James Dick

Author: dickj001

Laser Books Review 19
19. The Unknown Shore by Donald Malcolm

In the early 2010s, I went on a camping trip to Maritime Canada with my brother and father. It was a great trip. We saw whales, slept in the basement of a dilapidated (and possibly haunted) Red Bay schoolhouse, and discovered a rare species of mooseberry cheesecake.

We also drove the Trans-Labrador Highway.

In Happy Valley-Goose Bay, there is a map which shows the roads and towns of Labrador in white, and unsettled land in black. When you look at it, you see a ragged white ring around a huge black void. Contemplating that map, the realization slowly dawns on you that this part of Canada is almost totally devoid of civilization.

And then you squint, and notice a single thread that runs through the middle of that blackness, linking East with West.

That is the Trans-Labrador Highway, 1100 kilometres long… and at the time we drove it, two-thirds of that distance was unpaved gravel.

Imagine sitting in a Toyota Sienna, fully laden with camping equipment, bouncing up and down at 50kph for two days, wondering which will eventually triumph: efficient Japanese engineering, or the endless Canadian wilderness.

Funny thing about Siennas: they’re built for city driving, which means their tires have a safety bolt that can only be unscrewed by a special socket wrench that comes with the car. Did you know that? Well, we didn’t.

So when we blew a tire halfway down the Trans-Lab, we accidentally sheared that safety bolt off trying to replace the blowout.

We found ourselves stranded in one of the most sparsely populated regions on Earth, in high blackfly season, with night falling and the nearest help over 400km away. Fortunately, God preserves idiots, and He sent us a road crew who were retiring for the night who promised to bring back an acetylene torch in the morning to burn the safety bolt off our car.

All we had to do was survive the night.

We camped in a wet ditch, rain pattering down, water levels rising, surrounded by hungry black bears, our tent humming with swarms of the most relentless blackflies we’d ever seen, just hoping we could survive until daybreak, each of us wondering whether the bears or the bugs would get us first. Three men went into the tent, three came out, bit to shit and trench-footed. I’ll never leave home with a safety bolt on again.

Anyway… *sips whiskey* … we drove the Trans-Lab.

And it was almost as bad as the trip depicted in The Unknown Shore.

The bio for Donald Malcolm (far-right in the picture above) at the front of the book says this:

Donald Malcolm is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and a member of the British Interplanetary Society. He began his writing career in 1955 with astronomical and astronautical articles in New Worlds, Nebula, and Astounding and contributions to the Scottish national and local press. He continued to write for New Worlds from 1957 until 1964, stories such as “The Pathfinders,” “The House of Lights” and “Beyond the Reach of Storms.” The latter story was anthologized in a Penguin collection and published in Spain. Mr. Malcolm was one of three British writers put under the microscope by Brian Aldiss in SF Horizons (1965). His stories have also appeared in various anthologies, such as Out of This World and New Writings in SF.

Mr. Malcolm is married. He and his wife Rita live in Paisley, Scotland, with their two sons.

The Unknown Shore is his first LASER BOOK.

So, Malcolm’s bio stands out to me for a number of reasons.

First of all, he’s Scottish. Being of partial Scottish descent myself, this is delightful. “They may take our lives, but they’ll never take…” and so on and so forth. It shows that Roger Elwood has cast a wider net for his authors than just North America.

Second, Malcolm seems to have a more traditional career path compared to our other Laser Books authors. If you’ll recall, most of the authors published in Laser Books are noted for two things:
- They are known as major figures in fan circles, particularly SFF conventions
- They went on to write mostly tie-in fiction for Star Trek and Wars.
Malcolm doesn’t have a ton of writing to his name, but certainly a solid body of work. I note that on his Wikipedia page one of his earliest articles was titled “A Tenth Planet?”

Would You Like to Know More?

Uranus

Neptune

There is no real planet beyond the orbit of Neptune.

This isn’t a slight against Pluto, which I lovingly used as a setting in my short story, “I Felt a Star Die Today”, I’m just stating a fact. Neptune itself was originally discovered because of calculation errors in Uranus‘s orbit which couldn’t be resolved. Something was clearly tugging on Uranus, exerting gravitational influence on it, and so astronomers went looking for the cause, and found Neptune.

Later on, the U.S. Naval Observatory reported a similar phenomenon with Neptune, and so astronomers said, “Oh, we’ve done this dance before. Let’s find another planet!”

But no celestial body was ever found that was big enough to cause these disturbances.

It was eventually discovered that the gearbox in the telescope at the U.S. Naval Observatory had been taken apart for repairs, and not properly calibrated once reassembled. Once it was, the discrepancy disappeared.

And yet despite this, the media still stokes the fires of the “Missing Planet” hypothesis.

With his pedigree as a writer of science fact, I’m curious to see his take on science fiction.

Alright, Kelly, take it away!

Cover

Ach, take it away!

Seriously, we haven’t seen crap like this since Walls Within Walls. This is really beneath you, man.

I guess the volcano’s pretty good, and so is the portrait of Rangone, the protagonist, but the drab olive colours and utterly flat background really brings the work down.

In fact aside from the volcano, the only splash of real colour comes from Ingrid Immelmann’s bra. I can’t say much against her–she’s missing three limbs and still is prettier than I’ll ever be–but my God, Kelly, why’d you dress her up in just a bra? She’s a trained architect and systems engineer for goodness’ sake…

I might forgive the scantily-clad woman if the overall composition of the cover was better, but everything’s so… bland.

Ugh, okay, let’s see if Marketing Guy can cleanse my palate.

Blurb

Fear swept through the crippled spaceship. The 200 men and women aboard realized they were trapped. To Rangone, chief medical officer, sudden death seemed preferable to the future they faced. Drifting aimlessly in the void outside the galaxy, they were on a journey to nowhere that would last forever! In a tense drama, Donald Malcolm brings to life the hopes and fears, the nobility and the meanness of people under the pressure of The Unknown Shore.

As stated last time… I really like this blurb. Tales of castaways and ships lost at sea are meat and drink to writers and readers alike, and the delight only increases when these tales are flung into the depths of space.

Stories of sailors being shipwrecked on unknown shores on Earth don’t always age well: with the benefit of modern archaeology and anthropology, we can see that a lot of these stories boil down to stupid mistakes, ecological damage, and the exploitation of whatever indigenous peoples inhabit that shore.

But in SF, the rules are different. You can create any adversary, natural or otherwise, for your heroes to face without worrying about rewriting history.

Unless your intent is to rewrite history, in which case we need to have a very different conversation.

Would You Like to Know More?

Two of my favourite spaceborne stories of shipwrecks, in any medium, are Apollo 13 (1995) and The Alters (2025).

Apollo 13 is a film which tells the true story of the titular moon mission from 1970. Shortly after departing Earth, an explosion crippled the spacecraft and the three astronauts aboard had to use their wits to keep themselves and their ship alive until they could get home.

The Alters is a video game wherein you play as Jan Dolski, the sole survivor of a crash landing on a planet orbiting a giant killer star. Your one hope of survival–and the survival of humanity–is to create a number of “Alters”, versions of Jan programmed with different life experiences (doctor, scientist, engineer, security guard), work with them, and keep them happy until you all get home.

Science fiction (and fact) provides the perfect backdrop for all manner of shipwreck adventures.

Well, not much more to say except… bring on the story!

Story

“This is no time for caution.” — Brandt, The Unknown Shore, (1976)

“Cooper, this is no time for caution.” — CASE, Interstellar (2014)

What are the odds that two stories about two insterstellar voyages gone wrong, created thirty-eight years apart, would have the same quote in them?

Either way, gives me an excuse to play this banger while I tell you about the novel.

Earth is at war with an Enemy we have never once seen in the flesh, but from the opening chapter, I gather we’re not winning.

Carlo Rangone, our protagonist, is Surgeon-Commander aboard a hospital ship. This excited me because we typically don’t see hospital ships depicted in fiction, despite being an essential wartime service since at least 1670.

Hospital ships have served multiple purposes throughout history, from carrying casualties away from a theatre of war to resupplying armies with medicine to providing a quarantine environment for plague victims.

In fact the origin of the word “quarantine” itself is nautical: ships moored off Venetian-ruled Dubrovnik were required to stand off for 40 days, “quaranta giorni“, before docking at the city, to ensure the disease could burn itself out in a closed environment.

Those of us living in the Post-COVID world are all too familiar with stories of cruise ships being denied landfall because of an outbreak of COVID or Hantavirus, and being required to remain at sea until proper patient intake can be established.

The Unknown Shore begins with our protagonist overseeing the loading of a hospital ship in an attempt to escape their Enemy. Rangone and his team are faced with a dilemma: the hospital ship only has capacity for 75 people, but there’s 194 on the station they need to evacuate.

Sam Templeton lays it out for everyone:

“We have two alternatives. One: a selection can be made and the most seriously wounded left behind…

“Two: by using laser surgery, Commander Rangone and his assistant, Major Donlevy, can remove the arms and legs of some of the patients, the number to be determined by the Commandant. This will allow the storage of the living trunks in refrigeration tanks and enable everyone to be evacuated. At one of the home hospitals, regeneration can be undertaken using the serum.”

— The Unknown Shore, pg 8-9

Would You Like to Know More?

As cruel as this sounds, there are many historical precedents for military decisions just like this.

Bonaparte Before the Sphinx by Jean-Léon Gérôme

The one that springs quickest to my mind is Napoleon Bonaparte‘s retreat from Jaffa in 1799. Pursued by enemy forces, and dealing with an outbreak of bubonic plague, Napoleon made the decision to euthanize between 15 and 50 of his sickest men using opium overdoses.

This was not a decision he made lightly; Napoleon knew that his men would be tortured to death if they fell into the Ottomans‘ hands, and if the plague had a chance to spread, his entire army could be laid waste. His opponents, both then and now, used this incident against him in the press, but the terrible truth is, such decisions are commonplace for soldiers and doctors in any period in history, and doubtless will continue to be so far into the future.

These scenes are handled with a great amount of gravity, and Rangone’s inner turmoil–the feeling that he has gone from doctor to butcher–is palpable.

Indeed, every moral crisis in the book is depicted with both brutality and depth. The question the book poses is, “How do you maintain your humanity under the harshest of survival conditions?”

These people risk their lives to give all their patients a fighting chance at life. They cannot be called inhuman–the inhuman thing would’ve been to abandon their patients and escape as soon as they could. Instead, they stayed till the last minute, undertaking the most painful actions–knowing they wouldn’t be thanked, knowing they might be hated–in the name of preserving life.

We in the 21st century can moralize all we want, but right now there are similar stories playing out in Ukraine, Gaza, and anywhere else you have a clash between those who respect life, and those who do not.

The hospital ship escapes, but is damaged by an Enemy missile, and its FTL jump sends it careering 25,000 lightyears beyond the edge of the Milky Way. The crew manages to claw their way back into the galaxy and find refuge on a harsh world covered in glaciers and volcanoes before their ship breaks down completely.

Slowly, they all come to the realization that they will never see home again.

What struck me most about the book is that there’s no traditional climax. It’s just one life-threatening situation after another. Malcolm throws problem after problem at his characters–and the reader–until we all grow weary and exhausted.

That’s not a criticism, by the way; if you watch any interviews with Ukrainians these days, many will say that the Russian artillery doesn’t even frighten them anymore. They’re just tired.

Malcolm depicts that exhaustion as if he’s lived it himself. The constant push-pull of hope being raised, followed by sudden loss of life, is uncomfortably well-written.

Also, kudos to Malcolm for understanding that one of the greatest threats to a population landing on a new landmass, be it a continent or a planet, would not be the flora, fauna, or even the environment, but microbes.

There’s a brilliant and horrifying section of the book which depicts two marines who contract a virus from bird scratches. The virus overstimulates the human stomach, causing it to produce excess acid. At first this manifests as increased hunger, but eventually turns to excruciating pain as the stomach dissolves its own lining and spills acid onto the organs surrounding it.

It’s a sobering example of how one can survive shipwrecks, volcanoes, and animal attacks with barely a scratch, only to be killed in a most gruesome way by an enemy too small to see.

The novel ends on a truly heartbreaking note: after going to superhuman lengths to save the amputees in cryo-sleep, sudden volcanic activity forces the soldiers and physicians to abandon the landing site with only a small number of the amputees reawakened. Most of the sleepers are killed when an earthquake swallows the ship.

The closing lines of the book drive the finality of this moment home like a coffin nail:

For there is no returning

to enter that beloved door;

Our hearts have stilled their wandering

we have found the unknown shore.

— Durbin, pg 190

Conclusions and Recommendations

My Goodreads Review

While this story delivers some interesting moral quandaries, an intriguing setup, and some truly tense sequences, there is still too much of the “Golden Age” fluff about the characters to make it more than a 3 out of 5 for me. If it had focused more on its protagonist and not wasted precious pages on supernumeraries, it might have been stronger. It’s a solid effort from Laser Books newcomer Donald Malcolm.

I will add here that this story had a much shorter distance to go if it wanted to be excellent. As I work through editing my novel, Seekers of the Fallen Stars, I’m relearning the importance of interiority in characters. “Showing their souls.” That’s what this book needed.

It needed to not waste its precious page space on characters besides Rangone, and show us this doctor’s troubled inner thoughts.

Even so, I was glad to have read it, and more of this book will stick with me than other entries in the series. It’s just a shame it missed the mark of excellence by so narrow a margin.

Who’s Next?

Juanita Coulson, authoress of Laser Book 11. Unto the Last Generation, makes her second entry in the series with Space Trap. As you’ll recall from that review, I deeply enjoyed Last Generation and had a lot to say about the reproductive pathology in that book.

Let’s blurb it and see what we’ve got!

Blurb

Planet NE 592 wasn’t due for Secondary Survey for another ten years. So why, Ken wondered, were they heading there now? Then on his screen he saw the disembodied face of a girl with jewel-like skin and felt, rather that heard, her plea: “Go Back.” But they couldn’t go back. Against their will, they were drawn into a crash landing on NE 592. They were trapped – with no means of escape. And NE 592 was not the uninhabited planet they had been led to believe it was!

*Sigh*

Another crash landing on another alien planet? That makes three of those in this series so far…

You know most of the universe is empty, right? The odds of you crashing anywhere are infinitesimal compared to the probability you’d just drift on for eternity.

Well, I’ll give Juanita the benefit of the doubt. So far the female writers in this series are batting .1000, but I’m a bit nervous. Gordon Eklund wrote the spectacular Serving in Time, then promptly shat the bed with Falling Toward Forever.

I guess one could say… only Time will tell.
July 22, 2026
Laser Books Review 18

18. Legacy by J.F. Bone

It’s become a habit of these reviews to choose a theme for each Laser Book motivated by the content of said book. F’rinstance, we had Star Wars for Seeklight, time travel for Serving in Time, and Mad Max: Fury Road for The Black Roads. I was about to do the same for Legacy, but then I realized… let’s hold off on that. Keep the memes in reserve until we reach Story.

We’ll do this methodically, analyzing the cover and blurb, and I want you to try and guess the genre and content of this novel before I reveal it to you in the final segment. We’re gonna have fun.

Trust me.

Lettuce begin.

Reading Jesse Franklin Bone’s biography brought a smile to my face. Take a look:

(1916-2006) US veterinarian, in the US Veterinary Corps for many years until 1976; subsequently a professor of veterinary medicine and author who began publishing sf with “Survival Type” in Galaxy for March 1957. His first sf novel, The Lani People (1962), is his most memorable, perhaps especially for the guilty and/or atavistic pleasures afforded male readers through his depiction of the Alien Lani, human-like females only happy when naked and when pleasing males; in the end, his account of the costs to this folk of human exploitation is graphically related. Later works, including three contributions to Roger Elwood’s Laser Books imprint, are more routine.

Much of Bone’s short fiction – thirty-odd stories in all – remains uncollected, though several have been released as individual ebooks [see Checklist below]. His most-anthologized tale is “Triggerman” (December 1958 Analog), in which World War Three is narrowly averted after the destruction of Washington by, as it emerges, a meteor impact. The posthumous collection Jesse F. Bone Resurrected (omni 2011) assembles eight previously reissued in ebook form, not including “Triggerman”; the selection seems to have been determined by convenience – availability as Project Gutenberg ebooks – rather than merit. Further ebooks have followed.

