’s learned that man himself is causing the destruction of the sea harvests, due to chemicals being put in the ocean and scaring the aquatic life or somesuch. But he’s again branded a rebel and this time he’s thrown in a government prison. Soon he learns of the rioting going on around the world. And only here, like over a hundred pages later, does Wilde even bother to think of his son again, wondering what happened to him. Dad of the year, folks!

Greenfield goes for one of those downbeat endings that would be all the rage in the ‘70s; the rioters, now that the sea crops have all been destroyed, have turned to cannibalism, and Wilde, thinking he’s being freed from prison by a group of rioters, discovers instead that they’ve come here to eat him. And here Greenfield ends the tale, Wilde getting his “throat ripped open” by the very same government secretary he was having an affair with, early in the novel.

This one was lifeless, folks, and I wouldn’t recommend it. Greenfield was capable of better and one sees why he eventually moved out of the sci-fi field. But you’ve gotta love the cover art on this second edition: “Waters Of Death – starring Drew Carey!!”

Nomad #1

Nomad, by David Alexander
March, 1992  Gold Eagle Books

After writing the almighty Phoenix, the slightly-less almighty Z-Comm, and finishing off the C.A.D.S. series (still haven’t read his volumes yet, though), David Alexander briefly served at Gold Eagle, where he turned out this 4-volume series which is now available for free download at his website. Nomad takes place in the then-future of 2010, and while unsurprisingly some of Alexander’s predictions didn’t pan out into the real 2010, it’s pretty crazy how much he did predict correctly.

If this first volume is any indication, then the series is basically Neuromancer if William Gibson had been influenced by The Executioner instead of hardboiled crime. The plot of this one even follows Neuromancer, climaxing on a space station. However, there’s a lot more action than anything you’ll find in Gibson; in fact, Nomad #1 (Alexander’s original title being The Skyfire Kills) suffers from an onslaught of action, coming off as one action scene after another. This would be fine, but these scenes lack the spectacular gore and dark humor of similar scenes in Phoenix; one might say Nomad is “Casual Friday” David Alexander whereas Phoenix is “bedecked in the blood and guts of my enemies” David Alexander.

The hero of the series is Quinn, no first name, a former CIA badass in a special unit, where his codename was Nomad – a name he rejects now. This makes it humorous, then, because Alexander arbitrarily refers to Quinn as “Nomad” throughout. It’s pretty damn bad when you can’t even catch a break from your creator. Anyway we meet Quinn in action – stashing a mini-atom bomb in an installation as part of a test for his one-man security company. We see here that Quinn’s action suit is along the lines of that Metal Gear Solid video game: a blacksuit with night vision goggles and Virtual Reality headgear.

Meanwhile, the specialists who worked on the Star Wars-esque (ie the orbital missile platform, not the movie) Skyfire project are committing suicide in spectacular ways, their faces blank when doing so. Early on in Nomad #1 it becomes very clear that Alexander is attempting to write a James Bond-esque thriller, complete with scene-setting across the globe, lots of spytrade lingo, and even a secret terrorist organization with Nazi roots that’s looking to take over the world – an organization which, by the way, is run by a dude whose face is never seen. So that even the most dense of readers will get it, Alexander names one of this organization’s special machine guns a “Spectre.” For those readers who still don’t get it, the name of this evil organization turns out to be “Scepter.” Hell, there’s even a Thunderball riff where a Scepter agent who failed is killed in front of the others as an example. The only thing missing is a white cat.

Quinn is contacted by his former boss in that special unit, Bruckner, who still works in the shadowy intelligence realm and who keeps referring to Quinn as “kemo sabe.” Quinn’s skills are needed because he helped program the Skyfire tech, and even designed the “automatic kill zone” perimeter defenses which guard the Skyfire control plant. Now various technicians who worked on the secret project are killing themselves – we get to witness several of these suicides, which take place around the world, further giving the novel a sort of blockbuster vibe – and Bruckner wants Quinn to find out what’s going on. In particular, Bruckner wants to ensure the head honcho on the project, William Koenig, a famous pacifist, doesn’t end up offing himself.

A funny thing about Nomad #1 is that it starts off relatively quiet on the action front; indeed, it occurred to me that Alexander was writing for the most part a modern-day thriller, the sort of thing you’d see on the shelves at Wal-Mart with a bland Photoshop cover and way too many pages. This though turns out to be a ruse; while Quinn is in investigator mode for the first quarter, after this the novel goes hard into “nonstop action” territory, to the point that you almost wanna wave a white flag. The book also picks up an unintentional (or perhaps it's intentional) comedic vibe, in that Quinn and his female companion keep coming upon Skyfire techs after they’ve just been killed. If only the duo had left like ten seconds earlier!

As for that female companion, her name is Ramsey and she’s a comrade in the spycraft trade, one of Bruckner’s minions and a hotstuff blonde with a kickass bod. Quinn’s first stop is Rome, and here he meets Ramsey, whom he initially sees as cold and aloof – not that this prevents them from having the expected (yet mostly off-page, this being Gold Eagle and all) sex. Here begins the protracted comedy-esque action scenes, with Ramsey and Quinn constantly one step behind the Zodiac-named mercenary squads employed by the shadowy organization which is killing the Skyfire techs, an organization which is run by a never-seen individual who goes by the name Alpha.

The first big action sequence takes place on the nighttime streets of Rome, which are humorlously empty at the time; Quinn and Ramsey are hounded by a group of mercs in night vision goggles in a game of cat and mouse. Luckily Quinn just happened to bring along his handy submachine gun: don’t leave home without it, folks. Alexander sort of treads the line between straight-up men’s adventure pulp and tech-savy military fiction, with copious firearms and VR tech details; acronyms run rampant. While the action is nonstop and the bullets seldom stop flying, it must be said again that the outrageous gore of Phoenix is sorely missed. This isn’t to say that Alexander doesn’t occasionally throw us a bone:

Quinn never gave [the merc] the chance to pull the trigger. 

This time Quinn’s accurate fire tattooed a jagged pattern of bloody red tatters across the Scorpio merc’s upper chest. Pulverized bone and organ tissue spewed in dark crimson pulses from the exit wounds punched in the merc’s back. Reflex action triggered a panic burst that went wild and high, hammering holes in the ceiling. 

Badly shot up by the Spectre fire, the merc did a spastic two-step and crashed into the wall behind him. His knees buckled and he slid slowly down the wall to a praying position before keeling over to one side. Hitting bottom with a thunk he shuddered for a few seconds then gave up the ghost. 

Grabbing a funeral wreath that said “Rest In Piece” he’d noticed nearby, Quinn dropped it on top of the dusted merc as he and Ramsey pushed past him toward the alleyway.

So as you see, there’s not only a gun called a “Spectre,” but Quinn himself is prone to Bond-esque quips and actions; I mean the bit with the wreath could come right out of a Roger Moore picture. The action moves across Europe, with a protracted stopover in Brussels in which another extended action scene occurs during a bizarre-sounding local parade. Each stop follows the same template: a hit squad is already here and has just taken out the latest Skyfire tech, and Quinn and Ramsey come upon the scene too late. A massive firefight ensues. By the time the action moves to Hong Kong you already know where it’s headed when Quinn and Ramsey get on a boat and Alexander notes the heavy weaponry onboard. Sure enough, yet another Zodiac-named strike force is on the way, this one garbed in “black tactical face masks.” A massive firefight ensues.

