Swag 1: Swag Town by L.S. Riker

Swag 1
Swag Town
by L.S. Riker
1992, St. Martin

Near future America in decline - a new scenario to me, a combination of targeted assassinations of economic figures and financial terrorism decimates America's economy, with foreign companies buying up everything and turning the States into a third world country.

Swag (nickname from the phrase Scientific Wild Ass Guess) is a former cop turned hired gun who has a bodyguard client killed in front of him, dragging him into a plot to control New York's criminal underworld. Swag's role in the plot is a little cloudy, and you could tell the author had some background into finance and economics that they didn't mind sharing at length.

Like a lot of detective novels, Swag mainly just stumbles around with people either dumping exposition or trying to kill him, but the action scenes are some of the best I've read.

From Amazon https://amzn.to/4elKF6d

Dray Prescot 1: Transit to Scorpio by Alan Burt Akers

Dray Prescot 1
Transit to Scorpio
by Alan Burt Akers (Kenneth Bulmer)
1972, DAW

English sailor Dray Prescot is zapped back and forth between Earth and the planet Kregan by mysterious means, where he goes through cycles of being enslaved and escaping, and rescuing and losing his beloved, the princess Delia. One of the most self-conscious of the Barsoom pastiches. We've got a an often nude Dejah Thoris stand in, an oversexed evil princess in love with a heroic swashbuckler ala Aura and Barin from Flash Gordon, and there's even a throwaway reference to Gor.

Takes a bit to get warmed up, and feels like a fix up novel of short story fragments, but some good adventure here and there. More Douglas Fairbanks than Conan.

Available from Amazon

An Earthman on Venus by Ralph Milne Farley

An Earthman on Venus by Ralph Milne Farley
Originally The Radio Man
1924, Argosy

An earthly radio operator zaps himself to Venus, where he is captured by and assimilates with ant people and people people. Kept waiting for the admin to get out of the way (learning the language, customs, getting a job, etc) so we could get to the adventure, but I suppose all that was the point of the story. More planetary romance than sword & planet.

Available from Gutenberg 

Horn 4: Ultimate Weapon by Ben Sloane

Horn 4
Ultimate Weapon
by Ben Sloane (Stephen R. Cox)
1991 Gold Eagle / Worldwide Library

A black market engineer creates a droid body controlled by the brain and spinal column pulled from unwilling victims, planning to unleash them as unstoppable killing machines at the United Nations. Horn, his partner Winger, and their informant Dartt are on the case.

Very little action - the ending was wrapped up way to quickly with an EMP weapon. The setting felt like 1990 America but with high tech. Horn gets a bionic eye and an upgraded targeting system, and there's a theme that he fears this might make killing too easy and take away his humanity, which shows how much the series has softened since the first brutal installment.

Paperback from Amazon

Mathew Swain 4: The Odds are Murder by Mike McQuay

Mathew Swain 4
The Odds are Murder
by Mike McQuay
1982 Bantam

Set against a backdrop of a plague driving people paranoid and violent, Swain protects an old flame when a series of corporate investors turn up dead. A darker vibe with this one, with fewer Chandleresque similes.

Packs less of a punch after recent events – it depends on the notion that the government would take drastic steps to stop a plaque, and a major plot point is based on a misunderstanding of insurance law.

Available from Amazon

The Foreign Hand Tie by Randall Garrett

The Foreign Hand Tie
by Randall Garrett
Analog Science Fact Science Fiction Vol 68, No 4, Dec 1961

Insubstantial tale of psychic twins, one embedded in Russia spying on a scientist, the other a gambling layabout in DC receiving the messages. Approaches interest with some thoughts on the artistic mind processing information differently from the scientific mind.

Available from Project Gutenberg

Mathew Swain: The Deadliest Show in Town by Mike McQuay

Mathew Swain
The Deadliest Show in Town
by Mike McQuay
1982 Bantam

Swain is hired by a media conglomerate to find a virtual reality addicted newscaster, who is promptly snatched away from him. He deals with scummy media types and a candidate for Texas governor. The news companies pay criminals to commit crimes to generate footage.