— SF Encyclopedia

Galaxy was a flagship science fiction magazine, and the sole issue I’ve read from April 1965 has much to recommend it. I was thrilled to see his most notable work appear in Analog, my own personal favourite.

But what isn’t mentioned in this bio, but which appears on Bone’s Goodreads bio, is that Bone returned from his tour of duty in Vietnam in 1976, the very year that Legacy was published by Laser Books.

Put a pin in that: it’s gonna be important later.

Also, it’s positively crazy to me that this guy was born halfway through mankind’s first industrial war, lived through the second, reached middle age at the time of the moon landings, and passed away in the Internet Age. He literally watched the high tech future, which he and the Golden Age authors dreamt up, unfold around him. He saw the best and the worst of our species with his own two eyes.

Put a pin in this too.

Cover

*sniff… sniff…*

Bob? Bob, is that you?!

Sorry, thought I smelt Bob Heinlein’s aftershave again. Haven’t caught a whiff since Seeds of Change.

Nor has Kelly Freas delivered a cover this whimsical since Renegades of Time. I feel like I’m on the verge of a whimsy overdose. The grapefruit planet, the city-sized spaceship, the nebular backdrop, the… the lady in the portrait.

Listen, I don’t want to say too much about her yet. Suffice to say, she’s the hero’s love interest.

I do really like it though. I’ve got a soft spot for Golden Age SF covers (if not necessarily what lies beneath them). It’s the kind of cover that promises high adventure against a soft sci-fi backdrop. Really nice work.

Let’s take a walk round the block and see what Marketing Guy has cooked up.

Ugh… my OCD brain just hates the fact my scanner nicked the first letter of each line. That ain’t badass, that’s bad asset procurement. *beats breast* Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Anyway, here’s what it says.

Sam Williams is a fighter, but fate has dealt him a bad hand. Marooned on the bleak world of Arthe because of a computer error, he joins the local police force… and is soon fighting for his life. The enemy? The drug that drives men mad, the dreaded Tonocaine! In a harrowing, action-packed adventure, Williams whirls across the strange, forbidding planet as he trails a madman who is using the drug to satisfy his own lust for power. But the madman is chasing him, too!

Hmm, okay, okay, bit of darkness in this here high adventure tale. Getting a touch of John Carter perhaps.

Although, the talk of drugs makes me a little nervous. In the 1970s, the Drug War was climbing toward the zenith of its violence, and anti-drug rhetoric was used to excuse arrests made on the basis of racism toward minorities and apathy toward the sick.

Consequently, science fiction tales frequently pushed the same narrative: addicts are not people, minorities peddle poison, and violence toward both is the only answer.

Would You Like to Know More?

Carver: Girl, you can’t even call this shit a war.

Herc: Why not?

Carver: Wars end.

— The Wire, Season 1 Episode 1, “The Target”

The War on Drugs is a colossal failure and has destroyed more lives than it has saved. It has helped to entrench xenophobia in the countries who participate in it and estrange ordinary folk from people they should see as neighbours and family who need help.

The only proven way to reduce or eliminate drug use is to reduce or eliminate the demand for it. Healthcare, social programs, safe injection sites, decriminalization of substances, and education (not propaganda) about the nature of narcotics are the true weapons with which successful democracies should be fighting drug abuse.

This video from Kurzgesagt–In a Nutshell is an excellent primer for how a country can address addiction and recovery; I encourage you to do your own research as well.

So, I think we can guess what kind of story Legacy is, right? A fish-out-of-water tale of high stakes adventure, fate of a civilization on the line, and a beautiful alien queen for our hero to chase, all with a fine dusting of topical subjects. Are we in agreement?

Good.

Glad we’re all on the same page.

Story

Legacy is a hardboiled detective novel and that bejeweled woman is a nurse in a walk-in clinic.

Me too, Lieutenant, me too.

Let’s have a slow-clap for Kelly Freas and Marketing Guy. They really pulled the wool over my eyes.

The entire book jacket is a red herring.

But is the story itself any good? Well, how shall I put this…

… it’s great!

Not a word of a lie, I couldn’t put this book down. The very first page establishes Bone’s talent as a writer of good science fiction prose, and that continues for almost the entire novel.

Protagonist Sam Williams ranks up there with Catherine Boucher in terms of how likeable he is. He’s a short-fused hothead who’s quick to resort to violence, but he never raises a hand to those who don’t deserve it. His temper is reserved for those who are indecent to their fellow human beings.

A humanitarian to the core, Sam renders medical aid to anyone who needs it, regardless of their social standing or race. This makes him stand out in a society where racism and prejudicial treatment is the order of the day. He’s a cop on a police force whose mantra might rightly be “enforce and subjugate” rather than “protect and serve”. He despises corruption and narrow-mindedness.

In any other Laser Book, Sam could’ve been an insufferable, holier-than-thou dickhead who makes you want to rip the book apart, but Bone strikes a healthy balance between Sam’s faults and virtues: just when Sam starts getting on your nerves, he goes and does something absolutely noble, heroic, and downright decent.

Sam is a veteran of the Gakan War, a conflict which saw the first use of a drug called tonocaine. It’s a fungus-derivative which launches the user into a state of subjective, dreamlike reality. They become totally dissociated and filled with bliss, and there’s a disconnect between what they perceive and what their body actually does.

The Gakan, whom Sam calls “Geeks”–a racial epithet uncomfortably close to a real-world one used for the Vietnamese– employed tonocaine as a battlefield bioweapon, spraying enemy battalions with it to cripple their combat effectiveness. And the highly addictive nature of the drug means that a person is hooked after two or three exposures. If they stop receiving the drug, they die.

Sam is honourably discharged due to a battlefield injury and boards a transport for home, but a clerical error spits him out on the planet Arthe instead of Earth. Arthe is in the grip of a tonocaine epidemic, and rather than leave, Sam opts to stay and join the local police force. His experience with tonocaine makes him the perfect man to investigate, so Inspector Lantham gives him the remit of undercover agent to look for the source of the narcotic.

Here is where Sam really starts to grow on you: he disarms a fellow officer who is beating up a tonocaine victim, speaks out against his partner’s abuse of authority, and saves a woman from being assaulted by the mayor’s nephew. After arriving in Dunkelburg *snicker*, he opens a walk-in-clinic for lower-income families and charges much lower rates than the nearby hospital. He hires staff from the local community and teaches them basic healthcare.

In his treatment of tonocaine victims, he uses narcosine, which weans them off the tonocaine, but which also acts as a truth serum. So, during treatment, he gently questions his patients and gathers information on the source of the tonocaine.

Narcosine? Narc? Get it?

I really loved this plot point because, on the one hand, it feels unethical, but on the other, tonocaine really is the greater evil in this city, and Sam draws no distinction between his role as a cop and his role as a doctor: both creeds demand he put the good of the city over his own moral comfort.

It’s an excellent moral quandary for the protagonist: the patients are going to have to be treated no matter what, so is it right to get some information out of them while they’re under the influence of a drug, knowing that whatever they say may save their lives, and those of others, somewhere down the road?

And no matter what, Sam’s patients always leave his clinic clean of tonocaine and healed of all physical injury, often for no charge. Sam wants to do right by them, even if he sometimes uses them for information or camouflage.

His equitable treatment of the denizens of Dunkelburg has a massive payoff at the end of the story when he uses the mutual trust he’s built with them to avert a riot that could result in a military siege, while simultaneously arresting the pushers of tonocaine.

Reminds of a quote from May Sarton:

“One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.”

This book exemplifies that.

Conclusions and Recommendations

So, the first 100 pages are rock solid. Nothing to say about those. But there is a point in the middle where Sam and his buddy Riker–

Joe Riker, not Will Riker!

Anyway, they go underground and find this sci-fi disco ball that lets them manipulate gravity and energy. It’s The Power of an ancient civilization called the Shambra.

To be fair, this is hinted at earlier in the story, but the focus is never put squarely on this archaeological history, so it feels out of left field. The Power is the reason for the tonocaine epidemic. Inspector Lantham, who’s been stationed on Arthe for over a century, has heard tales of a device that acts like God’s Swiss Army Knife and wants it for himself. So he’s introduced tonocaine into the civilian population to destabilize it and create a pretext to exterminate the locals.

Would You Like to Know More?

This is similar to the way Britain introduced opium to China in order to reset the economy.

Trade with the Qing Dynasty was arranged so that most of the profits flowed to China. Opium was introduced to artificially create a demand for a good which Britain could export in vast quantities.

Textiles and capital were shipped to India, where opium was made from vast fields. The opium was then shipped to China, and through compradors and smugglers, sold for silver; the silver was used to purchase tea and other goods which were shipped back to Europe.

Millions of people became hooked on opium solely for the purpose of balancing Europe’s books.

In Legacy, as in history, drugs were used as a tool of conquest.

The end result is that, for a couple dozen pages, the novel becomes a Conan story.

But this isn’t a deal-breaker. It’s very clear Bone knows his stuff, and I wonder how much of Sam’s psychological makeup and life experiences were drawn from Bone’s own time in Vietnam.

For the umpteenth time, I can’t help but think what the author would do differently were he not constrained by the format of the Laser Books. I should just put this on a plaque and show it during each review.

My Goodreads Review

A gripping hardboiled detective story set against the backdrop of a futuristic narcotic epidemic. J.F. Bone’s protagonist, Sam Williams, is easy to root for, and likeable despite his faults. Barring a couple of sour notes in the midpoint of the tale, this is an easy recommendation for me: a rare story which treats victims of drugs with compassion, emphasizes the importance of trust and humanity in police work, and reminds us that when it comes to fixing the blame for Drug Wars, we must look not just to the Cartels and Narcos, but our own Senators and law enforcement entities. I recommend this Laser Book

I give this book four stars out of five.

Me too, Pablo, me too.

That’s case closed for Legacy, and we move on to number 19 in the Laser Books. Who can it be, now?

Who’s Next?

Is anyone else getting that low-poly feeling all of a sudden, or is it just me?

Blurb

Fear swept through the crippled Spaceship. The 200 men and women aboard realized they were trapped. To Rangone, chief medical officer, sudden death seemed preferable to the future they faced. Drifting aimlessly in the void outside the galaxy, they were on a journey to nowhere that would last forever! In a tense drama, Donald Malcolm brings to life the hopes and fears, the nobility and the meanness of people under the pressure of The Unknown Shore.

… you know what? I’m excited.

And I think there’s only one way to end this review.

July 1, 2026
Laser Books Review 17
17. The Black Roads by J.L. Hensley

… when you get to queue up some Mad Max memes for a review.

Today we’re gonna be taking a look at Blackrooms.

Sorry, The Back Roads.

Argh! Sorry. Look, it’s been a phonetically-challenging week. I just watched Backrooms with my girlfriend L. and now my tongue is in knots.

Get your minds outta the gutters, you filthy animals.

Would You Like to Know More?

What a breath of fresh air this film was!

As YouTubers break into the motion picture business, we’ve begun to see an energy, passion, and skill level absent from Hollywood films for over a decade. The phenomenon, started with Markiplier‘s Iron Lung, and now reaching a fever pitch with Backrooms and Obsession, is finally showing Hollywood that the revitalization of the stagnant cinema industry lies not with tired old directors succumbing to their own egos, but with wide-eyed youth belonging to the internet generation.

Don’t believe me? Then look at the numbers. All these films, made on what Hollywood would consider a shoestring budget, made back twelve to three-hundred-and-eighty-two times their budget:

Iron Lung

Budget: ~$5 million

Box Office: $60 million, briefly unseating Sam Raimi‘s Send Help as #1 Movie in America

Backrooms

Budget: $10 million

Box Office: $262 million (at time of writing)

Obsession

Budget: $750,000

Box Office: $287 million (at time of writing)

Let’s try this again.

This week on the Laser Books, we’re going to be taking a look at The Black Roads by J.L. Hensley.

Joe Hensley is quite an interesting character. According to his Goodreads bio:

Joseph Louis “Joe L.” Hensley (March 19, 1926 – August 27, 2007) was a lawyer, prosecuting attorney, member of the Indiana General Assembly, circuit court judge, science fiction fan, and writer of science fiction and mysteries. He was a long-time resident of Madison, Indiana and died there of complications of leukemia.

Upon further investigation, it turns out Hensley actually spent most of his life in legal circles, primarily as a judge in various courts. This is a fascinating background for an author of fantasy and science fiction to have. Crime and punishment is such a specific–and revealing–lens through which to view society, because codes of conduct and methods of justice tell you what a society holds sacred.

So, I’m eager to see what Joe’s take on a dystopian America in The Black Roads is.

But first… the court recognizes the Hon. Kelly Freas.

Cover

Gyatt damn, Kelly! This might be a contender for my favourite cover thus far. The colour and composition… wow!

Okay, let’s break it down.

Right away, the big fireball in the centre is where the eye goes first. If I had to guess, this is from one of the early scenes in the book where Jackman (the man in the portrait) sends a youth in an elecar spinning out into a fiery wreck. Kelly has drawn this thing like a meteorite streaking to earth, and the way he’s sculpted those… towers? antennae? pylons? … around the trailing flames is such an imaginative stroke.

Jackman is drawn with some incredible detail as well. The subtle sheen on the gold trim of his hat, the manic light in his eyes, the sneer. You know right away this guy ain’t the hero of the story.

By far the best aspect of this cover is the use of colour. Aside from Jackman’s portrait and the title, there’s no primaries; every shade is a drab, muted version of its base colour. Reds become maroon, greens and blues become teal. It makes my brain draw comparisons to mould sprouting on food, or flesh inflamed with blood poisoning.

This is a world that’s well past its Sell-By date.

Once again, Kelly is doing the heavy lifting, but lets see what Marketing Guy has going on.

Blurb

Sam Church is a trained killer, a member of the infamous Red Roadmen organization. In the bizarre world of this future America, the Roadmen’s word is law; to incur their displeasure is death. But Sam Church refuses to kill and is imprisoned and tortured by his peers for his nonconformity. He escapes and, in a terrifying race across the continent, clashes with the Roadmen in a running duel that can only end in death – his own or that of the system of tyranny that reigns on The Black Roads.

Yeah, that’s worth a napalm blast.

You know what? I’m on board. This is pretty slick copy from a guy who normally couldn’t sell a two-cent pencil topper. It’s simple, to-the-point, and teases the thrills to come.

I can’t even make fun of it! The dude actually did his job well! I’d be intrigued, even tempted to buy it.

Detour En-Route

Pump the breaks, everybody… my brain is wrinkling.

Something’s been bugging me for the last hour. Little neurons are firing, connections are being made.

Road warriors…

Duels on the highway…

Hensley…

There’s something… something there… but what? What doth my cognition reacheth for…?

Bonus Fear and Loathing meme.

Oh! I’ve got it! This is like the plot of Harlan Ellison‘s short story, “Along the Scenic Route”, from the collection The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World!

For those who haven’t read it, this story is a laugh-out-loud tale of futuristic road rage with a single, scathing message: those who live by the sword, die by the sword. It tells the tale of George and his wife, Jessica, a couple in a distant future of superfast armed cars trying to take a trip across the blacktop of America. They run afoul of a road-duelist who clips their car, and rather than let it go, George engages in battle with the bastard, despite his wife’s imprecations to just keep driving.

By sheer dumb luck, George pastes the twerp, which marks him as the deadliest road warrior in America–a fact which is instantly made public and broadcast across the country, putting a target on George’s back for every other road warrior out there. He realizes he’s gonna have to fight them all, and never stop fighting. He got lucky once; can he get lucky a thousand more times?

I first read the story in this collection. If you want a wide sample of Harlan’s work, pick up one of his Edgeworks series, published by White Wolf. Originally, there were supposed to be 30 volumes containing every piece of writing Harlan ever put out, but only four were released. Of those four, I recommend the first and the third. They combine some of his best fiction and non-fiction.

These books are hard to find: I’ve only seen one in the wild, and that’s the one above. It was on sale at The Scribe Bookstore on the Danforth in Toronto. My copies of the Edgeworks were purchased through Thriftbooks.

And I think somebody made a mistake because the copy of the above title that I eventually received… is signed.

I shit you not, that is Harlan Ellison’s signature. I checked.

I bought this for $26 CAD, plus $20 shipping. There was no note on the listing, no indication that this was a special, signed copy. I just bought a copy of the book, and it sat on my shelf for four months before I opened it.

