© 2008 by Gary
K. Wolf and John J. Myers
Did I like
it? Yes.
Was it meaningful, earth-shattering in any way, profound? Nah.
But it was interesting, exciting in places, more-than-occasionally
funny, populated with unique characters.
A page-turner that drew you in.
Most importantly, it did what it set out to do: revisit and pay homage
to a subgenre of Science Fiction called the Space Opera.
Space Opera is
kinda like a soap opera set in outer space.
Your typical one is chock full o’ galactic empires good and evil,
aliens, princesses, swashbucklers, ray guns, rockets, robots, action,
adventure, romance, and melodrama. If
the movie Star Wars comes immediately
to mind, give yourself a hundred points.
George Lucas, unable to secure the rights to Flash Gordon, went and wrote his own space opera and it rejuvenated
the genre.
The best
definition for it I’ve read is from Brian Aldiss: “the good old stuff.”
Me, I came of
age as a science fiction fanatic in the mid-to-late-70s, cutting my teeth more
on “hard SF” tales and the “New Wave” of the 60s where science fiction became a
tool to mind experiment and noodle with time-honored social conventions. However …
While not
personally not a huge fan of the space opera subgenre, I read my share as a
kid, beginning with Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Princess
of Mars and a bunch of its sequels.
His Pirates of Venus endlessly
fascinated me sometime around 1978 or 79 – I recall taking the book wherever I
went, including the high-school football games my father coached, reading it
under the bleachers. As mentioned, the
movie Star Wars, as well as the
original run of the teevee show Battlestar
Galactica and its late-70s competitor Buck
Rogers riveted me. I even watched
some Flash Gordon reruns with my dad
one day one spring at my grandmother’s house.
A few years ago,
on a whim, I picked up an entry in the E.E. “Doc” Smith “Lensman” series. It didn’t exactly take me, but I hacked my
way through it. When the basement
flooded back in ’09, my aunt saw the carcass of the book floating in the bilge
and bought me a new copy. Which I will
re-read again one day.
And so I came to
Space Vulture.
On first glance,
this book seems custom written for me.
Its co-authors, friends since childhood, are Gary K. Wolf and John
Myers. Gary K. Wolf is of Killerbowl, A Generation Removed, and The
Resurrectionist fame, and a genuine icon of my childhood – each of those
three books fascinated and undoubtedly influenced me to no end. Oh, and he also made his fortune writing a
little book about a cartoon character named Roger Rabbit. John J. Myers is the Catholic Archbishop of Newark , and the thought of reading a science
fiction book written by a Catholic Archbishop intrigued me the moment I heard
about it. So I bought it one day at
B&N and a few weeks ago finally got around to reading it.
Space Vulture was deliberately written to evoke the
space operas the two authors devoured as children in the 1940s out in Illinois .
All the elements are there: dastardly villain Space Vulture, dashing
Space Patrolman Victor Corsaire, the damsel-in-distress (updated to 21st-century
testosterone-laden lady) who would die to save her two young boys, a shady
criminal who has a novel-long change of heart, some of the most delightfully
disgusting alien species I’ve ever read about, hand-to-hand combat, blasters
firing away showdowns, sneaky escapes, terrible tortures, slave worlds, farm
worlds, deserted archaeological worlds stalked by mechanical guardians, space
ships and escape pods, and a robot named Can Head, who should have lasted
longer than the first chapter.
Space Vulture
and Vic Corsaire are two of the most hammiest villain-and-hero combos I’ve ever
read about, but, you know, it works!
They came to life right off the page, despite the whole ridiculousness
of the thing, and I could really envision this as an updated Flash-Gordon-with-CGI if anyone was ever daring enough to put
this on the big or small screen. I would
read more, and was pleased to see that the authors set up the possibility of a
sequel at novel’s end, with our titular menace inexplicably disappearing from
the inescapable prison world of Purgatory.
Grade: A –
I’m passing it
along to my 11-year-old godson next time I see him.
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