FORGOTTEN BOOK: AGENT OF T.E.R.R.A. #2: THE GOLDEN GODDESS GAMBIT

 Agent of T.E.R.R.A. #2:  The Golden Goddess Gambit by "Larry Maddock" (Jack Owen Jardine), 1967

Steve Lewis covered this book this week in a Dairy Review on his blog, calling it a "muddled mess."  George Kelley the looked back to when he first read the book in the 60s and agreed.  Being a connoisseur of muddled messes, I felt it was my duty to check it out. 
And -- yup -- it's a muddled mess.

And yet...

T.E.R.R.A. stands for Temporal entropy Restructure and Repair Agency, a galaxy-wide organization dedicated to maintaining the timelines of various worlds.  Conveniently, its headquarters are located smack-dab in the center of the galaxy, and to hell with the actual physics of that placement.  Hannibal Fortune is one of their free-lance agents, tasked with setting timeline straight whenever there is a glitch -- usually caused by T.E.R.R.A.'s arch enemy, the Empire.  Fortune's partner is a 15-pundalien symbiote named Webley, a telepathic creature who can assume animal shape within its 15-pound limit/.

A T.E.R.R.A. agent has uncovered an archeological find on Crete -- a copper tablet with a proto-Greek inscription that date back to 1509 B.C. -- long before both copper tablets and written language existed.  The tablet proclaimed the glory of a ruler named Kronos.  Further testing showed that the tablet actually dated back 11,000 years earlier, and originated in what would eventually be known as Mu, or Lemuria, the ancient unknown land that had been swallowed by the sea.  For reasons not made very clear -- a "muddled mess," remember? -- Kronos and his would-be empire have the capability of destroying the timeline.  So back into the past go the two agents.

Then comes the backstory.  An awful lot of backstory.  Too much backstory.  Kronos is evidently a time traveler, and he's playing the long game.  He is originally from a planet where humans have an extra-long life, aging about three or four times slower than Earth humans.  Before declaring himself ruler of Manukronis (his name for the island country) he impregnates a young girl who eventually (after a three-year pregnancy!) gives birth to twin daughters.  The elder daughter, Ylni, is slated to become ruler of the land. Ylni poisons the younger twin, because who needs possible competition for rule?  When Kronos finally arrives, he takes over and places Ylni in charge of the temple of Yolarabus, the golden goddess of fertility whom Kronus has invented to replace the sea-god Nodiesop ("Poseidon" spelled backwards; cute, huh?).

The craft Hannibal and Webley use to go back in time is full of all sorts of time-traveling tricks, some of which are gobbledegook-explained because the effects are needed later in the book.  Hannibal also has all sorts of super-charged weapons hidden in his contemporary disguise.  There's palace intrigue, a little bit of humor, and not that much action.  SPOILER:  Manukronis and Kronos are eventually destroyed and the timeline is safe.  Two other major villains are also killed in a very off-handed (and boring) way earlier in the book -- too early, perhaps, and a clog in the pacing.

Yes, the pacing of the book.  It's virtually nonexistent.  What could be decent action sequences are fraught with backstory and exposition.  There's a lot of ancient history between these pages and a rather lame explanation of goddess religions throughout the ages near the end of the book.  For the most part, these are meh.

In more capable hands, Hannibal and Webley could have headlined an interesting and long-running series, rather than just the four books published nearly back to back and never reprinted.  

A muddled mess to be sure, but it harked back to my personal Golden Age of science fiction when I was twelve or thirteen, a time when logic and literary quality meant nothing when compared to derring-do and strange worlds, a time when Captain Future (and later, Cap Kennedy,) would keep me glue to the pages.  Dammit, now I'll probably go and read the other three books in the series.

To give you an idea of what T.E.R.R.A.'s intended audience was, the last page of this Ace paperback edition contains an advertisement for the first nine books in that publisher's campy Man from U.N.C.L.E. series.  If that's your cup of tea, go for it!

Also, a word about the cover artist.  His name was Sergio Leone.  This was the British children's book illustrator and not the more famous Italian director.  This Sergio Leone did the covers for two of the three remaining Agent of T.E.R.R.A. books.

The author, Jack Owen Jardine (1931-2009), under the Larry Maddock byline, also wrote three earlier stories about Webley the alien symbiote in 1960.  With his wife, Julia Ann Jardine, he co-wrote two science fiction novels as "Howard Corey."  Under the names "Arthur Farmer" and "Alan Hunter" ("Hunter" may have been a house name; it was used several times for Bee-Line Books) he published a couple of science fiction sex novels in the 60s.  His writing can be seen as a somewhat pleasant time-passer.