And when I did, Harlan’s signature was staring at me.

Signed copies of the Edgeworks sell for anywhere from $250 to $400. This is as unlikely as picking up and cashing in a winning lottery ticket. Whoever made this mistake and sent me this book… thanks!

And now I gotta bring this digression full circle.

There’s another book in the Edgeworks, the Spider Kiss/Stalking the Nightmare combo. The latter of those two is a collection of short stories.

And in that collection is a story called “Visionary”.

And the by-line of that story: “written with Joe L. Hensley”.

That’s my brain right now.

Mind. Blown.

This–this!–is the joy of reading. You discover connections you didn’t even know existed. The world is tied together in the subtlest ways, and feeling part of that web is the whole reason I love books.

I’ve hijacked this post-apocalyptic armada long enough. Let’s get to the story of The Black Roads.

Story

“MEDIOCRE!”

— Immortan Joe, Mad Max: Fury Road

Would You Like to Know More?

Let’s have a moment of silence for the loss of Hugh Keays-Byrne, a truly underrated actor.

While most audiences will know him as the massive and terrifying Immortan Joe in Fury Road, or Toecutter in the original Mad Max, my personal favourite role of his is a brief guest spot on Farscape as the greedy, greasy, gluttonous Grunchlk (pronounced “grun-shlick”).

His appearance on the show was brief, but so memorable and popular that his character was brought back from the dead to appear in Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars.

Immortal indeed.

We’ve had a few let-downs over the course of the Laser Books, but this one really stings. I can so clearly see what this book was trying to be, and even hamstrung by the length of the Laser Books, I think it could’ve worked! It just needed to be bolder.

The story is told without chapter breaks, much like Stephen King‘s Cujo. Reading it feels like taking a drive down one long stretch of barren highway. It kicks off remarkably strong: a Mad Max-style chronology of events talks about the outbreak of WWIII and the collapse of modern America, and how the new government created the Red Roadmen to patrol the highways. This is followed by Sam and Doc evading patrols as they break free of prison.

We’ve seen such lawbringers before, in incarnations like Judge Dredd and the Spectres of Mass Effect: men who are judge, jury, and executioner rolled into one. There’s an almost ritual air to the Red Roadmen: they don red felt caps when they prepare to kill, and observe certain customs around obtaining the right to kill their targets.

These kinds of characters are fascinating to read about because, while they are the justice-bringers of a nation, that justice is shaped by the particular sensibilities of the one wearing the mantle: some prefer a more rigid code, others will find any excuse to skin their smoke wagons and waste some fools.

Jackman is of the latter variety.

A Tale of Two Roadmen

The setup for this story is a classic: two men–partners on “the force”–suddenly find themselves at cross-purposes when one of them has a break with “the code” and decides to challenge the reigning authority. This rankles his partner, who sets out on a mission of vengeance.

When these stories are told well, you have such classic rivalries as Benjamin Sisko and Michael Eddington.

Or Professor X and Magneto.

But in order for the story to work, these rivals have to clash regularly and often. Their worldviews have to slam together with the power of tectonic plates, and we have to see where each man is right, and more importantly, wrong.

Sam and Jackman are perfect mirrors of each other.
- Sam is young; Jackman is old
- Sam has forsworn killing; Jackman revels in it
- Sam has abandoned the System; Jackman clings to it
- Sam voluntarily betrays his codes of belief; Jackman is forced to do it
Jackman in particular is a fun character. He’s an old man in a profession where men do not grow old; that immediately marks him as dangerous. He’s very near retirement age, and he dreads it. He’s so accustomed to holding the power of life and death that, rather than surrender it, he turns upon the very system that made him, killing his own kind, making himself an enemy and choosing the life of a fugitive simply so he has the chance to drive free down the roadways until the clock runs out.

Jackman is the most entertaining kind of villain: the one who loves his work.

So it’s a disappointment, then, when he’s only in the book for about four or five scenes–and he spends only one of those with Sam.

This really pisses me off. Joe Hensley had the makings of a fantastic dual character study, and he squanders it on the same tame bullshit the bulk of the Laser Books is known for. You’d think with his background in law, Joe would take advantage of the opportunity to dissect the concepts of crime and punishment in a seemingly lawless world.

Other discomforts:
- There’s some kind of weird telepathic oracle
- There’s a lack of description of the kinds of communities that exist in the wasteland
- Sam spends an uncomfortable amount of time alone in a cabin shooting “black cannibal tribefolk” who come too close to his hideaway
Conclusions and Recommendations

To make this book truly historic, only a few changes are needed:
- Sam and Jackman need to clash. Repeatedly
- We need an equal share of screen time between Sam and Jackman
- We need these characters to have their morality tested over and over, particularly Sam’s–his vow of non-violence in a world lost to violence is a compelling story beat
- We need more than one roadrage battle scene; Hensley set up this thrilling concept of armed and armoured cars racing down killer highways, and the characters spend 70% of the book walking. There’s only one battle by road in the book.
- We need a proper climax; as it stands, there isn’t one
My Goodreads Review

Don’t bother firing up the Gigahorse and pounding on the Doofwagon for this road chase. What could have been a proto-Mad Max instead feels kind of flat and lifeless. There’s the spark of greatness in this novel, and the promise of a great character clash, but overall the story falls prey to the same tired issues the other mediocre Laser Books do: tired tropes and prescribed writing formulae.

As Harlan Ellison said, you can learn more from a bad film than a good one. The same is true for books. The Black Roads helped me to articulate some storytelling lessons that I can take with me into my own work, which I’m quite excited for. So, I’m glad I read this, but hopefully the next book truly does grab the sun and ride into Valhalla, shiny and chrome.

Who’s Next?

Ooh! Pretty! Blurb me, baby.

Blurb

Sam Williams is a fighter, but fate has dealt him a bad hand. Marooned on the bleak world of Arthe because of a computer error, he joins the local police force… and is soon fighting for his life. The enemy? The drug that drives men mad, the dreaded Tonocaine! In a harrowing, action-packed adventure, Williams whirls across the strange, forbidding planet as he trails a madman who is using the drug to satisfy his own lust for power. But the madman is chasing him, too!

Two protagonists, one after the other, both named Sam. Do I need to start keeping a tally? I’ll see you guys for the next review…

… huh…

… I feel like I’m forgetting something…

Ah! Yes.
June 17, 2026
Laser Books Review 16
16. Kane’s Odyssey by Jeff Clinton

TRANSCRIPT of Bradbury v. Bickham

Madame Register: Oyez, oyez, oyez! All those having business before the Court of Scientifiction Plagiarism, attend and ye shall be heard.

Judge Gernsback: (sighs) Mr. Dick, what is this, the hundred-and-seventieth time?

Dick: (stands) Your Honour, my client, Mr. Bradbury, cannot help it if he finds himself–due to his enormous talent–the repeated victim of plagiarism. Justice must be done in each and every case.

Judge Gernsback: Oh Lord… proceed.

Dick: Thank you, Your Honour–

Elwood: Objection! Will my esteemed colleague please stop putting “u” in all his words? This is America!

Dick: Can’t be helped, Your Honour. I am Canadian. It’s part of my culture. To censor me is discrimination.

Judge Gernsback: Overruled. Mr. Elwood, as you so rightly state, this is America, and we have never, nor will ever, discriminate against any person in a court of law. Clear?

Elwood: (mumbles in American)

Judge Gernsback: Mr. Dick, please proceed.

Dick: Thank you… Your “Honour”.

Judge Gernsback: Don’t push it.

Dick: Er, right. Well, my client asserts that in the year 1976, Mr. Jack Miles Bickham–pen name Jeff Clinton–did willfully and with full knowledge of his actions, plagiarize my client’s novel Fahrenheit 451 in his own novel, Kane’s Odyssey. I anticipate that you will hear evidence to that effect over the course of these proceedings. Now, if you will observe this cover by Kelly Freas…

Cover

Dick: I would like this entered into evidence as Exhibit A–

Elwood: Objection! No element of this cover bears even the slightest resemblance to Fahrenheit 451!

Judge Gernsback: Sustained. Mr. Dick…

(whispering between plaintiff and counsel)

Dick: (stands) Ahem… Your Honour, we withdraw the request. (sits)

Judge Gernsback: Mr. Elwood…?

(whispering between defendant and counsel)

Elwood: Your Honor, we would like this entered into evidence. We belief it supports our case that the Work In Question was not plagiarized.

Judge Gernsback: Very well. Continue.

Elwood: Major elements included in this cover are the portrait of Rufus himself, bottom-right. His farming community is shown front and centre. Behind are the trees, lit by a sickly yellow sun. And beyond them, the city, war-torn and mutilated. In essence, the entire story is told from right-to-left, foreground-to-background. Rufus goes on his journey from farmer to wildlands fugitive to urban rebel. This is as succinct a depiction of the story that it’s a wonder we don’t throw this case out right now!

Dick: Objection: hyperbole.

Judge Gernsback: Overruled. Mr. Dick, this is a court of scientifiction; being hyperbolic is standard process. We have hyperbolic generators in the basement, in fact. Mr. Elwood?

Elwood: Defense rests.

Dick: “Defence” rests.

Judge Gernsback: Mr. Dick, just because we respect Canadian sovereignty and language, doesn’t mean I won’t hold you in contempt.

Dick: Sorry, Your Honour.

Elwood: Defense calls Laser Books’ Marketing Guy to the witness stand!

Blurb

Rufus Kane is a born rebel. Forced to flee from the tightly controlled life of an isolated commune, he finds safety in a large city. But his dream of freedom to live is soon shattered. He is betrayed by a friend and his incredible trial reveals a society gone mad. Law and order are absolute, human rights have surrendered to fear. Hope has vanished from the world. In this exciting tale, Jeff Clinton is at his storytelling best. Rufus becomes a rebel with a cause: the creation of a world fit for men!

Elwood: Now, MG–may I call you MG?

Marketing Guy: Why not? Everyone else does. (glares at plaintiff’s counsel)

(chuckling from audience)

Elwood: Well, MG, do you see any parallels between Rufus’s journey, as described by your words, and the plot of Fahrenheit 451?

MG: ‘Course not. Rufus is an active protagonist from early on. He resists the constraints placed on him from the beginning. And he’s not engaged in any sorta book-burnin’.

Elwood: Mm-hmm. And would you say he is a stronger driving force in the story than Montag in Fahrenheit, especially when comparing the first third of both books?

MG: Absolutely–

Dick: (stands) Objection: leading the witness.

Judge Gernsback: Sustained.

Elwood: MG, I put it to you, that this story, in fact, bears no resemblance to Fahrenheit at all–

Dick: (stands, leans over table) Objection! You Honour, we have not entered plot or character into evidence at this time!

Judge Gernsback: Sustained! Mr. Elwood, this is your final warning.

Elwood: Defense rests.

Dick: (steps around table, clasps hands behind back) Marketing Guy, would you call yourself a Bradbury fan?

MG: I would.

James: And you are thoroughly familiar with Fahrenheit 451?

MG: I am.

James: Then answer me this: doesn’t Montag stash books at the beginning of–

Elwood: Objection. By his own admission, the plaintiff’s counsel has stated that Story has not been entered into evidence.

Judge Gernsback: Sustained–Mr. Dick, you will play fair or stand down.

Dick: Then I move that MG’s testimony be stricken from the record, because his words have never revealed anything of the Laser Books’ content and so can have no bearing on these proceedings!

MG: You bastard! I’ll kill you! (witness climbs over the stand, cries of dismay from audience)

Judge Gernsback: (bangs gavel) Bailiff! Bailiff! Remove the witness at once! Remove him!

MG: (being dragged from the courtroom) He’s got it in for me, y’hear?! The Dick wants to ruin meeee!

(doors slam)

Dick: (under his breath) You’ve done that yourself…

Interlude: A Brief Recess

TRANSCRIPT cafeteria conversation, Dick and Elwood

Elwood: Do you ever think you go too far?

Dick: On the contrary, I don’t think I go far enough. (mastication) This is a capital mac n’ cheese.

Elwood: Come back to Earth, Jim. At most you’ll be able to prove Subconscious Influence. You yourself are guilty of that in writing your own novel, Seekers of the Fallen Stars.

Dick: Yes, yes, Dune influenced some pretty obvious elements of my book: race memory, ancestral voices, mind-altering substances–and I didn’t even realize it till after I’d written the chapters.

Elwood: Subconscious Influence. Take it or leave it. (beat) Be reasonable for once. You can’t win.

Dick: Says you.

Story

Dick: Your Honour, I’d like to enter Story as Exhibit C and state my case.

Judge Gernsback: Done, and do so.

Dick: Your Honour, what it all comes down to is six points:
- Rufus is an indoctrinated member of a society where thoughts are controlled and reading material is banned, hidden, or destroyed.
- Knowledge proves the unlocking of his mind and the reorientation of his worldview
- He becomes a fugitive from those who seek to constrain his mind
- He finds refuge among those with the knowledge he seeks
- He confronts his own society
- He becomes a rebel and flees, just in time to see the city burn down behind him
Dick (cont’d): When I first read Kane’s Odyssey, even then it did not feel original, but when I compare it against Fahrenheit 451, I find the similarities striking. Truthfully, if I was in the business of reviewing science fiction novels, I would simply tell people to read the latter and ignore the former. Rufus’s story is a parallel to Guy Montag’s in virtually every way.

Dick (cont’d): The worst technical offence in this book occurs in chapter five, where Mr. Bickham stops the story to give a ten-page future history lesson that borders on the absurd! By myself I found ten implausibilities in this chapter, but my brother, an historian, could doubtless tear that whole chapter to shreds. Granted, I largely felt engaged throughout the novel, never felt the need to put it down, but against Mr. Bradbury’s work, there is simply no contest; it is a candle compared to a house fire. (sits)

Judge Gernsback: Mr. Elwood?

Elwood: (stands) Ahem, Your Honor… the defense would like to call… Mr. Ray Bradbury to the stand.

(pandemonium in the courtroom)

Judge Gernsback: Order! I will have order!

(plaintiff stands, walks to the witness stand)

Elwood: Mr. Bradbury, I believe I speak for everyone in this room when I say it’s an honor to meet you.

Bradbury: (smiling) Oh thank you. Thank you very much.

Elwood: In fact under other circumstances I’d ask you to sign my copy of Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Bradbury: I’d be happy to.

Elwood: But for now I’d like to discuss another of your books–not Fahrenheit, but The Martian Chronicles.

Dick: (stands) Objection–relevance?

Judge Gernsback: Mr. Elwood, if you have a point to make, make it quickly.

Elwood: I shall. Mr. Bradbury, I have a short excerpt here from your acceptance speech at the 2000 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters ceremony. It’s only a paragraph, would you please read it aloud for the record.

Bradbury: Let me see… (reading, laughs) Oh yes, I remember…

I arrived at the YMCA, the Sloan House, moved in there for $5 a week and proceeded to show my short stories to editors all around New York City, but nobody wanted my short stories. They said, “Don’t you have a novel?” I said, “No I’m a sprinter. I’m a sprinter.” But finally I had dinner my last night in New York with Don Congdon and Walter Bradbury, no relation of mine. Walter Bradbury at Doubleday. And sitting at dinner that night he said to me, “Ray, what about all those Martian stories you’ve been writing in the pulp magazines during the last 10 years? Don’t you think they would make a novel if you wove them together in some sort of tapestry and called it The Martian Chronicles?” I said, “Oh my God.” He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “I read Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson when I was 24 and I said to myself, ‘Oh God, wouldn’t it be wonderful if someday I could write a book as good as this but put it on the planet Mars.’”

Elwood: Mr. Bradbury… would you say that you plagiarized Mr. Anderson’s book to write The Martian Chronicles?

Bradbury: Certainly not! No aspect of The Martian Chronicles is copied from Anderson’s book.

Elwood: But by your own admission, you… drew inspiration?

Bradbury: The uh, the “pattern”, if you wanna call it that, was drawn from Winesburg. Anderson showed me how I might go about stitching my Martian short stories into a cohesive novel.

Elwood: And you did it rather successfully. So, would you contend that it is possible to be influenced by a story–follow its structure in your own work, even–without it being considered plagiarism?

Bradbury: (shrugs) Isn’t that how all stories are born?

Dick: (groaning) Oh God…

Elwood: (shrugs, addresses courtroom) Well, if Ray Bradbury says it, who are we to argue?

