INCOMING

 Incoming:

• Max Beerbohn, Zuleika Dobson; or, An Oxford Love Story.  Literary satire by "the incomparable Max."  "From the moment she set foot in Oxford, to stay with her grandfather (Warden of Judas), the lovely Zuleika played havoc with the undergraduates --and with none more than with the Duke of Dorset, a character whom Ouida would have been pleased to invent.  Max Beerbohn has called this delicious novel of his 'An Oxford Love Story', and for fifty years"  [-- 113 years now.  JH --] "it has delighted successive generations by its eloquence and wit."
• John Brunner, Endless Shadow, bound with The Arsenal of Miracles by Gardner F. Fox.  An Ace SF Double.  The Brunner was first published as The Bridge to Azrael in Amazing Stories, in February 1964; it was later revised and expanded as Manshape, 1982.  "Two worlds in conflict.  Azrael -- Where pain was the only reality, and murder was ot a crime but a ritual.  Ipewell --Where motherhood was honored and manhood meant a life of servitude and fear.  These two worlds were at the heart of a taut and dangerous situation which threatened to explode, and Jorgen Thorkild, director of the Bridge Systems that connected forty worlds among the stars, had to try tp tame them.  But Thorkild faced still another problem:  the loss of his own sanity..."  Brunner, even at his most slap-dash pulp and PBO heights, was always a skilled writer producing highly readable copy.  The Fox was reprinted in 2018 as by Gardner Francis Fox.  "When Earth's stellar empire was attacked by the Lyanir, a powerful race from the uncharted stars, it was Bran Magannon, High Admiral of Space, who met their battle-challenge.  He saved the Empire, but he also fell in love with the beautiful young Lyanirn queen Peganna, and to the people of the Empire his name became that of a traitor.  Now he was a lone, brooding outcast among Empire's outpost worlds, called Bran the Wanderer.  Then Peganna of the Silver Hair returned and told him of a fabled cache of deadly weapons left eons ago by the long-dead race of the Crenn Lir.  She wanted those weapons for her people, to use against Empire if need be.  Bran the Wanderer laughed, and showed her hoe to find them."  Fox was  prolific novelist in a variety of genres:  science fiction, sword and sorcery, historical, adventure, erotica, among them.. His science fiction tended to be very juvenile -- almost comic bookish.  Fitting, since his major claim to fame was as a writer of more than 4000 comic book stories, including over 1500 for DC comics, where he co-created the original Flash, Hawkman, Zantana, Doctor Fate, and the original Sandman, as well as creating The Justice Society of America before reforming them into the Justice League of America.  Fox also introduced the concept of the multiverse to SC comics.
• Kenneth Bulmer, The Key to Venudine, bound with Mercenary from Tomorrow by Mack Reynolds.  Another Ace SF Double (I picked up seven of these doubles for 50 cents -- less 15% because I'm an old fart).  The Bulmer is the fourth in his "Keys to the Dimensions" series.  "Rodro's men were pushing past, were blundering with reeking weapons into the room to kill and take the princess away.  Lai half stretched up from the princess's restraining arms.  The room was empty of other life apart from Sir Fezius and the two knights now lifting their swords, ready to cut down Lai.  A popping noise sounded like a drum beating.  A man appeared in the middle of the room.  One moment he was not there, the next he stood there, holding a bulky stick in his arm, peering about with a white face.  He said something that sounded like 'Skeet.'  The next instant the room resounded with an avalanche roar and a hellfire blast of scorching flame."  Bulmer was one of the "Piccadilly Cowboys," a group of British writer who produced a gazillion paperback originals in numerous genres under a slew of pseudonyms and house names, many of which were westerns, hence the nickname "Cowboys;" many of their books could easily be categorized as "trash" novels, akin to the violent men's action-adventure paperbacks that were appearing simultaneously ion this side of the Atlantic.  Although Bulmer's more than 160 novels were mainly in the science fiction field, he also penned westerns, historicals, and war novels.  In the science fiction field, he may best be remembered for his 52 novels in the Dray Prescott series (some of which were published as by "Alan Burt Akers" or by "Dray Prescott."  Outside the field, he may be remembered for the fourteen novels in his Fox series of naval adventures, as by "Adam Harvey."  Bulmer was also a talented editor, taking over the reins in the New Adventures in SF series from John Carnell.  The Reynolds is the first novel in the Joe Mauser series, and was expanded from Reynolds' novella "Mercenary" (Analog Science Fact -> Science Fiction, April 1962).  "In the lotus-land of People's Capitalism, Earth circa 21st Century, where telly viewers popped dream-inducing trank pills, what could be wrong?  There were basic staples for everyone.  