I saw this displayed prominently at my library's continuous book sale and once I realized it was a Barlowe piece I'd never seen before I knew I had to snatch it for ¢25. The psychedelic biology of the organism in the foreground is classic Barlowe but the translucent spaceship(?) in the back is interesting in how it highlights Barlowe a little bit out of his element. The rendering of it with the extremely soft highlights reminds me more of Angus McKie. I love the title design as well but unfortunately no designer is credited.
I couldn't believe this was a 38 year old book. Not a crease on it- I don't think it had ever been opened. No idea how it ended up at my library. When I looked it up there were no scans of the cover online that I could find- only a couple photos from ebay- so I knew I had to scan mine.
I don't no know if anyone would else would get this excited for what is probably (based on the back cover summary) a pretty middling and possibly racist ancient aliens novel.
I had to get a scan of the title page as well, I just love the typography.
[Free eBook] Trojan Orbit by Mack Reynolds & Dean Ing [Science Fiction Mystery Thriller]
Trojan Orbit by the late Mack Reynolds, a prolific multi-genre author who was the first to write an officially licensed Star Trek tie-in novel, & Dean Ing is the 4th novel in the Lagrange series of science fiction mystery/espionage thrillers, free for a limited time courtesy of publisher Wildside Press as one of their sporadic weekly giveaways to help promote their Black Cat Mystery Community for vintage pulp mystery/crime thriller reprints.
This was originally published in 1985 by Baen Books and was completed posthumoustly from Reynolds' drafts by Ing, with the approval of his literary estate. The series takes place in a Cold War-influenced future, with case adventures exploring societal issues and political intrigue afflicting a quasi-utopian international co-op space habitat set at the L5 Lagrange point between the Earth and Moon.
This case sees a fledgling U. S. space colony project succumbing to mysterious malfunctions, accidents, and other unfortunate occurrences, with an Earth detective called in to investigate whether the cause is due to rivalry from unfriendly countries, homegrown anti-technology sabotage, or something even more sinister.
Offered worldwide through April 1st (probably), available DRM-free directly from the publisher.
Free for a limited time @ the publisher's webstore (DRM-free ePub/mobi/PDF bundle available worldwide; requires account signup with valid email and billing address, but no payment info)
Description
Island One, the U.S.'s first space colony and symbol of an American Renaissance, is in trouble. Low morale, shoddy workmanshpi, unexplained malfunctions, and avoidable accidents have become a way of life, and nobody seems to know why. Is in the Russians? Home-grown anti-tchnologists? Arabs afraid of cheap solar power from Space -- or something even more sinister? Only a detective from Earth can solve the mystery!
It bothered me just a bit that I skipped this book a couple weeks ago. So I went digging.
There are only stories here, and they're both actually pretty good.
...although there's a bit of an issue with the first one. And it's big enough to bother me quite a bit more than all the overt cannibalism and torture and implied background nastiness in the second one.
Briar Patch, Dean Ing
This is the continuation of Cathouse, where Ing flirted heavily with the idea of writing inter-species erotica. This time he goes all in on it, sort of.
Yes, there's a fair bit of sex in the story. Yes the sex is between members of two different species. Or maybe not on that second one. There are people who classify Neanderthals as a Homo Sapiens subspecies. And the focus of the story is more on the adventure and the violence than on the sex.
But I referred to an issue.
I really wish that issue was the relationship between Locklear and Ruth, which is complicated by her telepathy and their mutual distaste for each other's appearances.
No, the issue is that when Locklear starts waking up hominids from stasis in an overt attempt to get laid, his first choice is a twelve year old. A twelve year old that he nicknames 'Lolita'.
And while he doesn't have sex with her, a few of the closing lines are Locklear bragging to his Kzin friends about how hot he thinks Lolita's going to be in a few years.
I'll just say that that particular bit of wrong is so much more striking now that I'm closer to Locklear's age than it was when I first read this and was basically Lolita's age.
The Children's Hour, Jerry Pournelle & S. M. Stirling
Humanity strikes back!
This is a pair with The Asteroid Queen, and leads directly into that story.
Humanity's been at war with the Kzin for forty years or so. Alpha Centauri was conquered. The Kzin staged three invasions of Earth, and each one was more narrowly defeated than the one before it. A military genius among the Kzin is preparing a fourth invasion, and humanity's only hope is to kill him so his plans never leave the drawing board.
So, big adventure. Wartime spy sneakiness. Big explosions. And a truly horrific end for a Kzin governor who has been developed into a surprisingly sympathetic character.
Romance sticks out in this one. And I'm not using romance as a euphemism either, although it is a touch subdued and a bit complicated in the narrative.
Ingrid, one of our two heroes, grew up in the Alpha Centauri system before the Kzin invaded. She narrowly escaped by piloting a ship full of refugees on a decades long trip back to Earth. And once she got there, she almost immediately turned back around for this mission.
For her, thanks to time dilation and stasis and whatever else, it's been no time at all. For the two men who were competing for her love, it's been forty years.
Her getting together with one of those men is a bit of an old man's fantasy about the one that got away. But at the same time, it's an interesting take on a stock romance that usually involves comas or cloning or time travel.
Final thoughts
It was a good read.
But a part of me still thinks that books titled 'Man-Kzin Wars' ought to involve a bunch of fairly directly Man-Kzin war related stories like The Children's Hour, and basically no stories completely unrelated to the wars between Man and Kzin like... well almost every other story in the three Man-Kzin wars books I've reviewed.
Dean Ing’s Ted Quantrill trilogy—1981’s Systemic Shock, 1983’s Single Combat, and 1985’s Wild Country—is an odd relic of Cold War America. Many authors presented us with various versions of Cold Wars Gone Hot, but few took the tack that Dean Ing does in this series.
It’s not just that this is explicitly a sequel to someone else’s book, General Sir John Hackett’s The Third World War. Or that Ing teeters on the edge of inventing the technothriller genre (before Tom Clancy, if one considers The Hunt For Red Octoberthe first technothriller; please feel free to debate genre history in comments). Or even that one of the books features a lovingly depicted Segway, decades before those were invented. Ing brings an … ahem … unusual political sensibility to this trilogy. I believe that’s what has kept this series out of print.
