ARCHIVAL UPDATES: STRANGE POWERS OF THE MIND & STRANGE POWERS OF E.S.P.

It's a double dose of psychic flimflam from the gruesome twosome of Warren Smith and Brad Steiger! Both Strange Powers of the Mind and Strange Powers of E.S.P. are now available to read and download at archive dot org. This marks the digital debut for both titles, chock full of midcentury parapsychology, psychic predictions, and that old reliable maybe-fiction:

Original reviews are here and here, from way back in 2022.

 

FOREST FIRE by David James

About a block from the depot, a horse pulling an empty buggy flashed by him towards the center of town. The horse would die in the fire, O'Rourke thought as he turned the corner by the burned-out feed store. It could not be helped. He did not have time to chase it.

David Hagberg returns to the disaster scene under his David James pseudonym, this time with an ambitious period piece about the Cloquet Fire of 1918, which killed almost 500 people as it swept through the isolated communities of Northeastern Minnesota. Says the Minnesota Historical Society:

What is often called simply the Cloquet Fire was really a host of fires, fifty or more, that combined in a single event. It had two major theaters, one called the Cloquet–Duluth Fire and the other the Moose Lake Fire.

Conditions for both had been building for months. Lumbering, the region’s main industry, created giant depots of cut, dry lumber and left the countryside littered with wood waste. Farmers routinely burned fields and brush. Locomotives, contrary to law, spewed sparks and embers. The summer and fall of 1918 had been extremely dry.

Hagberg focuses heavily on the locomotive factor, and on locals' disbelieving mindsets: a fire would be too terrible, unthinkable even, so it can't possibly happen. One man who's all too ready to accept the awful truth is Chief O'Rourke. His life is currently falling apart, what with a pregnant mistress and political machinations against his office (we first meet him as he stops a white-on-white lynching, earning the ire of a local big shot), and even if he sounds the alarm it may be too little, too late. Those duplicitous trains, spewing hot embers, are nonetheless the lifeblood and lifelines of the north country, and O'Rourke will need to move fast to organize Cloquet's evacuation via rail. The few citizens who own automobiles can choose to ride off down the road, at the risk of driving right into the inferno.

Writing in that far off, futuristic year of 1975, with its satellites and phone lines and computerized whats-its, Hagberg makes it starkly clear for readers how limited the toolsets were in 1918: telegraph and couriers. A distance of 20 miles becomes an insurmountable hurdle, and the search for a missing child across town becomes a Herculean task. Poor form from Belmont Tower, by the way, spoiling the fate of O'Rourke's mistress on the back cover and letting us know that there's a "miracle of Cass Lake."

Besides Belmont Tower's spoilers, there's a certain stiffness to the narrative, maybe owing to its period setting. Whether or not we're experts on the Cloquet Fire of 1918, or had never heard of it before this book (raises hand), we know Hagberg is working with somebody else's script, as it were. Per usual, his writing is strong, but we're just missing that spark (ha!) that's present in his other 1975 disasterpieces Blizzard and Twister. We almost get there, with the firestorm proving a crucible for characters like reporter Sullivan, nursing shame from a cowardly episode on the Western Front, and poor, doomed mistress Mindy, but ... alas.

Forest Fire must have taken the most research out of the three 1975 titles, so it's disappointing that it's not quite as good. Not bad by any means, but still not as good as we know Hagberg can be.

Belmont Tower give us a nice spread of ads in the back pages, fiction and nonfiction, including the YA classic Walkabout and a story about the "confused, tortured world of the homosexual" title Boychick.

One final, humorous note: the anachronistic whirlybird almost hiding behind the title text on the cover art. Carelessness from Belmont Tower, or a deliberate attempt to hide the period setting from would-be buyers? When the smoke clears, Hagberg's Forest Fire earns a respectable 3/4 rating and sits comfortably enough alongside his other disaster work. Y'know, there's as much distance between now and 1975 as there was between Hagberg and his 1918 setting? Far out ...

Belmont Tower Books, 1975

STAR FORCE by Robert E. Mills

Haaass! Quaarg scuttled down the garden path, darting nervous glances left and right as he went, feeling, for the first time, more secure in the open, sunlit gardens of Kallidor than in the close and murky halls of Ylang’s new residence.

He had beaten a hasty retreat from the lair while that dreadful thing was still exulting over its resurrection. Consistent with its hideous sense of humor, the Dark Emperor had certainly surprised him, all right. The mechanoid horror it had created was not just a supermachine, not just another one of the emperor’s many sinister toys; no, it was Blorg himself!

Or Blorg’s brain, anyway: all that was salvageable after his last encounter with the star-pirate, Red Rian. But that was enough. Blorg was back!

BLOOD CURDLES! FLESH CRAWLS! BLORG LIVES!

