Four pulp sci-fi novels (set #2) – An Echo That's Reversing

Updated 21 Aug 2018 (art)

Updated 15 Sep 2018 (notes on all four)

I enjoyed (generally) the first three books I picked up so four more have been obtained:

The Rings of Tantalus, book 2 of The Expendables (Fawcett, 1975) by Richard Avert aka Edmund Cooper

Cover by Ken Kelly, painted many album covers for metal band including for Kiss, Manowar, and Rainbow

The Siren Stars (Analog magazine, Mar/Apr/May 1970; Pyramid Books, 1971) by Richard and Nancy Carrigan

Cover by Frank Kelly Freas, painted the cover for the Queen album News of the World

Shadow of Heaven (Avon, 1969) by Bob Shaw

Cover by Edward Soyka

Starmasters’ Gambit (Daw, 1973) by Gerard Klein

Cover by Frank Kelly Freas (see above)

We have a trip to Vancouver in September, so some of them will find their way to coffee shops or airports. The rest, somewhere here in Atlanta.

Updated 21 Aug 2018 (art)

I found a site called North Star Art that has many of the pulp artists from these books (links added for each artist above). Here is their full list. Prices run from $1,000 up to maybe $20,000.

Updated 15 Sep 2018 (notes on all four)

Reviews and notes. These books were eventually deposited in various locations around Atlanta. One in a car parked across the street from Manuel’s Tavern, one behind condiments at a booth at The Albert, one on an outside table in front of the Midtown Savi, and one behind the napkin dispenser on the coffee-prep counter at the Midtown Caribou.

The Rings of Tantalus

A group of rough-and-ready space fixers are sent to prepare a planet for human habitation. Society on Earth is collapsing because of lack of resources and so there are “expendables” sent out to brave the trail but also make sure no alien societies exist that would be pushed out. This is the crew’s second sally, with the first ending successfully yet with a cost. Only a few, the strongest few, survived and they now have brought on rookies. BUT: one rookie is a spy!

Several of the governments of the Earth, mostly those of poorer Africa, would rather the money be spent on food and support than on extra-solar enterprises. Any of those countries would want this expedition to fail in order to nix further ones and redirect moneys back home, and so are all potential suspects for sabotage.

Mysterious monkey robots start attacking the ship after it’s landed, and ground-based “rings” of enclosures–later found to be previous inhabitants’ museums–are discovered. One expedition member encounters a ravenous, blood-sucking, Venus flytrap-type plant and barely escapes with the help of one of the robots that came with them.

Monkeys are defeated, the spy is dispatched, and the heroes secure the planet!

The Siren Stars

Ugh, another one that’s only barely sci-fi.

There’s a mysterious signal that’s been received by the Russians from another planet. A Sexy Female Linguist [ed. insert joke here] is contacted by the gubment for her “skills” and–for no apparent reason–she fear that the signal is sent to hypnotize its recipients into building machines that replicate its sentient, robotic broadcasters. The entirety of the books is spy sexcapades between the All Man government agent and said Sex Linguist as they out wit the Ruskies.

The final scenes are at the Russian lab where the leader has in fact succumbed to the signal-as-written-down and is nearly finished building the first machine that will soon replicate ad infinitum. All Man and Sexy Linguist defeat the loopy scientist and barely defeat the now-conscious and angry building-sized computer. Success!

More sexism than usual, but no less than a Bond movie at the time.

Shadow of Heaven

This had some good concepts.

The US and most other nations had their most bountiful lands turned into desert by a chemical weapon of unknown source (and for some reason it never becomes known throughout the novel!?). In the US, populations are crowded into dense cities, primarily on the east coast, and are sustained mostly by sea farming. Key to the plot, other farmed food comes from anti-gravity-suspended islands over the Atlantic that contain miles and miles of farms, un-peopled and harvested by machines. Our hero is a newspaperman who, generally suppressed by a dictatorial government which is controlled by the food corporations, ventures to one of the supposed uninhabited islands to find his missing brother. On the way, he meets a charismatic cult leader who, by the end, becomes the President of the United States. Odder things have happened, I guess. </s>

He finds there a village of expats who could not survive the claustrophobic coastal megalopolis and so escaped to the only open land available. In fact most people are conditioned to be agoraphobics in order to survive life as it is. For these villagers, it did not take. He eventually finds his brother, natch, who is the village’s dictatorial-yet-beloved leader, but our hero is barred from returning for fear that he will rat them out (he will not, or will he?).

The food corps show up to begin to populate the farms, corruption-like, with their wealthiest executives. Villagers battle them, our hero becomes a little less so and rats them out, and the island comes crashing into the ocean. The lesser hero marries his brother’s girlfriend, lives in the dense city and on the very last page is recruited by cult leader/president to be the leader of a group that will man the remaining islands as the take to space to terraform Venus.

Starmasters’ Gambit

This had some really interesting ideas!

The universe is populated by humans and some aliens and ruled by a government residing on a planet I can’t remember. Antares? Anyway, the interesting part about society is that people, though they live normal lifetimes, exist for centuries by traveling at light speed from star system to star system. Because of time dilation (blah blah science), someone may leave to live on another planet, knowing that if and when they ever return it will be hundreds of years later. They would never again see the friends and family they knew and may only meet their long-time descendants. The government somehow keeps the culture cohesive across these people of disparate milennia.

Early in the book, the main character is shanghaied, as is normal, on a government ship in order to travel the galaxy as an agent of some sort. I don’t really remember. He declares he will have his revenge, finds a mysterious chessboard on a planet populated by what seems to me to be fundamentalist Muslims, travels for centuries and finds the giant citadels of the super-race that created the chessboards (that also allow you to travel anywhere instantaneously) and who also possibly created humankind, and he eventually becomes immortal. Returning to the planet whose name I can’t remember, he defeats the governing autocrats (who are also immortal) and ushers in a new era of instantaneously-traveling humankind.

I liked the unique concept of a centuries-separated society.