James Nicoll Reviews

David Gerrold’s 1983 A Matter for Men is the first volume in his as yet unfinished War Against the Chtorr series.

Supine beneath the treaty terms inflicted on America by the Soviets, Chinese, and the rest of an overpopulated world — or just possibly, victorious in a game of fourth dimensional geopolitical chess — America was still recovering from the economic side-effects of surrender when disease made the situation unimaginably worse.

Plague after plague swept the planet, killing four and a half of Earth’s six billion. Young Jim McCarthy’s family tried to wait out the disaster in their mountain cabin, but misjudged the end of the crisis. With half his siblings dead and his family broken by trauma, Jim is drafted into the nation’s Teamwork Army. He soon discovers that the challenge facing America and other, lesser nations, isn’t just disease. It’s an alien invasion.

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David Gerrold’s 1973 The Man Who Folded Himself is a standalone time-travel story.

Assured by his Uncle Jim that he will inherit a vast estate, Daniel Eakins is unpleasantly surprised to discover (after his uncle’s demise) that his legacy is not the hundred-million-plus dollars Daniel had expected. What he gets: the far smaller sum of six thousand dollars … and a belt.

It is a particularly fine belt. In fact, closer examination reveals that it is a fully functional time machine.

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David Gerrold’s 1973 non-fiction book The Trouble with Tribbles may be the only SF-related biography I own whose subject is not a person but a story. By 1973, Star Trek novelizations and tie-ins were nothing new. Blish was credited with seven eight collections of Trek adaptations¹, as well as the tie-in Spock Must Die! And then there was Mack Reynolds’ obscure Mission to Horatius. Gerrold’s book was something else. Let the subtitle speak for itself:

The Birth, Sale, and Final Production of One Episode.

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David Gerrold and Larry Niven’s 1971 standalone novel, The Flying Sorcerers, was Gerrold’s first published novel and Niven’s fourth. Even though this book uses the vernacular of fantasy, it is a science fiction comedy. More on that last bit later. 

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Moonstar: Jobe Book One, is, as far as I can tell, David Gerrold’s 1977 Moonstar Odyssey under a new title. I own a first edition of the older book¹; I compared it to the later ebook; they seem substantially the same. 

This book was an obvious candidate for an ebook re-issue. The 1977 original earned a Nebula nomination and I expect it would have been mentioned by the Tiptree Award people — if the Tiptree Award had existed then.

I don’t think this book quite works, but at least it’s an ambitious book. Where it fails, it fails in interesting ways. 

Satlik is an unusual world; its origin is unclear and it orbits an atypical main sequence star. It was a lifeless world until human starfarers arrived, as colonists who terraformed the world. That was centuries ago. Satlik is now a fragile paradise.

The human inhabitants of Satlik are nearly as unusual as their world.

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