There's something about Blorg. Maybe it's the shine of his chrome dome now that he's been transformed into Mecha-Blorg after his last near escape from the brave heroes of the Fellowship of Light ... or maybe it's just endearing how he's always pissed off, always Haaaaas-ing, and always loyal to the dark cause. In any case, Blorg and the snakelets of Ysss have one last chance to destroy those humanoid turds in the Fellowship of Light, and secure the universe for the Dark Emperor Ylang-Ylang's endlessly evil designs.

No points for guessing how this will go.

In other news, Lady Nila chooses Red Rian over Dann Oryzon, but don't worry because Dann has a new sweetheart already lined up. Thank God, we might have had some tension or conflict there! Our heroes continue to be drips, if you couldn't tell.

Mills might have benefited from the long creative and collaborative process George Lucas had to go through to whittle down or fine tune names from the Journal of the Whills like Mace Windy, C.J. Thorpe, and, well, the titular Whills, instead of dashing off the whole Star Quest trilogy in a year - here, names like Mr. Purpur and Siiin (Dowager-Empress of Sserp and mother of Blorg) sit dead on the page. Heck, even ol' Blorg himself has a bit of a silly moniker, right? Don't tell him that to his face, though ...

Mills doesn't always have a tin ear and heavy hand - Androids Altektu and D-Anacom make decent sidekicks, especially given their slightly ethereal character, with soft green skin and enlightened attitudes vs the nuts and bolts and neuroticism of Artoo and Threepio. Al and D-Ana feel like something out of some comic or animated Euro SF, and the way their names shorten is an effective bit of nice Star Wars style humanization. The beautiful, terrible Kallidorians are also nicely done, with the Fellowship of Light and Ylang-Ylang competing to influence them. Plus this time the (still uncredited) cover art isn't such a tawdry ripoff of Star Wars to the point of borrowing a Rebel Trooper, and looks pretty cool. It's the type of generic but evocative art that could be used for lots of random SF books.

After all the sound and fury of a thousand suns and a trillion souls crying out, and dread immortal Ylang-Ylang finally getting extirpated from this plane of existence, Mills ends things on a limp cliffhanger, as Nila gets kidnapped and the gang has to rush after her. Well, fine. Oddly, there's zero SF titles in the back page adverts here. Meanwhile, Star Fighters had exactly one: Garbage World by one Charles Platt.

The Schlock Value blog also reviewed this entry, and like the previous reviews in the series it's a hoot:

I’m not sure which book I’d consider the worst. I’m leaning toward the middle one, just because of the way they managed to take Dann out of the picture for the entire book by hitting him in the head with a rock. Dann was hardly in this one, too, but it was at least because he was off somewhere else training with the Fellowship (something that should have been dealt with much earlier in the series) and getting laid (which I can’t begrudge anybody).

Star Force did have the good graces to have a title that almost rhymes with Star Wars, and also finally gave me the satisfaction of misspelling Red Rian’s name as “Red Rain.” It took them most of the series to finally do that, and that’s incredible.

As noted by Thomas at Schlock Value, typos remain rampant. He also details some '70s pulp sleaze that the Kallidorians get up to, blurring lines with Nila and Red Rian, if you'd like more details from the text. Otherwise, hop to it yourself, as Star Force is available to read and download at archive dot org!

The final, Force-ful chapter of the Star Quest saga blunders into a 2/4 rating for consistently silly and sometimes endearing sci-fi schlock. Whither Mecha-Blorg?

Belmont Tower Books, 1978

STAR FIGHTERS by Robert E. Mills

Haaass! Haaass! The sound of Blorg’s stertorous breathing drowned out the gentle hum of the levitator that took him down to the city beneath the surface of dead Flaigon. Dwarfing the humanoid equerries who escorted him to the Forbidden City, the reptiloid lord stared vacantly at the door-panel in front of him. Since, for some unknown reason, the Dark Emperor had not probed his consciousness once he touched-down on the black planet’s surface, the lord of the Yss allowed himself the luxury of brooding over his recent misfortunes.

Not only had the mighty star-armada been demolished, thereby disrupting his plans for the conquest of the Primula galaxy, but that bearded man-ape, Rian, that hairy and disgusting piece of humanoid trash, had actually bested him in deep space combat. And the worst was yet to come: he must now answer for his disgrace and defeat to Ylang-Ylang, the only thing he feared in this life. It was a dark day for Lord Blorg and, as he left the levitator and strode through the eerie and self-illuminated corridors of black rock that led to the lair, the weight of fear lay on his body with the pressure of several dense atmospheres.

Lord Blorg. Dann Oryzon. Mr. Purpur. Villains and heroes in a galaxy some distance off, in a time uncertain, with questionable copyright status. Author Robert E. Mills dashed off a whole trilogy of sci-fi schlock in 1978 based on the success of Star Wars, and, in keeping with George Lucas' own style, we're diving in with book two of that trilogy - Haaaaas! Haaaaas!

