James Dick

Tag: Harlequin

Laser Books Review 25
25. Scavenger Hunt by Stephen Goldin

If you scroll back far enough on Instagram, I’m sure you could find my posts from 2021 hailing Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk as visionaries and applauding the billionaire space race.

I’m not being sarcastic; there is–and I shit you not–an Instagram post I wrote where I called Bezos’s flight in New Shepard a “victory for humanity.”

Just thinking about it makes me want to scourge myself.

You have to remember, I was locked inside a house for over a year like the rest of you sorry schmucks quietly going insane with my family. Any distraction was welcome. So when this big pissing match between Bronson, Bezos, and Musk kicked into high gear, I tuned in religiously.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Now I know y’all are intelligent people. You don’t me to tell you how all those long months spent stuck inside helped the far-right find more foot soldiers for its army of darkness, how ordinary folk turned into extraordinary bigots, how we silently allowed minorities to be exploited so that we could have food, drink, and graphics cards delivered to our homes while we rode out the lockdown in supreme comfort. It will be decades yet before we’ve fully recovered from the psychological injury of that time.

If ever.

I bring all this up because today’s Laser Book reminded me of the billionaire space race, and how such infinitely wealthy people succumbed to such infinitely petty displays of their wealth.

Stephen Goldin, author of the excellent Herds and the very good Caravan, delivers a third Laser Book today: Scavenger Hunt. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed his work in the series and am looking forward to diving into his latest novel.

And with the arrival of book 25, we now have an official bio from Roger Elwood for Goldin. Let’s see what he has to say about one of his regulars in Meet the Author.

Stephen Goldin has a bachelor’s degree in astronomy from UCLA. His first published story (at age 18) appeared in If; since then, his works have appeared in such diverse publications as Galaxy, Adam, Magazine of Horror, Pix, and Vertex, and in anthologies such as Protostars, Generation, Universe 5, Tomorrow’s Alternatives, Future Corruption and Nameless Places. One of his stories, “The Last Ghost,” was runner-up for a Nebula Award as Best Short Story of 1971.

As an editor, Mr. Goldin has assisted David Gerrold with four original sf anthologies as well as publishing one of his own–The Alien Condition. One of the stories in the latter collection won the Nebula Award in 1974. He has also worked as editor of a nationally distributed underground newspaper.

His background includes a stint as a restaurant busboy, managing a grocery store and working as a space scientist for the United States Navy. He is married to fellow Laser author Kathleen Sky.

OTHER LASER BOOKS BY STEPHEN GOLDIN

NO. 2 HERDS

NO. 8 CARAVAN

Gotta give an obligatory shoutout to David Gerrold, with whom I’ve had the great good fortune of being published. Our stories appeared together in the July/August 2025 issue of Analog.

His story was the standalone anti-slavery piece, “North Station Blues”.

Mine was “ESRI”, the second installment in my critically-acclaimed Europa series.

Would You Like to Know More?

Among his many prose credits, he is also a screenwriter, contributing to Logan’s Run, Superboy, and Babylon 5–the latter in which he wrote one of the most gut-wrenching sci-fi teleplays I’ve ever seen: the first season episode “Believers”.

But he is perhaps best known for Star Trek S2E15, “The Trouble with Tribbles”.

My grandma had a 30th Anniversary of Star Trek boxed set of VHS tapes containing “Tribbles” and the Deep Space Nine episode “Trials and Tribble-ations”. Every time I visited her, the first thing she’d do is sit me down in front of the TV, warm up a box of Michelina’s macaroni and cheese, crack open a Coca-Cola, and put on these two episodes. For an hour and a half, I’d be delighted by some of the best sci-fi television ever aired. To this day, I get the warm and fuzzies every time I watch these episodes.

And it’s all thanks to David Gerrold. It was a highlight of my career to share page space with him.

As I mentioned in my last review, I was very keen on talking about Kelly Freas‘s cover for Scavenger Hunt, so without further a-dew, let’s get to it!

Cover

Mm-hmm!

Kelly has played with a number of primary colours in his cover designs over the course of the series, the most frequent being green, red, and blue. This is the first time gold has taken centre stage, and damned if it isn’t pretty!

Right away the eye goes to the portrait of Tyla in the bottom-right and her glorious golden cap’n’s cap and command collar. If I ever get launched into space, this is exactly what I want to wear.

And my goodness, have you noticed Tyla is black?! This is terrific! Our first black female protagonist of the Laser Books! What a triumph! I know I harp on the Laser Books a lot for often being backward, but cheers to Stephen Goldin for finally showing his fellow authors the way.

As for the rest of the cover, two words come to mind: simple elegance. The trails of the spaceships mirror the gold colouring of Tyla’s uniform and the three spaceship hulls almost match the shade of her hair. Those ships by the way are the Honey B, Hermes, and Egalité, more on which later.

The planets are aligned so that they draw the eye up from Tyla (hard to do, I know; she’s gorgeous) to the title, written in a shade of red that hints at blood.

Hmm…

Anywho, onto the blurb.

Blurb

The SCAVENGER HUNT is the most deadly game in space. Tyla deVrie means to win it–no matter what the cost–and the beautiful Tyla is accustomed to getting her own way. But when the Scavenger Hunt exerts its macabre influence and exacts its toll, even Tyla’s indulgent world begins to turn sour. From the eve of the Hunt, when she is publicly humiliated at the glittering Hunt Ball and throughout the reckless race through space, her personality undergoes a subtle but sinister change–of which only she is unaware.

Whoa, Marketing Guy’s cooking on gas today! This is easily one of the more engaging Laser Books blurbs, and I could see myself thumbing through the first few pages of this title in a bookstore on the basis of the blurb alone.

Moreover, this premise feels like it could fit just as easily into a fantasy or dark fantasy tale as well. It’s so open-ended, you could go anywhere with it!

Not much more to say on this, really, except… give me the story!

Story

We’ve been catfished!!

This woman, depicted so prominently on both covers in a place typically reserved for either the protagonist or antagonist of the book, and who is mere millimetres away from the blurb on the back cover which makes specific mention of the protagonist Tyla deVrie and whom we would most likely assume to be Tyla deVrie…

… is not, in fact, Tyla deVrie.

It’s Kirre, captain of the Honey B, employee of the white female protagonist’s white male brother.

“We’ve been tricked, we’ve been backstabbed, and we’ve been, quite possibly, bamboozled.”

— Sarge, Red vs. Blue

We were so close–so effin’ close!–but no, this will not be our first black female protagonist. Kirre appears a few times throughout the book when buttons need to be pushed or exposition delivered, and even though she takes a strong moral stand at the story’s climax, it doesn’t redress the fact that she’s a secondary character.

Come to think of it, she might be the least-significant character in a Laser Book to get a cover portrait. So, that in itself is odd, but it gets even weirder when you consider that the protagonist of the story is female; naturally, after reading the blurb, I assumed the woman on the cover was the protagonist.

Nope.

I gotta say, the narrowmindedness of the Laser Books is really starting to chafe. I know that white male protagonists have dominated literature since… forever… but I have to reiterate: the LB’s came out 1975 to 1977, at the absolute crest of the New Wave. This was a time when black protagonists, female protagonists, and even transgender protagonists were breaking into mainstream stories. And readers loved them! Across the Laser Books, so far the only female protagonist has been Kate in Blake’s Progress.

And the only protagonist from a visible minority was Juan in The Star Web.

So, I can’t figure out why Kirre is on the cover. Did Kelly feel he needed to include more BIPOC faces on his covers? If so, good on him for looking for opportunities like this. The only other possibility is that he was told to put Kirre there as a bait-and-switch, and I cannot countenance the notion that Roger Elwood would do such a thing.

There’s one more problem: based on the amount of screen time each character gets, I would argue this book is an ensemble piece. If Tyla is the protagonist, her time spent on-page doesn’t really reflect that; Bred, Johnathan, and the all-female crew get just as much.

As for the story… it’s a phenomenal premise.

In the far future, billionaires have grown so wealthy that ordinary work and pleasure provides no satisfaction. They’re also the only private citizens wealthy enough to own their own spaceships, so travel between worlds becomes their primary means of distracting themselves.

But even this loses its lustre after a time.

Craving a new form of entertainment, they create the Scavenger Hunt, which is just that: an interstellar search for items of extreme rarity. It’s a lethal game, taking them to some of the most dangerous places in the galaxy. The items required are unique to each hunter, and some can go the whole Hunt without ever running into each other.

The Hunt is hosted once every twenty years, and seven total have taken place to date, four of which have been won by the deVrie family.

Tyla and Bred deVrie lost their parents in the last Hunt. They ran into some trouble pursuing a dragon’s egg on an alien planet. The other hunter who was there, Ambic Jusser, chose not to help them and fled with an egg of his own, causing them to die and going on to win the Hunt. Now, twenty years later, Tyla deVrie hopes to avenge that loss by winning this Hunt.

Tyla is a wonderfully messed up character. She’s what happens when being the Cool Girl in high school becomes a career path. Tyla has matured into a cutthroat socialite who uses sex as a weapon and prizes image above all else. She wants to enter the Hunt herself, but the rules say only men are allowed to. All her life, she’s had to manipulate men into opening the doors of high society to her. She has no moral compass, no sense of humanity, and no resilience of any kind.

Bred deVrie, Tyla’s brother, owns his own spacecraft. He’s a walking HR violation: he employs a crew of only women, regularly sleeps with all of them, and is indifferent to the Hunt. But, he enrolls his ship, the Honey B, at the behest of his sister because he cares about her happiness, and beating Ambic Jusser will make her happy.