But Quinn isn’t just the typical meatheaded action hero. Despite being a hulking bulk of muscle, he’s computer savy too, which of course brings to mind the current crop of action protagonists, just as home behind a computer as a machine gun. So we get lots of “computer stuff” as Quinn tries to access various databanks in his quest to find out who is behind this plot. Along the way he finds out about something called “Castle.” When the action repairs to Germany and Quinn meets Skyfire director Koening, the plot is almost unveiled; Koenig starts at Quinn’s mention of “Castle,” implying that he has much to speak with Quinn about in private. But wouldn’t you guess it – a shadowy assassin appears at just that moment and takes Koenig out.

“Castle” turns out to be the codename of an experimental space station which is hidden in Earth’s orbit; so experimental that even the President is unaware that it’s operational. It’s been taken over by Alpha and his minions, and in the final stretch Nomad #1 continues with the Bond vibe, coming off like a gorier take on Moonraker (the film, not the book!). This is the highlight of the novel, if really it’s just yet another endless action scene. Quinn heads up there – this after various turnarounds and reveals, including Quinn faking his own death – and we finally meet the mysterious Alpha.

While he doesn’t have a bald head, scarred face, or white cat, he does at least wear a black jumpsuit (his minions wear gray ones so there can be no question who’s in charge, I guess). Most interestingly he has this “neural disrupter chip under his skin” that “distort[s] visual and audial perception of his face and voice.” This means that Alpha’s face is a blur, his voice scrambled. It’s a cool mental image, and Alexander does make the big villain pretty memorable, if Quinn is for the most part more focused on taking out Alpha’s chief henchman (whose identity is supposed to be a surprise, but really isn’t). Alexander takes advantage of the space station setting, with Quinn about to be sucked out of an air dock into space (like Bond, the villains can’t just friggin’ shoot the guy), but thanks to a special shirt that hides explosives, he escapes. A massive firefight ensues. There’s also an Aliens-esque finale in which Quinn takes on that chief henchman, who happens to be wearing powered armor. 

After all this, the actual climax is kinda bland. Quinn sets off a nuclear explosion on Castle, just managing to escape back to earth (and it’s heavily implied Alpha has survived – as well as that annoying Energizer Bunny of a henchman). But whereas the novel should end here, Quinn still has to deactivate the Skyfire program, which is about to run amok thanks to a worm Alpha has implanted in it. This necessitates Quinn suiting up and taking on the automatic kill zone of machine gun implacements he himself arranged in the central command center. So it’s mostly Quinn blowing up robots and automated weapons.

The novel ends with Quinn now apparently reporting directly to the President, and as mentioned the reveal that the henchman is still alive and gunning for Quinn’s blood. A glance at future volumes shows that he doesn’t appear again until the third volume. Overall I enjoyed Nomad #1, but the constant action got a bit repetitive and wearying. However the Scepter villains were cool, Alpha in particular, and it was kind of neat to see “the Phoenix guy” writing James Bond.  

Richard Blade #7: Pearl Of Patmos

Richard Blade #7: Pearl Of Patmos, by Jeffrey Lord
July, 1973  Pinnacle Books

Manning Lee Stokes has a hard time of it with his penultimate volume of Richard Blade; you can easily see why the next one was his last. On the plus side, this was the first “new” story that Pinnacle published (“Here is our first original in the series”) – and per the copyright date they released it at the same time as their reprint of #2: The Jade Warrior. This must’ve been confusing for readers at the time, as Pinnacle spread out their reprinting of the first six volumes over a few months. Not that there’s much continuity in the Richard Blade series, but still – I can imagine some fans back in the day were a bit confused by the out-of-order publication schedule.

My guess is that Stokes had written this one the year before, but it wasn’t published due to MacFadden Books closing shop; same goes, no doubt, for volume 8. Stokes had probably already called it quits by the time producer Lyle Kenyon Engel got Pinnacle to take over the series, at which point Engel hired new series author Ronald Green. It will be interesting to see how Green tackles Richard Blade, but it can’t be as disjointed as what Stokes turns in for this particular installment. To be sure, Stokes’s writing is up to its usual caliber, but boy does he make some “interesting” authorial decisions, not to mention one of the most brazen cop-outs I’ve yet encountered in a novel.

As ever we’re not given much pickup from the previous volume; Blade is merely relaxing in his cottage in the sticks, swimming in the lake, when, as it normally happens in this genre, a hotstuff babe just happens to waltz onto his property and announces that she intends to swim. Stokes does a good job of setting up this “meet cute,” which has this gorgeous gal – whose face Blade finds somehow familiar – drafting Blade into a game in which they will call one another by fake names and might have sex, depending on how it plays out. She calls herself Diana, after the goddess of the hunt, and Blade calls himself Hercules; as ever, Stokes works some mythic references into the tale. More pointedly, Blade muses on Diana’s boobs in a paen that brings to mind the similar one Stokes delivered in the Nick Carter: Killmaster novel Spy Castle, even down to the repeating “connoisseur of breasts” line:

Her breasts were beyond description. Blade forgot words and simply gazed, his loins excited and moving. He was something of a connoisseur of breasts and he immediately recognized that hers were hybrid, half Nordic, half Mediterranean. Not tanned pears, but with a hint of conoid; not warm melons, but swelling to round fullness. Her nipples were half-awakened rosebuds.

Folks, I only wish I had enough field experience to instantly detect that a pair of freshly-bared breasts are “half Nordic, half Mediterranean,” but really this is just par for the course so far as it goes for a hero in a Stokes novel, and I for one am not complaining. And if “conoid” above had you surfing over to dictionary.com, be prepared for similar stuff throughout the novel; Stokes is usually a bit, uh, literary for the genre, but it’s as if in Pearl Of Patmos he wanted to set the bar even higher. On page one alone we encounter “sciomachy,” “litterol,” and “corundum.” Sometimes I think these fancy words are just Stokes entertaining himself while he bangs out the latest manuscript.

Blade starts to fall for Diana post-bang, but a game’s a game and off she goes in her fancy sportscar, never to see him again per the rules. Eventually Blade will learn that her name really is Diana; she’s the famous jet-setting young wife of some British notable, and at novel’s end (nine months later), Blade will return to Home Dimension (aka “HD”) and discover that Diana has a son. He is certain it is his, but knows he’ll never see the boy or even Diana herself again, so it’s yet another arbitrary go-nowhere development which will have no impact on Blade’s characterization. But at least we get one of Stokes’s patented graphic sex scenes early on, with Blade and Diana conjugating underwater: “Blade slid easily, deeply, into that moist undersea cavern.”

Finally it’s time for the latest trip into Dimension X (aka “DX”). There’s absolutely no reason why Blade goes over this time; previous volumes have at least gone through the motions of providing a reason for the latest trip, but this time there’s none. I guess Lord L and J are just sending Blade over to Dimension X because it’s there. Why not? Lord L greases up a nude Blade per the norm, this time casually putting a few extra wires on his “scrotum,” and then just as casually mentioning that this time he plans to send Blade over to DX “a little longer” than previous missions. What’s odd though is that Pearl Of Patmos seems to occur over less of a span of time than earlier volumes, at least so far as the DX portion goes. Stokes explains this away with vague mentions that time “runs differently” in those other dimensions, at least when compared to HD.

