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.
DSPACE 