Work was a forgotten pastime.  Action was all in a flip of a switch.  Nothing could be wrong in this Utopia for which men through the ages had strived.  Nothing, that is, but movement.  The class system had petrified.  You were born a Lower or a Middle...or if you were one of the lucky few, an Upper, with certain special privileges.  But there's always an upstart rebel, like Joe Mauser, who'd risk life itself to rise in caste.  And in lotus-land that's how it was.  Only by hiring oneself out as a mercenary. to fight in the prime-time programmed wars that telly viewers craved for their violence and gore, could Joe Mauser move up the social level.  that is, if he lived that long..."  At one time, Reynolds -- who specialized in combining economics, politics, and action in his stories for John W. Campbell. was the most popular writer for Analog.
• Lin Carter,  Tower of Medusa, bound with Kar Laballa by George H. Smith.  Another Ace SF Double.  Fanboy Carter never came across a fantasy writer or genre he did not try to emulate.  This time it's planetary romance and interstellar roguery.  " 'You are the most notorious and celebrated jewel thief in the Nine Stars.  It was Kirin of Tellus whole stole the Nine Diamonds of Phovia from the dragon-guarded citadel besides the Flaming Sea.  It was you who carried off the tiara of the Queen of Zodah, a trifle composed of eleven thousand matched fire-rubies, with an emperor's ransom...I want you to steal something for me.  I am a doctor of the Minor Thaumaturgies and I am come from Trevelon.  The jewel we are after is called the Medusa.  It is concealed within a structure called the Iron Tower which lies amidst the barren wastes of the uplands of Pelizon, guarded by a maze of traps and deadfalls.  We have, over centuries, and at frightful labor, obtained very precise and complete blueprints of the Tower...There will be no danger.  No danger at all...'  The softly modulated voice of the starship interrupted the conversation.  'I have been under attack for the past 12.03 seconds,' the ship observed calmly."  Not to be confused with the better-known and (possibly) more talented SF writer George O. Smith, George H. Smith penned both science fiction and soft-core eroticism.  "Kar Kaballa was the new king of the Gogs and the rumor was that he would lead his barbaric cannibalistic band of Northern nomads down on a mad crusade against the civilized nations of the world.  Cultured people found this improbable -- but they were soon to know better.  Their weapons were good, about as good as you can get in a Victorian army, which was what the period was.  But there was a traveler in town with a weapon he said was better, an odd chap with a thing called a Gatling Gun from a country nobody had ever heard of called the United States of America.  The question was could this outsider, this Major Churchward, sell his unearthly import to the Empire soon enough -- or would Kar Kaballa become the new Tamerlane of a bloody-dawned Twentieth Century?"
• Samuel R. Delany, The Ballad of Beta-2, bound with Alpha Yes, Terra No! by Emil Petaja.  another Ace SF Double.  The Delany half runs to just a little over 90 pages:  "Centuries ago, the Star Folk has left Earth on twelve spaceships on a generations-long mission to colonize the distant stars.  Ten of the ships had reached their destination.  Two had failed -- and nobody, in the hundreds of years since the disaster, had the slightest inkling of what had happened.  Joneny, a student of galactic anthropology, was assigned the problem.  It seemed routine to him.  Just dome faster-than-light travel to the two wrecked ships, a bit of poking around and then writing up his findings.  But he was ill-prepared for what he found in space at the site of the two ancients wrecks.  One, the Sigma-9, was not subject to the laws of time-stasis (the only exception he knew of), and it was covered entirely with a mysterious green fire that shimmered so much that it seemed alive.  And the other ship, the Beta-2, was nowhere to be seen."  It's hard to explain the excitement Delany and other new writers of the Sixties brought to the field.  You really had to have been there.  The Petaja:  "Earth's space thrust has taken her further and further out, grasping for habitable planets to house her over-flowing population.  She had come to the rim of the Alpha Centauri system, where she knew she could find new homes.  Only, she would never reach them.  the Alphans had been watching Earth for centuries, seeing its technological advances and its moral stagnation.  They had erected a barrier against her attempts to enter their system.  Finally, they decided she was a canker on the face of the universe, and they decreed her total extinction!  Only a small group dissented and they sent one Alphan, Thovy, to save all of Earth..."  This was Petaja's first published novel.  Petaja, once a (rather distant) member of the Lovecraft circle, was of Finnish descent and would incorporate that country's lore for many of his future SF novels.