Blade finds himself in a temple that’s been set to fire, and fights his way out of the melee; soldiers in Romanesque sort of helmets and armor are ransacking the city Blade finds himself in. At lenth Blade will learn the city is named Thyrne, and the siegers are Samostans, barbarians who are led by the infamous Hectoris. Per Stokes’s usual template, Hectoris is much discussed but doesn’t actually appear in the text until the very final pages. Blade briefly hooks up with a roughneck criminal sort named Nob, a Thyrne local who helps Blade escape – sans Nob, who is apparently killed by the Samostans – down through a hidden sewer. Prepare for some gross-out stuff as Blade makes his way through a “horrible porridge of feces and urine and rotted flesh.”

Eventually Blade comes across the first of many statues of the living goddess Juna, in particular a 200 foot statue of gold, as depicted by Tony DeStefano on the cover. Blade meets the latest incarnation of Juna when he saves her from one of the most horrific fates I’ve ever encountered in pulp: a depraved priest named Ptol and his followers plan to put a flaming hot bronze helmet on the pretty girl’s face, burning her flesh down to the bone. Blade of course saves the nude babe, chopping of Ptol’s hand and killing one of the priests. But Ptol gets away and Blade regrets that he didn’t kill him. The reader soon regrets this as well, particularly given the copout Stokes will pull before novel’s end.

“[Blade’s] heart was not in the mission; over him there hung a strange lethargy and, name it, fear!” Folks I’ve said before that Manning Lee Stokes often used his characters as mouthpieces for his own complaints about the latest writing job Lyle Kenyon Engel had handed him; practically ever Stokes book I’ve read that was “produced” by Engels features a part where the protagonist bitches about his latest assignment and wonders what the hell he’s supposed to do. I think this time takes the cake, as it goes on throughout – page 148 features another humdinger: “This was a wasted mission and [Blade] knew it.”

Worse yet, Blade is fashioned into a chaperone here, escorting a haughty, ungrateful Juna (“a shrewd and articulate wench,” per Blade) and her entourage. Eventually Blade learns that Junia herself was plotting against Ptol; she is not from Thyrne, but from Patmos, an island empire, and via complex backstory came here posing as Juna but really working as a spy. She reports to Queen Izmia, the titular Pear of Patmos, Juna’s grandmother. That all settled, Blade overcomes Juna’s imperiousness and engages with her in the expected sex scene: “Enter the house of Juna,” she eagerly commands him. Blade for his part has taken to insultingly referring to her as a “temple whore,” and once she’s nice and randy Juna is only too eager to agree with him – “For the moment [Blade] was master and they both knew it.”

Patmos turns out to be a “land of flowers and drugs,” the populace hooked on a hash-like drug that keeps them all nice and mellow. Even the soldier who is to guard a newly-arrived Blade is a “popinjay” in Blade’s eyes, and they will all be easy prey for the advancing forces of Hectoris. Blade reunites with old pal Nob, not dead after all and also a sort-of prisoner here on Patmos: “They shook hands and in that moment Blade reasserted his strength and his authority.” Blade of course gets laid again, this time courtesy Queen Izmia, who like Juna is a hotbod young gal – a “giantess,” even, with silver hair and chameleon-like skin that seems to be reddish in its normal state. And despite being a “grandmother” she too is eternally reborn into youth; yet another of Stokes’s recurring motifs is the lustful young babe who in reality is quite old. And another of those recurring motifs is the sex scene: “[Izmia] was narrow and tight and moist and there seemed no end to her cavern.”

But here’s where that copout occurs. Blade’s woken up to find Izmia ready for some lovin’ – and folks, Blade has forgotten where he is. He’s forgotten Juna, Thyrne, Patmos, wily priest Ptol, all of it! Blade has amnesia!! It’s the most puzzling authorial copout I’ve yet encountered in pulp, as there is absolutely no reason provided why Blade experiences amnesia…we get some vagueries that it might be the computer back home messing with him, but it’s too little, too late. We must read now as Blade fumbles his way through his temporary command of Patmos’s island forces; he’s even so forgotten Ptol that when he catches the little cretin again, he doesn’t even kill him.

Stokes moves on to other stuff – like that mythic stuff he tries to imbue each volume with. And it gets real weird this time. Izmia, during that boff, captured Blade’s uh, effluvia in a cannister…and she takes this and puts it in a chalice and mixes it with wine and herbs and etc, and then has Blade drink it, after which Blade goes on this quasi-psychedelic swimming trip to the bottom of a well, where he gathers up a mystical sword. And Izmia’s gone when he returns, shriveling back up into the crone she truly is. After this wildness, the final fight with Hectoris’s warriors is anticlimactic, particularly given that Stokes page-fills with near-identical scenes of Blade first fighting Hectoris’s chief lieutenant in combat before taking on Hectoris himself in a similar match. 

As if the chalice-drinking, sword-gathering stuff wasn’t weird enough, Stokes caps off the DX portion of the tale with Blade conjugating with Juna, who again catches his seed, and this time spreads it on the mystical sword – which Blade then jams right up into a certain part of Juna’s anatomy(!). And all this psychedelic stuff happens and suddenly Juna becomes the new Izmia, with the silver hair and scarlet flesh and big build, and it’s all weird and crazy, and then Blade’s head snaps and he’s thrust back into Home Dimension, where it’s nine months later. Oh, and he sees in the paper that Diana is pregnant with a boy, which Blade is certain is his: “[Blade] had come back from hell to find a bit of immortality had been bestowed on him.”

Well, I enjoy doing these overlong reviews/rundowns of the Richard Blade series, and despite the padding and uneventfulness of this particular installment, I’ll be sorry to see Stokes’s tenure come to an end. But he only had one more volume to go, and I’m hoping he at least goes out with a bang.

The Thirteen Bracelets

The Thirteen Bracelets, by Robert Lory
No month stated, 1974  Ace Books

Taking place in the far-flung future of 1989, The Thirteen Bracelets is a sci-fi yarn that shows the more humorous side of Robert Lory, who around this time was also writing installments of my all-time favorite men’s adventure series, John Eagle Expeditor. (And of course I geeked out when, late in the novel, the narrator-protagonist relays how he’d been “expedited” to the scene of a past assignment…!) Unfortunately though, the novel is a bit too funny (or at least, attempts to be) for its own good; it’s more in the vein of a Ron Goulart novel than what you might expect, given the otherwise-serious back cover copy. 

Anyway, it’s ’89, and our narrator is shape-changing mutant Hari Denver, a spy who, due to being near the nuke blast which separated “White Dixie” and “Black Dixie,” now has the ability to change his appearance, from his face to his entire body – if an arm is chopped off, for example, he can regrow it. He now works as a secret agent for Section, reporting to a crusty boss named Fowler, whose office is in Manhattan. One of the recurring “jokes” is that the US is now so messed-up that most government agencies work out of old corporate buildings in Manhattan, given the mass exodus of businesses from this area in the late ‘70s.

We get a glimpse of the slapstick vibe of the novel in the first pages, as Folwer contacts Denver on a “vidscreen,” telling Denver to “get rid of” the lovely young woman Denver happens to be getting in bed with. Denver responds by hitting the girl beneath the chin, instantly killing her. He explains to a nonplussed Folwer, watching it all on the vidscreen, that the girl was in fact a terrorist, and the subject of the assignment Denver was working on, which is now wrapped up! When Fowler grumbles over Denver’s “unorthodox methods,” Denver responds, “These are unorthodox times.”

