Interstellar Empire by John Brunner

This is number 4 in the Venture SF series, and it’s not too bad. It’s 50s-style space opera by one of its top producers.

It contains 3 pieces; 2 short novels and a novella — The Altar on Asconel, The Man from the Big Dark (a novella at 40 pages) and The Wanton of Argus. The stories are set in a galactic empire centred on Argus. All are lean, straightforward adventure stories, with no pretences and a sensible economy of description.

Interesting also is the foreword, in which Brunner discusses the galactic history that might lead to the coexistence of swords and spaceships.

Wanton of Argus is replete with mysterious figures, beautiful women, swordsmen, robots in disguise, you name it, before it ends in a kind of confrontation between two mighty wills  — the kind of ending that renders much of what went before superfluous. A bit like a story in which much happens and then a comet wipes out the Earth anyway. Well, not quite as extreme as that, but that’s the somewhat unsatisfactory sense it gives. It is most interesting because it is a very early work — as a piece of fiction, it’s pretty clearly little more than grist for the publishing mill of the time. Brunner wrote it when he was 17, and sold it and got paid for it, although the buyer slapped the terrible title on it that is completely unreflective of the content.  It was republished as The Space-Time Juggler.

The other stories are better constructed, as you’d expect, especially Asconel, but nothing here is a major work, and there’s really no reason to read the book unless you’re interested in Brunner or a fan of SF from the 50s.

The omnibus is a good read if you like freewheeling, unselfconscious space opera in the 50s style. Very much not like Brunner’s major novels of the late sixties and early seventies. More like this one.

 

Space opera

sf Impulse: A random review of nothing you’ll read

sf Impulse Vol 1 No 7

Roberts & Vinter, 1966

160 pages

This is the seventh issue of Impulse/sf Impulse, the successor magazine to Science Fantasy. It’s the last issue edited by Kyril Bonfiglioli, and in that way possibly marks the beginning of the end — not many more were to come.

The cover of sf Impulse volume 1 number 7. Quite a good cover, I think.

If this is anything to go by, it’s not hard to see why.

It contains 70 pages of Make Room, Make Room!, Harry Harrison’s overpopulation novel, the one that led to the movie Soylent Green, and that is far and away the best thing in it. Most of the rest is taken up by ‘The Rig’, a vaguely interesting but very silly story by Chris Boyce. The rest is better left unnamed. It’s not even an interesting cultural artefact, because there aren’t any funky old adverts or naff but nifty examples of internal art. The cover is probably the second best thing about it.

You’ll never see a copy of it anyway, but this is really only for the completist collector or someone who weirdly has the other parts of the serial. It cost me 50¢ as a curiosity many years ago. I finally got around to reading it and I should have waited longer.

Strange highways.