The Grayspace Beast

By Gordon Eklund, © 1976


Intriguing Characters – CHECK
Dubious Motivations – CHECK
Alien aliens – CHECK
Hyperspace and Associated Physics – CHECK
Story within a Story – CHECK
Quest to Slay a Dragon – CHECK
Big Bad Monster – CHECK
Twist Ending – CHECK

Yeah, it’s all there, to varying degrees.

This was a pleasant read, more so for the fact that I had a dreamlike déjà vu that I traveled with these men and women before. I believe I have, as a boy in the 70s, though for the life of me I can’t attach a tangible memory to the book. Oh, well. Regardless, it was still a solid and enjoyable science fiction tale, phantom nostalgia notwithstanding.

The book was such a quick read that any attempt to summarize it would make drastic and unfair in-roads to the plot itself. So, how about …

We’re eavesdropping on a storyteller whose audience of children is quite demanding and precocious. Neither may be who we think they may be. The story being told is of the Grayspace Beast and the men and women who come together to hunt it down. The beast itself is some planet-sized blobby thing that lives in the gray-hued regions of hyperspace.

But the Grayspace Beast is not really the subject of the novel.

Eklund focuses on character. The half-dozen main characters are full-fleshed three-dimensional people with all shades of motivations. No one is entirely good, no one is entirely evil. Most are not who we think they are, any more than we think we know the family that lives next door to us. I like that; it’s real; it’s intensely interesting. I liked the origin story of the bad guy heavy, for instance. He wasn’t born twisting his waxed moustache evilly; life and his youthful reactions toward it brought him to his specific situation and attitude toward it.

Anyway, the hero, warts and all, is an aging swashbuckling Flash Gordon type named Kail Kaypack. And boy are the warts plentiful. The character is all tongue-in-cheek, all bluff and bluster, but there are real endearing moments with him. He meets a boy, Darcey, raised in an alien culture, who is tasked with slaying this Grayspace Beast. The two assemble a team from a planet resembling a cross between a carnival midway and a mob-run casino and make a getaway worthy of Jerry Bruckheimer. Soon they’re tracking the monster, at each other’s throats, and we’re wondering, with them, just how you kill a thing that’s a trillion cubic miles big.

The aliens were authentically, legitimately alien, not just dudes with funny masks on. Even these non-humans had dubious motivations. It’s always a joy to be pleasantly surprised when reading a novel you superficially feel you know where it’s going. It’s even more so to be surprised when you think you know a character through and through. Eklund has packed a couple of worthy surprises in this neat little throwback to 1970s science fiction.

I give it an A.