In addition to Jusser, the android Johnathan R has enrolled the Egalité in hopes of winning the Hunt in order to gain prestige and recognition for androids as their own species. All the other participants take a dislike to him, especially Tyla after he stiffs her on a dance at the Hunt Ball, but he seems to be the only person who’s into the Hunt for reasons other than popularity.

The Scavenger Hunt

The rules of the Hunt are simple:
- Every ship is accompanied by an Umpire: a tamper-proof robot who announces objects to be collected
- Each item must be collected before the next will be announced
- Collecting every item on a hunter’s list means automatic victory: barring that, the participant with the most items wins
Notice how there are no rules governing the conduct of hunters toward each other. Fucking each other over is all part of the game, you see, and none fucks as hard as Ambic Jusser.

Not only did this tosspot leave the deVries’ parents to get eaten by dragons, he also helps an alien race hijack the Honey B, and attempts to murder Johnathan R by torching him with the Hermes drive plume.

(Fortunately, our android friend has thicker skin than your average schmuck.)

As the story progresses and the competitive bullshit piles up, Bred and Johnathan start having second thoughts about participating in the Scavenger Hunt. The first item is hazardous enough to try and get–an artificial dream from a planet where the inhabitants killed themselves by entering dream machines and never leaving–but the story really gets interesting on the planet Eclipsiascus.

Eclipsiascus is divided between two races: the aquatic Lithuwaan and the terrestrial Grosstem. These species are at war with each other, but neither can make any inroads into the other’s territory because the environments of land and sea are so different from each other; each species has a perfect home field advantage, but can’t fight effectively on the other’s turf.

Johnathan, Jusser, and the deVries are tasked with finding an Eclipsiascus flower which only blooms during this world’s monthly eclipses. Trouble is, the flower is growing in a warzone. The Lithuw promise to help find flowers for the contestants if the hunters will do one teeny tiny favour for them.

Use the drive plumes of their spaceships to incinerate the Grosstem population.

“We get genocide, you get flower. Good deal!”

Bred and Johnathan say no on the spot. Jusser says no as well, though not for reasons of morality: he simply believes that getting the Lithuw’s help would make the Hunt too easy. He craves the challenge of this game.

This is the moment when I realized the potential of this story: moral checkpoints that push the character’s closer and closer to the lines they profess they will not cross.

Risk your own life and limb? No problem. Risk your friends? Well, if they’re into it, sure. Hurt your friends? Maybe… Hurt a stranger? Well… Commit genocide? Um… I would’ve loved to see these characters pushed against that wall again and again with carefully calculated tests of their willingness to proceed.

Unfortunately, by kicking it off with potential genocide, Stephen doesn’t leave himself much room to innovate later on, and the story never quite reaches the heights it should.

It doesn’t even feel finished, come to think of it… it just sort of stops halfway through the plot.

Conclusions and Recommendations

IT’S A TWO-PARTER??

Yes, ladies and germs. I canna believe it, but I guess Roger Elwood agreed with me that a single book is not enough to contain this story. A full twenty titles down the road, he commissioned the conclusion to Scavenger Hunt in the aptly-titled Finish Line.

I wouldn’t have even known about it if I hadn’t checked the first book’s Goodreads page.

This Laser Books edition was originally published in 1976 and is only the first half of the complete story. (The second half was published later that same year as “Finish Line.”) Years later, the two halves were published in single-volume form under the comprehensive title SCAVENGER HUNT; the paperback edition was published by CreateSpace for Parsina Press, and the ebook edition was published by E-Reads. For a more satisfactory experience, read the later, complete edition.

Hang on, hang on, I need to do some calculations…

$20 x 2=40$

I wish I had a NASA supercomputer to verify these, but if I understand this correctly, at the current rate I’m working through these Laser Books, it’ll be 40 weeks before I read the conclusion to Scavenger Hunt.

But right now, I’ve got bigger questions.

How did Kelly Freas get a picture of my uncle from the ’80s… if he drew this in ’76?

Well… onwards we go.

My Goodreads Review

There’s a truly clever idea in this story, and for the most part, it’s handled with Stephen Goldin’s typical skill, but 190 pages is not nearly long enough to satisfy the demands of this ambitious plot. Apparently series editor Roger Elwood agreed, because he commissioned a second book from Goldin, Finish Line, to explore and conclude the story properly. I’m excited to read it, but as for this book… it’s hard to rate an incomplete tale. So far, I’d give it a 3 out of 5, with the real rating closer to a 3.5. If this story were told today, with more room to expand and dig deep into its subject matter, it might be a bestseller.

There’s truly so much potential in the idea of “billionaires on an interstellar scavenger hunt, screwing each other over every step of the way” that I think, if this story were expanded on, edited, and repackaged in a new format, it would be a colossal hit.

Something for me to think about…

And you know what else I should be thinking about?

Who’s Next?

Robert Coulson, one half of the writing duo that brought us the totally forgettable Gates of the Universe, returns with a tale all his own: To Renew the Ages. Hopefully this one stays in my head longer than the last one did.

Blurb

North America, after the nuclear holocaust, is a hostile and desolate land–populated by tribes of barbaric savages and ferocious wild animals. From one of the few widely scattered settlements, Bill Ashley rides onto the Deadlands, searching for a chilling, unknown enemy that lures its prey by telepathy. Instead, he finds Tamara Bush, the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. She considers him beneath contempt. But if she is ever to see her home again, Tamara knows she must accept Bill’s protection.

Something tells me it will not.
October 7, 2026
Laser Books Review 24
24. Ruler of the World by J.T. McIntosh

“Everybody wants to rule the world.”

— Tears for Fears

Another day, another milestone in the Laser Books. With the completion of J.T. McIntosh’s debut entry in the series, we will have finished another dozen books in this series.

Good thing, too, because that’ll give me something extra to add onto this very short review.

Ready, steady, go!

J.T. McIntosh is the pen name of Scottish journalist James Murdoch MacGregor, whose first published science fiction story “The Curfew Tolls”, appeared in my alma mater Astounding (later renamed Analog) in 1950. Let me tee up his official Laser Books bio for you.

J.T. McIntosh was born in Paisley, Scotland, and now lives in Aberdeen. A former teacher, musician and photographer, he received an Honors M.A. in English Language and Literature from Aberdeen University.

One of his short stories, “One in 300,” was included in the prestigious anthology, Best SF of 1954. For the next ten years he abandoned the writing of science fiction novels in order to create books on photography, wine- and beer-making, and novels of general interest.

He returned to science fiction with his highly acclaimed novel, Snow White and The Giants, which was first published in Worlds of If.

Ruler of the World is his first LASER BOOK.

We’ve now had two Scottish writers on this series, the last being Donald Malcolm who penned The Unknown Shore. I had some good things to say about that book in my review. Let’s see if the same is true for Ruler of the World.

It’s Kellytime!

Cover

This cover scratches a very particular itch in my cerebellum.

I watch a lot of 1960’s sci-fi films and television with my dad, and there is a lost art which existed in that medium which has largely been replaced by computer generated effects: matte paintings.

These works of art were created to be inserted into sets as backdrops, or photographed separately and composited into footage. From the ’60s to the ’80s, matte painters enjoyed a boom in their work with the widespread use of colour film and increasingly more detailed film cameras, and their popularity in science fiction soared.

It’s probably no exaggeration to say that the mattes of this time period defined the look of Science Fiction in film, television, books, magazines, albums, and visual art for three decades.

This cover looks exactly like a high-quality matte composite created by a skilled team of filmmakers: a portrait featuring Ram Burrell (protagonist) in the bottom-right, his love interest Roberta Murdock lounging against a foreground soundstage element, and in the background, the spiraling, decadent madness of the tourist station Paradiso. There’s so much freakin’ depth in this image that even two weeks after picking up the book, I’m still finding details!

This is one of those covers you could blow up into a poster and you wouldn’t lose much detail. Kelly’s firing on all paintbrushes here. The use of pink on Roberta’s outfit is also a great departure from the colour schemes we’ve seen thus far in Laser Book covers, and it’s reflected in the title letters as well.

Let’s flip to the back and see what Marketing Guy has done.

Blurb

Earth, four centuries from today, is in dire peril. A half-empty world, it is slowly destroying itself. The Terrans are drab and obedient. Instant exile is the penalty for non-conformity. Interplanetary visitors are restricted to reservations where they cannot meet native Terrans or threaten their self-imposed isolation. But Burrell succeeds in breaking through. He is a rough, tough spaceman with a flair for stirring up trouble. And he is determined to shake the world of his ancestors out of its apathy.

Hardly original, but then again, if I wanted originality, I wouldn’t be reading the Laser Books.

This blurb wouldn’t get my attention; it reads like a million other cover blurbs both from the time, and stretching back to the Golden Age.

But what the hell, maybe MG is just struggling to convey a deeply nuanced, complex narrative that doesn’t exactly fit into traditional–

Story

–son of a bitch, that was boring.

I’m really struggling here, guys. I don’t know if there’s much to say about this book. It avoids the 1-star status by (just barely) not being as offensive as the other 1-star titles, but it comes pretty damn close…

Actually, you know what? No. I am not giving this book a free ride: it’s going into the 1-star trash bin because it committed the cardinal sin of being boring. If I’d paid $0.95 for this back in the day, I’d have felt ripped off.

