Grand old man of SF Michael D. Resnick knocked out a duology of "sword and planet" stories - a subset of planetary romance - in the late '60s, and today's entry is the second of these, as space-wrecked astronaut Adam Thane finds himself chasing the love of his life Delisse, helpless in the foul clutches of the deposed demigod Tarafolga in a PURSUIT ON GANYMEDE! Thane is transmitting his adventures to author Resnick via a jerry-rigged radio, and isn't it always fun to read the prologues to these Barsoom pastiches, and see how the he-man heroes are getting their stories to Earth?
Adam Thane is your typical protagonist of the sword and planet thriller: male, of Earth, stronger and smarter than any alien foe! Just as for John Carter on Mars, Thane finds that the lighter gravity of the moon Ganymede (known as Kobar to its inhabitants) grants him superhuman strength against the locals ... but Resnick is too fine a writer not to surround him with interesting characters who bring value to the story through their own heroism and contributions, and Thane's superhero powers are leveled with a certain humble caution in the face of Kobar's alien threats. He's about as likeable and relatable as he can be while still embodying a power fantasy. It helps too that Resnick's writing during the post-ERB Barsoomian renaissance, when Burroughs' cruder racism and colonial designs were being tempered with then-modern attitudes. This is obvious in Resnick's treatment of the heroic black tribe that guards the mountains between the civilized west of Kobar and the atom-blasted eastern wastelands: Thane must best them if he's to continue his pursuit of his bride Delisse and the villain Tarafolga. The guardians are presented as honorable people faced with severe culture shock from Thane's reckless slashing of age-old planetary taboos with his modern American astronaut boldness. These austere fighters may have been influenced by Resnick's lifelong interest in Kenya, its people, and their experiences with colonialism. The headman of the guardians gets his own subtle characterization too, when he sends a boorish bully as his champion against Thane: if Thane loses, he deserved it, but if he wins, everyone's down one asshole nobody likes!
Another piece of the planetary romance where Resnick excels is in Thane's travails against the many, many species of hostile Kobarian wildlife, which bring suspense and verve to the proceedings - dig the hideous karix, and the bizarre centauroid/sauropod predators (with 10 foot tongues!) who rule the post-nuke jungles of Eastern Kobar! I love any author who indulges in creating weird and nasty alien wildlife.
Thane of course makes it into the eastern wastes and encounters these and more hideous beasts, including endless flocks of vicious blind pterodactyloids and grotesque golden apemen wearing mysterious medallions. The story starts going in circles after Adam Thane's arrival at the city-state of Luros, with plots and counterplots between Thane and the dread sorcerer Tarafolga, but Resnick keeps things lively enough with (for example) Thane being drafted into a gladiator death match against a hit parade of all the most awful Kobarian monsters - this portion is genre daftness at its best, as Thane as his luckless Lurosian comrades battle on for hours against waves of hideous monsters, before loosing the surviving creatures back upon their tormentors and the city at large! We're in prime sword and sandal territory here, as the city also catches on fire! With further developments our hero and his friends win the day, and here Resnick ends their story, with no further sequels. His work with Ganymede is equal to ERB's early Barsoom titles, and better for my money than anything Burroughs wrote past Chessmen of Mars.
The excellent but somewhat generic cover art is by fantasy art titan Jeffrey Catherine Jones. Pursuit on Ganymede earns 3/4 stars for solid, enjoyable planetary romance.
Paperback Library, 1968
No comments:
Post a Comment