Denver hops in his Datsun Super Electric and heads over to Fowler’s office, where he’s briefed on his latest assignment – appeasing the Mudir of Chad, a visiting dignitary whose thirteen virgins, each of whom was wearing an antique golden bracelet, were recently stolen from a boat that was touring Staten Island. It’s a locked room mystery sort of deal, as there was just a small window on the boat and the girls disappeared while the boat was out to sea. Denver’s job is to find those bracelets.

The novel is more of a private eye yarn than a spy story; Denver ventures about the country in his search, following various leads. Actually the novel is more of a satirical look at a whacked-out America that is now separated along outrageously-overdone racial lines. In fact, due to this outrageousness alone, The Thirteen Bracelets is the sort of novel that likely could not be reprinted in today’s santized world. In his picaresque journeys Denver meets every racial stereotype you could imagine, up to and including actual spear-chuckers.

Another of the novel’s recurring jokes is that Hari Denver, no matter what “disguise” he’s fashioned himself into, is always recognized. In the course of the book he changes himself into an American Indian, a Jew, an Eskimo, a black, an old Russian, and possibly some other caricatures I’ve forgotten. Yet in each case someone will immediately know they are dealing with the infamous Hari Denver, in what sort of comes off like a prefigure of the “I heard you were dead!” line everyone greeted Snake Plisskin with in Escape From New York. In fact, many elements of The Thirteen Bracelets are reminiscent of that later film.

Lory’s “predictions” of course didn’t come true – the novel is really more of an over-the-top satire than a serious work of sci-fi – but he does at times hit an eerie note of prescience. Like when Denver informs us of the GPS-type device which is embedded in his neck and called a “hotspot.” Otherwise the novel sticks to racial caricature-type stuff; after ditching the Mudir and his four identical brothers, Denver tracks clues from Chinatown to a series of interstates overseen by American Indians, until finally he ends up in the presence of Obadiah, the “chief wuggum of the New Lesotho,” a giant black guy who wears a leopardskin cape, surrounded by spear-carrying warriors.

At this point Denver has disguised himself as a black as well, bearing a three-foot afro with a gun hidden in it, but per the recurring bit Obadiah already knows it’s really Denver beneath the black skin. Our hero has tracked the missing girls here, but the chief claims not to have them. Meanwhile he’s about to go to war with New Zion (located in what was once Bridgeport); in an impromptu naval skirmish, Denver and the chief are knocked off the chief’s boat, and as he hits the water Denver changes himself to a Jew – prompting one of those pre-PC lines from a New Zionist on the attacking ship: “We scared this one white!”

Denver gives himself a four-inch nose, only to be informed by Obadiah that it’s a bit much; when Denver shrinks it down to three inches, the New Zionists think he’s an Arab. He’s taken into the presence of President Wineberg, a nutcase bearing a .357 he arbitrarily fires at people. The true ruler here is The O’Donnell, an obese fiddler who is in fact Jewish but changed his last name to an Irish one when he began publishing sleaze novels. With the chief out of the picture – once The O’Donnell has had him and his men screw a bunch of syphilis-tainted women the New Lesotho sold them – The O’Donnell becomes Denver’s new traveling companion.

Eventually they get to Washington, which is even more shattered than New York; Lory gets even more spoofy with the revelations that “the Mall” is now “the Maul,” and the Lincoln Memorial statue has been recarved so that Honest Abe is sitting on a toilet. After a too-brief run-in with a former colleague named Jolly Van Cleeve – who turns out to have been involved with the kidnapping of the thirteen virgins – Denver finds himself down in the White Cave, ie the relocated White House, now in the caverns beneath the destroyed structure. Obese president George II, self-styled monarch who goes around nude save for different hats, enters the fray and stays longer than he should, for here the book sort of loses its fun.

Here’s also a good part where I can show the goofy tone Lory maintains throughout the novel. While below-ground Denver runs afoul of various generals who are united against the president. Denver escapes them and engages them in a car chase through the zigzagging, booby trapped tunnels:

At that point, the air boomed with the commander in chief’s command: “Catch him – I’ve changed my mind!” 

At which point, my car took off like a shot. 

At which point, running feet in pursuit stopped and a second car, accommodating four Army brass including General Morg himself who rang the brass bell decorating the front, soared after mine. 

At which point the shooting started.

The novel is written in this same smug, pretty contrived style throughout. However, at 188 pages of big print, it is at least a breezy read. After more turnarounds, Denver next discovers that one of the Mudir’s “brothers” isn’t really a brother at all, but one of his sisters, Althea. Lory doesn’t describe her at all, but we do learn she is ugly, or at least Denver considers her so. Eventually it turns out that this too is just a disguise and she’s a smoking hot babe after all.

It stays down here in the White Cave area for the duration, unfortunately, including an arbitrary bit where Denver is briefly captured by some Red Chinese who force him to play “ping-pow,” which is ping-pong with a bomb instead of a ball. It turns out those missing bracelets contained blueprints for something called a Blight Bomb, sort of a virus-generating bomb, and the Mudir planned to use it on Nepal. Althea wants to stop this. Evetually Denver finds himself posing as an old Russian, and must also have sex with all thirteen of the stolen virgins, one after another, as part of a ruse on the Mudir’s part to suss out who here is really Hari Denver in disguise. But Lory isn’t exploitative at all: “I finished her off fast” being the extent of the sleaze.

The finale continues with the comedic approach; the Blight Bomb plan safely prevented, George II reveals himself to really be a computer, the human form just a puppet, and instructs Althea to go have sex with Hari so as to burn off her hostility! And here we leave our narrating hero. Overall The Thirteen Bracelets is passably entertaining, but a bit too “funny” for its own good, and I’m not just saying that because I normally dislike genre novels that are written in first-person.

Yolanda: The Girl From Erosphere (Yolanda #1)

Yolanda: The Girl From Erosphere, by Dominique Verseau
May, 1975  Grove Press
(Original French publication, 1972)

This is one of those books I’ve wanted to read for a long time, but it was always exorbitantly priced. But, in one of those random flukes, I recently came across it at a jawdroppingly low price – pretty much the exact same thing that happened, years back, with another book I hunted for: Jackboot Girls. Anyway, enough preamble – Yolanda: The Girl From Erosphere is an English translation of a French sci-fi sleaze novel from 1972. “Dominique Verseau” was in reality prolific pulp writer Henri Rene Guieu.

A curious thing about this book is that it is packaged identically to a Dell paperback of the day, even down to the blue tippings on the pages. Was Grove Press a subline of Dell? I don’t think it was, but Yolanda looks just like a Dell book. Another curious thing is that no info is presented about the French provenance of this novel, when it was originally published, who Dominique Versea was, etc. About the only thing we get is a blurb on the very last page that another Yolanda novel, The Slaves Of Space, would be forthcoming from Grove. It came out in 1976, and that one is so astronomically priced on the used books marketplace that it’s not even worth thinking about tracking down.