Quick overview: Earth tried to solve its overpopulation (no longer an issue taken seriously by modern sociologists) and crime by exporting troublemakers to other worlds, leaving behind only those who will conform comfortably to a perceived status quo. Problem is, they never stopped the process: they continue to get rid of any Terrans who might have the least bit of spunk and taste for mayhem.

Now, I appreciate a bit of “get-aff-mah-lawn-ya-dahn-kids” attitude as much as the next geezer, but I also recognize the importance of celebrating creative, independent, even radical thought in any society.

You don’t get X-ray machines, spaceships, and T2: Judgment Day by conforming.

But oh how I wish, I wish, I wish this book had a plot!

Burrell just kind of does things without having a clear motivation for doing so, and when motivation is finally ascribed to him at the midpoint of the book, it feels like an afterthought. Same goes for just about everybody. There’s a whole lot of, “Let’s do this because someone told us not to, and we’re troublemakers,” as opposed to “Let’s do this because we have a personal stake in the outcome.”

There’s a great video from Spacedock I’ve been waiting to insert into a review and this is the best opportunity I have for it:

Also, Burrell is kind of a brute, very much straight out of the Golden Age: the man who bewitches women with violence rather than charm. All the ladies find his, “raw, potent masculinity” intoxicating and “even when they fight his advances, they’re not really fighting, and actually do want him to ravish them.”

Ugh. Just ugh. Did this sort of stuff still fly in 1976?

Nevermind, don’t answer that. It still flies in 2026.

I’m not gonna get into any more of the plot because I just can’t be arsed. You’re never gonna read this book, and I really wouldn’t want you to. It’s just so boring. So let’s move this thing along and get to the really important stuff.

Conclusions and Recommendations

My Goodreads Review

Setting aside the toxic masculinity of the protagonist and the REALLY annoying gender stereotypes, this book is just plain boring. It has no plot, no character motivation, and no sense of forward momentum or purpose. It’s as rudderless as the boat its protagonist uses to sail into Scotland in the first half of the story. Give this one a pass.

However… this story doesn’t by necessity need to be bad.

There’s a tradition of making husky, strong men like Burrell the Heavies in stories: the villain’s muscle, the bad guys, the second-to-last boss the hero fights. This body type signals to the reader “TROUBLE”.

But the tall, heavyset men that I’ve known have usually been gentlemen with kindness to match their frames. Heroes have usually occupied only a very narrow range of body types, and that needs to change. Most people don’t fit the idealized body types of well-muscled hunk or lithe, slender beauty, but you’d never know it from watching television or reading most mainstream books.

So here’s what I’d suggest. Burrell can still be horny, but his soft spot for the ladies has to be just that: soft. He needs to be gentle, kind, and giving as a lover, only employing his considerable muscles to protect women from being harmed. If you insist on keeping him taciturn and hard to read, then his heart of gold has to shine through twice as strong in the moments when it needs to.

And would it be so terrible to ask that he crack a smile, at least once?

And for the love of God, does he have to be twice the age of all his female companions?!

The Story So Far…

Mercifully, we can get on to our next title, but before we do that, I have to rank the last twelve books, starting with Blake’s Progress and ending with Ruler of the World. As a reminder, I group books into four categories:
- Recommend
- Tentatively Recommend
- Don’t Recommend
- Kill it with Fire
I’ll spotlight titles here and there that are of particular note, for either good or bad reasons. All I ask is that you trust me.

I’d never steer you wrong…

*wink*

Recommend

The trend I’m noticing with the Recommended titles is that apart from being great tales, they all have insights into society and the human condition. They are About something.

Blake’s Progress is a squeaker here, but I include it for two reasons:
- It has the first female protagonist of the Laser Books
- It is a wild fever dream of a book mixing history, science fiction, and the mind of one really weird 18th century artist
The rest, of course, are strong stories. The most memorable for me is A Law For the Stars. It has one of the coolest covers of the Laser Books, and its depiction of a far-future guarda costa is an honest study of the relationship between law enforcement and crime, and how the two are frequently one and the same. If you read one book out of this batch, put that one at the top of your list.

Tentatively Recommend

We have one more in this category than last time, which is nice. Take a gander.

Take heed: Star Web is here, but with a big asterisk attached.

If you’ve never read any Golden Age science fiction stories, you might find it interesting.

If, however, you’re steeped in the works of Arthur C. Clarke, Bob Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov, you will not find one word in this book that you haven’t read in theirs. Star Web may be exactly the kind of homage Roger Elwood was looking for when he started this series, but for that very reason, it is not original for we who know the works of the grandmasters of this genre.

Same goes for Unknown Shore, but that book at least takes some extra risks.

I was really tempted to elevate Birth of Fire to the Recommend category, but as discussed in my review of that book, it’s held back by the small wordcount of the Laser Books.

Don’t Recommend

I actually enjoyed reading Kane’s Odyssey, but then I immediately went and read Fahrenheit 451 and now I see just how many stories have imitated Ray Bradbury‘s masterpiece.

I will, however, encourage you to read my review of Kane’s Odyssey. I do believe it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever written.

As for The Black Roads, well… it’s got the best cover art of the LB’s so far, but its story is lacking in character development and is full of sci-fi cliches. Coulda been a contender, but wasn’t. And Ruler of the World is just boring, but not truly offensive like our final entry.

Kill it with Fire

Juanita… for the umpteenth time, I will ask, “How is it possible that the same woman who wrote the incomparable Unto the Last Generation turned around and wrote this drivel?” I truly am at a loss. This book reads like the very worst pro-colonization episodes of Star Trek TOS, minus the attendant charm of Bones, Spock and Kirk.

Closing Thoughts

Looking over this breakdown, the quality of the last dozen Laser Books is, overall, markedly improved from the first. There are fewer books I think should’ve been pulped and more for which I have a kind word or two.

Remarkably, we have the same number of Recommended titles as we did last time. Does that mean the average book is growing stronger, or that my standards are falling?

At any rate, we can close out this dozen and begin the next.

Who’s Next?

My goodness! I’m going to have so many good things to say about this cover in the next installment.

Blurbety-blurb-blurb?

The SCAVENGER HUNT is the most deadly game in space. Tyla deVrie means to win it–no matter what the cost–and the beautiful Tyla is accustomed to getting her own way. But when the Scavenger Hunt exerts its macabre influence and exacts its toll, even Tyla’s indulgent world begins to turn sour. From the eve of the Hunt, when she is publicly humiliated at the glittering Hunt Ball and throughout the reckless race through space, her perosnality undergoes a subtle but sinister change–of which she is unaware.

*Gasp*

Mon dieu… do my eyes deceive me? A second female protagonist? And a story which actually sounds… good?

I’ll try not to get my hopes up, but considering this tale is by our old friend Stephen Goldin, there might be reason to hope.

See you guys soon!
September 23, 2026
Laser Books Review 23

23. Birth of Fire by Jerry Pournelle

Foreigners often ask, “What’s the difference between Canadians and Americans?” The simplest answer I like to give ’em is this:

America was born in a war.

Canada was born at a party.

Our respective literature reflects this: you can’t throw a rock but that you hit a thousand American science fiction books with a military/civil war/war of independence theme. It’s baked into collective unconscious of the US of A. Whereas Canadian literature tends toward idyllic pastoralism (blech).

(We could also talk about how American science fiction frequently glorifies colonization, but pot, kettle, black; Canucks are just as guilty.)

Please don’t misunderstand me: as a descendent of Irish, Scottish, English, and Ukrainian stock, I find the subject matter of wars of independence deeply compelling, and have even adopted it in several of my own works, the most recent of which would be “The Pirates of Pan”, set in the aftermath of a war where the Outer Solar System wins independence from Earth.

I’m fascinated by the multitudinous ways nations and peoples choose to shape their own destinies, and what freedom means to each of them. Moreover, at what point do people decide that freedom has a price tag in human lives? What kind of freedom are they after? How do they define freedom?

These are the questions today’s title, Birth of Fire, flirts with, but doesn’t quite manage to answer.

On the Laser Books, we’ve had some noteworthy authors such as Dean Koontz, Ray Nelson, and Joe L. Hensley, but I think I can say that of all the authors thus far, the one who would truly catch people’s attention at the time is today’s writer, Jerry Pournelle.

Let me read you the bio included in the book:

Jerry Pournelle spent fifteen years as a working scientist in the US space program. He has been a successful political manager, executive assistant to the mayor of Los Angeles, and college professor. He now writes full time.

Dr. Pournelle is currently science editor at GALAXY SF magazine. He is a past president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and winner of the first John W. Campbell Jr. Award. His works have frequently been nominated for other awards.

He lives in southern California with his wife, four sons, a Husky dog, no cats, and a number of bluejays who occupy the tree outside his office window. He is an ardent sailor and backpacker, and swings a sword as Knight Marshal of the West in the Society for Creative Anachronism.

His editorship at Galaxy alone gives him some serious street cred, but what is not mentioned in this bio is the many titles he co-authored with science fiction grandmaster Larry Niven, in addition to a fat stack of original novels including Falkenberg’s Legion. And, if you do some quick math, you realize that “spent fifteen years as a working scientist in the US space program”, stated in 1975, means he was probably there for the birth of NASA and all the triumphs and tribulations which followed.

So, if there’s a man qualified to write about space, above and beyond all the other authors in this series, it is most assuredly Jerry.

Radio Corporal Freas, get him in here. We have some battleplans–I mean, book covers–to look at.

Cover

You could not be more Golden Age if you tried!

This cover could’ve been lifted off of any issue of Astounding, Amazing, or the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. The ruddy orange soil of Mars, the retro-futurist spacesuits, the soaring pinnacles lining the valley, the flash of laser fire… it’s enough to make a man feel downright idiotic–I mean patriotic!