(laughter)

Elwood (cont’d): Oh, one last question, Mr. Bradbury: who was it who suggested you sue my client?

Bradbury: Well, my lawyer of course.

Elwood: Can you point to him?

Bradbury: Sure. (points)

Elwood: Madame Register, let the record show that Mr. Bradbury has identified James Dick. The defense rests.

Conclusions and Recommendations

Judge Gernsback: Each party will now have a chance to make their closing statements, and since this is a court of scientifiction, grandiose pontification is not only welcome, but encouraged. Mr. Dick?

(whispering between plaintiff and counsel)

Judge Gernsback: Mr. Dick!

Dick: (stands) Counsel rests… (sits)

Judge Gernsback: Very well. Defense?

Elwood: (stands, straightens tie, clears throat) Your Honor, ladies and gentlemen of the court, this case could–and more properly should–be called Dick v. Posterity. We are not here because Mr. Bradbury seeks justice. We are not here for the benefit of the literary world. We are here so that one man can salve his conscience.

Elwood (cont’d): Mr. Dick, by his own admission–on multiple occasions–has plundered countless works of fiction across every genre for his ideas. Arthur C. Clarke, Patrick O’Brian, Clive Barker, Tim Powers, David Twohy–these are just a few of the artists whose ideas have been pilfered by this common thief. In fact, if there was any true justice in the world, he would be the one having to defend himself!

Elwood (cont’d): (sighs) But thank God–thank God–there is room for nuance in this world. No story is created in a vacuum. I’m sure if we could call the cave-dweller who decorated Lascaux to the stand, we would learn that they were influenced by the Sherwood Anderson of cave paintings!

(laughter)

Elwood (cont’d): If we curtail creativity because a creator reimagines old ideas, we cut humanity’s storytelling potential by half. And consider what you’ve heard here today: The Martian Chronicles would not exist without Winesburg, Ohio, just as The Terminator would not exist without Harlan Ellison‘s “Soldier” and “Demon With a Glass Hand”. Yes, there will be many, many cases where the reimagining is vastly inferior to the original, but every now and then, the reimagining exceeds the original, and prompts new ideas, new creations. The potential far outweighs the drawbacks, but only if we learn to draw the line between plagiarism and inspiration. (sits)

Later

Judge Gernsback: In the matter of Bradbury v. Bickham, I find insufficient evidence of plagiarism as defined by law. Mr. Elwood, please inform Mr. Bickham he is free to go.

Elwood: Thank you, Your Honor.

Judge Gernsback: Mr. Dick, I’m of half a mind to cite you for wasting this court’s time. I’m surprised at how you’ve conducted this case, and I should be very worried if you were my counsel in a case such as this. But this time I’ll let you off with a warning. Pick your battles more carefully, please.

Dick: I will, Your Honour. This has been a humbling experience. And if I may… I have some pages here–something I wrote–which I think would make a great fit for your own magazine, Amazing Stor—

Judge Gernsback: Overruled. Court’s adjourned. (slams gavel)

Who’s Next?

TRANSCRIPT telephone conversation, Bradbury and Dick

Dick: Sorry ’bout today, Ray.

Bradbury: Elwood had a point, you know. Can’t go around fighting everyone who creates something inspired by something else. Maybe take this as a lesson: free yourself to be inspired more by the works you meet rather than less, and experiment with others’ ideas to see what you can come up with.

Dick: I guess so. Thanks, Ray.

Bradbury: You got another case coming up?

Dick: As a matter of fact…

Bradbury: Goodness! What a cover! What does the blurb say?

Blurb

Sam Church is a trained killer, a member of the infamous Red Roadmen organization. In the bizarre world of this future America, the Roadmen’s word is law; to incur their displeasure is death. But Sam Church refuses to kill and is imprisoned and tortured by his peers for his nonconformity. He escapes and, in a terrifying race across the continent, clashes with the Roadmen in a running duel that can only end in death – his own or that of the system of tyranny that reigns on The Black Roads.

Bradbury: Well, we’ve certainly seen ideas like this before. But why don’t you give this Joe fellow the benefit of the doubt?

Dick: You know what? Maybe I’ll do just that…

Bradbury: Something else, Jim?

Dick: I’d just like to say… The Martian Chronicles… the story of how that book came to be was a huge inspiration for me to start pitching my own Europa Trilogy as a fix-up. In fact, your work consistently gives me the confidence to accept that there’s no right way to get my foot in the publishing door. If Europa does come out in the same format… I hope you’ll take it as the compliment it’s intended to be.

Bradbury: Wouldn’t take it any other way. Good luck to you.

Dick: You too, Ray. We miss you.

Addendum

My Goodreads Review for Kane’s Odyssey

From the Case Notes of Bradbury v. Bickham

This is a novel of a kind which has been seen countless times in science fiction canon: the “Good German” (an authoritarian, book burner, etc.) suddenly awakens to the injustices of his society and breaks free of the thought controls which bind him. He goes on to become a rebel and fight for the cause of knowledge/life/free potato chips, whatever. It’s basically Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The problem is that Ray Bradbury perfected this story with Fahrenheit 451. This tale has been remixed, rebranded, and repackaged as films such as Equilibrium and The Matrix. Do yourself a favour, and read Fahrenheit 451. The essential plot has not been bettered since.
June 3, 2026
Writing Seekers of the Fallen Stars
From a labour of love to a debut novel.

On May 22nd, 2026, I received an email from Flame Arrow Publishing in which was enclosed the cover of my debut novel, Seekers of the Fallen Stars. This is a moment which very few writers ever have. I imagine it’s not so different from the feeling a parent gets when they see the ultrasound of their child for the first time.

You might think that’s a bit hackneyed, but let me assure you that this book, like a child, was created from the most intimate parts of me. My thoughts, my beliefs, my experiences, my pain, and my passion are in these pages. And to see all of them summed up by a single image is both invigourating and humbling in equal measure.

Seekers represents the culmination of five years of career-building, ten years of focused writing, and a lifetime of reading, gaming, and dreaming. I’d like to tell you a little of how I got to this point.

I’m not going to be the dick who says, “If I can do it, so can you.” The harsh reality is that not everyone can do this, not everyone will get to have that moment of seeing the beautiful cover of their first book. But if, in my experiences, there’s something that resonates with you, that helps you in your own voyage, surely it is worth sharing.

Disney‘s Last Minute Tie-In

You will, of course, remember a little film that released in July of 2003 called Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. This film single-handedly resurrected the swashbuckler genre and redefined its formula for modern audiences. To this day, there has not been a single pirate-related piece of media released that has not been informed by the visual language of PotC.

What you might not know, however, is that the same month that Curse of the Black Pearl released, a tie-in game quietly slipped onto game shelves called Pirates of the Caribbean. This game, as it turned out, was made by Russian developer Akella, and up until a couple weeks before the film released, was actually titled Sea Dogs 2.

You see, Disney had absolutely no faith in PotC. They believed it would be a flop, and so their promotion of the film was halfhearted. They realized they had no tie-in material, so they contacted a developer (Akella) who was working on a pirate game, paid them a sack of cash and said, “Hey, can you tweak the story of your game so that it aligns with our movie?”

What was Akella gonna do, say no?

It just so happened that Sea Dogs 2, by some friggin’ miracle, had a story which almost perfectly mirrored Curse of the Black Pearl: a ship called the Black Frigate plundered an ancient Incan temple and stole the artifacts of the temple’s builders. In retribution, the gods of the Incan people cursed ship and crew to a living death until such time as they returned what they stole.

Change the Black Frigate to the Black Pearl, her captain’s name from Balthazar to Barbossa, and throw in a thirty-second bit of narration by Keira Knightley, and Disney had themselves a tie-in game juuuuust in time for the release of their silly pirate movie.

(Whaddya mean the game takes place a full hundred years before the movie? Who’s gonna know?)

I played the hell out of this game when I was little. It scared the bejeezus out of me. These days, liminal spaces from childhood are all the rage: the labyrinthine corridors of House of Leaves‘ titular residence, the concrete playgrounds of Control‘s Oldest House, and the off-yellow sprawl of the Backrooms.

For me, the liminal spaces which hold my mind prisoner are the jungles and towns of Akella’s Pirates of the Caribbean.

I keenly remember walking through jungles with my officers and sprinting like hell past groups of bandits to the safety of town, or accidentally discovering the dungeons of Oxbay and soiling myself when a skeleton in a tricorn came at me with a sword. And the music.

My God, the music!

This game had some of the catchiest, most exciting tracks I remember hearing in a game. Between this, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, I had some of the best childhood soundtracks a boy could wish for.

Have a listen, and tell me this isn’t great stuff.

Menu Theme

This track fills me with such longing to see the pyramids of South and Central America.

Town 1

This one has me swaggering down the street like Dr. Livesey.

I think, between this game and the film it was tied to, the seeds of my later interest in pirates, windjammers, and Naval history were sown. But it would be another two decades before they bore fruit.

The Learning Curve

Throughout my late teens and early twenties, I wrote almost exclusively novels.

I fell victim to that seductive dream most young writers have of crafting that exquisite First Novel, taking the world by storm, and becoming a household name. Not that the dream is bad–on the contrary: it’s excellent fuel for the fire of creative passion. But that doesn’t make it any more attainable. Those who succeed on their first try are as rare as unicorns, and they don’t always have the most consistent of careers.

“Early failure is healthier than early success.”

Chris Hadfield

I’ve lost count of how many drafts of science fiction and fantasy “masterpieces” I wrote in college and university, but sometime around my 24th birthday, I realized that my writing skills weren’t improving. I resolved, then, to try a completely different approach.

A word to you aspiring writers out there: there’s no “one-size-fits-all” career path. There is no teacher, no book, no guru who can give you the “optimal” system of creating stories–though many will try to sell you just such an idea. Discovering your process is a matter of trial and error.

However… there is one thing which I recommend which always seems to benefit writers who try it.

Start by writing short fiction.

Writing a novel is a big time- and energy-sink, and if you’re a writer still learning your craft, there’s a very small return on investment when it comes to building your skills.

The best thing most young writers can do is begin small: write a 1000-word story. That’s about four pages. The tiny scale forces you to be economical, to set the scene, describe the characters, and kick off the plot as quickly as you can.

Then, when you feel confident, expand: scale up to 2000, 3000, 4000, 7000, 10,000 words incrementally, and keep experimenting with different lengths. Short stories allow you to try and fail repeatedly in a short span of time, and also provide endorphin boosts more often because you can complete many of them in a short span of time.

Consider: in the time it takes you to write a novel, you can write as many as 80 short stories.

1 novel.

80 short stories.

Which do you think is going to help you improve faster?

You can also submit short stories to magazines and anthologies to start getting your name out there and develop a thick skin toward rejection. All of this will serve you well, both in your career and life.

There are many writers out there who attained early success with a breakout novel who, by their own admission, cannot write short fiction. They wrote a big book when they were young, got lucky with an agent or publisher, and continued writing at that scale into their 20s, 30s, and 40s.
- If you start out writing short fiction, you can easily scale up.
- If you start out writing long-form fiction, it is hard to scale down.
My aspiration when I was 24 was to develop my craft, not try to swing a novel and hope for the best. So I focused exclusively on short fiction, and through short fiction, I learned:
- How to do more with less
- How to write character arcs
- How to plot stories
- How to write a series of interconnected stories
- The kinds of stories I enjoyed reading and writing (and the kinds I didn’t)
- The sorts of messages I wanted to spread with my writing
- That I am, at heart, an optimist, and want to tell optimistic stories
- How to market myself
All these came into play in late 2023 when I eventually did return to novel writing.

2023: The Dwindling Days

September 2023.

Leila Batten, my boss at the Whitehouse Meats Butcher Shop in the St. Lawrence Market, unable to find a buyer for her shop, elected to close it completely and retire from the market. I suddenly found myself out of a job, but with a little money to float on.

Since I had the time now, and since I’d grown so much as a writer in the past three years, I decided to finally try writing a novel again. Something small–maybe 70,000 words. And it wouldn’t be some project which I thought “might be marketable” or “might be popular”. I’d write purely from a place of passion, satisfying no one but myself. After all, that was how I broke into professional short fiction writing with “EDIE”, my first major sale to Analog.

But what to write?

As a child, I had no idea that Pirates of the Caribbean was originally part of the Sea Dogs series. These days, PotC/Sea Dogs 2 is a hard game to find; lost in the sea of licensing, it is, for all intents and purposes, abandonware.

In 2023 I felt the need to play it again, but I couldn’t find it. Instead, I found Sea Dogs: To Each His Own, a roleplaying game which is a Eurojank classic. Despite many frustrations with the interface and quests, I nevertheless was captivated by the world Sea Dogs: TEHO presented. Through it, I discovered a love of nautical fiction, including Patrick O’Brian‘s Aubrey & Maturin books (better known as Master and Commander) and C.S. Forester‘s Horatio Hornblower series.

Engrossed in sailing ships and stormy seas, I decided to write a nautical fantasy with a mid-18th century Caribbean atmosphere. That was the answer to my first question.

Now the second: do I set it in the real Caribbean, or a secondary world?

I immediately discarded the idea of using a real historical setting. The Caribbean has been the site of some of the most appalling genocides in the long dark catalogue of human misery, and given that I’m a white-as-bread descendent of the British Isles, I felt it would be wrong to use someone else’s history as my personal plaything.

Plus, with a secondary world setting, I could still deal with serious issues, but in a manner and pace of my own choosing, and I wouldn’t be treading upon anyone’s real–and personal–history.

I was actually able to resurrect a world I’d created for The Journeyman and the Bear, a series of short stories I’d written in high school and college–and one which I now realize was also inspired by my time playing PotC/Sea Dogs 2.

So, late on the night of December 28th, 2023, with the snow falling heavily outside and the wind howling like a tortured voice from the past, I sat down on the sofa in my parents’ living room and wrote the outline to Seekers of the Fallen Stars.

2024: A Year of Darkness and Wonder

I wrote the bulk of Seekers in almost exactly nine months, starting December 28th 2023, finishing on or about September 15th 2024.

Many things happened in that time.

Image Credit: NASA

I couldn’t work in my chosen field: media. Unbeknownst to me, I’d graduated into one of the worst job markets in Canadian history, and my financial prospects looked grim–still do, if I’m being honest. My inability to provide for myself or find steady income meant I had to continue living with my family. All of this contributed to some of the worst episodes of depression and anxiety I’ve ever experienced. My sense of self-worth steadily weakened.

Through all that, the thing which got me up in the morning was my novel. Seekers was the only thing on my brain. It consumed my every waking thought, and sometimes made its way into my dreams. It was the first thing I thought of when I got up and the last before I went to bed. It energized me and gave me a reason to keep going.

The rest of humanity was still sloughing off the long time-skip of COVID-19, and 2024 offered miracles to help us shake the cobwebs:

I witnessed my first eclipse on April 8th–an event which made its way into the novel.

A new comet came to visit us in the form of Tsuchinshan-ATLAS.

Solar winds created some of the brightest aurorae in living memory.

If I can say one thing about 2024, it is that I lived, in every sense of the world: I survived my inner demons, accomplished a dream I’ve had for a decade, and saw things that restored my sense of wonder. For all the difficulties I was fraught with, both mentally and financially, I cannot help but think of that year as the time when I finally began to bloom.

And Seekers was there, a constant companion, a source of endless joy.

2025: Flame Arrow

“A story is not a machine that does what you tell it. A story is a beast with a life of its own. You can create it, shape it, but as the story grows, it starts wanting things of its own. Change one thing and you set off a chain reaction of events that spreads through the whole thing. The characters have to be true to themselves. The events have to follow a logic that fits the story. A single flaw and the magic is gone. The story dies.”

— Alan, Alan Wake

After finishing the third draft of Seekers in September 2024, I took a few months to relax and recharge. In the start of 2025, I reached out to Rae Oestreich, a fellow writer who attended Clovis Editorial‘s Group Coaching sessions with me, and took her up on the offer of letting her beta-read my book.

When she finished, she had many good notes, but the one which stuck in my brain was this:

“Why does it have to be one book?”

Few questions have I ever loved more, and few have I ever loathed more. Because Rae had a good point: the current draft of Seekers was a bloated, overlong mess with a rushed ending, over 120,000 words in length. So, I cut it in two around the 100,000 word mark, and sat with it…

And sat with it…

And the damnedest thing happened: I realized it needed to be two books.