Not that this is something to lose sleep over, as if it’s anything like this first volume, I can already guess what the contents will be – endless hardcore screwing, with occasional references to French poets, Classical literature, or philosophy. I was hoping for a Barbarella-esque softcore space yarn, but instead The Girl From Erosphere is pretty much all about the sex. In this regard it’s similar to another sci-fi sleaze yarn of the day, The Moonlovers. Like that novel, this one also has a humorous tone about it; not an outright parody or satire, but just a lighthearted romp about an oversexed four-person crew on the first voyage into hyperspace.

It’s the sexually-liberated future of 2107, and our heroine is Yolanda Hammerlove, a gorgeous, phenomenally-built blonde who works as a “sexologist.” In reality Yolanda mostly just sexually-bullies people throughout the novel. We only get vague setup about this future world, mostly that men and women now hardly wear anything, just “jerkins” or “minishorts.” Instead it’s really just all about sex, usually shoehorned into the narrative; like in the opening, in which Yolanda, on board a jet that’s taking her to Washington, reflects on her recent lez experience with a 16 year-old German girl, celebtrating her SF day (aka “Sexual Freedom”).

The sex scenes in this novel make those in The Baroness seem restrained in comparison. They are more along the lines of the sleaze in The llusionist, though not to the same gross-out levels, however it must be stated that some of the descriptions are so thorough that they do reach off-putting levels. At least in The Baroness Donald “Paul Kenyon” Moffitt knew when to say when. Not so with Guieu, who goes to explicit levels that are not for the squeamish. As ever with ultra-hardcore sleaze, this only serves to make sex more repugnant than arousing.

Yolanda encounters test pilot Bob Rowland on the flight, and promptly they make plans to screw. This will serve to be one of the recurring jokes in the novel, as it takes forever for them to accomplish this, even though they think they have, multiple times over. Turns out they’ve both been called to the Pentagon, now a large black “monolith.” There General Murdock of the Spece Security Committee tasks them with taking the experimental ship Torgar, the first capable of hyperspeed, and heading for the Capella sun, in the Charioteer constellation, 42 light years away. Along for the ride will be Ted Cunningham, astrophysicist and co-pilot, and Jany Jankins, psychologist.

The mission is top secret and the four can tell Murdock has something up his sleeve. But regardless they get right around to sexually-harrassing one another; Jany in particular, she of the beautiful face, awesome body, and “flaming red forest” of pubic hair, is taken through the wringer throughout. The author is not concerned with sci-fi realism, per se; despite entering hyperspeed, and thus exiting the time-space continnuum, the crew is able to keep in touch with Murdock via a viewscreen, making periodic check-in calls to Mission Control.

The focus is instead on hardcore shenanigans. Soon enough Yolanda is bullying Jany into some lesbian action, our heroine taking umbrage at the redhead’s “prudish” demeanor. Apparently being a “sexologist” (and Yolanda even has a doctorate in it) means harrassing and bullying people over any conservative thoughts they might have about sex, and then forcing them to do the deed. It goes on like this for pages, documented in ultra-thorough detail. It gets even more outrageous in an interminable sequence which has Bob and Ted banging Yolanda and Jany, respecitively.

Only it turns out it wasn’t them – thick pubic hair is a recurring motif in the novel, often mentioned, save for the thin blonde “fringe” of Yolanda’s nether regions. Yet the women Bob and Ted screw all night are bare “down there,” and the men Yolanda and Jany have sex with – and they too think it is Bob and Ted, respectively – have massive wongs. All this occurs with the lights off, hence the confusion. Anyway when everyone’s nude on the deck of the ship next day, the guys can’t help but noticing those bushes and the gals can’t help but noticing how much smaller the guys are – Yolanda even speculates that Bob and Ted might’ve screwed ‘em with dildoes.

Gradually – plot development takes a leisurely backseat to hardcore sex – we will learn that Bob and Ted actually screwed an alien woman last night, one who came to Bob’s room and then went to Ted’s. Her name is Iyrinndoa and she’s a seven foot tall bald chick with big boobs. The women actually screwed a male bald alien of the same hieght named Kaloon Ghour. They are from the very planet our heroes are headed for, and teleported aboard to “test” the crew sexually. This leads to more screwing, Jany once again getting the most of it, probed and banged by all and sundry. Oh, and Yolanda busts out a host of sex gadgets from her attache case. It’s all kind of gross.

It gets grosser in the cliffhanger finale, which has the crew and their two alien friends captured by the Rigelians, known as the “sexually insatiable ones.” As tall as the other aliens but hairy (and memorably described as smelling “gamy”), the Rigelians immediately go to town on our heroes, screwing them endlessly – we’re informed Bob and Ted are abused by Rigelian women and men. And Jany gets the worst of it again. Even Yolanda is worn out after the “two hour orgy.” The novel ends with them all in prison on the Rigelian ship, wondering how they will ever get free – and here is where we leave them. And will leave them; as mentioned the sequel is atrociously overpriced, but to tell the truth I wouldn’t want to read it anyway.

This is another of those novels that is best described via quotes, most of which I’ve chosen at random:

Now it was their companions’ turns to emit muffled screams. For the penises of both men emerged out of thick forests of dark-brown pubic hair! -- pg. 88

Before either man could respond, Yolanda reached over and gently palpated both of their sexes. “The only rational explanation I can think of,” she continued, “is that you two came to us equipped with dildoes.” -- pg. 98

[Yolanda] held up a transparent plastic box containing some green pellets. 

“These, my dears, cause the anal sphincter to expand temporarily so that one cannot run the least risk of being ripped apart inside. In fact, one-half hour after swallowing two of these, one’s rectum walls have opened wide enough to allow a man’s fist all the way in without the slightest danger. I know, darlings, for I’ve tried it. And it’s wild, kids – wild and wonderful!” 

“Do you like being sodomized?” Now it was Bob’s turn to look astounded. 

Yolanda tossed her golden mane over her shoulders. “Doesn’t every woman, from time to time? What’s more, I’ve found that most men enjoy it also.” -- pg. 120

Ever the gentleman, Ted seized the end of the artificial member which still protruded from between Jany’s creamy buttocks and withdrew it – although not completely. -- pg. 126

Taurus Four

Taurus Four, by Rena Vale
January, 1970  Paperback Library

Hippies in space! Well, that’s sort of the premise of this paperback original, or at least what’s hyped on the back cover. In reality the hippies of this “2270 AD” are more along the lines of stone age primitives, with the intelligence level to match. Okay so they’re just like regular hippies…only they’re on another planet.

Rena Vale had a career that was sort of the opposite of Leigh Brackett’s; she started as a screenwriter in Hollywood in the ‘30s, then moved to writing science fiction stories and novels in the ‘50s. Taurus Four was one of her last novels; she died in 1983. The cool psychedelic cover, by the way (which I’m assuming is by Robert Foster, given its similarity to Foster’s cover for Mythmaster), has nothing to do with the actual contents of the book – not sure what the hell’s going on there, but you won’t find anything like it occuring in the novel.

You also won’t find any space hippies of the sort featured in the “classic” Star Trek episode “The Way To Eden” (I put “classic” in mocking quotes but I actually enjoy that episode…I mean Mr. Spock channeling his inner Hendrix on a Vulcan harp, what’s not to love?). Which admittedly is what I was hoping for when I cracked open this slim paperback. Instead, it’s more of a character-driven piece about a portly but determined “space sociologist” who crash-lands on a planet in the Taurus system and there encounters a group of hippies, descendants of ones who were abducted from Earth centuries before.

