James Nicoll Reviews

Eric Frank Russell’s 1939 Sinister Barrier is a standalone Fortean novel.

2015! The distant future! Bill Graham, a liaison officer handling relations between scientists and the U.S. Department of Special Finance, is alarmed at a recent wave of deaths amongst America’s top geniuses. Some died of what seems to be natural causes, others by suicide. Graham is convinced someone is murdering the USA’s brain trust. 

Graham is on the right track but he does not grasp the scale of the crisis. The culprit isn’t the Soviets, the Asian Combine, or even some sort of sinister world-spanning conspiracy like Hydra, Thrush, Spectre, or the Phone Company, but something far more ominous. The target is not merely the United States of America. It is humanity as a whole.

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Eric Frank Russell’s 1957 Wasp is a standalone science fiction novel. 

Terra and the Sirian Combine have been at war for a year. Humanity enjoys a significant technological edge, but the Sirians outnumber the Terrans ten-to-one. The solution, as far as Terra’s High Command is concerned, is to adopt tactics in which the weight of numbers cannot come into play. 

James Mowry is given an offer he cannot refuse. He is to become a wasp. 

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Military speculative fiction doesn’t have to be all pew-pew-pew and Stern People Who Do What’s Necessary. There’s lots of room for other approaches, including satire. The (or at least a) master of military satire was, of course, Eric Frank Russell, a British SF writer active mainly in the 1940s to the 1960s. His milSF story ​“Allamagoosa” won the very first Hugo Award for Best Short Story, in 1955. 

Inaugurating my series of reviews of MilSFF That Does Not Suck with a classic like ​“Allamagoosa” strikes me as a necessary antidote to the blind military-worship that all too-often characterizes the genre. There are two catches: I actually inaugurated the series last week with Cook’s The Dragon Never Sleeps and I have already reviewed ​“Allamagoosa.” Here, have another worthy Russell work: 1962’s The Great Explosion.

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This is intended, not just as a tribute to an author whose work I remember fondly, but also as a tribute to a line of single author collections that had a huge impact on me when I was a teenager. Under various series names, Ballantine’s Classic Library of Science Fiction collected the short works of various pulp-age notables, authors of whom I might otherwise have remained ignorant. I very quickly learned to snap up anything from Ballantine (and later, Del Rey) whose title was of the form ​“The Best of [Unfamiliar Author Name Here]”. This Eric Frank Russell collection was one of those books, and one of the better purchases I made in 1978.

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