I write a weekly book review for the Daily News of Galveston County. (It is not the biggest daily newspaper in Texas, but it is the oldest.) I have been doing this for nearly a dozen years, and am reprinting some of the older reviews here. Books I feel are still worthwhile. I was a science fiction reader as a kid. (Still am.) I am a sucker for a reprint of long-out-of-print SF from that era, especially short story collections. Like this one:
Go back in time with futuristic sci-fi book
By Mark Lardas
Correspondent
Published February 11, 2007
“Interstellar Patrol II: The Federation of Humanity,” by Christopher Anvil (edited by Eric Flint), Baen Books. 648 pages. $26.
Space flight science fiction had a golden age between Sputnik I and the final Apollo moon mission. Adolescent males with a technical bent then devoured these fictional space adventures. It was their future.
Harry C. Crosby, writing under the pseudonym Christopher Anvil, produced that brand of science fiction. If you grew up in the 1960s and read hard science fiction, you absorbed Anvil through your pores.
Anvil was never a star; his fiction never won awards. It was just fun to read.
Anvil wrote massive amounts of fiction between 1957 and 1980. A master of the short story, and especially, the novella, Anvil wrote for magazines — ephemeral offerings printed on disposable pulp paper.
Many of Anvil’s contemporaries — notably Harry Harrison and Mack Reynolds — mastered the art of repackaging short fiction as a short novel. Not Anvil. His five books appeared briefly as paperbacks in the 1960s and 1970s then disappeared.
Anvil has re-emerged after two decades in eclipse. Baen Books began republishing Anvil’s fiction in book form. “Interstellar Patrol II: The Federation of Humanity” is Baen’s third such anthology.
This collection contains Anvil’s short fiction that fell outside his “Pandora’s Planet” or Paradise Planet” series. It also includes a rare 1970s Anvil novel. The tales are set in his “Paradise Planet” future. If the terms “Interstellar Patrol,” “Space Force” or “Planetary Development Association” ring a chord, these stories will be like meeting old friends.
You know what to expect in an Anvil story. Protagonists are consistently square-jawed males, with European names. Culturally white (although they could have been black or Native American), they are always sidearm-carrying men of action. Plots usually center around technology or a point of a character similar to those found in Kipling’s poem “God of the Copybook Headings.”
Anvil’s writing is not brilliant, but these stories are fun, and consistently entertaining. It is everything a 1960s teenage boy could ask for — whatever his age.
Mark Lardas, an engineer, freelance writer, amateur historian, and model-maker, lives in League City. His website is marklardas.com.