Our hero is Dorian Frank XIV, out on his first mission; his assignment is to inspect the planet Taurus Four with its two suns and determine if it is suitable for human colonization. But he crashes his ship and is stranded here for two months until the mother ship can come collect him. Dorian is an interesting character; coddled due to the emasculating nature of the 23rd century, in which women run everything. This is total prescience on the part of Ms. Vale, but don’t go dusting off your “I’m With Her” banners just yet – she clearly is not fond of the idea.

In Vale’s future, “space is the man’s world;” women, having cemented their authority on Earth, have no desire to travel in space. Thus it is men who fling about the cosmos, declaring habitable planets for Earth; the women who do go into space usually do so in the capacity of servants to the men. Space is the only place where men can be men, yet they are for the most part confused about what exactly “being a man” entails:

The male aggressiveness was fading out of the human race…Women forged ahead in the professions and in politics; they took over many, if not most of the Earthside positions. As a rule, they dominated their mates, made puppets of them.

And:

Male-female relationships on Earth had become tests of strength…of willpower. Men loved women for their physical charm and grudgingly ceded as much of their independence as necessary to obtain their desires. Women loved men who obeyed their commands.

Damn, if I could go back in time I’d have the preacher read that last one at my wedding!

Dorian encounters all manner of flora and fauna on Taurus Four, which has an Earth-like atmosphere, save for the two suns; one is red, and the “night” sun is a white ball of fire that paints the sky in psychedelic hues. There are tree roots that move in the soil, fawn-like creatures that are harmless, bats that nearly rip Dorian to shreds, and intelligent bear-like creatures which Dorian is certain are not native to the planet. He will turn out to be correct; these are the daels, or at least so referred to by the transplanted hippies, and they too are part of a colonization party.

The hippies don’t appear until a quarter of the way through; Dorian stumbles upon them after a near-fatal encounter with vampire bats. Their presence initially baffles him, as Taurus Four was marked as an uninhabitated planet. Plus they are not only humans, but Earthlings – ones who speak to Dorian in English, at that. Though it is a crude, gutteral English, and these people have descended fully into tribalism. They go about nude, the men sporting long hair, rangy beards, and nails so long they are claws. The women are practically baby-making machines, some of them having born fourteen childreen. Even the “crones” are naked, much to Dorian’s discomfort.

Dorian gradually learns the history of the colony, his memory sparked by a tale told by elderly “witch” Bernedine, who recalls a story from the time of “twenty grandmothers ago.” Basically, a hippie in Haight Ashbury in the late ‘60s was approached by a reptilian being, which promised to take the hippie and his flock to a faraway place where they could live free, in the commune fashion the hippies so loved. Dorian instantly understands what happened; in the time of the “Space War,” two hundred years before, the “green Saurians from the Cygnus chain” abducted many humans; abductions which eventually sparked the war.

In his history classes, Dorian heard vague mentions of hippies that disappeared in that long-ago era, but Dorian in his time has no concept of the hippies, only that they were part of a “drug culture.” He realizes that he has stumbled upon the descendants of those Saurian abductees, living here in primitive squalor on Taurus Four. And they are a primitive bunch, sacrificing “virgin white” women to the “god in the well” so that the daels – ie the “devils” in their pidgin English – won’t come eat everyone. There is also the “daelsnarks” in the ocean, which apparently refers to sharks, but these go unseen.

Leading the hippies is a young man named Pete – all the leaders are named “Pete,” after the original Haight Ashbury hippie who brought them here – who uses his role to exercise his mean streak. There’s Billum, a young hippie who doesn’t appear to be as distrustful of Dorian as the others are. And most importantly there is “virgin white” Teeda, a lovely blonde Dorian falls instantly in love with, despite her innocent, “fawn-like” nature and primitive attitudes. Dorian is already engaged, his fiance back on Earth the usual strong female type, thus he constantly puts off the temptation to “take” Teeda, even though she clearly wants him and he her. There’s also the fact that she is being saved in her untouched condition to be given as the Great Sacrifice to the god in the well, part of the ancient belief structure that keeps the daels and daelsnarks at bay.

Speaking of which, these “savages,” as Dorian refers to them, are so primitive that the “god in the well” is merely one’s own reflection when gazing in a certain pool. They have regressed to such a state that they don’t even understand they are looking at their own face in the water. One thing they share with their hippie forebears is their love of weed; their “Sacred Garden” is filled with hemp, though surprisingly this isn’t much exploited by Vale. I mean there isn’t a single part where Dorian gets high. Instead, he spends most of his time transcribing “spools” of his sociologist findings, to be used as the material for a groundbreaking study upon his return to Earth.

Dorian also spends most of the time under guard in a cave, his precious “pack” with his stunner gun, clothes, and other gadgets separated from him. The hippies bring food to him; they only eat “manna,” a native fruit. He also gets occasional visits from Teeda, with the two falling in love, though Dorian has a habit of condescendingly referring to her as “dear girl.” Teeda’s need for Dorian’s strength is a new concept for him, given the strong females of Earth; subtext capably conveyed by Vale. Again, Vale’s connotation is clear that a “girl power” future might not make for the most attractive concept. 

Despite the coddled nature of his upbringing, with an overbearing mother and an overbearing fiance, Dorian is pretty tough, mostly due to his space training. Thanks to a few judo classes he can toss these dirty hippies around with ease; for “play” the hippie men like to engage one another in brutal wrestling matches, using those nails as claws. Even the toughest of them doesn’t stand a chance against portly Dorian, who due to the hardscrabble nature of hippie life on Taurus Four quickly slims down.

When Dorian learns that Teeda is planned as the next Great Sacrifice – to be raped by an increasingly-insane Pete beforehand – he makes his plan to escape the savages with her. But Dorian’s end game is a bit vague; he has no plans to take Teeda back to Earth with him, as his “grasshopper” transport ship is a single-seater. Also, he would be expressly forbidden to do any such thing by the captain of his mother ship. Dorian also has no plans to have sex with Teeda, to remain faithful to his fiance back home. But anyway he manages to stage an escape, thanks to a pair of friendly hippies, one of whom is Billum, Teeda’s brother.

Vale works in an imminent invasion subplot which is a bit clumsy; we’re told the bear-like daels came here long ago as part of a colonization fleet, but their ship crashed, and now the modern daels – who occasionally steal away hippie children and eat them! – are but pale reflections of the original crew. However a second colonization ship is supposed to come at a later date. Gee, guess when they’re coming? That’s right, shortly after Dorian crash-lands on the planet. Dorian learns all this from a dael female who “sings” her tale in their bizarre language, a language which Teeda understands, thanks to some tutoring from witch Bernedine. Dorian will be able to use Teeda’s knowledge of this language to get her off the planet, so as to warn off the invading ship of daels.

The finale sees Dorian finally mete out some payback to nutjob Pete, who we learn, upon finding out that Dorian and Teeda had escaped, went full-on psycho, even raping and killing an 8 year-old girl! His payback isn’t bloody enough, but he does show his cowardly colors when Dorian, a full-on man now thanks to the rigors of Taurus Four (not to mention the strength which has been borne in him thanks to the compassion and respect Teeda has shown him), challenges Pete to combat. Vale gets a few more digs in on her post-feminist future with the captain of Dorian’s mother ship, finally having come back to pick him up, marrying Dorian and Teeda as a slap in the face to Dorian’s mom and fiance, given how much trouble they got the captain in for abandoning Dorian when he crashed on the planet.