I think I hear “Fortunate Son” playing.

Would You Like to Know More?

Hey, anyone ever see this gut-buster of a Family Guy sketch?

I mean, they’ve literally got Garrett Pittson, our protagonist, done up in a tinfoil doo-rag and green face paint like he’s boutta commit casual war crimes against some space Vietnamese.

If you’re having a hard time parsing my sarcasm, let me speak plainly: I think this cover is great–if it were made in the 1930s or ’40s. But in 1976, with the terminus of the Vietnam War barely a year in the rear window, I have to ask myself… who is this for? I don’t think anyone asked for a callback to the longest war in US history (till it was supplanted by Afghanistan), especially when it left such deep cultural scars that, to this day, have not fully healed.

I’m not sure what else Kelly could’ve done. The book covers a guerrilla war set on Mars; Kelly depicted a guerrilla fighter. But if I was the parent of a child who died in Vietnam, I can’t imagine this imagery would make me buy the book.

Still, it knows what it wants to be and does it well. I can’t fault Kelly for that.

Blurb

Life imprisonment on Earth or transportation to Mars? Convicted of first-degree murder, Garrett Pittson chooses Mars–a colonized world strictly controlled by Earth and the giant mining corporations. But Garrett is not doomed to slavery in the mines. Tough men like him are needed on Mars–to fight for freedom in the outlawed Free Mars Army. With the beautiful Erica at his side, Garrett embarks on a deadly mission to prove that a free Mars has the power to survive and that he is a true Marsman.

Bakka strikes again, baby!

Okay, this blurb actually gets me excited, but not, perhaps, for reasons of plot or character.

The billionaires of Silicon Valley like Elon Musk dream of a day when humans build a colony on Mars. I ask myself… “Who is doing the building?” Because, of course there’s going to be some percentage of people who want to be there, but historically, colonization efforts always needed more bodies than were willing to transplant themselves to the new territory.

So the powers-that-be sent criminals and slaves to puff up the workforce.

America has a flourishing prison-industrial complex today, but how overcrowded will that system become if poverty continues to rise over the next century? All those bodies, all those muscles… what happens when the billionaires tell the state, “Hey, we can make your overcrowding problem go away. Just help us fund our reusable rockets, tweak the sentencing protocols for criminals, and we’ll move all these able bodies to Mars to help us build our colonies.”

And because minorities are always the first to feel the effects of poverty, they are also the first to suffer increased crime, and therefore the first to be sentenced. The faces who build the first Martian colony will be black, brown, red, and yellow, but seldom, if ever, white.

I fear the day when Starships become slaveships.

Jerry Pournelle obviously didn’t have SpaceX and Elon Musk on his mind when he wrote this book; he was just writing about America. This is how his country was built, as a colony of England. It is how many countries have been built. It is how countries yet-unborn will be built, long into the future, if humanity does not win out over inhumanity.

Birth of Fire is not science fiction, it is history, playing itself out in the same way it always does.

Story

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Laser Books are created equal, that they are endowed by their Editor with certain unalienable Traits, that among these are a Male Protagonist, a Cover by Kelly Freas, and a wordcount of 50,000 or so.

Birth of Fire is a good, engaging story, but it is incomplete.

Forced to come in under the word count, it only has time to cover the basic plot and nothing else. Garrett joins the Free Mars Army because his home is destroyed and his mentor arrested by Earth marines, and there is some discussion with his neighbours about their motivations for rebellion and why they’re against Earth, but there is no deep dissection of the individual motivations which drive a person to take up arms in pursuit of independence.

Consider this: 1 out of 4 people were Tories (British loyalists) during the American War of Independence. That is a significant number of people who believed that fighting against the King was wrong.

Or how about this: Lord Dunmore, a general of the British Army, made a proclamation outlawing slavery in America–not because the Brits believed in human rights, but because, by crippling the slave trade, the Brits would be crippling America’s economic and therefore military power. And this proclamation dramatically increased support for independence (and, by extension, slavery).

Or even this: one of the greatest attrition factors in George Washington’s army was the departure of soldiers at the end of their contracts because the army couldn’t pay them past that point, indicating a great number of them weren’t so ideologically committed to independence that they would fight without being paid.

In any war like this, an individual’s motivations for fighting are deeply personal and rarely simple. Pournelle touches on this when he says that even though crimes are being committed by Earth marines against Marsmen, most of Mars is unwilling to rise up for fear that rebellion is a lost cause.

One of the more realistic aspects of the novel was the plot point where Earth and the other Martians only begin to take the Free Mars Army seriously because Garrett helps the army acquire nuclear weapons.

Would You Like to Know More?

While I dislike all weaponry, and have a particular distaste for the hydrogen bomb, I am not so naive as to believe that a nation can be at peace without it.

One of the worst mistakes Ukraine ever made was surrendering its arsenal of nuclear weapons after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. That act is what allowed modern Russia to invade them. I do not believe they will know peace until they gain the capability to build their own nukes.

The simple fact is, in the modern world, there are Haves and Have-Nots: nations who have a nuclear arsenal, and those who have not. And bad actors who have nuclear weapons–like Russia, like Israel–have licence to attack any nation that does not. The world cannot intervene for fear those weapons will be turned upon the intervening countries.

So you wind up with situations where bullies like Russia, like Israel, can invade non-nuclear countries with impunity, commit genocide, and the world cannot put a stop to it.

If a nation craves the chance to determine its own destiny, the first thing they have to do is create the infrastructure and delivery systems for nuclear warheads. If they don’t have that, then when push comes to shove, they will have nothing. Props to Jerry Pournelle for understanding that and putting it in the book.

The other interesting plot note is that there is a disconnect between the Marsmen who work the land and the scientists studying Mars from the University. The Marsmen (quite sensibly) want to terraform Mars into a world like Earth. Trouble is, this will start a water cycle which will erase most surface chemistry on the planet, making the study of ice, geology, and potential fossilized life impossible.

One female scientist, Eileen (with whom Garrett has an affair after he’s promised to Erica), almost sabotages the resistance, despite the fact she herself is Martian-born. Her reasoning is that if the Marsmen win, all her people’s scientific progress will be unraveled. She cares only for science, not politics or the freedom of Mars. So long as she and her cohorts can study the planet, she’s happy.

There’s such a rich potential discussion here about the collision and conflict of grassroots movements and intelligentsia, and how each comes to mistrust and mistreat the other, but since this is a Laser Book, we never get that kind of depth.

My Goodreads Review

This book is a strong 3 out of 5, and would be rated much higher if it were allowed to be longer and have the sort of depth and nuance I’d expect from an 80,000 word novel, rather than a 50,000 word one. Jerry Pournelle does the best with the space he’s given.

Quite gripping all the same, but I’m certain there are sci-fi books out there which deliver on all the nuance and character study that’s absent from this book. I encourage you to comment below if you know of any; I’d like to read them.

But first, I got another 35 Laser Books to get through, and on deck we have…

Who’s Next?

Ruler of the World, by J.T. McIntosh! My goodness, that’s a lotta pink. What’s the blurb say?

Blurb

Earth, four centuries from today, is in dire peril. A half-empty world, it is slowly destroying itself. The Terrans are drab and obedient. Instant exile is the penalty for non-conformity. Interplanetary visitors are restricted to reservations where they cannot meet native Terrans or threaten their self-imposed isolation. But Burrell succeeds in breaking through. He is a rough, tough spaceman with a flair for stirring up trouble. And he is determined to shake the world of his ancestors out of its apathy.

From Earth to Mars and back again. Let’s hope the grass is greener there.

Till next time!

September 9, 2026
Laser Books Review 22

22. Keeper by Joan Hunter Holly

Don’t you just hate emotions sometimes?

Having lived with depression and anxiety, I can tell you there’s been many a time when I’ve wished I didn’t feel anything at all. It can be a terrible burden, being an emotional creature.

But it is also the only way to know that we are alive.

Throughout the Golden Age of Sci-fi, there’s been plenty of fiction which posits that emotion and intelligence are separate things, and that to be a truly enlightened species, we must learn not to feel. I can’t tell you how many depictions of “higher life forms” involved an evolutionary step of “letting go” of emotion.

Neuroscience was even on board with this idea for a long time, but in the last thirty years we’ve come to reexamine this notion that emotion and intelligence are incompatible. Indeed, the prevailing theory these days is that emotion is the bedrock of intelligence–that it emerges in complex organisms before problem-solving and communication. This theory is supported by a growing body of evidence that all animals which possess a brain are capable of feeling joy, sadness, fear, and love.

It makes sense if you look at it this way: how do you know the people who are important to you? You feel an emotional attachment to them. How do you know when you’re in danger? You feel a chill creeping down your spine. How do you know when you’ve done something important? You feel happy and accomplished.

Emotion is our lighthouse, guiding us toward safe harbour and warning us away from rocky shoals. The psychosomatic chemical responses triggered by intense emotions are the perfect tool for conditioning our behaviour. And while emotions can be manipulated so that we fall prey to irrational decisions, we cannot exist as living things without them.

That is the case which Joan Hunter Holly, pen name of Joan Carol Holly, makes in Keeper.

Author bio:

Joan Hunter Holly is the author of ten science fiction novels, including Encounter, The Mind Traders, and The Time Twisters, and of many shorter works, among them “The Gift of Nothing.” She wrote her first story at the age of five and won a blue ribbon in a youth talent contest a year later. Her first professional sale was made when she was eighteen. She comments: “I sometimes think I was born writing and wouldn’t be surprised if my very grave exuded the clackety-clack of a typewriter soft-pounding underground.”

