SOJALS rating:

Awful (1/5)

I first read this in March 1984 and most recently on the 20th July 2010

I picked it up from the original Forbidden Planet in Soho, London. That was the 23 Denmark Street address. It cost me the once-significant sum of two pounds and five pence. Obviously that's not from memory. It's from the price sticker. All I can remember about Forbidden Planet is that it moved, and that it was never as good as "Dark They Were and Golden Eyed" in Berwick Street. Back to the book. Yes, well it's a teenage action drama. The heroic, principled and unbending Commodore Tancred Dalton is a rising star in the Imperial space navy. Our hero saves the human empire a couple of time but rubs up against the smug superiority of the military establishment to do so. He ends up without the girl (Arianne) and running a spaceship junkyard. There is a little more after that, but it's of little consequence, just other one or two occasions when Dalton has to save humanity again

If you remember this is really for teenagers, it's not bad. But it doesn't go down quite as easily now I'm over twenty (cough, cough). Well over twenty. I think even alluding to my age suggests that I've had one too many tequila shots. I'd better have a cigarette.

There's a neat little short story, "Founder's Day", appended in the paperback. Both then and now I read straight through the novel into the short story assuming it was the final chapter of "Glory Game", so I suppose everybody else did too. It did for some confusion and lessened the impact of the novel itself. My advice to the Publishers is if you insist on sticking a short story at the end of the novel, please insert some flag pages first.