• Harry Harrison, The QE2 Is Missing.  suspense thriller "The QU2 is missing.  On board: - $250,000,000 in diamonds, the treasure of Nazi war criminals, wrenched from Jewish lives; - Joachim Wielgus, the monstrous, shadowy paymaster to the Nazis in exile; - General Alfred Stroesser, the bloodstained 'lifetime president' of Paraguay, drawn by greed into a desperate gamble; - Hank Greenstein, the American lawyer who finds himself, and his fiancee, caught in the ever-deadlier whirlpool of a tremendous clandestine arms deal; - Uzi Drezner, the enigmatic elusive Israeli who has sworn to seize Weilgus, no matter what.  Before the great ship is found, 2,000 people disappear -- and the future of nations is changed."
• David G. Hartwell & Glenn Grant, editors, Northern Stars:  The Anthology of Canadian Science Fiction.  Collects 27 stories form 1973 to 1994, plus two non-fiction pieces. Authors include Judith Merril, Phyllis Gotlieb, Dave Duncan, Spider Robinson, William Gibson, Michael G. Coney, Donald M. Kingsbury, Charles de Lint, Garfield Reeves-Stevens, Robert J. Sawyer, Robert Charles Wilson, and Candas Jane Dorsey.
• Philip E. High, The Mad Metropolis, bound with Space Captain by "Murray Leinster" (Will F. Jenkins).  Another Ace SF Double.  High was a British SF writer who began contributing to the field in his forties.  The Mad Metropolis  has also been published as Double Illusion.  "Given:  Earth 400 years from now -- a rotten society in which mankind is doomed to die out.  A solution ot the problem -- an ultra-intelligent computer to govern humanity.  One man of seemingly average intelligence, but with an incredible I.Q. potential.  And you have:  A corrupt society turned into a world where there is no corruption, because Mother Machine knows what's best for her human children and does it.  Where that same all-powerful computer is rapidly turning men into zombies.  And where the world's only hope turns out to be the one outlawed not-average man.  Result:  An unusual science-fiction thriller."  The Leinster was first serialized in Amazing Stories in October and November 1965 under the title Killer Ship.  "Trent, captain of the space freighter Yarrow, came from a long line of spaceship commanders...and all of them had been troubled by pirates.  Due to the nature of the space drive, ships in flight were in more danger to each other than from anything else.  It was this ability of one ship's drive to blow out any drive near it that made space pirates so difficult to eradicate.  But this time Trent went into overdrive with a special device aboard -- one that would turn the tables and make space permanently barred to pirates.  Trent was skeptical himself -- and his skepticism stood him in good stead when he found himself more pirate bait than pirate baiter -- and his secret weapon a space-warping double-edged boomerang."  For good old Sf adventure, it's hard to beat Leinster.  ALSO, Philip E. High, The Time Mercenaries, bound with Anthropol by Louis Trimble.  Yet another Ace SF Double.  In The Time Mercenaries, "There had been one war scare too many and so the human race used genetic sorcery to delete aggressive tendencies from its heredity.  But  now mankind was faced with an alien enemy so superior, so ruthless, that it was fight or be wiped out...and the humans could not fight.  They couldn't even give orders to their robots tp reproduce weapons.  The only possibility was to call up and bring back to life a museum exhibit, the submarine Euphrates and its battle-trained crew.  The ship had been sunk a thousand years before and had been preserved to show the decadence of violence --violence which was the only hope against an enemy to whom living space was all-important and human life was only superfluous.   (Has anyone else noticed a major plot fallacy from what we've been given here?)  Trimble was a prolific author of over fifty books -- mostly forgettable westerns and mysteries -- before he published Anthropol, his first science fiction novel:  "There was a double urgency message from the Chief waiting for Vernay, Anthropol's trouble-shooter.  The new assignment was a critical one -- get control of the totalitarian-feminist government on Ujvila -- and do it before the Galactic-Military brought the new-found planet under Federation control their own way -- by slamming in an invasion force and destroying half the planet.  Gal-Mill didn't like Anthropol's slow scientific methods; the natives were afraid on aliens and certainly didn't want Vernay's intervention; and the underground opposition had too much to hide.  So it looked like this mission was going to be one of Verney's hardest. if not his last."  Sounds more than a bit sexist to me, although I suppose a feminist government can be just as corrupt and soul-sapping as any other kind.