Overall Taurus Four is a quick, mostly entertaining read, though to tell the truth I would’ve preferred something more along the lines of “The Way To Eden,” with actual space hippies.

The Stars My Destination (aka Tiger! Tiger!)

The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester
March, 1957  Signet Books

Originally appearing as a four-part serial from October 1956 to January 1957 in Galaxy Science Fiction (available for free download at the Internet Archive here, here, here, and here), The Stars My Destination was published, in slightly different form,* in a single volume in the UK as Tiger! Tiger! in 1956. This Signet editon came out in 1957, under the Galaxy title and also featuring the edits of Galaxy editor H.L. Gold, more of which below.

I think I first became aware of this book over twenty years ago, when it received the Vintage Books reprint with the appropriate industry coverage. I got a copy at Half Price Bookstore, which I’d recently discovered, having just moved down here to Texas. (This was back in the days when books there were really half off, and LPs were super cheap…I mean I got “Abbey Road” for under two bucks!) When I read it at the time, I was surprised by how good the book really was. Re-reading it again these years later – I couldn’t believe how great it was.

At that time, one of the main proclamations about The Stars My Destination was how prescient it was, and how, despite being written in the mid 1950s, it felt so modern. In particular, it was championed by cyberpunk writers and readers. However I don’t think this is so much because Bester was prescient (not that he wasn’t); it’s that all those cyberpunk writers were ripping him off. There’s enough for five or six novels in The Stars My Destination, Bester hopping from plot development to plot development in true pulp style – it’s like comparing a super-compact, super-fast Stan Lee/Jack Kirby comic from the ‘60s to a super-contrived, super-“cinematic” comic from today – and no surprise, given that Bester wrote comics for a time.

But the story changes, constantly. We meet our hero, Gulliver “Gully” Foyle, who is really more of a villain, adrift in space; the sole survivor of a ship called Nomad which has been crippled by a ship from the Outer Planets – it’s the 25th Century, the solar system is inhabited, and the inner planets of Earth, Mars, and Venus are at war with the outer ones. Foyle is a “common man,” a minor mechanic on the ship; at 30 years old, a guy who has never applied himself. But he’s managed to survive alone on this ship for 6 months. The ship is owned by Presteign, a vast corporation – another of those elments that makes the novel seem so modern is how powerful corporations have become – and when a sister ship, Vorga, finally passes him by, Foyle thinks he’s been saved. (We will later learn that this occurs on September 16, 2436.) But Vorga abandons him – and the common man is no more; Foyle is reborn for the sole purpose of revenge.

Bester made clear his intention to write a sci-fi version of The Count Of Monte Cristo, and that’s what we get here, but as mentioned it’s a lot more colorful, pulpy, and fast-moving. I wouldn’t say The Stars My Destination classifies as “forgotten fiction,” so I’ll forego my usual belabored, long-winded, digressive sort of review and just go for the highlights. Because basically if you haven’t read the novel, just go read it.

The stuff with “Foyle surviving in space” is enough for one novel, but before we can grasp it he’s been saved by “Joseph and the Scientific People” (a name for a ‘60s acid rock group if ever there was one), who live on the “Sargasso Asteroid” amid space detrius. Bester is a superb scene-setter and describer, and well brings to life these innovative future worlds – more presience in how these places are cluttered with the junk of the past. Joseph not only gives Foyle a “wife,” Moira, but also tattoos his face like a Maori mask, all in black, with “Nomad” emblazoned on his forehead. He does both these things without Foyle’s being aware of it, and much to Foyle’s wrath.

Before we can catch up with all this, we’re in New York, where Foyle’s secretly learning how to “jaunt” again. Another thing I recall from back when I first learned about this book; the reviewer in whatver magazine I was reading said something to the effect that, to enjoy The Stars My Destination, you’ll just have to accept the fact that, in this future century, human beings have abruptly discovered that they can teleport. I admit, I still think the jaunting stuff is goofy – and again, it’s enough for a novel all its own – but Bester has it that a scientist named Jaunte spontaneously teleported in the lab one day, and from there it spread that practically all mankind could do the same. Bester has really thought the whole jaunting thing out, too, with “jaunt-mazes” and people escaping citywide destruction instantly, to even the women of the 25th century being practically “cloistered” due to concerns of improriety.

Speaking of which, Foyle rapes a woman in this section – a scene which makes clear that he’s not a hero. Initially I thought this was so Bester could give the Galaxy artist a “spicy” scene to illustrate (which he does), but it turns out that there’s more here than that. The victim is a “lovely Negro girl” named Robin Wednesbury who also happens to be a telesend, meaning she can broadcast her thoughts – usually unintentionally – but cannot receive them. This is a “century of freaks” as Bester describes it, but in reality it’s like the comic books he had written, only normal people have superpowers. But Foyle rapes her – the act of course off-page – after she’s learned he can jaunt, despite being in her beginner’s class. In truth, the “rape” deal is sort of awkwardly used – it happens apropos of nothing and is not dealt with again until later in the book. Plotwise, Bester wants Foyle to do something awful for which he’ll later want to be forgiven.

Special warning: this rape scene is known to trigger the sensitive readers of today, most of whom fail to grasp that 1.)Foyle is not a good guy, or at least doesn’t start out as one; 2.)And, most importantly, that Foyle spends the entire last quarter of the novel wanting to be punished for his raping of Robin. I already had a run-in with a reviewer who took the opportunity to rail against the “fucking vile” treatment of the women in this novel. She was not grasping – no doubt intentionally not grasping – the two items mentioned above, not to mention the fact that Bester clearly states that, due to jaunting, the women of the 25th century do not have the freedoms of today’s women. Also not to mention the fact that, you know, the entire crux of the novel is sin, redemption, and forgiveness.

She also failed to grasp how important women actually are in The Stars My Destination, and that each of them has an impact on the future of the entire galaxy. More importantly, Robin Wednesbury has the power of forgiveness, telling Foyle in the end sequence – in a cool psychedelic bit that takes place thirty years in the future – that “all that is long forgotten and forgiven,” or something to that effect. I can’t recall too many pulp novels in which the act of forgiveness is employed. But this is just one of the many things that elevates The Stars My Destination above the norm.

Another thing elevating it is the multiple characters. While you have Foyle with his tattooed face running around like a bull in a china shop, you also have Presteign of Presteign, his daughter Olivia (who in another comic booky element can only see in infra-red), CIA honcho Y’ang Yeovil (who is Chinese but doesn’t look it – in another bit of prescience Bester has race becoming a moot point in the future; due to jaunting, races have mixed to the point that most everyone has the same complexion); female radical Jisbella McQueen, whom Foyle meets in prison and who basically educates him (and I have to admit I got a sophomoric chuckle out of how Foyle always called her “Jiz;” now you tell me if “Jiz McQueen” isn’t a pornstar name waiting to happen); Dagenham, a former scientist who now runs a sort of courier company, who is “hot” due to radiation; and a host of minor characters, from a doctor who keeps a circus of surgically-augmented freaks to a child telepath who is 70 years old.