She earned her B.A. degree in Psychology from Michigan State University, graduating with High Honors, but immediately reverted to writing. Her chief interests lie in the fine arts, American Indian culture and religion, gardening, and nature in all its forms.

She is also a member of The Science Fiction Writers of America and serves them as a Nebula Anthology Trustee.

Those are some pretty solid credentials for an entrant into the Laser Books.

And if you want to visit her grave and find out if she is still clackety-clacking away on her typewriter, you can find her in Delta Center Cemetery, Delta Township, Eaton County, Michigan, USA, Plot Section F, Lot 4, Grave 3.

Grave details and photo courtesy of Chad Hunter, posted to Find a Grave.

Also, chalk another one on the board for “books bought at Bakka“!

It’s Kelly-time!

Cover

There have been Laser Books covers where Kelly has wasted space. This is not one of them. Let’s go through the elements.

In the portrait bottom-right, we’ve got the stern face of our chief antagonist, Re-Conditioner Bretton, a monster of a man who tortures people for a living.

Behind him we’ve got our protagonist Dainig clutching his ward, Peter (notably wearing his girl disguise). Dainig’s eyes are furtive, scanning the Metropolis-style city for signs of pursuit.

The looming cityscape is really well done, a true piece of Golden Age retrofuturism that still looks gorgeous today, but my favourite element of this cover is the crowds.

This is a future where humans have drugged, electrocuted, and coerced all emotion out of themselves, and so most of them behave less than human. Kelly brings that vacuous emptiness that’s on the inside of each of them to the outside, drawing their faces as vapid, slavering, ghoulish caricatures. I like the cover, but I love this artistic flourish.

And finally, the word Keeper is stamped overtop the city in bold, blood-red letters; Dainig is Peter’s Keeper, and he’s got blood on his hands, as we’ll see very soon.

Blurb

In this world of tomorrow, there is neither hatred nor love. Normal human sentiment is punishable by death! Dreams of happiness, human warmth and joy have given way to indifference. Man has been programmed not to feel. It is a chilling world in which there is no feeling at all, save fear… fear of any human emotion! This is the world in which Frederick Dainig must live. He told himself he couldn’t help it, but he knew better than to let himself care about the little child of whom he is the Keeper.

Hey, anybody watch Equilibrium?

As you can probably tell just from the poster, this is one of the many Matrix knockoffs that came out between 2000 and 2005. I think somebody in Hollywood basically said, “Let’s do Fahrenheit 451, but with leather cassocks, katanas, and gun kata.”

“What’s gun kata?”

“I don’t know, but lets do it.”

And boy, did they.

This is a prime slice of early-00’s cheese. It’s actually pretty fun. Take a look at the trailer:

In this movie, everyone is on a drug called Prozia II which suppresses emotion. “Sense offenders” (people who feel emotion and secretly keep works of art and literature) are hunted down by Clerics of the Grammaton: gun-toting ninjas who enforce the state of Libria’s will.

Narratively, it’s exactly what you’d expect: they steal Fahrenheit 451‘s plot structure beat-for-beat almost without deviation. You know what they say: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.

Ray Bradbury was indeed great.

… what were we talking about before? Oh yeah, the blurb. It’s fine.

Story

I hope everyone’s got their therapist on speed dial because we’re ’boutta feel some things.

In this twisted future, children are given away by their families to have all emotion tortured out of them via a violent electroshock procedure. If they express emotion of any kind, ZAP!

And if you relapse as an adult (a process called Re-Emergence), you’re taken by the Special Police for Re-Conditioning, which is the same electroshock torture, but worse.

The rationale for all this is that emotional behaviour led to the tragedies of the 20th and 21st centuries. Capitalism, war, famine, it’s all because people couldn’t control their feelings. Better to do away with them altogether.

Except…

Another horrid feature of this future is that people still fetishize emotion, even though they aren’t permitted to experience it. On some level, they know how fucked up they’ve become, they know they need to experience joy, sadness, rage, in order to be human. So the government satisfies these desires with Viewings.

Developmentally-challenged children–children with no hope of ever controlling their own feelings, Conditioned or not–are either offered up by their parents or ripped away from them and placed into rooms with walls that can be made transparent. There, clinicians manipulate these children’s emotions by offering gifts, love, pain, fear, in order to evoke a response which is then shown to a live studio audience and broadcast around the world.

And when the children finally realize they’re being manipulated, when the clinicians are unable to evoke any planned emotional response from them, the children are euthanized, either quickly or through starvation (to prolong suffering and therefore emotion).

The people get their dose of feelings vicariously, and go back to their tranquilized existence.

Peter is one of these victims. Dainig is the one charged with Keeping him: priming his emotional state so that his expectations can be affirmed or shattered by the other clinicians.

Dainig’s job is to psychologically torture a child.

When Dainig begans to feel empathy for Peter, he makes the decision to rescue him from the clutches of the government. He takes him home, gives him food and rest and love. He shows him the real world, transporting him on public transit in the guise of a small girl.

And then he does the one thing that I, as the reader, did not see coming: Dainig chickens out and returns Peter to his prison and submits himself for Re-Conditioning.

The scene where he walks an unwitting Peter back into the clinic was such a gut-punch, especially because Peter doesn’t have the cognitive ability to perceive that he is being double-crossed. He thinks Dainig and he are playing a game, until he walks into the clinicians’ office. He begs them to go back, to “go another way”, as if time can be unwritten. He doesn’t understand that some things like death and poor choices are permanent.

When Dainig submits himself to Re-Conditioning, he gets a surprise visitor between sessions: Laine Todd, a Re-Conditioner who’d been asking to see him for some time. Apparently she’d marked him as a potential Re-Emerger and wanted to treat him, but not for reasons of state. She tells him there’s a growing movement of Re-Conditioners who believe that society must stop torturing human beings and start learning to live with our feelings in a disciplined manner.

I was reminded of the passages from A Law For the Stars where Ryne is told that drugging feelings away is no substitute for self-discipline.

Laine wants Dainig to become a front man for her organization, and tells him to write off Peter as a lost cause, but Dainig finds a way to manipulate her into unwittingly helping him save Peter for a second time. Laine is furious, and in the final scene, threatens to kill him and Peter to save the organization, but her will is broken by the moment when Dainig throws himself in front of Peter to save him.

This simple act of love, so obvious and sensible to us, is baffling to these people who have no concept of what love is. It’s fascinating to see these supposedly intelligent people suddenly come to grips with their emotions and try to keep themselves together in the face of it.

In the end, Dainig and Peter are promised a place in a settlement where Re-Emergers like them will be left alone.

Conclusions and Recommendations

On the one hand, I feel bad this review is going to be so short, but on the other, I’m not sure what else I can say. Keeper does exactly what it sets out to do, and very well.

My Goodreads Review

A wasp’s stinger of feeling. Keeper is a brutal book to read, and so very simple in its plotting and characters, but no less painful for it. This is a classic example of Simple Idea + Perfect Execution. It’s an easy 4 out of 5, with some parts of it reaching almost to a 5, especially in the first third of the story. This is an easy admission to the Laser Book Hall of Fame.

In fact, that’s something we need to institute: the Laser Book Hall of Fame, reserved for the entries in this series that are must-reads or hidden classics. In a couple more installments, we’ll have reached #24 in this series, and that’ll be a good time to step back and reflect.

For now though, we must move on. The female authors are 3 for 4 in the Laser Books (dammit, Juanita, you just had to shit the bed with Space Trap…), and Joan will return in… Jesus, 33 books… for Shepherd.

I’m not gonna get my hopes up; so far, when a Laser Books author delivers a great title like Unto the Last Generation or Serving in Time, their second entry sucks burps. I’m praying that’s not the case for Joan, but… well, the pattern has firmly been set by now, and not even the authoresses are free from it. Fortunately, it’s a long road, getting from here to there, and we have to look to our next book.

Ladies and gentlemen, we’re about to be graced by sci-fi royalty.

Who’s Next?

If the name Jerry Pournelle rings no bells, fear not; I’ll do a write-up on him in our next review. Suffice to say, he was a contributor to my alma mater, Analog, a frequent collaborator of sci-fi grandmaster Larry Niven, science editor for Galaxy, and has an awards list as long as my arm.

He is, in other words, a Big Deal.

Blurb

Life imprisonment on Earth or transportation to Mars? Convicted of first-degree murder, Garrett Pittson chooses Mars–a colonized world strictly controlled by Earth and the giant mining corporations. But Garrett is not doomed to slavery in the mines. Tough men like him are needed on Mars–to fight for freedom in the outlawed Free Mars Army. With the beautiful Erica at his side, Garrett embarks on a deadly mission to prove that a free Mars has the power to survive and that he is a true Marsman.

I’m very excited to see what he’s cooked up for us in his first Laser Book entry, and I hope you’ll join me for that.

Meantime, I’m going to therapy, and I suggest you do too!

Everyone should go to therapy!

— My Girlfriend, L.

August 25, 2026
Laser Books Review 21

21. A Law for the Stars by John Morressy

I’m often asked, especially after installments like our last entry from Juanita Coulson, “James, why do you continue to torment yourself reading what is largely a very mediocre series of science fiction books?” And my answer is always the same.

“For the memes, of course.”