• "Alice Kimberly" (Cleo Coyle), The Ghost and Mrs. McClure.  Paranormal cozy mystery, the first in The Haunted Bookshop series.  "Young widow Penelope Thornton-McClure and her old Aunt Sadie are making ends meet by managing a mystery bookshop -- a quaint Rhode Island landmark -- rumored to be haunted.  Pen may not believe in ghosts, but she does believe in good publicity -- like nabbing Timothy Brennan for a book signing.  But soon after the bestselling thriller writer revels a secret about the store's link to a 1940s murder, he keels over dead -- and right in the middle of the store's new Community Events space.  Who gives Mrs. McClure the first clue that it was murder?  The bookstore's full-time ghost -- a PI murdered on the very spot more than fifty years ago.  Is he a figment of Pen's overactive imagination?  Or is the oddly likable fedora-wearing specter the only hope Pen has to solve the crime?  You can bet our everlasting life on it..."
• David Morrell, Shimmer.  Thriller.  "When police officer Dan Page's wife disappears, her trail leads to Rostov, a remote Texas town where unexplained phenomena attract hundreds of spectators each night.  Not merely curious, these onlookers are compelled o reach this tiny community and gaze at the mysterious Rostov Lights.  But more than the faithful are drawn there.  A gunman begins shooting at the lights, screaming, "Go back to hell where you came from!" then turns his rifle on the innocent bystanders.  As more and more people are drawn to the scene of the massacre, the stage is set for even greater bloodshed.  To save his wife, Page must solve the mystery of the Rostov Lights.  In the process, he uncovers a deadly government secret dating back to the First World War.  The lights are mote dangerous than anyone ever imagined, but even more deadly are those who try to exploit forces beyond their control."
• Otto Penzler, editor, The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps.  Doorstop anthology (1144 pages of double column small type) with 52 stories and two novels (Carroll John Daly's The Third Murderer and Frederick Nebel's episodic novel The Crimes of Richmonnd.  (I have this one buried in a box somewhere but I can't find it and I wanted to read Erle Stanley Gardner's "The Monkey Murder," one of two stories I haven't read in a rare ESG collection, The Bird in Hand and Four Other Stories, a 1969 book published by Walter Black (the Detective Book Club publisher) for The Ellery Queen Mystery Club; the other story in The Bird in Hand that I haven't read, "A Tip for Scuttle" is available in the Crippen & Landru ESG collection Hot Cash, Cold Clews, and by the time this is posted, I will also have read that.)  The Penzler book also contains most of the usual pulp detective suspects.  Five bucks for a used copy is a heck of a bargain.
