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
