STARDRIFTER by Dale Aycock

He's a lady's man, always greets with a kiss on the hand

Protects us all, at the ready to answer our call

He's a spacer, a star chaser

Author Dale Aycock delivers some interminable space swashbuckling with her Stardrifter, as reluctant hero Gil Corbett is pulled into an interstellar conspiracy involving his lost brother Ken, his newly upgraded ship the Gabriella, and his mysterious new lover Beth, the future Marquessa of Sandyminder.

Aycock has a way with names, anyways - the dangerous nobleworld Sandyminder, the (also dangerous, and mysterious) Brothers system, Federation man Pelonyi - and she's gentle with her characters, even the nasty ones. We're all just trying to make it in this big bad universe. Her space opera tech is delightfully retro, with Corbett demanding day capsules for the pain and eying up a deadly LEM - that's a light-emitting matrix, AKA a laser gun, by the way. There's some daring space maneuvers with some plausible-sounding reasons why XYZ has to happen for our characters to make it to their destinations intact that allows for Corbett to strut his stuff as an ace pilot. Meanwhile, Corbett and Beth trade screwball dialogue and will-they-won't-they moments.

This universe is a lonely one. Humanity is limited to a few star systems, longing for a long past golden age of old Earth and truly galactic civilization. Aycock is coy about the reasons for our reduced state, but her setting is pleasingly unsettling. Unfortunately, once the plot is truly up and running, we find ourselves in Scooby-Doo mode: our heroes running around room to room, finding clues, tying up bad guys, and rescuing old man Silvernight (a genius with new formulas for starship fuel). It's stock genre madlibs, basically.

He will blast off tonight 

He puts his life on the line every time he's in flight 

A man you can't trace 

But our love will last beyond time and space

The cheekily Star Warsian cover art is, of course, completely unrelated to the actual story. At the most, Corbett could be vaguely defined as a Han-esque rogue who's been running from doing the right thing, until circumstances force him to man up. He's also a Federation academy washout and former classmate to hard ass Pelonyi. This galaxy doesn't have any alien sidekicks, or even robots.

Aycock's fair go at space opera thrills settles down for a rough landing of 2/4 stars. In the end, everyone involved deserved a better class of transport.

Leisure Books, 1981

RAZORBACK by Peter Brennan

The kid called Dicko never knew when to keep his mouth shut. "What she needs to get is one of the Big Reds grab 'er by the tits and she'll forget about what she came for," the kid was saying as Cullen pulled himself onto the stool. "Then she'll soon forget about savin' the kangaroo."

Dicko's brother Benny chuckled a bit for his kin's sake, but none of the other shooters and graziers propped over their drinks bothered to look up. Like Cullen, they didn't appreciate talk about the Winters woman or the problem unless it was important, and no one among them could remember the kid Dicko ever saying anything that qualified.

Have a drink, mate? Have a fight, mate? There's nothing else out here, except the killing. Killing roos, killing boars, killing anything that'll turn a profit and sometimes just for the hell of it anyways. 

Killing anything that gets in your way. But as we're about to learn, this killer instinct extends from the beasts of the Outback to the warehouses of Sydney and clear across the ocean to the New York mob and Madison Avenue. And now author Peter Brennan has summoned THE RAZORBACK, and nothing on two or four legs is safe!

Thicko Dicko and his brother Benny are two of the most hateable yobbos you'd ever be unfortunate enough to meet, but they're just the bottom rung of a long and crooked ladder that reaches near all the way to the top. Their atavistic sadism as they "butt shoot" scores of kangaroos (for easier butchery come morning, as the animals won't expire prematurely, stiffening in rigor mortis) is stoked by the simple logic of business, and their cruelty comes in handy when the bosses need a little problem solving to cover up some dirty business that the scabrous Baker boys won't ever see a penny from.