I wrote a fourth draft, and then a fifth (which was really just a reassembling of the plot structure of the fourth), sent it to Genevieve Clovis for a copy edit, and then in May, I began querying.

Would You Like to Know More?

“Querying” is the process by which an author sends out a query letter and a sample of their manuscript to an agent or editor. It basically says, “Here’s what my book’s about, here’s why I think it’s a great fit for your agency to represent (or your publishing house to publish), and here’s my publishing history.”

I sent my package out to ten agents both in Canada and the States. Half didn’t reply, and the other half rejected me. By this point, October was coming around and with it, Can*Con, so I decided to put queries on hold until after I gathered more information about publishing from the panels in Ottawa.

While I was walking the Vendors’ Hall with my Genevieve and Rachel MacLean (another Clovis Editorial alum), I spotted a new title by Rich Larson being sold at a table. The title was The Sky Didn’t Load Today and Other Glitches. The table was Flame Arrow Publishing. As I stepped closer, the man behind the table, Dave Dufour, spoke to me.

Our conversation went something like this:

Dave: “Reader or writer?”

James: “Well, both actually.”

Dave: “Nice. What have you written?”

James: “I’ve published some stories in Analog, a few other international markets. And recently I completed a 100,000 word fantasy swashbuckler about found families and inherited trauma.”

Dave: “Oh, you should definitely query us.”

James: (Eyeing the lengths of the other books on offer) “100,000 words…?”

Dave: “Yeah, we’re looking for works in that range. But you should definitely do it, like, now, because we’re opening queries November 1st.”

James: “Oh, wow, okay, I’ll get right on it.”

Dave: “Let me give you my card…”

You might think it strange, but I’ve always been able to sense the moments when my life changes direction. It’s like a subtle itch at the back of my skull. It usually happens when I meet someone new, or exchange correspondence with them.

I spoke to three other publishers while at Can*Con, and I only got that feeling from Dave at Flame Arrow.

So, as soon as I got back to Toronto, I watched George Springer hit the home run that sent the Blue Jays to the World Series.

And then I wrote my query letter–and it was a home run, too.

Baseball players talk about seeing the perfect pitch coming, the one they know is gonna be a homer even before they swing. I got that feeling whilst writing my query letter to Flame Arrow. Normally I try not to get my hopes up, but as I wrote the words, I couldn’t help but feel as if the universe had shown me the way.

I was leery of that feeling, especially in light of the Blue Jays narrowly losing the World Series to the Dodgers. What had seemed like a storybook ending was ripped away from us Toronto fans at the last moment, and as November turned into December and Christmas neared, I began to fear that my hopes for Seekers would be dashed as well.

December 8th, 2025 — 1:00 p.m.

Hi James,

Thank you again for sending Seekers of the Fallen Stars. Our team has now completed the full evaluation, and we’re really pleased with the strength of both the premise and the execution. The manuscript shows clear potential for our catalogue, especially with its imaginative worldbuilding and reflective themes that align closely with Flame Arrow’s editorial direction.

We’d love to move forward and discuss acquisition with you.

Dave

710 days since I wrote the first words of Seekers, I received an acceptance letter for it.

I wrote and sold a novel in less than two years.

There are writers who don’t get there in ten years.

There are writers who don’t get there in twenty.

There are writers who never get there.

I got there in 710 days. I got there in less than two years.

I don’t write these words to brag, but to reaffirm my success. There were times when the only thing which got me out of bed, the only thing that kept me sane, the only thing that brought me joy, was writing this book. For nine months, it was my life entire. And even after signing the contract, the old demons of self-doubt and anxiety crept in.

Humility is a virtue, and is right and healthy, but it is also right and healthy for us to speak boldly of our triumphs, to ourselves and others, so that we may resist the demons–both within and without–that try to erode our sense of self worth.

Seekers was a labour of love, and if I’m being honest, I never believed I’d be able to sell it, at least not right away. Few publishers will buy a book over 100,000 words in length from a new novelist. I thought for sure Seekers would end up on the backburner while I wrote and queried a shorter, tighter novel.

The fact I sold it right out the gate tells me two things:
- I am a good writer
- The Canadian indie publishing scene shows more imagination than the Big Five
I’m glad I ended up with a small Canadian publisher. The work these houses are doing is innovative and exciting, and they take a great interest in the development of their creators. I’m looking forward to a lasting partnership with Flame Arrow.

The Voyage Continues…

Aboard the Empire Sandy tern schooner at the Midland Tall Ships Festival, August 17th, 2025. This is the same class of vessel as the Seeker from my novel.

Ten years ago, I fantasized about publishing a novel. I was very impatient and thought–as doubtless millions of young writers have thought–that I could get to the finish line quicker than others had before me, that I would be a household name by the time I was twenty-five.

If I could go back and give myself three pieces of advice, it would be these:
- Learn to love the journey. Each day you get to sit at a desk and put words on a page is a treasure. Not everyone has the time or freedom to do that.
- Start small. Work on the smallest scale you can, and then expand from there.
- Try everything. Opportunities surround you. Listen. Be attentive. Be ready at all times to leap at a chance to get your work into the world.
Having read all this, scroll back to the top and look at the cover again, and think about all the things that had to happen, all the strife, all the lucky turns of fate, for that image to exist.

I know I will.
May 27, 2026
Laser Books Review 15

15. The Star Web by George Zebrowski

I’m not crazy, right? You guys see it too?

Juan Obrion

John Wilkes Booth

This has been driving me crazy for weeks now. I dodge enough bullets for a living; I don’t need sic semper tyrannis over here adding on his two cents o’ lead.

Anyway, you guys check out this review while I check out my hat for holes.

Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Award nominee George Zebrowski brings us a story in the purest tradition of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. I say that without the least bit of prejudice because, at their best, Golden Age stories depicted battles of wits between humanity and the cosmos.

Reading up on Zebrowski, I’m unsurprised to find out that, like many of our authors thus far, he wrote tie-in novels for Star Trek, focusing on The Next Generation era. Most of those works were co-authored with writer Pamela Sargent.

Going boldly where many have gone before, Zebrowski’s Star Web articulates a classic question popularized by Arthur C. Clarke, and perfected by Andy Weir:

Are these people smart enough to survive?

Would You Like to Know More?

If you spot a copy of this book in the wild, most likely at a used bookstore, buy it. It is some of the best value-for-money you can get in a book. Not only does it contain Clarke’s body of short fiction (which by itself is marvelous), it also holds one or two novel-length works which usually are published under the SF Masterworks label.

Clarke’s importance to science fiction isn’t that he was a great storyteller (he was), or that he predicted many technologies before they were invented (he did), but that he made his readers feel that the story of the universe, of our solar system, of Earth, was their story–that no matter the colour of your skin, your sex, or your personal beliefs, you have a magnificent heritage written in the stars themselves, and no one can deny you that heritage.

There are few tropes from the 1930s that have aged well, but this is one of them, and was used to greatest effect in books like The Martian and Project Hail Mary.

But how well does Zebrowski employ it? Does The Star Web stand tall or fall flat? And just who is that John Wilkes Booth-lookin’ doofus, anyhow?

We’ll find out after paying our dues to Kelly Freas.

Cover

Ahhh… you know that crisp, refreshing sound you get when you crack open a cold one with the lads? For some reason, that’s exactly what I hear when I look at this cover.

Maybe it’s the cool cerulean of the aurora, or the sharp lines of the bright star in the sky. Maybe it’s the texture of the sky itself or the ice as the spaceship breaks through. Maybe it’s the gentle curves and shadows of the thready title at the top. Maybe it’s Juan Obrion’s wavy hair. Maybe it’s Maybelline.

Whatever it is, there’s something just so soothing about this cover.

I’ve been staring at it for so long trying to decide whether it’s one of Freas’s better covers, or more workmanlike ones. Having read the book, I can tell you that there are very few story elements present. In fact, Freas has chosen to depict a single scene from the book: the rising of the alien ship in the third or fourth chapter.

But it kind of works. He really evokes a sense of “jumping-off” combined with a feeling of wonder. There could be anything hiding behind those curtains of light, and we’re gonna peer behind them and find out.

Blurb

A UN research team has been sent to the Antarctic to investigate strangely patterned radio signals. Expecting a buried transmitter, the team is awestruck by what they discover hidden beneath the polar ice. But it doesn’t remain hidden for long! The team is soon hurtling through space on an adventure that is as incredible as it is frightening. George Zebrowski, author of The Star Web, is a Nebula Award Finalist. His first novel, Omega Point, published in 1972, has already been translated into six languages.

You pitch me a spaceship buried under Antarctica, and I’ll buy a ticket on that hotrod today.

In the review of Birthright, we talked about tropes that always hook readers, right? “Literally-Anything-Buried-in-Antarctica” is one of them.

I think the reason this never fails has to do with the nature of Antarctica: it’s the only continent on our planet that was never colonized by humans. There’ve been proposals and attempts, both aborted and ongoing, but the reality is there’s very little economic or political incentive to setting up shop.

Would You Like to Know More?

I spent three years writing for the Hearts of Iron IV submod Operation Deep Freeze. Set in the alternate history universe of The New Order: Last Days of Europe, our story depicted a fictionalized Scramble for Antarctica in which three superpowers vie for control of the “Exile Continent”.

The events my brother and I wrote for that mod are some of my best work. We drafted hundreds of thousands of words over the course of COVID and created countless storylines and plot threads. Our research into Antarctica revealed the most astonishing things about the continent that laypeople simply don’t know.

COVID was a shit time for humanity, but I’ll always have fond memories of my brother and I quietly going insane together as we crafted the most outlandish scenes this side of a Terry Gilliam fever dream.

The landmass is covered in glaciers, and is routinely scraped by katabatic winds exhaled from the mountains of the interior. Assuming you can even reach the Antarctic littoral (you have to cross the Roaring Forties, which are some of the most vicious latitudes on the planet), depending on where you make landfall, you might be met with sheer walls of ice that are too high and too unstable to be scaled from sea level. And even if you make it into the continent proper, you will find cold desert stretching for thousands of kilometres–desert in which the mean annual temperature is -40 degrees Celsius.

There is nothing there to eat except scarce pockets of wildlife. Nothing grows. Half the year is spent in perpetual daylight, and the other half in persistent darkness. It is, for all intents and purposes, impossible to survive there without great financial and technological investments.

Antarctica is not for us.

But it wasn’t always so inhospitable. We know from paleontological evidence that in the deep past, it was a tropical paradise, a veritable Garden of Eden. Dinosaurs prowled jungles denser than the Amazon. Flora proliferated and learned to survive seasonal frosts without dying. All of that is still there, buried and fossilized under hundreds of metres of ice.

It’s no secret why stories of horror have been set there: the essence of cosmic horror is that human existence on planet Earth is bracketed by beings far older and more powerful than we are, that we are comparative newcomers to a vast and ancient stage.

This is entirely true from a paleontologist’s point of view.

While there is definitely some fear in Zebrowski’s novel, it is not the chief emotion which The Star Web elicits.

That would be wonder.

Story

“Wonder” indeed. As in, wonder at the fact that this is the first Laser Book that’s less than the regulation 190 pages in length.

I’m serious, this is completely unheard of! Every single book in this series, up until this point, has been ~50,000 words long, and exactly 190 pages in length. These are the guidelines set by Harlequin.

So how the hell did Zebrowski get away with subtracting 13 pages from this novel?

I wonder if any of the other Laser Books have the same problem. Which ones are they?

What are their destinies?

All joking aside, my experience of this book was much like my experience of reading Bob Heinlein‘s Methuselah’s Children: thoroughly enjoyed the first half, but found the second to be underwhelming.

Would You Like to Know More?

Funny story about Methuselah’s Children. The copy I had was a paperback older than the Antarctic dinosaurs and the binding was crumbling. The pages of this little book were literally falling out as I turned them. So when I read the book, I placed a wastepaper basket next to my bed and let each page fall in as I finished reading it.

If you can cast your minds back to the very first Laser Book review, for Thomas F. Monteleone‘s Seeds of Change, you’ll recall that I wrote that that book felt like two stories Frankensteined together: one was Logan’s Run, and the other was a gripping tale of scientists figuring out the workings of an alien spacecraft. I also suggested that, to salvage that tale, you’d simply have to peel the disparate stories apart and let them grow into their own books.

Zebrowski clearly had the same idea, because he took the spaceship plotline of Seeds and did exactly that.

The story follows four UN scientists, led by our protagonist, Juan Obrion (the John Wilkes Booth-lookin’s doofus), who try to unravel the mysteries of a structure found beneath the Antarctic ice. The structure is in fact an ancient alien spacecraft, buried under the ice for untold millennia, and before you can say “Geronimo!” the scientists find themselves trapped in the spacecraft as it hurtles away from Earth at relativistic velocity.

Suddenly, unraveling the vessel’s mysteries is no longer an academic exercise, but a matter of life and death.

This is where the story is at its strongest. Are these people capable of thinking like beings which are far more intelligent than humans? Can these supposedly educated people use rationality and logic to puzzle out the workings of this ship while simultaneously batting aside their preconceptions and biases?

These kinds of stories are a dime a dozen from the Golden Age, but seldom do GA authors demonstrate the deftness and detail that Zebrowski demonstrates–which makes it all the more frustrating when he falls victim to cliche.

The Journey of the Spacecraft

Look, if you’ve read these two books, you can probably guess where Star Web is heading.

The vessel taps into an interstellar network of tunnels–the titular Star Web–and navigates to its native port: a berth hidden inside a blue giant star. Obrion and co. learn that the builders of this spacecraft eventually eschewed space travel altogether in favour of stargates.

Would You Like to Know More?

It never ceases to amaze me how often this trope is used in sci-fi to denote an advanced civilization: thousands of doorways scattered across space, connecting thousands of different planets in a sort of galactic metro system. We’ve even seen it used in this very series with Gates of the Universe.

The Expanse, Star Trek, Contact, and 2001: A Space Odyssey all had some version of stargates, but in my opinion, no story did it better than the TV series named for the device.

If you’ve not seen this show, I heartily recommend it. It’s a classic of science fiction, and one of the rare examples when a spinoff of a feature film (Roland Emmerich‘s Stargate) turned out smarter, funnier, and more exciting than the original. With ten seasons and two films, and featuring a friggin’ army of Canada’s finest screen talent, you are guaranteed two hundred hours of wonder, laughter, chills, and thrills.

The spacecraft, like the Monolith in 2001, like the wormhole in Contact, takes the scientists on a tour of its builders’ history, from their humble beginnings to their tragic downfall. The spacecraft itself is a character–it has goals, opinions, beliefs–and is an intriguing part of the story, but ultimately, Zebrowski doesn’t do anything really novel with the concepts he explores.

Conclusions and Recommendations

I will never say no to Antarctica, spaceships, aliens, or combinations thereof.

Some of my favourite tales in this genre involve scientists puzzling out the workings of extraterrestrial technology.

My favourite video game–perhaps my favourite piece of media period–Outer Wilds is about the unraveling of a millennia old mystery.

My Goodreads Review

All the things I love in a sci-fi tale are present in the Star Web, and there is much to recommend in this novel, but unfortunately, the tropes which Arthur C. Clarke and Carl Sagan plumbed to such a great depth in their magnum opuses are recycled too easily in this novel. I would like to give The Star Web a solid 3.5 out of 5, but since that’s not possible with Goodreads rating system, a 3 shall have to suffice.

Kathleen Sky‘s Birthright was so effective because she took tried and tested tropes and put her own unique spin on them. George Zebrowski never quite gets there with The Star Web. The novel would work a lot better if it were longer, and put more obstacles in the path of our characters: more puzzles to unravel, more secrets to uncover, more machines to figure out.

I could recommend it, but then again, why not just read 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Contact, or watch Stargate SG-1? All those pieces of media have the same essential premise: pitting human intellect against ancient alien machines and seeing who comes out on top. This trope has been done perfectly before, and Zebrowski, strong writer though he is, is simply treading a well-beaten path.

Who’s Next?

Rufus Kane is a born rebel. Forced to flee from the tightly controlled life of an isolated commune, he finds safety in a large city. But his dream of freedom to live is soon shattered. He is betrayed by a friend and his incredible trial reveals a society gone mad. Law and order are absolute, human rights have surrendered to fear. Hope has vanished fromt he world. In this exciting tale, Jeff Clinton is at his storytelling best. Rufus becomes a rebel with a cause: the creation of a world fit for men!

