James Nicoll Reviews

Jack Williamson’s 1948 Darker Than You Think is a stand-alone anthropological horror novel. It’s an expansion of the 1940 novella of the same title.

Reporter Will Barbee waits at Clarendon’s new municipal airport. He is expecting Dr. Lamarck Mondrick of the Humane¹ Research Foundation, along with his team of researchers. They are returning from a research trip in post-war Central Asia. Barbee is eager to report on his former mentor’s discoveries.

Unfortunately for Will and even more unfortunately for the scientist, Will is not alone. The ravishingly beautiful April Bell is a reporter for a rival paper. She may be a killer!

Warning: Newbery Award-levels of animal carnage.

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Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson’s 1975 Farthest Star is the first novel in the Cuckoo duology, which was a fixup of the 1973 novella Doomship (1973) and the 1974 serial The Org’s Egg.

Farthest Star is an example of the Big Dumb Object school of science fiction. This makes it cousin to such classics as Ringworld, Rendezvous with Rama , and Orbitsville, as well as to books like The Wanderer.

By the late 21^st century, humans have made contact with a loose association of alien civilizations. These civilizations are linked, not by physical spacecraft, but by near-instantaneous tachyon communication. Tachyon beams carry information; they cannot transmit matter, but material objects can be scanned., That information can then be transmitted by the tachyon transporter, to be duplicated at a distant location¹. This tech has allowed humans to join the association and travel, as copies, to other worlds. 

What if the traveller dies? Run off another copy. Or another dozen copies. Just ask the ill-fated Ben Pertin. 

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1977’s The Starchild Trilogy collects the three short novels of the eponymous trilogy by Jack Williamson and Frederik Pohl. I cannot say the novels are actually any good — in fact, I will be devoting a certain amount of space to pointing out the ways that they aren’t — but they certainly are odd and they do offer a remarkable level of wacky fun.

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