Author Brennan makes ready comparison between the struggle for survival for animals and human beings, whether we're on the razor's edge in the unforgiving Outback or navigating the perhaps equally dangerous modern "civilized" world. Death is sometimes quick, sometimes slow, but when it comes to Brennan's titular monster, a true freak of nature, it's all there is. The razorback, we're informed, only becomes more enraged the more it kills, and its gargantuan body hosts a litany of parasites - maggots, botflies, lung worm, stomach worm, tapeworm, plus unidentified creatures incubating under its skin and clouding up its eyes - that drive it further into painful rage.

This thrice-cursed halfbreed cross shouldn't exist, but it does, and that's everybody's problem. It's hard enough for the sheep graziers keeping the regular boars out of their wells (the only water for miles around) and the roos from devouring every last shoot of growth meant for their sheep. Now the razorback threatens to ruin them totally. Dicko and Benny's lazy method of "butt shooting" doesn't help either, as crippled roos are left out overnight for the pigs to feast upon, drawing even more trouble upon the beleaguered ranchers.

You may have caught on that nature's casual indifference to human affairs looms large here. The men (and it is men, in this world) who kill so easily, whether with guns and axes or with a word and a nod, are not prepared to be on the other side of the equation. Brennan gives us some savage instances of this turnabout, and here he maybe belabors the point a little, as we sit through perhaps just a little too much back and forth over the crime syndicate that owns the Petpak pet food company going about its dirty deeds. Come halfway through the story we realize there's about a half dozen subplots going over men named Wallace and Scully and Briggs and Wagstaff and Grabow ... somewhere we lose the sublime focus of the Outback scenery. Brennan zips us in tight for the ending though, as the final fifty pages trim the fat and knock off characters left and right. This is what we came for! The slaughter!

Above, the Fontana edition. Contra the synopsis, Gene Taylor is a New York adman and not a lawyer, by the way. Brennan works fast and tight with his characters, laying their neuroses bare under the hot Outback sun and fraying their nerves to the breaking point. Everybody's got an angle, and questions of heroics and justice are quickly abandoned for the overriding fact of survival ... although we might have some room for a little bit of simple, primal vengeance before the final curtain.

Some movie tie-in editions

Readers may be more familiar with the stylish film adaptation of this story from 1984, which ditches most of the crime angle to focus on the Outback action. If you haven't seen it, well, it's pretty damn good!

Some pig ... Brennan's freak of nature earns a nasty 3/4 rating for engrossing brutality amidst some loopy plotting.

Jovian Publications, 1981

SHOCKWAVE by Nick Everett

"From the depths of the ocean comes the most devastating of all the Earth's forces ..."

Watch out ... for the SHOCKWAVE!

The "rugged Englishman" Kirk, sexy lady scientist Simone, and a boatload of Norwegians are sitting on top of a big problem in the North Sea: an unstable trench that's about to launch a landslide into the ocean depths, triggering the most massive tsunami ever seen in this hemisphere. Worst of all, the blast wave will be on track to slam into the eastern coast of the UK!

This is author Nick Everett's only credited work, though the polished writing points to a pseudonym of some working writer. Everett leads with a little bit of disaster science onboard the good ship Isthmian, along with Kirk's battered libido - Simone "can make a duffle coat and a pair of sea-boots look sexy" we're told, and once Kirk gets off this tub he's entertaining thoughts of a courtship with her. That'll have to wait, of course, once the seafloor shakes and the big wave starts rolling.

Everett writes a short, tight little disaster epic, drawing down on family man Walter's evacuation via traffic jam and on daredevil pilot Ryan's rubbernecking by way of his precious twin engine Dakota, the very same plane brought to life on the front cover. Walter's a drab grey man living a drab grey life, and now he might lose it all without having ever really enjoyed himself! Ryan meanwhile gives us a bird's eye view of the action and pushes himself further and further into reckless hedonistic thrill seeking.

Like the water sucked out to sea before a tsunami, the empty hours between the announcement of the disaster and the inevitable crashing wave are a loathsome absence, proof via negation of a horrible, inescapable reality. When the shockwave finally comes roaring ashore and overground it's almost a relief, a sweet release for our trapped cast. Pilot Ryan could easily have flown to safety, but his own demons compel him to witness the destruction, and poor Walter, well, he's stuck in a miles long caravan along with a thousand other souls.