• "John Rackham" (John Phillifent), We. the Venusians, bound with Water of Thought by Fred Saberhagen.  Yes, another Ace SF Double.  Among other works, Britisher Rackham published a gazillion juvenile-ish SF books for the Tit-Bit SF Library in the fifties, and wrote at least three The Man from U.N.C.L.E. novelizations; he also penned a slew of books for the Ace SF Double line.  "Anthony Taylor sat watching the wealthy Borden Harper on his multi-vision screen.  'Is there any more news about the -- the Greenies?' the interviewer was asking.  'None at all,' Harper dropped his voice to a deep sober sincerity.  'We keep on trying.  But I'm afraid we are just going to have to face the unpleasant fact that the greenies are nothing more than human-looking animals...'  Anthony could contain his detestation no longer.  snatching the cushion, he rammed it violently into the speaker grill, wishing he could ram it down Harper's throat.  Harper and the other humans on Venus, milking it of its miraculous beans, using the green-skinned natives to cultivate the crop, because that's all they could be trained to do.  They had no language, no human-style intelligence, no cultural potential, nothing.  Anthony grabbed up a dummy piano -keyboard savagely.  He struck out a crisp-edged series of chords, double handed, up the keyboard.  The notes were sharp. precise sounds.  'Not bad...' he said, aloud. 'For an animal.' "  The Saberhagen was the second novel published by the future best-selling author.  It was revised and expanded twenty years later.  "One explorer had already disappeared on the primitive planet, Kappa.  So the day a second Terrestrial, Jones, ran away after drinking the sacred Kappan water that he had coerced the natives into giving him, the remaining planetologists meant to find out just what was going on.  Questioning the aliens only deepened the mystery.  For they said that what Jones had drunk would enable him to communicate with his animal ancestors.  It was their most precious and sacred possession.  But how could it affect a person never born on Kappa, a person without such 'animal' ancestors?  What had really happened to Jones and the other man -- and what would happen if either of them managed to bring this incredible liquid back to Earth?"
• James Reasoner, Doom of the Dark Delta.  Sword and sorcery novella, the first in the forthcoming Snakehaven series.  ""Washed ashore on a jungle-choked island in the delta of the mouth of the great Jehannamun River, Jorras Trevayle has survived an attack by pirates only to find himself in a desperate race to rescue a beautiful young woman from the sinister plans of an evil sorcerer and save himself from becoming the prey of a Nloka Maccumbo -- one of the giant serpents raised by the inhabitants of this bizarre, perilous land."  If that wasn't enough, the nifty cover art sold me on this one.  
• John Saul, The Unwanted.  Early horror novel from a best-selling author.  "Cassie Winslow is sixteen,  Cassie has just lost her mother in a tragic accident.  Now Cassie, lonely and frightened, has come across the country to live with the father she barely knows and his new family in tiny False Harbor on Cape Cod.  For Cassie, the strange, unsettling dreams that come to her suddenly in the dead of night are merely the beginning.  For very soon, Cassie Winslow will come to know the terrifying powers that are her gift.  And in the village of False Harbor nothing will ever be the same..."  Saul received a lot of flack for making a career of children-in-jeopardy horror novels, but the controversy never hurt his sales.
• John Scalzi, The Last Colony.  Science fiction, an "Old Man's War" novel.  "John Perry, the hero of John Scalzi's debut novel, Old Man's War, has retired with his wife and daughter to one of humanity's many colonies.  It's a good life, but something's...missing.  when John and Jane are asked to lead a new colony world, they jump at the chance to explore the universe once more.  But nothing is as it seems.  Perry and the new colony are pawns in an interstellar game of diplomacy and war between humanity's Colonial Union and a new, seemingly unstoppable alien alliance that has demanded and end to all human colonization.  As these gambits rage above, on the ground Perry struggles to to keep his colonists alive in the face of threats both alien and familiar.  For his family's survival, and everyone else's, Perry must unravel the web of lies, half-truths, and deception spun around him and uncover the colony's shocking true purpose -- lest it become, truly, the last colony of the human race."
• Harry Turtledove and Martin H. Greenberg, editors, The Best Alternative History Stories of the 20th Century.  Fourteen stories not really covering the entire 20th century.  Categorically, t starts with Ward Moore's 1952 "Bring the Jubilee," then jumps to a 1967 Poul Anderson story, then to Jack Chalker's 1979 "Dance Band on the Titanic."  Then  six stories from the 80s and four from the 90s, ending with 2000's "Suppose They Gave a Peace" by Susan Schwartz.  Good stories all, but a pretty self-limiting selection.