But memes aside… as I’ve repeated ad nauseam, there are gems among these books; stories which, despite their Golden Age-revival trappings, truly do speak to the world we live. I would endure all the shit books again if it meant I still got to read Serving in Time, Invasion, Birthright, and Unto the Last Generation. Some of these stories have inspired me, some have made me think, and some have changed my approach to writing science fiction.

And now, with the Blackjack(et) of the Laser Books, I’m delighted to say we have yet another winner.

John Morressy’s bio, courtesy of Roger Elwood and the Laser Books.

John Morressy was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1930. He published his first story in 1952, and has been writing ever since: novels, novellas, juvenile literature, stories, essays, fables, poetry, verse and reviews.

A Law for the Stars is his first LASER BOOK but it is the ninth book he has had published. Of these, six have been science fiction novels. He plans to write a good many more, for he finds that science fiction is a pleasure to write and it offers him the chance to work with themes that don’t fit easily into works with a contemporary setting.

If there is a single theme running through all his work, he hopes it is the belief that the world would be a more pleasant place if we could accept the fact that killing each other is not an effective way of solving our problems.

I love the term “juvenile literature”. I think I’ll use that to describe my work more often.

And I fully agree: science fiction is a pleasure to write because it offers possibilities not constrained by the reality we live in, thereby allowing us to examine reality from the outside, objectively and without dogma to hold us in check.

(This is me foreshadowing the content of this review.)

I have to say that I was not encouraged by the wording of the theme of his work. There’s a rule they teach you in creative writing school (one of the few lessons I actually agree with): don’t choose simple, childish themes that are obvious to everybody. That third paragraph felt like a warning.

But I immediately overlooked it in light of what I saw on the title page.

Whoooo! Ladies and germs, we have a new first in the Laser Books: a surprise signed copy!!!

*Blows party horn*

This might be one of the few signed copies of the Laser Books signed by the original author. I can’t imagine these novels (or their authors, I’m sorry to say) were popular enough to warrant many signatures.

I might be the only man on Earth who has a signed copy of this exact book… That’s a scary thought. This might put a target on my back.

And for the authors who did make it big, they have other works far more popular than whatever they turned in to the Laser Books that are deserving of signatures. For example, if I’m going to get a book signed by Tim Powers, am I going to take The Skies Discrowned (later published as Forsake the Sky), or am I going to take a chart-topper like The Anubis Gates, or Last Call, or On Stranger Tides, or The Stress of Her Regard?

Um… actually… maybe not The Stress of Her Regard. The ghost of Mary Shelley would probably cut my balls off.

Would You Like to Know More?

I first discovered Tim Powers through the Treasure Chest which contained the other Laser Books. I plan to do a post about them once I finish reading the last of the titles which were included.

I think we’ve dallied enough, let’s get this review started.

Cover

I really love this cover. It really brings a wave of nostalgia.

Growing up with the late 90s, early 2000s Star Wars games, I got to see a lot of really cool science fiction character designs. Some of my favourites were actually the characters who were not human, but shared a lot of the same models and textures. Maybe they were coloured blue, or pink, or green, but other than that, they weren’t very “alien” looking.

I think that’s what I liked about them: they were mostly recognizable as people, but there was just one or two odd things about them.

I’m getting those same vibes here.

I believe the man in the portrait is Thone, one of two characters who take our protagonist Ryne into the Sternverein Security forces. He’s got so much character in his face! The blue-black skin, the smirk, the world-weary eyes, the red ascot–you can tell this guy has been places. He could be a cherished uncle or brother.

His cheerfulness is undercut by the shadowy figure behind him. This might actually be our protagonist, Ryne, but he’s not wearing any medals or commendations that I can see (an important aspect of adult Ryne’s character), and he looks a bit like Thone’s race, so it might not be him. Either way, it’s one of Kelly Freas‘s best character designs in my opinion.

In the background, you’ve got a Sternverein driveship, and a collection of worlds which could be all the major locations in the novel, or simply one planetary system with two moons. Kelly arranges all these spacey elements vertically and backlights them with a river of stars to fill the negative space.

This might be one of my favourite covers because, rather than simply capturing characters or moments from the story, it captures the essence of the story: a front of good cheer with the spectre of violence looming large in the background.

Looking at this cover, I feel like I’m being made an offer I can’t refuse.

This is why Kelly is a master of SFF covers: when he’s at his best, he pulls you into the story before you’ve read a single word.

Would You Like to Know More?

Oh! Before I forget… On the subject of signed Laser Books, I met a geezer at The Only Cafe a few months ago who actually had the entire Laser Books collection… signed by Kelly Freas.

Jealous-making!

But he also told me about a really incredible piece of animation that I’d like to share with you all, simply because there hasn’t been a better place to do it before now. If you watch Corridor Crew, you might be familiar with this guy. His name is Mike Jittlov, and his creation is “The Wizard of Speed and Time”.

Feast your eyes.

Let’s get onto the Blurb.

Blurb

The Sternverein polices the universe. Criminals dread it; law-abiding citizens esteem it; all respect it. Ryne, an orphan from the planet Jadjeel, worships it. The organization rescued him from slavery and trained him to be a man among men, an elite Blackjacket. It gave his life purpose and direction, excitement and adventure. But it is totally corrupt, as Ryne learns in the shattering episode that brings to a climax John Morressey’s sweeping odyssey, A Law for the Stars.

A great blurb! Marketing Guy, you aren’t doing too badly these days.

Stories of corrupt institutions have been popular for a long time, but especially now, as late-stage capitalism is deconstructed by intellectuals and artists.

But I have a particular fondness for stories of soul-searching in law enforcement (more on this later). Indeed, in most of the novels I’ve written, there is often a grey-haired mercenary, cop, or soldier who comes to a crisis which forces him to reexamine the system of power he serves. Sometimes that examination costs him his life, and sometimes he manages to redeem the institution to which he belongs.

We’ve had stories and blurbs many-a-time in the Laser Books of characters realizing they’re living under a dystopian society, so I wasn’t expecting much from Morressy. I was thinking this would be another run through Detroit.

I was wrong.

Buckle yer fuckles, boys and girls, this review is gonna be as sprawling as the Sternverein itself–but hopefully, more self-aware.

Story

Qiānggǎnzi lǐmiàn chū zhèngquán.

Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

— Mao Zedong

How does law enforcement gain the trust of people? A Law for the Stars posits that one of the most lasting and effective ways is a demonstration of force right at the time and place the people are victimized the most.

That’s how it goes for our protagonist, Ryne.

On his planet Jadjeel, the citizens have forgotten that they once came from another planet called Earth, so they’re quite shocked when one day, visitors from the stars arrive, give weapons to a rival clan, and march together on the cities, killing and pillaging as they go. Ryne’s parents are killed and he finds himself alone on the streets of a city now ruled by bandit lords.

In his quest to survive, Ryne accidentally kills an otherworlder who was trying to rob him. This scene is handled with such simple cruelty: when Ryne tries to stop the thief, the thief slaps him and goes back to rummaging through Ryne’s pack, as if Ryne is expected to know his place. It really gets your blood up, and you’re quite happy when Ryne greases the schmuck.

Afterwards, fearing he’ll be made into an example, Ryne flees and falls in with two other otherworlders: a blind seer named Thone and his companion Varyssa. They take Ryne in, ostensibly because he has nowhere else to go, and Thone uses his “talents” to worm his way into the court of the Overlord, a star-borne renegade on the run from men and women called “blackjackets”.

That night, Thone and Varyssa murder the Overlord and his cohorts in their sleep, and reveal themselves to be members of the Sternverein–the blackjackets the Overlord feared.

But who are the Sternverein?

Bad Men with Badges

Sternverein Security is the military arm of an interstellar trading empire.

After humanity expanded to the stars, human beings diversified into many phenomes, and that’s before alien civilizations were thrown into the mix. The nature of FTL in this universe mandates that only small arms can be carried aboard interstellar starships. If you try to go superluminal whilst carrying, say, a particle cannon or nuke, the FTL field collapses and the ship explodes.

With no direct link to Earth, no central government to keep order, and only small weapons being available, a class of pirates, bandits, and warlords took power over multiple systems, preying on those who couldn’t defend themselves.

In order to protect commercial vessels plying the shipping lanes, an alliance of merchants created a force of armed traders who eventually became the Sternverein Security forces.

Officially, its role is to police the stars, hunting down pirates and despots, and keeping merchants safe.

Unofficially, the Sternverein engages in the assassination and genocide of anyone it deems undesirable, and it has a hierarchical system that prizes racial purity. (They have a numerical scale for how close a person is to “Earth basic” genetically.)

The only difference between a police force and a gang is a badge. So long as the state has the monopoly on force, it can–and often does–allow its peacekeepers to get away with murder.

There are many historical precedents for the Sternverein: ICE, the Presidency Armies of the East India Company, and the Gun Trace Task Force of Baltimore, but the comparison I believe is most apt for the Sternverein is Spain’s guarda costa (“coast guard”) which operated in the Caribbean throughout the Golden Age of Piracy.

In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Spain had a real problem with piracy. Anybody with a canoe and a gun could, and often did, raid Spanish possessions. It didn’t help that rival powers, jealous of Spain’s wealth, gave permission for their own captains, whether military or commercial, to plunder Spanish holdings at gunpoint.

Spain’s Navy didn’t have the numbers to protect its assets, so it began issuing letters of marque and reprisal to captains of armed traders, empowering them to search and seize any vessels heading into or out of the Caribbean. With these licenses in hand, the guarda costa proceeded to conduct a campaign of terror against pirates and honest merchants alike. They would torture, rape, and kill whomever they wished, and even if you somehow escaped with your life, chances are good they’d still rob you of your cargo, fence it, and burn your ship.

