In the 1970s English publisher Robert Hale put out a series of smallish-format hard cover SF novels aimed at libraries. They were not all bad — World of Shadows by Australia’s Lee Harding certainly aimed to be something interesting — but they were not typically good. I believe they may have been constrained to all be the same 192 page length, for example, to keep costs down.
Philip High had been publishing novels and short fiction for 20 years when he wrote small cluster of books for Hale. This is one of them. When Venture SF started up in the 80s, their mission was to put out SF adventure stories, and they were to be novels and to have not been published in the UK in paperback before. Hence, the series consists of old UK hardback titles that never made it into paperback (like this one), US fiction had not yet had a UK paperback edition, and a few omnibuses, in which they could combine things that had been out in paperback, on the grounds that the omnibus was new. By volume 3 they had already published a collection of stories, albeit as a kind of fixup. The best of them are good examples of the kind — early works by Roger MacBride Allen, for example. The worst of them … are not good. But, then, they can’t all be gems.
This book begins with a premise that could have been well-suited to a successful action-adventure story in a Deathworld kind of way — a jaded, decadent galactic empire has discovered Earth and set it aside as a game hunting reserve (Predator, anyone?). Hence the title. One could imagine it being one of those 1950s-type US stories in which humans turn out to be superior to the aliens because we can whistle, or something. In such a story, the alien overlords get more than they expected when they tangle with us ingenious Earthfolk, and we end up running their empire.
There’s a bit of that here, but the superscience silliness and unlikeliness of almost all the action, the complete lack of characterisation and humour and the stiffness of much of the dialogue combine to make the story quite a slog after the somewhat intriguing set-up is complete. The further you get into the story, the worse it gets. The last few pages went by slowly, even though the book is only 170 pages long.
I think there is a kind of attempt at the sort of story in which the scope keeps widening. You think it’s about Earth — no, it’s about a local confederation of worlds. No, it’s about the whole galaxy … no! It’s about the whole universe … no! … and so on.
High clearly had plenty of ideas. The book amply demonstrates that ideas are one thing, an interesting narrative peopled with interesting people quite another.
Also, and not the author’s fault, the book is woefully badly produced. Quite a lot of explicative paragraphs end with closing quote marks, as if the typesetter got to the end and thought it was dialogue (perhaps they had tried to avoid actually reading the text). I noticed ‘in’ instead of ‘it’ (or the converse) now and again, and a few other things.
The Venture SF series begins rather promisingly with We All Died at Breakaway Station, and the next book is the competent military space adventure of Hammer’s Slammers, but if the series editors wanted punters to ‘start collecting them now’ as the little blurb inside the front cover suggests, they ought to have placed this story a little later in the series.
Maybe Philip High was a mate of theirs.
DSPACE 