Ehh… I’m not gonna get my hopes up.

Ancillary Matters

Credit: David Twohy

Those who’ve read my 8000-word retrospective on the Riddick franchise know what a huge fan I am of screenwriter/director David Twohy. Recently I discovered his website where he posts every screenplay he’s ever written, either on-spec or shooting, including an unused Alien³ screenplay.

This lattermost script in particular will be of great interest to cinephiles because many of the elements he introduced in it (sci-fi prison, different versions of xenomorph, killer hounds) would later be re-used in the Alien franchise and his own films like Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick.

His scripts have renewed my appreciation for the importance of solid scripts, and how films transform and evolve in the course of shooting and editing.

I even dropped him a line via email and he was kind enough to reply, mentioning his acquaintance with Harlan Ellison. Still super jealous you got to meet him, David!

May 20, 2026
Laser Books Review 14
14. Birthright by Kathleen Sky

“I am an android.”

—Data, Star Trek: The Next Generation

Ray Nelson kicked in the door of the second round of Laser Books with a piece of historical fanfiction that took us to the past, the future, the afterlife, and all places betwixt. Today, our next author–pardon me, authoress–steps through that door.

The Laser Books (and indeed sci-fi in general) being such an “old boys club”, it’s a breath of fresh air every time a woman arrives to tell a tale, and to date, Kathleen is only the second female writer to submit an entry to this series, the first being Juanita Coulson‘s terrific novel Unto the Last Generation.

I couldn’t dig up much information on Kathleen. The most comprehensive biography I could find comes from the website Worlds Without End, and it’s pretty thin.

Kathleen Sky is the pen name of Kathleen McKinney Goldin, an American science fiction and fantasy author. Her pen name is her former married name from her marriage to first husband Karl Sky. From 1972 to 1982 she was married to fellow author and collaborator Stephen Goldin.

Most of her fiction is romantic in nature. Her books include Vulcan! and Death’s Angel, two of the earliest original novels based on the 1960s Star Trek TV series.

Sky appeared as an Enterprise crewmember in the recreation deck scenes in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

—WWEnd/Kathleen Sky

I’m beginning to see a pattern with these Laser Books authors: many seem to be, or have been, extremely active in fan circles and written much tie-in media for either Star Trek or Wars. And some, like Kathleen, have pretty sparse credits apart from said tie-in work and their contributions to Laser Books.

Which is a damn shame, because as we’ve seen–and will see again today–many of these authors are very skilled.

So, cue up the android memes, let’s talk about Birthright!

Cover

“Big things have small beginnings.”

—David, Prometheus

I’m so sorry. It was right there. I had to.

First off, let me apologize for the state of this cover. Not all the Laser Books in my collection have been properly cared for, and a few are scuffed like this one. One or two have torn covers, and a lot have some of the wear and tear you see here. They don’t look too bad in person, but the HD scanner on my Canon printer isn’t doing them any favours.

Even so, the major elements are intact. The Double Helix worshipped by the android Children of Vat rises like a phoenix behind Miranda, whose inscrutable glare really tells you a lot about her character; she’s no Golden Age sci-fi waif who needs saving.

In the portrait to our bottom-right are two characters, Bron and Andros. Bron is the one with tattoos, and is the android foil to our protagonist (I am reticent to say “hero” because Andros is most emphatically not that).

This is one of Kelly Freas‘s workmanlike covers, and it’s pretty barebones when it comes to representing the story, but there’s one element I want to call your attention to, and that’s the title. The word “BIRTHRIGHT” looms like a tombstone over the cover. It is, in fact, the blackest, bleakest part of the cover. If the rest of the cover filled you with excitement and hope for a gripping space yarn, the font and colour of the title take the starch out of your stride.

It really makes you question whether a birthright is something desirable.

Blurb

Hey, this is another Bakka purchase!

Anyway, blurbtime.

In this towering adventure, Kathleen Sky has created an unforgettable character. Is Andros human or an android created by his scientist-father? Others besides Andros would like to know. The survival of an entire android civilization hangs in the balance. In his desperate search for the truth about himself, Andros discovers what terror means. But neither terror nor love will stop him from finding the answer. He must claim his Birthright.
Kathleen Sky is a storyteller of the first rank.

If I had a nickel for every time this trope has been used in a story, I could retire early.

This is one of the Big Ones, a standby dating back to the earliest days of Ye Auld Scientifiction. It’s a hook that works, despite its total lack of originality. But we haven’t had a story like this in the Laser Books, so… I guess it’s permissible?

Look, I’ve long since learned my lesson that Marketing Guy is strapped for word space and is doing the best that he can. He rarely succeeds in selling me on stories, and the real fun comes in retrospect: reading the story, and seeing how much of it he managed to mention in the blurb. It’s no one’s fault but Harlequin‘s; they draw the lines, and everyone else has to colour inside them.

This blurb probably wouldn’t impress even the most casual sci-fi fan; it certainly doesn’t impress me. But like I said: lesson learned. I’m never going to judge the author(ess)’s work by the blurb.

Story

“Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.”

—Roy Batty, Blade Runner

Well, lube me up and call me Slick! That was a tightly-written tale!

My College screenwriting teacher, Rob Corbett, said, “There are no bad stories, only stories badly told. For example, if I were to pitch you a story about a little person who travels a thousand miles to throw a ring into a volcano, you’d say, ‘Huh? What? DUMB!’ But Tolkien went ahead and wrote The Lord of the Rings.”

A story, regardless of premise, theme, plot, or characters, is made or broken in the telling. There are thousands of incredible novels, video games, and films out there which, if you reduced them to a one-liner, would be laughable–and yet they work.

Execution > Concept

Burn that into your minds, because that is the equation which governs Birthright.

Andros Roarchik is an aspiring space cadet who also happens to be the son of the finest android designer in the galaxy, Dr. Erik Roarchik. When a routine medical check casts doubt on whether or not he’s human, he suddenly finds himself without job prospects and the victim of assault by every Tom, Dick, and Harry at the academy. With his future growing dim, his one hope is to go to his late father’s factory on the planet Mhalkeri and find proof that he is not an android.

Would You Like To Know More?

Those of us who are struggling to make our living in this most terrible Year of Our Lord 2026 would empathize keenly with Andros’s struggle.

With the rise of generative artificial intelligence, writers submitting stories to publications around the world have been confronted with some variation on the following text:

I submit that I DID/DID NOT use AI in the creation of all or part of this piece.

As AI becomes more advanced, I expect such challenges to artists to “prove you are human” will become ever more common.

But when he arrives, he learns that there is a power struggle going on between the acting head of Roarchik’s, a sleazeball named Fitzsimmons, and the androids. Dr. Roarchik, went full Tyrell toward the end of his life, and was moving androids closer and closer to humans, to the point where the two are indistinguishable from one another. The Confederation is terrified of that: they want drones working their mines and spacedocks and chemical plants, not entities which can think for themselves and have feelings.

“‘More human than human’ is our motto.”

–Eldon Tyrell

Andros, whose humanity is entirely in question, finds himself at the centre of this struggle. If he can prove his humanity, he can regain control of Roarchik’s and decide the fate of the androids. If he can’t, he’ll be deactivated. Either way, he’s a challenge to Fitzsimmons’ authority, and must be removed.

Fitzsimmons sics his android aid (andraid? aidroid?) Miranda on Andros with the intent of keeping tabs on him, and distracting him from what’s really going on. But Miranda, far from being a mere lackey, is a member of the android resistance, and the Church of Vat, an emergent religion founded by the androids. Through Miranda, Andros learns that the androids have faith, culture, politics–they are, for all intents and purposes, a people. And yet they are denied personhood by the humans who designed them.

If this were a Golden Age story, told by one of the Old Boys, Andros would be a Moses-like figure come to lead the slaves out of Egypt, but Sky refrains from falling for such plain cliches.

Instead, she makes Andros an insufferable, self-centred prick who couldn’t care less what happens to others. He just wants his humanity confirmed dammit! Except…

… except it’s almost as if someone doesn’t want him to be able to prove he’s human.

Think about that for a sec: if the son of the smartest android designer in the galaxy turned out to be an android, then the only way to claim his birthright would be to gain personhood for all androids–himself included. That’s what Dr. Erik Roarchik wanted: emancipation of his “children”: the Nexus-6–sorry, I mean, Super-Matrix androids.

Andros is no emancipator.

But he could be.

We Need Brains, not Bron!

Bron is a clever element in the story that further casts doubt on Andros’s humanity. He is an android who looks exactly like Andros, hinting that Andros himself is just another model that thinks he’s human.

Now, all androids are supposed to be marked by tattoos that tell the world what they really are, no matter how human they look, but it would’ve been a simple matter for Dr. Roarchik to create an android and just… not apply the tattoo. If he knew his life was ending, and he saw a chance to create an heir which would have a vested interest in protecting androids (assuming he is one), he would absolutely do it.

Bron is a delightful foil to Andros: an android with Andros’s appearance, the love of the Double Helix in his heart… and no chance of guiding his people to a better future, because he is:
- A: Too headstrong
- B: Not human
- C: Involved in schismatic conflict.
In any lesser novel, there’d be some switcheroo bullshit involving Bron and Andros, but Kathleen Sky doesn’t go in for such paltry plotting tricks. Bron is a tool, in every sense of the word, and he gets used and discarded when he is no longer needed.

Of Androids and Politics

One of my favourite things about Birthright is the politicking of the androids. Again, in a Golden Age story, they would present a united front to the humans: one glorious voice crying out “We Shall Overcome!”

But in Birthright, they are, as Elrond would say, “Scattered, divided, leaderless.” The religious fanatics, the rationalists, the scientists, the street gangs, each has their own idea about how to win their freedom from humanity, but no one can agree on a single course of action.

How very… human.

But if, like me, at this point, you’re asking, “Why the hell was Roarchik so obsessed with making the androids such independent thinkers?”

Once again, Kathleen demonstrates her storytelling chops.

Drina

For Dr. Erik Roarchik, creating a new race was an intellectual exercise; for his partner Drina, it was a megalomaniacal imperative.

Drina has to be one of the most fucked-up characters yet seen in the Laser Books. She is the mother of Andros, but she considers–as Roarchik did–the androids to be her true children.

Yes, Andros is human. As Drina says, it’s in his name: “andros” in Ancient Greek means “behold, a man”. She was the one who hid the documents who proved Andros’s humanity. She put him through hell just so he would come to Mhalkeri, get to know the androids–even fall in love with one, Miranda, and become their greatest advocate, so that, when he finally did prove his humanity, it would be as a defender of androidkind.

And Drina’s plan works flawlessly. All it cost was Miranda’s life, Bron’s , and that of countless other humans and androids.

Drina is obsessed with the creation of an entirely new race, of being the mother to that race, and she is utterly lacking in conscience. She is the kind of person who was lynched at the end of World War II–but here, she gets everything she wants.

Conclusions and Recommendations

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.”

–Roy Batty, Blade Runner

I haven’t even had time to talk about the most horrifying scenes: the humans burning the android Nurseries, the riots in the streets, the lynch mobs, the death of Miranda. Suffice to say, Kathleen isn’t pulling any punches when it comes to violence and strife. She gets away with things I thought for sure were impossible in the Laser Books.

My Goodreads Review

There is a tendency for stories about AI and androids to devolve into anti-slavery narratives, which have not only been done to death, but are at best a superficial way of engaging with topics like artificial intelligence and machine life. And while Kathleen Sky is not exempt from this, she subverts expectations just enough to create a truly compelling, dark, and believable tale of a people fighting for their right to life. I am awarding this story four stars; the absence of a fifth is strictly because this story plays with an aged and well-used trope. Sky has proven her excellence.

I’d like to underline the word “believable”. Since this is an anti-slavery story, and if you’re even slightly aware of the history of the Civil Rights Movement in Canada and the States, you know exactly how cruel humans can be to other humans who, due to melanin variations and evolutionary pressures, have darker skin.

Now imagine that those other humans… were not human at all. They were, in fact, not born of womb. How much worse would our cruelty be? How much greater licence would we give ourselves to inflict pain, if we knew for sure the beings we were hurting were not human?

This is an idea as old as the science fiction genre, but Sky illustrates it to devastating effect. There were points I actually had to stop reading for a minute to process the horror of what I was seeing.

I perceive a pattern among our female Laser Books contributors: both Juanita Coulson and Kathleen Sky have written cutting social commentaries that command the reader’s attention. Their books, so far, are praiseworthy and nuanced in ways most of the other Laser Books haven’t been, and I can easily commend them to modern audiences.

I can’t even make jokes about them! These women step up to the plate, knock it out of the park, and head home. We need more of this, dammit!

We must bid farewell to Kathleen Sky for now, but she will be back for 38. Ice Prison. A long wait, I know, but in a very short time, Juanita Coulson shall be gracing us with 20. Space Trap.

Looking forward to seeing you ladies again.

Who’s Next?

George Zebrowski‘s comin’ in ice cold with… wait a minute…

*squints*

Is that… John Wilkes Booth?

Well… this is awkward; I just dedicated 2500 words to talking about great emancipators.

*Raises voice* Hey, L., honey? Yeah, sorry, we can’t go to the theatre next week!

… ‘why’ you ask?

Oh, um… just take my word for it…

Blurb

A UN research team has been sent to the Antarctic to investigate strangely patterned radio signals. Expecting a buried transmitter, the team is awestruck by what they discover hidden beneath the polar ice. But it doesn’t remain hidden for long! The team is soon hurtling through space on an adventure that is as incredible as it is frightening. George Zebrowski, author of The Star Web, is a Nebula Award Finalist. His first novel, Omega Point, published in 1972, has already been translated into six languages.

I have a really good feeling about this. Nothing bad ever happened to a science team that went to Antarctica in a science fiction story!*

*Would You Like to Know More?

Why in Satan’s glorious name haven’t the studios let this man make his At the Mountains of Madness movie? Do you schmucks not realize that that would be a money-making machine?

Guess it’s true what John Cleese says: “Ninety percent of people in their chosen field have no clue what the fuck they’re doing.”
May 4, 2026
Laser Books Review 13

13. Blake’s Progress by R.F. Nelson

The Story So Far…

With 1/5th of the Laser Books behind us, let’s pause for a moment, cast our minds back and look at the 12 (13, really) titles we’ve enjoyed/endured since late December, 2025. Yes, ladies and germs, today we’re doing a brief clip show.

Hey, if Star Trek: The Next Generation could get away with that by the end of Season 2, so can I!

No tears, please. It’s a waste of good suffering.

—Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

Don’t worry, this won’t be an exhaustive list. I just want to quickly go over which of these twelve books I recommend, which ones I tentatively recommend, which ones I don’t, and which books should be killed with fire.

Ready? Let’s go!

Recommend

Absolute bangers, every one. Caravan barely squeaks in; there’s just enough nuance in there to make it stand with the rest.

2. Herds by Stephen Goldin

6. Serving in Time by Gordon Eklund

8. Caravan by Stephen Goldin

9. Invasion by Aaron Wolfe (Dean Koontz)

11. Unto the Last Generation by Juanita Coulson

Tentatively Recommend

Seeds is an odd duck: two clever ideas Frankensteined together, both weaker together than they could’ve been apart.

Seeklight is well written, but nothing we haven’t seen countless times from the masters of the Golden Age.

0. Seeds of Change by Thomas F. Monteleone

7. Seeklight by K.W. Jeter

Don’t Recommend

No point in reading these stories. They don’t have much to offer.

1. Renegades of Time by Raymond F. Jones

4. Gates of the Universe by Robert Coulson and Gene DeWeese

5. Walls Within Walls by Arthur Tofte

10. Falling Toward Forever by Gordon Eklund

Kill it with Fire

These titles espouse harmful rhetoric and ideologies which, in the past, have been used to curtail freedoms and enable tyranny.

3. Crash Landing on Iduna by Arthur Tofte

12. The King of Eolim by Raymond F. Jones

Surprisingly, there were far more easy recommends than I was expecting, and far fewer works that made me want to go full Fireman on them. And even the middle-of-the-road titles had some redeeming qualities.

And so, a new chapter in these reviews commences, with today’s title…

R.F. Nelson was a name unknown to me at the time I picked up this book. I refrain from looking Laser Books authors up until after I finish their first novel in the series, to go in with a blank slate as it were.