The guarda costa were pirates, but pirates armed with badges and licences as well as guns and sabres, so they were considered legitimate, at least by their own government.

The Sternverein’s modus operandi is explained early in the novel:

“Remember, our primary mission is execution. We fight only if we must. This is not a tournament–we’re going after outlaws condemned by the Court of Mercy. If you can kill them in their sleep, do it. If you can kill them when they’re unarmed or after they’ve surrendered, do it. Kill them and everyone who sides with them, including women and children. You won’t be killing humans, you’ll be ridding the stars of an infection. You’ll be helping to build a future that promises safety and security for people who have no other protection but our strength. This is what you trained for. Do it right and you’ll stay alive and all the civilized worlds will benefit. You’re the deadliest weapon in the galaxy–a Sternverein Security trooper. Be a good one. That’s all, Ryne. You’re dismissed.”

— Pg. 54-55

I can easily imagine such lessons were given to the Sturmabteilung and Hitler Youth regarding the Jews, or to the Israeli Defence Forces regarding the Palestinians.

And one page later:

The simplest, most basic weapon of all was the trained professional warrior.

— Pg. 56

That is true.

What’s also true is that for most of history, those trained professional warriors maintained their status through the brutal subjugation of anyone who threatened their power. Thus it is with the Sternverein.

Ryne

Having seen the efficacy of the Sternverein, and been promised the chance to join them, Ryne becomes one of the most zealous and effective troopers the organization has ever known.

The reason this book is such a treat to read is because, as the reader, we know how fucked up the Sternverein is from the word “go”, but it’s so interesting to see Ryne fall in love with them because we’ve seen what happened to his family. He has legitimate reasons for wanting to be in law enforcement: they killed his family’s murderers and gave him shelter when no one else would.

As a middle class white boy with a suburban upbringing, my parents drilled one lesson into me over and over again: “No matter what happens to us, you can always trust the police.” And for me, that was true; being straight, white, and male pretty much guaranteed the police would be on my side for life. I grew up a rule-follower, with a healthy respect–even reverence–for authority.

It wasn’t until I dated my first partner in college, a black woman, that I realized what held true for me didn’t hold true for everyone.

She had a problem with a stalker and I repeatedly urged her to talk to the police. To which her constant refrain was, “I don’t trust the police, and they don’t trust me.” I never got it through my head that for her, the police weren’t necessarily friends, and it was purely down to the colour of her skin.

I would like to say that I know better now, but the truth is I still view law enforcement with rose-tinted glasses. In the past, I’ve gone out of my way to give witness statements to the cops on car accidents and assault cases.

I cannot imagine I would ever lie to a police officer.

That trust is magnified a thousandfold in Ryne, and cemented by the use of drugs. The Sternverein keeps all of its officers on Nolo while in service, a drug which suppresses emotion and sex drive and quietens conscience. It makes troopers more effective killers.

Troopers are always given the chance to come off Nolo during their R&R, but over time, many simply choose to remain on the drug permanently. These men and women are not machines; on some level, they know that what they’re doing is wrong.

But as long as they don’t have to feel their guilt, they can get on with the job.

Ryne comes off Nolo for the first time and instantly begins to regret the lives he’s taken. He confesses this to his romantic partner Keela, who consoles him with these words:

She placed her hands on his shoulders and looked at him intently. “Ryne, you’ve been talking about killing. But you’re a blackjacket. You don’t kill. You’ve never killed anyone yet, and you never will. Your purpose is to locate and eliminate dysfunctional components, and you do it superbly well. You’re a good man, Ryne–you know your purpose and you fulfill it. That’s why I love you so much.”

— Pg. 98

Dehumanization is a necessary first step in genocide.

Ryne earns the Order of Leddendorf, the highest commendation of the Sternverein, for his actions on a mission gone bad. He is often cited as the most proficient soldier in the organization, and is given increasingly higher levels of trust.

But predictably, it all comes crashing down.

The Endgame

The goal of the Sternverein is to cleanse the stars of pirates, renegades, and bandits–to Make the Galaxy Safe Again.

And for the most part… they succeed.

But as the last pirate strongholds are purged and the grizzled old Sternverein troopers retire, a new class of asshole takes power. These pencil pushers haven’t the guts to undertake dangerous missions and would prefer to just glass troublesome worlds from orbit. They draw even less distinction between rebel worlds and worlds that simply want to be left in peace than the Security forces do.

And they are learning to build uncrewed bombships to that purpose.

John Morressy pulls such a clever bait and switch on the reader. He convinces you that Ryne and his ilk are the worst thing in the universe, and then shows you that there’s still further for humanity to sink. Ryne, for all his faults, still has a code he adheres to, as twisted as it may be.

The people rising to power in the Sternverein now have no code at all, save greed.

And we come at last to the climax of the book. During a routine diplomatic mission to a supposedly primitive world, Mog Korb, Ryne partakes of a hunting ritual where he eats the heart of a wild animal. The Sternverein have explicit rules against eating local food, ostensibly because it might carry diseases for which they don’t have cures, but if you know a little about human biology, you might have guessed the real reason for this taboo.

Ingesting food stimulates the body’s metabolism, speeding up the breakdown of molecules in the bloodstream… including drugs.

Drugs like Nolo.

That animal heart carries enzymes which breaks down the Nolo in Ryne’s body, causing him to experience heightened emotion for the first time in years.

Ryne had never lost his curiosity about the great variety of human life forms found among the stars. As a boy in Jadjeel, he had seen all otherworlders as brutal enemies until he met the ones who saved his life and freed his world. An Agyari and a Mallelan were his first heroes; Seadhal the Thorumbian was the finest trooper he had ever known. Since his first space duty, most of his friends had been part of the Old Earth blood, it was true. That breed was predominant on nemesis runs. And the nature of his duties brought him in contact with only the worst of every galactic race. But despite all the experiences that might have led him to see every alien as a deadly enemy, the force of those early impressions was great. It had created a lifelong interest in alien races and cultures, an interest Ryne had pursued even when his superiors gave him no encouragement. Now he was grateful for the long discipline.

— Pg. 135

Free of Nolo, Ryne begins to empathize with the Korbians. He tells them about his experience with Nolo, and why troopers are forced to take it.

Milam looked at him as if seeing someone new and fearsome. “You make yourselves less than men, less than women. You are not human!”

“We sacrifice something, for a time, in order to gain the discipline that keeps us alive. Our discipline has made us the greatest power in the galaxy, and we’ve used that power for the good of all human races,” Ryne said.

“This is not discipline, Ryne,” Milam said vehemently. “Discipline comes from within. It is freely chosen. You are slaves.”

— Pg. 160

But it’s more succinctly stated twenty-two pages later:

The Sternverein, for all its proud boasts and imperial dreams, seemed to fear normal humans reacting in a normal way.

— Pg. 182

When Ryne discovers that a shadow mission has been deployed to Mog Korb–forty-four blackjackets sent to train a rival tribe in offworld firearms–he realizes that he was wrong about this organization which saved his life and took him in.

This is Jadjeel all over again, only this time, it’s being perpetrated by his found family.

Turns out the galaxy is getting sick of the Sternverein. Some worlds are banding together to form their own defence league against the blackjackets. There are also signs the Sternverein is about to collapse: the reason they’re interested in Mog Korb is because the planet is abundant with a critical element used in the construction of faster-than-light driveships. The ships used by the Sternverein are on their last legs, and once they break down, the blackjackets will have no vessels capable of carrying them across the stars.

Moreover, the new leadership’s gambit of building bombships can only work with an influx of the element. Without that, the plan falls apart.

Ryne’s actions on Mog Korb might have saved the galaxy from several generations of tyranny.

I would like to close this portion of the review with a short piece of dialogue from Battlestar Galactica. It comes shortly after humanity finds itself on the run from the Cylons. President Roslin asks Commander Adama for his forces’ help in keeping order amongst the refugees.

Conclusions and Recommendations

The brilliance of this novel is not that it says anything new; rather, it shows us how a person can become indoctrinated into trusting a system of authority with their whole heart, and the extreme measures that must be taken to deprogram that person.

Ryne is a simple character, but the truth is, there are millions of people like him around the world: people whose lives were saved by a powerful entity, and who now put their faith in that entity. It’s so easy to become enamoured with authority when authority exercises force in your defence. What is obvious to the reader is not obvious at all to Ryne, but Morressy’s strength is that he helps you understand where Ryne is coming from.

Flawed as he is, misguided as he is, Ryne’s story could be mine.

My Goodreads Review

An insightful deconstruction of law enforcement, order, and justice, this novel is also a cautionary tale about putting one’s faith in systems of authority. It’s a reminder that, as dangerous as the world is, and no matter how badly people have hurt you, nothing should convince you to trade your freedom–or humanity–for security. I can easily recommend this novel, which is as relevant in 2026 as it was in 1976.

This book was a joy to read, pure and simple, and it belongs on a shelf with the other Laser Books that actually say something about the world we live in. Easy 4 out of 5. Perhaps even a 4.5. It is at least on the level of Serving in Time, in case the length of this review wasn’t a clue.

Sadly, we must now bid adieu to John Morressy for a very long time. We will not read his work again until Laser Book 52. The Extraterritorial. For now, we must turn our attention our next title, which represents only our third entry by a female author in this series.

Who’s Next?

Ooh, nice cover! Blurb me up.