Just as compelling are the colorful scenes Bester captures throughout, all of which are incredibly cinematic. Foyle is sent to infamous undergrond French prison Gouffre Martel early in the novel, a place that is pitch black; in his inevitable escape, Foyle gets hold of a pair of infra-red goggles worn by the guards, and Bester appropriately brings the setting to life. It’s in Gouffre Martel that Foyle meets Jiz, who teaches him over the course of several months via the “Whisper Line:” a freak occurrence in the caves which allows them to converse, even though they’re separated by miles. They take up a sort of correspondence class, and Foyle’s character begins to subtly change, losing the “gutter” language he started the novel with. They also fall in love, sort of, and eventually have sex – though of course Bester leaves it off page, and for that matter isn’t much for exploiting his female characters, in fact barely even describing them.

And again the material with Jiz and Foyle is enough for its own novel, in particular a gripping part where they take a “Saturn Weekender” out into space (one of the things I like about the novel is that it doesn’t stay Earth-bound throughout) to find the wreckage of Nomad, now integrated into the Sargasso Asteroid. Foyle has determined that something valuable must be there – he’s found out there are millions of credits, but what he doesn’t know is that the true treasure aboard is all that exists of PyrE, an experimental substance which we’ll eventually learn could not only hold the key to the balance of the Inner-Outer Planets war, but also to the future of mankind. The scene is masterfully built up and played out, as Foyle, consumed only with his vengeance, actually abandons Jiz to Dagenham’s men.

My favorite part soon follows; now we are very much in the “Count Of Monte Cristo in the future” mold, as Foyle, a millionaire many times over, poses as eccentric Fourmyle of Ceres, who runs the punningly named “Four Mile Circus.” More importantly, Foyle has had “Space Commando” surgery to his body, which has augmented his reflexes to inhuman speeds. (I wonder if this “fast reaction time” business might have inspired author Robert Vardeman in his unpublished volume of The Baroness.) Foyle is now “more machine than man,” and with a touch of his tongue on an upper molar, he can go into Six Million Dollar Man-type superhuman speed.

More comic-booky is that, thanks to Jiz earlier paying some quack doctor, Foyle has had his face tattoos surgically removed, but he later discovers that, when he is angry or consumed with passion – or basically anything that makes him lose control of himself – the tattoo reappears on his face, but this time it is red. So now we have a red-faced “tiger” with “Space Commando” reflexes, and it’s very cool, and Bester delivers several thrilling parts where Foyle, face glaring red, activates his speed setting and takes out pursuers Matrix style, wiping them out in fractions of a second. However Bester does not dwell much on violence, and there’s certainly no gore in the novel.

Also returning here is Robin Wednesbury, whom Cyrano de Bergerac style Foyle has hired to be his social mediator, introducing “Fourmyle” to all the jet-setters, but really using her telesending skills to let him know who is who so that his cover never falters. More dramatic sparks here with Robin learning that Foyle is the same “monster” who raped her, but deciding at length to assist him, mainly so she can use him to discover the fate of her family, who appear to have been casualties of the solar system war. This entire sequence is a lot of fun, with the two jaunting around the world and tracking down the crew of Vorga; it also introduces the eerie “Burning Man,” a flame-consumed vision of Foyle which keeps appearing in front of Foyle and others at random intervals.

On and on it goes – the novel’s not even 300 pages but man is it meaty. In fact it’s breathless. Today, it would’ve been written as a trilogy (at least!), but then today it wouldn’t have been half as brutal or pulpy. Bester, despite writing in 1956, even factors in psychedelic stuff, from various reality-warping drugs to a finale which sees Foyle – having of course become the Burning Man due to PyrE – jaunting across the space-time continnuum, the text warping and expanding courtesy artist Jack Gaughan. There’s another great psychedelic visual sequence where Foyle stands beside Olivia Presteign while the Earth is being bombarded by intergalactic missiles; the Earth defense system kicks in, up in the night sky, but only Olivia can see it, due to her infra-red vision, and her descriptions to Foyle are downright lysergic.

The Stars My Destination starts off being about Gulliver Foyle’s drive for revenge, not to mention his lunkheadedness – he starts the novel so simple-minded that he literally wants revenge on Vorga, ie the ship itself, before Jiz informs him that it’s the crew who made the decision to abandon him – or, as she so wonderfully puts it, that Foyle must begin to use “brains, not bombs.” The novel gradually diverges into the Monte Cristo parallel with Space Commando trimmings, before changing again into a metaphysical probing of mankind’s right to determine its own fate, not to mention its right to travel the stars. Fittingly for old comic writer Bester, the philosophy behind this comes from a bartender android, whose circuits are shorting due to Dagenham’s radioactivity.

Anyway to finally sum up (and there’s a ton of stuff I haven’t even mentioned!), I rank The Stars My Destination as one of my favorite novels, up there with Boy Wonder.

*The publishing history of the novel is a little scewy. After a lot of research – imagine my “shock” when none of this could be found on “usually reliable” Wikipedia – I’ve discovered the following: 

There are three versions of the book extant: the original Galaxy serial, collected in this Signet paperback; the UK version, titled Tiger! Tiger!; and finally the 1996 Vintage Books edition, which per the copyright page features a “special restored” text. This last one might be the definitive version, as it tries to find a healthy balance between the original US and UK editions.

The Galaxy and Signet versions feature minor edits, courtesy Galaxy editor H.L. Gold; I found a reference in some book that Bester often complained that Gold made unwarranted edits to his text. However the differences I found when comparing the serialized version to the Vintage Books edition – and it wasn’t a thorough A/B test – were minimal. It appears that most of the material Gold added was for purposes of clarification. For example, early in the book during the Sargasso Asteroid sequence, Bester notes that the tattooed names on the faces of the women feature an “O” with a “tiny cross at the base.”  He leaves it at that, but Gold adds, “the sign of Venus and female sex.” When Dagenham visits Foyle in prison, he reminds Foyle (and the reader): “I’m dangerously radioactive, you know.” This does not appear in the Vintage/UK edition, and clearly was inserted by Gold because this sequence appeared in the second serialized installment; Dagenham was introduced in the first. Gold also removed minor things – sometimes, I feel, for the better. Like during the tense scene where Foyle abandons Jiz to Dagenham’s men in space. In the US edition, Jiz merely screams, “Help me, Gully!”

The UK edition does not feature Gold’s edits, but it does feature the edits of some unknown and apparently skittish UK editor; most notably, all of Foyle’s promises that he will kill Vorga “filthy” are changed to “deadly.” In the sequence with Dagenham’s men capturing Jiz, mentioned in the paragraph above, Jiz has the additional dialog, “Do something, Gully! I’m lost!” I think these extra lines interfere with the intensity of the sequence. Finally, the psychedelic printing tricks of Chapter 15, courtesy artist Jack Gaughan, do not appear; at least, so I have been able to determine, in most of the original UK editions.

The Vintage edition from 1996 is basically the British version, Tiger! Tiger!, only with the US title and without the H.L. Gold edits, but it does have “filthy” instead of “deadly.” Otherwise I think it is the same as the version detailed in the paragraph above, save that this Vintage edition features the psychedelic font tricks in Chapter 15.

Personally, I most prefer the original US version, as presented here in the Signet edition. I think Gold’s edits are, for the most part, beneficial to Bester’s text. But the Vintage Books edition is much easier to acquire these days – it’s still in print 22 years after it was published – so that’s probably the one I’d recommend. Or you could just follow the links way up above and read the original version, as serialized in Galaxy.