So you can imagine my astonishment after finishing Blake’s Progress when I discovered that Nelson not only came back to this series with 32. Then Beggars Could Ride and 53. The Ecolog, he was also a contributing author to Harlan Ellison‘s seminal anthology Again, Dangerous Visions, and–

I shit you not.

–the inventor of the propeller beanie.

I could not make this up!

This is one of the principal joys of writing these reviews: discovering the lives of the authors and the things they made.

I hope Ray gets remembered for his fiction, but even he admitted this wee cap is probably what’ll get his name into the history books.

It’s little things like this that make life worth living: sunshine, hot coffee, and finding out a science fiction writer created a hat for nerds.

Delightful.

I’d love to tell you whether Ray can write the way he builds his headgear, but let’s touch base with Kelly Freas first.

Cover

13. Blake’s Progress by R.F. Nelson

… wait a tit.

Floating city… hawkman casting lightning… crumbling towers… rivers of blood… grim man picture-in-picture…

Oh my God…

… is this a Dark Souls Twitch stream?? I’m not hallucinating, right? You guys are seeing this too? Oh, man. Well, at least he’s not fighting the Fume Knight. Otherwise Blake would be making a very different face.

Would You Like to Know More?

What makes Fume Knight one of the most challenging bosses in the game is his large move-set and difficult tells to his attack animations and patterns.

—DKS2 Wiki

The rage this fucker has induced in players from here to Japan is legendary, and many’s the gamer who has rage quit rather than face him again. Somewhere in the basement of a house in Scarborough, there’s a hole made by my brother’s fist which has been plastered over. It was made the first time he battled the Fume Knight.

As far as Freas’s covers go, this one feels… off. Not bad–far from it!–but there’s definitely something jarring about the realistic sketch of Blake’s face, haloed in white, placed against the surreal image of an angel mopping the floor with some unfortunate people. It really puts you on the back foot and makes you feel uncomfortable.

As always, that’s deliberate on Freas’s part. Blake’s Progress is a story of alienation from all familiar times and places, and Freas gets you started early on that. This is the kind of thing you could blow up on the walls of the Sistine Chapel and it would somehow work.

Let’s see how Marketing Guy is doing.

Blurb

William Blake lived as no man had ever lived before. Sweeping across the centuries, he clashed with Cleopatra, chatted with Churchill, entertained with Ezekiel. His wife Kate was astounded at the man she had married. And she knew what she had to do! In this amazing account of Blake’s life, Ray Nelson tells it like it might have been, had Blake had his way. “There are wonders galore in this book… I don’t believe I’ve read a science fiction novel like Blake’s Progress before.” –Terry Carr

Hmm, okay, Churchill and Cleopatra. Very promising. And while I’m not fond of wasting blurb space on quotes from other people, Terry Carr‘s words are at least short and to the point.

Honestly… I’d be intrigued. I love people going on exciting journeys across spacetime, sweeping up their loved ones in the act–for good or ill.

But can the story deliver?

Story

So first of all, Catherine Boucher and William Blake were real people.

Blake (1757-1827) was a poet, painter, and printmaker who was largely unappreciated in his time. His Prophetic Books were dismissed in his time as being religiously problematic, but have since been reevaluated as unique, esoteric works of art. The more I read about him, the more William Blake feels like a character in an H.P. Lovecraft story: a man charting a hidden mythology and being dismissed by the rationalists of the world as a madman.

I can’t speak to the quality or importance of Blake’s art. I’m already undertaking a forlorn odyssey in reviewing a series of 1975 Golden Age of Science Fiction revival novels; I’ve neither the time nor the inclination to add a foray into a late 18th century poet’s iconoclastic fantasyland, magical though it would no doubt be. But even a cursory reading of Blake’s biography reveals just how closely Ray Nelson cleaved to the source material.

Even Kelly Freas took note:

Look familiar?

Catherine Boucher was the last child of market gardener William Boucher and his wife, Mary Davis. Though illiterate, Catherine demonstrated an inclination to art, and is credited as being the pillar which held William Blake aloft throughout his entire career. Blake took work as an engraver for printing houses in order to pay the bills, but frequently let that work fall by the wayside in favour of his own artistic pursuits. So, it fell to Catherine to pick up the slack and do the work so they could make rent.

Would You Like to Know More?

Okay, seriously, is there a Deadbeat Dead Poets Society that got created around the turn of the century?

People romanticize the Romantics, but in order to have the time to write their best work, these guys put the burden of supporting them entirely on their families, avoided work like the plague, and gaslit their spouses into believing that “free love” (read “infidelity”) was the way God intended things to be.

I’m so glad the conversation around these men finally started turning around. From a feminist perspective, you can point to any one of their works and say, “there is a deep, emotional cost attached to this poem’s creation–a cost that was paid by a woman.”

Neither Golden Age of Sci-Fi novels nor period dramas set in the 18th century typically position a woman as the protagonist, so you can imagine my delight and surprise when I learned that Kate Boucher is the protagonist of the story!

The tale begins with the Four Zoas (beings from Blake’s mythology). They travel to and fro across time, observing, but never interfering, until one day, Urizen wonders why don’t they interfere? Why don’t they make the world into what they please? The other Zoas don’t like this idea, but they are too late to stop Urizen from vanishing into the timestream.

Fast forward (or backward?) a few thousand years, and Kate Boucher has butterflies about her imminent marriage to William Blake. They’ve had a brief courtship, but have decided they are right for one another. She signs the wedding certificate, they’re wedded, but never bedded–Blake has some hangups about sex. That’s okay. They’re happy.

For now…

Kate notices some odd behaviour on William’s part. He speaks with people late into the night, walks through a door of the house and comes back in a split second looking wild-eyed and disheveled. His work takes on a strange, esoteric tone. Finally, Kate begs to be let in on the mystery.

William reveals that, since he was a child, he’s been visited by a being called Urizen, who looks like an angel, but isn’t one. Urizen has plans to build a new world by rewriting the past, and they want Kate along for the ride.

But when Kate finds out they intend to do this by killing people at different stages of history, she’s mortified.

Would You Like to Know More?

In a true Golden Age story, Kate would be cast as the unreasonable female who can’t see the necessity of the male characters’ actions. Nelson flips this so that she is the sole voice of reason in Blake and Urizen’s insane world. Hers is the only conscience in sight, in this timeline or any other.

In fact, Nelson consistently does a good job of putting the reader in the mind of a woman who is not only struggling to make her way in her own time, but trying to stop a strutting egoist as he attempts to erase everything she knows.

Having been taught how to step out of spacetime by Blake, Kate takes on the mantle of the preserver of history. Much like in Serving in Time, we have two factions battling for their own perfect version of history, with all of humanity and William Blake caught in the middle.

Social Commentary in Blake’s Progress

There’s a tendency in a lot of time travel fiction to position organized religion (usually Christianity) as a destructive force in human affairs. In the novel, Urizen seeks to correct this by allowing a kind of animism–the worship of the sun–which espouses peace and cooperation.

But inevitably, the same thing happens as happened with Christianity: systems of power became entrenched and perverted a message of peace into a licence to exterminate all those who are different.

Urizen’s fundamental misunderstanding about humanity is that he can change the circumstances of our development all he likes, but the end of the day, we will still be human, and still flawed. Kate sees the detritus of his efforts all across the various histories that are born and unborn.

The Triumph of Woman

Ultimately, Kate realizes that she and her husband–now firmly back on her side–cannot defeat Urizen in a head-on confrontation, so her only hope is to outwit him. And she does so by discovering depths of power in the Zoas’ time manipulation techniques that not even they suspected. There’s a thrilling scene where Kate realizes she can multiply herself by backstepping one second at a time, creating a tsunami of Catherine Bouchers that wage war on Urizen across the timestream. It’s hilarious and invigourating seeing a tidal wave of 18th century urban housewives fighting an army of evil angels on the deck of Cleopatra’s galley.

Ultimately Kate defeats Urizen by stepping outside not just her timeline, but all timelines, and is able to destroy all versions of Urizen at once before they embark on their crusade to alter history. I absolutely love that Kate wins by taking the high ground, metaphorically, metaphysically, and literally. It’s a terrific conclusion to a surreal dreamscape of a book.

I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist!

Conclusions and Recommendations

Blake’s Progress is the strangest, most outlandish story yet featured in the Laser Books. It takes a pair of historical figures and sends them on a journey that mirrors the works of William Blake. You don’t need to know anything about Blake or Catherine to enjoy it. It’s a strong start to the next dozen Laser Books.

What’s weird to me is that… I’ve actually read lots of stories like this in the canon of science fiction, but the way Nelson flips the narrative by placing a woman at the centre and challenging a lot of the assumptions both of his chosen time period and genre makes this a very magical unicorn of a novel.

Catherine is an incredibly grounded protagonist: she definitely feels like an 18th century housewife in that she wants a safe, stable life with her partner, but she’s not spineless. Far from it: she goes to superhuman lengths to save the world thousands of times over, shows ingenuity to rival the gods, and withstands more emotional shocks than any person in her situation could be asked to endure. She’s a bundle of contradictions and convictions and you just can’t help rooting for her.

My Goodreads Review

A book whose title should probably be “Blake’s Acid Trip”, this novel takes the cliches of the Golden Age and flips them upside down, placing a woman in the driver’s seat of the narrative and taking you on a whirlwind tour of history, the afterlife, and one troubled poet’s weird view of creation. This novel has to be read to be believed.

This was a great palate cleanser after the bullshit that was The King of Eolim. I’m suddenly feeling a lot better about life.

Now… who’ve we got on deck?

Who’s Next?

Eyy, speaking of putting a woman in the driver’s seat, we’ve got our next entry of the Laser Books written by a woman! Kathleen Sky coming in hot with #14: Birthright.

Blurb it, Sam.

In this towering adventure, Kathleen Sky has created an unforgettable character. Is Andros human or an android created by his scientist-father? Others besides Andros would like to know. The survival of an entire android civilization hangs in the balance. In his desperate search for the truth about himself, Andros discovers what terror means. But neither terror nor love will stop him from finding the answer. He must claim his Birthright.
Kathleen Sky is a storyteller of the first rank

Until next time!

April 24, 2026
Laser Books Review 12

12. The King of Eolim by Raymond F. Jones

*sigh* I was having such a good fortnight.

First, my publisher told me they liked my first round of revisions on Seekers of the Fallen Stars, were adding the novel to their editorial pipeline, and wanted a proposal for Book 2 pronto. Sent that over, and they said it was strong, and told me to get writing.

Then Escape Pod emailed me saying they wanted to add my breakout novelette “EDIE” to their reprint catalogue and podcast it.

Then I watched Project Hail Mary, and knew right away that it was going down as a sci-fi classic alongside 2001, Contact, and Interstellar.

And then, just when life couldn’t get any more awesome, four astronauts–including a Canadian–launched to the moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972.

A great wave of optimism has swept the world as Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen took us with them, further than any humans have ever gone before. I have been living a dream.

And then I remembered…

… I have to review The King of Eolim.

Raymond F. Jones, author of Book 1: Renegades of Time, returns for a second outing. And oh-my-various-gods, it is painful.

I suppose, much like the crew of Artemis II, sooner or later, we all gotta come back down to Earth.

Cover

If there’s a slide scale for Kelly Freas‘s work, it would look something like this:

Bad —— Workmanlike —— Excellent

Eolim’s cover falls somewhere between Workmanlike and Excellent, closer to the former than the latter. I really like what Kelly is doing with light and colour, but I think he overdid it a touch on the sparkle. And I’m not sure why there’s two spaceships; the Bradwell family takes two trips through space, sure, but on the same ship. Pictured in the portrait is Freeman, the protagonist (and no, you can’t convince me his father is the main character) and his crown, which we’ll talk about later.

Oh, we will talk about it.

Overall, the composition and blend of colours is good, but the sparkliness is just a little too much. I think he could’ve toned down the lighting.

Enjoy this positive feedback, good people. It’s all downhill from here.

Blurb

Adventure stories don’t normally make a point as well, but Raymond F. Jones is no ordinary adventure story writer. In this touching and beautiful tale, Forester Bradwell shares his son’s adventures and learns a lesson he will never forget. Neither will you. For Forester Bradwell is one of the elite in a time and society where stupidity and ignorance have been conquered by genetic engineering. But his son Freeman is a Retard. The King of Eolim is the story of the Bradwell’s search for a home that will truly be “home” for Free.

If you read that and threw up a bit in your mouth, I wouldn’t blame you. I had the same reaction, and I’ll tell you why.

Elementary school was the most excruciating experience of my life. I had good teachers and made some friends, but I was always the slowest kid at sports and scholastics, to the point where I was given a Special Accommodations rating to help me keep pace with my classmates in learning.

In the Ontario school system, this means I was often separated from the rest of my class and put in a small group of students with similar learning or concentration challenges so that I could be taught in a quieter environment where teachers could spend more time addressing my needs. These sessions actually nurtured my desire to be a writer, because I had the time to express my desires to my teachers who in turn gave me the time and space to pursue them.

But what bothered me for all those years is that I knew I learned differently from other kids, but I was still chained to the school system. Some of my fondest memories are of going to the school library, picking up a book, and reading. I could read whole books in one sitting, and if it was an educational or non-fiction book, I could frequently recall every single thing I read in that book for weeks afterward.

And yet, if you put me in a classroom and tried to teach me math, religion, or science, my eyes would glaze over and my mind would shut down.

And yes, I had the R-word thrown at me a few times. That is not something you forget.

Reading the cover blurb for this novel, I knew exactly what kind of story I was in for. I hoped I was wrong.

I wasn’t.

Story

This just in: Neurodivergent Youth Taken from his Abusive Family and Placed in Foster Care with Telepathic Aliens

In a eugenics-based future, undesirable traits have been edited out of human beings, but occasionally, children like Freeman Bradwell are born who, while completely ordinary by today’s standards, with healthy imaginations and empathetic minds, are considered R—— by the standards of a society where exceptionalism is ordinary and cold calculation is prized.

In school, Freeman’s “disability” is recognized by his students and teachers and he is crowned “King of Eolim”, in a perverse tradition that follows the wearing of a dunce cap.

Would You Like to Know More?

The dunce cap is a tradition stemming from the 19th and 20th centuries. Children at school who were considered slow or disruptive were brought to the front of the class and forced to wear a pointed cap with a D or DUNCE printed on it. Modern psychologists agree that these “problem children” were likely kids with ADHD or who would’ve benefitted from special learning accommodations, or even who simply didn’t gel well with the school system.

Kids like me, in other words.

While a normal practice, there were many who, even at the time, called it debasing and harsh . I cannot imagine the psychological damage that was done to children with brains like mine because of it.

The saddest thing is, Freeman knows he is being made fun of, but he tries to wear the crown with pride as a way of undercutting his abusers. He demonstrates a remarkable strength of will considering his young age and his lack of allies in this cruel society.

His worst abusers are his parents. His mother won’t show him an ounce of love, and his father Forester wants to take his family away from Earth so he won’t have to listen to his colleagues demean him for having a R—– son. So they fly away in a spacecraft and crash-land on an alien world, Iduna-style.

Throughout the novel, Forester belittles Freeman, disregards his ideas, and even when Freeman calls the attention of an alien tribe to assist his family after their crash landing, Forester takes it upon himself to assume the role of colonizer and indoctrinate the aliens into human ways of thinking.

Oh yeah, and he frequently equates the aliens to Freeman because of their wide-eyed, dim-witted innocence, and denigrates them for sacrificing many of their number to stop Forester from taking Freeman away from them–Freeman, at this point, having become their friend.

Forester and his wife, seeing that Freeman is happier on this alien world they’ve come to, leave him there and go back to Earth. At the end, Forester and his wife come to love Freeman, but they still think it’s for the best to leave him behind.

Conclusions and Recommendations

I’m sorry, guys, I have to wrap this up. I would’ve gone into more detail of the plot, but this book is too painful for me to talk about any longer.

There have been many well-intentioned attempts by sci-fi authors over the years to address issues such as race, sex, and neurodivergence, but lacking in modern resources and studies, such attempts were inevitably clumsy, and often harmful. The King of Eolim is one such attempt.