Blurb

In this world of tomorrow is neither hatred nor love. Normal human sentiment is punishable by death! Dreams of happiness, human warmth and joy have given way to indifference. Man has been programmed not to feel. It is a chilling world in which there is no feeling at all, save fear…fear of any human emotion! This is the world in which Frederick Dainig must live. He told himself he couldn’t help it, but he knew better than to let himself care about the little child of whom he is the Keeper.

Wait a sec…

… is this Equilibrium?!

Shiiiiiit it’s been ages since I practiced my gun kata!

August 13, 2026
Laser Books Review 20

20. Space Trap by Juanita Coulson

Whoa, 20 came around real fast.

Juanita Coulson, the author of Laser Book 11. Unto the Last Generation, brings us a tale of exploration gone awry on a far off planet. Yes folks, this is the third shipwreck story we’ve seen on the Laser Books.

But, if you’ll recall my review for Last Generation, you’ll remember I had some glowing words for that book, in particular for Juanita’s perspicacious depiction of reproductive immune disorders. That was a 4 out of 5 book.

So I’m going into Space Trap with high hopes that she’ll do something very interesting.

First, some housekeeping.

As of the previous book, 19. The Unknown Shore (review here), Roger Elwood began including biographies of the Laser Books authors. This is a godsend. As you’ve no doubt realized, most of the authors of these books were not very prolific, so they never got enough attention to warrant the writing of extensive bios in magazines and periodicals. And if the authors died before rounding the bend into 2000 A.D., they likely never began the process of creating digital personas and records of their lives.

This means I have to go down a research rabbit hole for each and every one of these writers, but now, mercifully, I have a trailhead in the form of the Elwood bios, and I’ll include them in every review. For the sake of consistency, I’ll add Juanita’s here, even though I already covered her in my Last Generation review.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Juanita Coulson has been involved in the science fiction field most of her life. With her husband Robert, she edits and publishes the Hugo award winning fanzine, Yandro. Her first story, a collaboration with Marion Zimmer Bradley, was “Another Rib.” In addition to numerous short stories, she has the following science fiction novels to her credit: Crisis on Cheiron, The Singing Stones, Star Sister, The Gates of Eden, War Wizards. She has also written three gothic romances.

The Coulsons, and their son Bruce, attend numerous science fiction conventions: they were Fan Guests of Honor at the 1972 World SF Convention in Los Angeles. and the 1975 Deep South Con in Louisville, Kentucky.

Juanita Coulson also wrote Unto the Last Generation, LASER BOOK No. 11

See? Isn’t that so much more elegant than my digital bumbling?

Anyway, let’s get stuck in.

*Deep breath*

KELLY!

Cover

This is a bit better than The Unknown Shore. Kelly has really captured the surrealistic, dreamy quality of the planet NE 592. In fact, this might actually be a scene from early in the novel where R.C. and Ken are shown a vision of an Earthling murdering one of the M’Nae people. The Earthling is presented as a faceless, wraithlike image in the M’Nae’s telepathic imagery of the event. The giant crash of Noland’s Class-D spaceship in the background and the Survey Ship burning her engines as she falls planetward are all correct as well.

The blood-coloured trees, sparkles, and Thayenta’s rainbow hair really elevate the dream-like quality of this cover. The whole thing feels like a memory plucked from an alien mind: subjective and colourful.

That said, this still isn’t quite on par with Kelly’s best work, like The Black Roads or Invasion. The composition and staging of the elements is a little off. It feels like we’re looking at a stage play from the wings instead of the front row seats. It’s a little… off. Maybe you guys know what I mean.

Anyway, lettuce move onto the blurb.

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 than heard, her plea: “Go Back.” But they couldn’t go back. Against their will, they were drawn to 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!

As I said in my review of The Unknown Shore, I love nautical tales of shipwreck and marooning, and I love them even more when they’re set against the backdrop of the Universe.

Would You Like to Know More?

I was on vacation with L. in New Brunswick this past week whilst reading Space Trap, and we listened to a podcast episode which covered the sinking of the whaling ship Essex. This is the tale which inspired Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick.

In brief, the Essex was an American whaler which was rammed and sunk by a sperm whale on November 20, 1820 in the South Pacific. Of a crew of 20, only 8 survived, some by making landfall on a Pacific island, and others by resorting to cannibalism. Melville later sought out the survivors and used their accounts as background to the writing of Moby-Dick.

The story of the Essex matters because it is part of a growing body of evidence which proves the intelligence and sentience of whales. As whaling activity increased throughout the 19th century, a pattern of behaviour emerged among whales that is referenced in Moby-Dick: when whaling ships bore down on pods of whales in mating season, the males would signal the females to flee, and then they would turn and attack the whaling ships, usually losing their lives in the process, but sometimes taking a whaling ship with them to the deep. These attacks increased in frequency as more and more whalers invaded the sperms’ mating grounds.

In short, the whales learned how to defend themselves, their mates, and their offspring.

The importance of whales as a keystone species was only understood later with the discovery of the Whale Pump. The wanton destruction of these animals represents one of the greatest mistakes in the catalogue of human affairs on this planet–a mistake which we continue to perpetuate in the modern world.

There’s a Gordon Lightfoot song which speaks to the tragedy of humanity’s actions: “Ode to Big Blue”.

Knowing Juanita, she’ll probably make of this tale a deft study of colonialism and invading peoples. I’m actually excited! Let’s open this thing up and see what we got!

Story

Remember how excited I was to dive into Gordon Eklund‘s Falling Toward Forever after reading the incomparable Serving in Time? Remember how disappointed I became after seeing the travesty that Forever turned out to be? Remember how I said in my last review I shouldn’t get my hopes up just because an author turned in a great story once in the Laser Books?

I never listen to myself. I know I should, but I’m ever the optimist.

I was sitting with my girlfriend on the sofa in her parents’ house at ten-o’-clock. I finished the last page of Space Trap and let the book fall from my hands. L. looked up at me, laughed, and said, “You look so unimpressed.”

I held up the book and replied, “Well, this was pointless.”

And it was.

My God, Juanita, what kind of month were you having when you wrote this?

To outline in brief, our protagonist Ken…

… just Ken…

… crash lands with his captain, R.C. Zachary, on NE 592, and discovers that a race of telepaths has already colonized the place. Worse still, a group of regressive humans led by Zachary’s old colleague, Noland Eads, have also crashed here and the technophobic zealots have gone and started a shooting war with the telepaths.

Ken and R.C. are charged with a murder committed by Eads, and it is here that Ken meets Thayenta, a telepathic apprentice, and falls for her scantily clad body and feminine helplessness.

Look… if you’ve seen any number of Star Trek TOS episodes, you’ve seen this plot. Man falls for helpless alien waif–a “space trap,” if you will–who can barely speak English and immediately feels protective and possessive of her. He tries to make peace between the unenlightened humans and barbaric aliens and teach everyone Peace, Freedom, and the American Way.

I cannot tell you how tiresome such a plot is, especially in 19-fucking-76 when the SF New Wave was at its peak, redefining the genre and thrashing the Old Boys Club that science fiction used to be. And I am stunned that Juanita Coulson, authoress of Unto the Last Generation, would turn in a story this banal, this pointless, this exhausted after such a wonderful examination of human fertility and the importance of hope in a world in freefall.

But most shocking of all? How could a woman write a story that so naturally and effortlessly perpetuates the stereotypes her fellow female authors have struggled against for decades?

In the words of Vannevar Bush, “I apologize if I’ve become stirred, but I am.”

Conclusions and Recommendations

My Goodreads Review

A misogynistic colonizer’s wet dream. This novel is a throwback to the very worst stories produced in science fiction, and I’m shocked and appalled that a woman–let alone the authoress of the endlessly inventive and fiercely intelligent Unto the Last Generation–could pen it.

I know I’m coming across as very hard on Juanita Coulson, but I’m honestly so baffled and disappointed. She’s shown herself to be a very talented writer, and her choice in subject matter was subtle and clever in Last Generation. So why did she choose to waste her talents on this drivel?

There’s actually a very simple way to make this plot work, and it’s the same suggestion I made in Seeds of Change.

Write Thayenta as only pretending to be a speechless, emotionally immature waif. In truth, she’s only feigning loyalty to Ken in a bid to gather intelligence for her people. Once she gets everything she needs, she casts him and the other humans aside and her people throw the humans off-world.

This way, you could still tell the story from Ken’s POV, but his dreams of being the dashing space hero blow up in his face and his worldview is completely upended by Thayenta’s apparent “betrayal” of him. He realizes how stupid he was to underestimate her and her people, and how dangerous his own species has turned out to be. A real space trap indeed! This would be such a great inversion of expectations, and would be a massive “fuck you” to the imperialist plotlines of the Golden Age.

Juanita, you missed a golden opportunity. I’m sad this is the last time we get to see you on the Laser Books. I really enjoyed Unto the Last Generation, and it’s been an inspiration for me. But Space Trap is such a waste.

Who’s Next?

Okay, let’s shake this one off and see if the next author can wash the bad taste out of our mouths.

Ooh, hot diggity, I like the looks o’ this! Now, let’s see the blurb?

Blurb

The Sternverein polices the universe. Criminals dread it; law-abiding citizens esteem it; all respect it. Ryne an orphan from the tiny planet Jadjeel, worships it. The organization rescued him from slavery and trained him to be a man among men, and elite Blackjacket. It gave his life purpose and direction, excitement and adventure. But it is totally corrupt, as Ryne learns in the shattering episode that brings to a climax John Morressy’s sweeping odyssey, A Law For The Stars.

Corrupt space cops? Sign me up!

August 6, 2026
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