Closeup on the cover art!

Everett mentions a 220 foot tall tsunami resulting from the Good Friday quake that struck Alaska in 1964, which also factored into the background of Arthur Herzog's Earthsound. Over at the Paperback Palette, Jeffersen has amassed an exhaustive entry for water based disasters - that's "flood, deluge, squall, gale, tempest, cyclone, hurricane, typhoon, tsunami," any and all "EXTREME WATER EVENTS," and Shockwave is among the many, many entries. Jeffersen also has questions about Everett's identity, because great minds think alike.

His lengthy survey also covers Deluge by Richard Doyle and The Raging Flood by R.T. Larkin. Check it out!

Shockwave earns a reliable 3/4 for a no frills, cheap thrills disaster!

New English Library, 1981

THE GENESIS ROCK by Edwin Corley

The Big Apple's about to get the big one, and the only warning is THE GENESIS ROCK!

That's an ancient rock from deep within the earth, the most famous example being a sample taken from the moon by Apollo 15 in 1971, where it had lain undisturbed for 4 billion years after being ejected from the earth during some primordial upheaval. Geologist Janet McCoy has just identified a piece found in Central Park during construction for subway expansion as just such a rock, meaning that the bedrock under Manhattan isn't nearly as stable as formerly thought ...

A volcano in NYC should be a no brainer for extreme disaster thills, but Corley's story is disappointingly limp and unfocused, spending way too much time on pointless filler flashbacks to Janet and her estranged husband Linus' courtship down in Mexico while also piling on more and more ancillary characters until we can hardly keep track and don't hardly care. Corley is also too cutesy with his characters, letting us know just who we're supposed to cheer for and boo hiss at in clumsy scenes of would-be snappy repartee - and would you believe that all the male characters keep noticing how fricken hot McCoy is? Brains and beauty, wow!

When the earth finally erupts, there's a little bit of action, but not enough, and the climax involves too many meetings and phone calls to be very suspenseful. The techno thriller aspects around McCoy's volcano knowledge are adequate, anyways. Corley drops references to prior work, like his NYC race hate thriller Siege and his nuclear thriller The Jesus Factor, and weaves a secret Mars mission into the plot to no real end. It doesn't add up to much.

Hardcover art

The official Edwin Corley website features biographical information, pseudonyms, and a bibliography. Corley died young at the age of 50, just months after his wife passed.

Author Edwin Corley (1931-1981)

The Genesis Rock earns a shabby 1/4 rating. Find your volcanic thrills and sexy scientists elsewhere.

Dell Publishing, 1981

HELLSTONE by Steven Spruill

Look for Nessie ... but don't messy!

Ancient horrors meet the modern technothriller in HELLSTONE! Author Steven Spruill did loads of research on Nessie and crafts his own unique version of the monster, something much more surprising and horrifying than a surviving plesiosaur. Unfortunately the story is dogged by jittery pacing, tiresome thriller antics, and a hard man protagonist with a maudlin backstory. It's way better than Konvitz's Monster, but that's damning with faint praise.

We open with an evocative historical prologue and then settle in for some two fisted filler in the present day, before we can finally get back to the loch. But then things get jumpy and we haven't been out on the water for two seconds when the horror strikes! We go back and forth for a while and learn about pagan cults and corrupt authorities, while a bloodless cast of scientists stick around awaiting their inevitable dispatch. The monster hangs around too, more present than in Konvitz's garbage story but still frustratingly ephemeral. The thought and care Spruill puts into his creature is appreciated, but it's almost lost in the padded storytelling.

Spruill's historical vignettes of foreign invaders running afoul of the beast are the best parts of the story, and it's too bad the present day action seems so rote and drawn out. When a supporting character blows their brains out from the horror, the effect is null except to note that another plot thread has been cleaned up. Eventually everything ties up neatly and we're left dissatisfied, having slogged through a 300 page thriller with little to show for it.

Spruill's bibliography impresses even if the total package cannot. Hellstone earns a 2/4 for some swings and roundabouts.

Playboy Press, 1981