My Goodreads Review:

Raymond F. Jones is a veteran of the genre. He was a regular contributor to Astounding (Analog) and Galaxy. His last outing in the Laser Books, Renegades of Time, had some good scenes in it. But King of Eolim, however well-intentioned, is a deeply harmful book, and in the world of modern science fiction and neurodivergent studies, it has no place.

I can’t be too harsh on Jones, I’ve written some well-intentioned but deeply harmful stories myself, but I also had the benefit of living in a wiser society, with gentle, educated friends, who showed me where I mis-stepped and where I could do better. Maybe Jones could do better if he were alive today, maybe not.

But let this stand as a cautionary tale to writers everywhere, including myself: educate yourself before you write, lest your pen draw blood.

And with that… we’re one-fifth done the Laser Books. The King of Eolim marks the end of the initial run of 12 novels. Let’s see where Roger Elwood takes us next.

Who’s Next?

Lucky 13 is Blake’s Progress by R.F. Nelson. Blurb it, baby!

William Blake lived as no man had ever lived before. Sweeping across the centuries, he clashed with Cleopatra, chatted with Churchill, entertained with Ezekiel. His wife Kate was astounded at the man she had married. And she knew what she had to do! In this amazing account of Blake’s life, Ray Nelson tells it like it might have been, had Blake had his way. “There are wonders galore in this book… I don’t believe I’ve read a science fiction novel like Blake’s Progress before.”–Terry Carr

Well, you know, one mention of ole’ Winston C. and I’m on board. I’ll see you all then!

Addendum: Artemis II

As I write these words, the Orion spacecraft Integrity is falling back down Earth’s gravity well, on target for a splashdown April 10th at 7 o’clock. Godspeed, Artemis II. The whole world is wishing you four a safe and uneventful return.

April 10, 2026
Laser Books Review 11
11. Unto the Last Generation by Juanita Coulson

Last review, I made a crack about women writing sci-fi, and got a crack on the head for my political incorrectness. To anyone who might’ve been offended: I apologize. I don’t know how I’ll ever forgive myself. I’ve already booked myself into rehab.

And next week I’ll be on the Jordan Peterson Podcast.

Okay, okay, I’m gonna cut the chauvinist humour now. In today’s review, we have to talk about extinction, cloning, and vaginas — subjects I take very seriously.

Juanita Coulson’s first listed sci-fi credit is “Another Rib”, published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, co-authored with Marion Zimmer Bradley in 1963 under the pen name John J. Wells. In 1965, after being nominated seven consecutive years, she, along with her husband Robert, won the Hugo Award for Best Fanzine for editing Yandro.

Would You Like to Know More?

If the name Robert Coulson sounds familiar, that’s because he co-authored Laser Book 4, Gates of the Universe, with Gene DeWeese. Check out my very short review of that forgettable tale here.

She is also a Filk Hall of Famer. Her list of works on ISFDB shows a healthy blend of original fiction, essays, art, and reviews — and that’s before you get into her history with filk songs and poetry. To my delight, she also wrote a Star Trek: TOS tie-in story as part of the collection Star Trek: The New Voyages.

I’m always excited to read works by authors who flex their muscles not only across many different kinds of writing, but also different kinds of art. Generally, this is indicative of a robust intellect and a linguistic ingenuity not often found in those who confine themselves to one field. An excellent example would be Clive Barker: a man whose paintings are as widely appreciated as his prose. He paints with words, and tells stories with paint.

And speaking of art…

Cover

Whoa, what a stark departure from the previous covers! I can tell Kelly Freas got tired of being told to colour inside the lines, so he made his own lines.

Having read the book, I can tell you this cover is representative of the story within, but not in the way you’d think. There’s a lot of travelling through abandoned cityscapes and desolate imagery in the story, but Freas chose not to depict any of that. So, what did he leave us with?

The first place the eye goes when looking at the cover is the huge red cloning vat on the right. The ghostly forms of unborn children float within. It’s a haunting image, and it takes effort to tear the eye away from it.

The bright yellow and orange lights of the leftmost panel draw the eye next. At first, I had no idea what he was saying with these geometric shapes and flashing lights, but now I realize he’s evoking the image of a computer — the bulky kind with flashing lights that was a staple of sci-fi storytelling from 1950 to 1970.

Next the eye travels to the little girl on the bottom left, Ria. She’s got a forlorn expression on her face, but a hard set to her lips and shoulders. She looks tougher than her size suggests. And her gaze naturally directs us to the portrait of our protagonist, Richard Parnell on the right, looking a little drawn and haggard.

It’s only writing this review that I realize what Freas was going for:
- Cloning
- Computers
- Ria
- Parnell
These are the people and technologies that the world is banking on to provide hope to a fading humanity. Rather than showing dark and depressing images of empty cities and rioting crowds, Freas showed us the tip of the spear, the vanguard, the forces trying to save Homo sapiens from extinction.

That would be striking enough, but the way he arrays his elements with unexpected geometric precision, leading the eye in a spiral down to our protagonist and all that concerns him, is such a stark departure from what I’ve grown used to seeing from him.

I hope to see more covers like this in the future.

Blurb

Population Zero has accomplished its mission only too well. Not only has the world’s population ceased to mushroom, it has ceased to reproduce…because it cannot. Wholesale application of population control technology has rendered man infertile. In the Life Sciences Building, a team of doctors and scientists is trying everything imaginable in their frantic efforts to produce life artificially…when into their midst walks a little girl. “I’m eight,” the girl announces proudly. But mankind has been sterile for more than 15 years!

I mentioned last review that this reminded me of The Children of Men. I’d never read the book, but I’ve seen the Alfonso Cuarón film, and the notion of a young woman suddenly turning up who provides hope to a dying humanity definitely has echoes with this blurb.

Marketing Guy did pretty good here! I’d certainly be intrigued. It’s dark with a bright ray of sunshine cutting the gloom. Nicely done, MG! Keep it up and we might not have to feed you to the hungry Targs.

Now, while he’s busy quaking in his boots, lets move on to the main course.

Story

*cracks open the book, clears throat*

The story begins… wait a minute…

*squints*

Now what are the odds of this!

First Re: Reading with Caravan, now Bakka!

You know what that means…

Bakka-Phoenix Books

It’s pluggin’ time!

Bakka was a combined SFF book and comic shop on Queen Street in Toronto, opened in May of 1972 (one month after John Young, Ken Mattingly, and Charles Duke went to the moon on Apollo 16, funny enough). The comic portion of the shop split off and became Silver Snail, originally situated across the street from Bakka.

In March 1998, Bakka “marched” over to Yonge Street, and in March 2005, it “marched” back to Queen. Then in November (sigh… they could’ve gone in March and got the hat trick) 2010, they… relocated… blech… to their current spot at Harbord and Spadina, and rebranded themselves Bakka-Phoenix Books.

In the years since, they’ve become the de facto launch site for Toronto-based genre writers. P.A. Cornell is the most recent author I know who launched a book there (Shoeshine Boy and Cigarette Girl — check it out!), and I hope to have the Toronto launch of my own debut novel, Seekers of the Fallen Stars, at that store. They’re also frequent vendors at Can*Con. I’ve given them an absurd amount of money over the years, and doubtless I’ll be giving them even more in the future. It’s worth every cent. They are the flagship of Toronto’s SFF scene and I’m happy to support them.

I look forward to the day when my book is on their shelves.

Digression Over

Okay, now that that’s out of the way, let’s get back to the story.

Unto the Last Generation presents us with a future with echoes of Stephen Goldin’s Caravan, but rather than too many people being the direct cause of societal collapse, it is too few.

The reason for this is actually quite intriguing. Prior to the events of the book, women across the planet developed an immune response to male sperm, killing sperm cells as they would a virus or bacteria. The result is that no sperm are able to reach an egg and so women cannot have children.

Would You Like to Know More?

Human ovum

Holy shit, Juanita. I don’t know if you realize just how smart and prescient your plot device is, but you deserve the gold-pressed latinum star of sci-fi worldbuilding.

Let me mansplain for a minute.

I’m not sure what the state of immmunology was at the time Last Generation was written, but it’s well-known now just how hostile and uninviting the female vagina is.

Microbiotically-speaking, of course.

The vagina has a high pH level, is coated with antimicrobial mucus, and is armed to the metaphorical teeth with every kind of immune cell available to the human body.

(Geez, this got Freudian fast…)

It shouldn’t be a surprise: being an orifice into the body’s interior, there has to be a great deal of security to prevent unwanted intrusion.

But that security also attacks sperm cells — the very cells needed for reproduction. The reason why is probably evolutionary: you don’t want any Tom, Dick, or Harry fertilizing your eggs, so the vagina’s defences whittle down the sperm count until only the toughest remain. From there, it’s a race to the ovaries.

But this world of immune-meets-reproductive systems gets even more interesting.

We’ve known for some time now that as much as 8% of the human genome comes from viruses — specifically ancient viruses who smuggled genetic sequences into our ancestors which never got eliminated, probably because it imparted an advantage of some kind.

But there’s a theory gaining traction in recent years that says we may owe our entire existence to viruses. How, you ask? It’s simple.

Sperm.

What is a sperm cell, really? It’s a vessel carrying a genetic payload which infiltrates a larger cell (ovum) and reprograms it. This is the exact behaviour a virus uses to reproduce.

The modern theory is that our ancient ancestors learned this trick during a viral infection and incorporated it into the reproductive process. And since anti-sperm antibodies are already a well-documented cause of infertility in some couples, it’s no stretch to believe that a slight change in genetics (particularly in a developed country, where autoimmune diseases are more common) could lead to sex-wide infertility.

If you’d like to know where I learned all this, read Philipp Dettmer‘s book Immune. You will come to know not only your immune system, but your whole life, a lot better.

Researcher Richard Parnell and his wife Therese, who’ve long dreamed of having a baby, have been working feverishly as part of a cross-country team of scientists to solve the fertility issue before humankind goes extinct. So far, cloning has seemed like the best option, and some scientists like Jesse Bliss are going all-in on the technology. Into their midst walks an eight year old girl, Ria, a street orphan being cared for by a group of elderly folk hiding out in the local library.

Eight years old… except women have been infertile for fifteen years.

Suddenly the Life Sciences team realizes that not all women are infertile. Someone out there is able to have children. Cloning may not be the only option.

As a riot inches closer to the Life Sciences Building, Richard and Therese make the decision to move Ria to the project’s headquarters, there to begin a nationwide search for her parents and any other children. This involves a perilous journey across a collapsing America.

Detloff, Bliss, and Preconceptions

One of the most interesting characters in the story is Nevin Detloff, a populist radical. Food is scarce in this world, and the government maintains strict control of it. Detloff works hard to redistribute calories equally.

Reading this book, I assumed early on — as many readers doubtless would — that Detloff would be the villain, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a ringleader of the masses who would use charisma to get whatever he wants. I was surprised, then, when by happenstance he fell in with our hero’s convoy and turned out to be a decent guy.

Is he opportunistic? Yeah. Always hunting for a political angle? Sure. But it’s always in service of his movement to feed people and building grassroots connections. He is that legendary political unicorn: a moral demagogue.

If anything, it’s Detloff’s more zealous followers that pose the most danger; people who have taken his message to mean that they should take whatever they want by force of arms, even from innocent people. That’s not what Detloff believes. He always punches up, never down. He challenges authority and fights for the common folk.

As I mentioned in my Crash Landing on Iduna review, most grassroots movements start out innocently like this. Then some assholes take over and it becomes something sinister.

Would You Like to Know More?

One example that hits close to home is incel culture.

I want you to sit back and think for a minute. Where do you think the term incel came from? When I tell you the answer, you probably won’t believe it.

The term incel was originally coined by a Canadian university student named Alana. In 1997, she created an online forum called “Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project” wherein she discussed, and invited discussion, on sexual inexperience as it pertained to societal expectations. Initially, it was a positive conversation, and Alana departed believing it would continue thus in her absence.

But over the next twenty years, the term was taken and perverted by men who used it to blame women for why they failed at relationships. The movement metastasized and became a hub of misogynism — the total opposite of what Alana sought to foster.

After the Yonge Street Van Attack, she was shocked to discover what her conversation had turned into.

But do you know which character actually turns out to be an asshole? Jesse Bliss.

Bliss is the man in charge of the cloning efforts, working closely with a woman named Ines to create a test tube baby. They use one of his sperm and Ines’s ovum to make the child. When Bliss reveals the success to the Parnells, it is treated as a miraculous moment of hope.

And then Bliss, in front of Ines, casually suggests they dissect the child to make sure it developed properly.

Ines very nearly claws Bliss’s eyes out for that, and it’s only by revealing their success to the rest of the team that she stops Bliss from going ahead with the dissection.

Normally in Golden Age Sci-fi novels, the demagogue is the bad guy and the scientist is the good guy. But Juanita Coulson, New Wave authoress that she is, flips it, and throws in a good helping of maternity rights in the bargain. And it’s brilliant.

Two Hopes for Humanity

“Send in the clones!”

— Danilo Odell, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Episode 218, “Up the Long Ladder”

Shortly after the cloning process is revealed to be working, dozens of other children are found and brought to the Life Sciences headquarters along with their parents, to keep them all safe. Nevin Detloff plays a critical role, here: he uses his network of followers to find the children and their families. His national reach proves essential to Life Sciences’ work.

Richard Parnell realizes that even with these children, they’ll still need the cloning process; there aren’t enough natural-born kids alive to rebuild the human race in their own time. And what if the mutation that created the infertility problem spreads to the healthy kids eventually?

Better keep the Kaminoans on speed dial.

And how will clones be viewed in the future? Will they be seen as second-class citizens, less human than natural born children? How will legislature integrate cloning practices?

So many questions, so few answers, but the novel ends on a cautiously optimistic note: whatever vicissitudes and pitfalls await us, we’ve proven we’re smart enough not to go extinct. Rich and Therese now have the hope of having their own child someday — a cloned child, perhaps, but a child of their genes nonetheless. Coulson nails the final notes of the book with expert precision.

Conclusions and Recommendations

You can feel Juanita Coulson struggling against the constraints of the Laser Books in writing this tale. She clearly wants to go further, get meaner, but Harlequin has her on a leash, as they do all the other authors in this series. But she easily ranks among those authors who succeeded despite their constraints, and every page of this book crackles with expectation and tension.

If this book were written today, without those constraints, it would be very different — and much more brutal.

Consider this: what would the world’s reaction be if it discovered the human race was about to go extinct, and the female body was empirically proven to be the cause?

Violence against women would explode in ways the human race has never seen.

It nauseates me to even contemplate saying this… but I wish that had been examined in this story, because it would absolutely be a pandemic in the future Coulson depicts. Misogyny and femicide are on the rise now, but a fertility crisis involving only the female sex would cause crimes against women to reach the stratosphere.

I wonder if Coulson would’ve made that a part of her book if she’d been given free reign. I don’t think you could tell this story today without acknowledging it in some way.

I do not, by any means, advocate for graphic descriptions of violence against women — you can turn on the daily news and glut yourself on that horror any time, which is itself a tragedy — but pretending the crisis doesn’t exist, or would not worsen in Coulson’s invented future, is naive at best, and dishonest at worst.

But even as it stands, Coulson still manages to integrate women’s rights into the novel at the very end with the showdown between Ines and Bliss, and considering how much else she accomplishes, I’m more than happy with the end product.

My Goodreads Review

A tight, powerful, scientifically-informed tale of a fertility crisis in the near future, Unto the Last Generation marks the first story told by a woman in the Laser Books lineup, and it sets a high bar for those that follow. Crackling with tension, sprinkled with poignant commentary, this is a very powerful tale of hope in a hopeless future. Easy recommend if you can find a copy!

With that, I close out our review of the first female Laser Book entry. I’m eagerly looking forward to our next authoress, Kathleen Sky, and her novel Birthright. We don’t have long to wait; she’s #14 in the series!

But for the nonce, let’s see who #12 is.

Who’s Next?

Damn, that’s sparkly! Let’s see what the blurb says.

Adventure stories don’t normally make a point as well, but Raymond F. Jones is no ordinary adventure story writer. In this touching and beautiful tale, Forester Bradwell shares his son’s adventures and learns a lesson he will never forget. Neither will you. For Forester Bradwell is one of the elite in a time and society where stupidity and ignorance have been conquered by genetic engineering. But his son Freeman is a Retard. The King of Eolim is the story of the Bradwell’s search for a home that will truly be “home” for Free.

…

…

…

Fuck.
March 25, 2026