Most of the fun here is comparing how Mills - not usually an SF writer, by the way - borrows from Lucas and how he brings in his own original ideas. The uncredited cover artist made some interesting choices as well, what with the Rebel trooper helmet. The best characters are undoubtedly Lord Blorg and the Dark Emperor Ylang-Ylang, who spend most of their page counts reveling in evil for the sake of it. Blorg is a four armed reptiloid Ysss from planet Sserp while Ylang-Ylang is a disembodied energy being of pure, you guessed it, evil. Ylang-Ylang wants to revive the ancient, evil Mordlings, of which he was one before ascending to his current state of pure energy evilness.

Mills manages some decent pulp SF scale with Ylang-Ylang's immortal quest for universal domination, even if he does seem to mix up galaxies and solar systems - our heroes are constantly liberating this or that galaxy named for single inhabited planets like Primula and Aquaea. 

Those heroes are pretty much a bunch of dorks, if you couldn't guess. Luke Skywalker is kind of a dork himself, so Dann Oryzon makes a fine young padawan in that mold, but space pirate Red Rian doesn't have half of Harrison Ford's swagger and sleazy charisma, and since this trilogy was written before The Empire Strikes Back and its shocking reveals (dig the back cover tagline though!) Leia character Lady Nila spends this entry dithering between Dann and Rian's love. The possibilities of Lord Blorg actually being Dann's father are left sadly unexplored, and the honor of paternity of young Dann goes to the Obi-Wan character, Garthane.

Mr. Purpur, meanwhile, is an 8 foot tall cat person who (like poor Chewbacca in the classic Star Wars expanded universe novels of the '90s) mostly growls in agreement with his captain Rian. He definitely licks Rians more than Chewbacca ever licked Han, though.

Ween Leever, pride of Red Rian. Ween's middle name is Nerdeen.

Mills avoids using lightsabers or the Force, with Garthane and the Jedi stand-ins being sort of generic New Age espers. There's dolphins, too, for that great '70s New Age vibe. Dann hails from Aquaea, a water world with twin suns, which makes his background totally different from Luke who of course was from a desert planet with twin suns!

The Schlock Value blog by Thomas reviewed this title back in 2015, along with the rest of the trilogy. Thomas has a lot of the same ideas that I did reading this, but also wonders if maybe Mills was writing a low key parody of Star Wars and SF what with his almost deliberately silly Blorgs and Purpurs and Mordlings and so on. Thomas also points out some of the most hackneyed writing in the book, when hero Dann Oryzon gets conked on the head with a rock and spends about a third of the story unconscious! How's that for classic serial writing?

Belmont Tower books littered this work with typos, sometimes in the middle of sci-fi names. Is Lord Blorg a Ysss or a Yss? Are we allowed to ask that question in reptiloid culture?

These wannabe Star Warsians earn themselves a 2/4 rating for some bright patches amid a ridiculous tapestry - it's not as bad as it could have been, but we're starting out with extremely low expectations. Viva Blorg!

Star Fighters is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Belmont Tower Books, 1978

MYSTERIES OF OUR WORLD by Peter Briggs

Not a mystery mongering text, but a solid pop-sci volume covering the cutting edge in earth science c.1969. Author Peter Briggs lays out the debates and scientific developments leading to our new knowledge of the world around us, from the ocean depths to the mountain tops, atmospheric heights, and beyond! There's a healthy dose of natural disasters, with volcanos and earthquakes making for engaging reading. Oceanic investigation is another exciting subject, with plenty of ships dredging and scanning and netting all around the seven seas - the Glomar Challenger is here, a few years before the Explorer would launch its now infamous secret mission. 

Reading on through Briggs' explorations, dense but smoothly flowing, it makes me think. We only just saw the announcement of the phasing out of "pocket" paperbacks, and here's a relic of that soon-to-be-bygone age: a portable, dependable, entertaining science primer, readable by anyone, anytime, anywhere, packed with references and sources - put out by a relatively sleazy/lowbrow publisher, even. Nowadays google is just as likely to give you a completely hallucinated "AI summary" for your search terms as a straightforward URL ... maybe I'm just being cranky, I don't know! Google also doesn't offer as many cigarette ads as vintage paperbacks:

Briggs appears to have been a prolific nonfiction writer - here's a spread of titles including Water, The Vital Essence, which Briggs references in this current text, and a title on the Glomar Challenger.

"And if California falls into the ocean/
Like the mystics and statistics say it will"

 

True to their rough and tumble image, Belmont Tower included a two page spread of mafia books as part of their nonfiction advertising. "You liked reading about volcanos, Billy? Well how about Lucky Luciano?"

This educational title is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Belmont Tower Books, 1969