Thin plotting and not much going on this time around.

Paperback from Amazon

Hook 3: Star City by Tully Zetford

Hook 3
Star City 
By Tully Zetford (Kenneth Bulmer)
1974 New English Library

Hook loses his payment for a job, tries to steal it back in what may be a Parker tribute, then saves a child and hangs around a rich woman. We don't reach an actual storyline until the short novel is almost over.

Hook is invited to a hunting party where the rich mow down primitive humanoids for sport. Hook takes the natives' side and organizes a defense, culminating in an unexpected, though unlikely, conclusion.

Other installments had a GTA feel of running from danger to danger. This felt like he just kept typing, hoping an idea would come, and it never really did.

Paperback from Amazon

Series Showdown: Mathew Swain vs Simon Rack

Both had future societies centered around gaining status - the citizens of Aleph fought for the number of rooms to their apartment, while moon citizens fought for seniority ranking. Both underperformed, but Swain at least performed at all. Mathew Swain kicks Simon Rack out of the airlock.

Simon Rack 2: Starcross by Laurence James

Simon Rack 2
Starcross aka War on Aleph
by Laurence James
1974 Sphere

Rack and his partner Bogart are forced to act as Ambassador between two planet, one like decadent Rome, the other militaristic Sparta, to broker a peace around a settling a new planet. eventually a Romeo and Juliet situation resolves the whole thing unsatisfactorily, along the way almost nothing happening. There are occasional sleazy flourishes - gladiator games over a poo lake filled with giant carnivorous worms, a duel with vibro flails, but even these fall flat.

In Kindle from Amazon

Mathew Swain 2: When Trouble Beckons by Mike McQuay

Mathew Swain 2
When Trouble Beckons
by Mike McQuay
1981 Bantam

Scifi Private Eye Mathew Swain goes to the moon to help an old friend, to find her comatose with a dead man in her apartment. He finds drone workers, hostile police, and everyone clamming up at the word "beckon".

The process works better than the result - the clues don't make sense and the uncovered plot makes even less. Swain still cracks wise, but there wasn't a good sense of location. Half on the moon, half in a space station, and only occasional confusing references to the state of gravity.

Toned down from the first installment, though there are a couple of interesting sequences of him mind melding with a woman's consciousness in a tube.

Paperback from Amazon

Series Showdown: Spaceways vs Hook

Both books had hermaphroditic aliens with accompanying discussion on pronouns, with Hook even creating new ones. Hook was fun, while Spaceways was mostly filler and even the author lost interest. Spaceways is discorporated into individual atoms and scattered to the winds.

Hook 2: The Boosted Man by Tully Zetford

Hook 2
The Boosted Man 
by Tully Zetford (Kenneth Bulmer)
1974 New English Library

Ryder Hook takes a shuttle down to a planet, only to find the inhabitants attacked by a fungus that makes their eyes droop out of their sockets. The shuttle turns around, only to be refused landing by the mothership. Hook crash lands on a supposedly uninhabited planet to find a thriving industrial planet, rich in culture. Hook and his co-passengers find themselves working their days at cushy, well-paying jobs directing robots and spending their nights in fancy restaurants and going to the opera.

This is, of course, all an illusion. Slaves toil in radioactive factories, lulled into complacency by hypnotic generators. Hook snaps out of it due to his connection to the boosted men. Hook is a cyborg, but only had part of the procedure completed. He's capable of speeds so fast that time stops still and his clothes catch on fire, but his partial powers only kick in if he's in proximity to another, more powerful boosted man.

This leads to some interesting story devices. Hook doesn't know where the boosted men are or where they are, and if he dispatches them too quickly or moves too far away he'll lose his power and even be overwhelmed by the illusion. Hook has to figure out a way off the planet, rescuing a couple allies he's met, while being chased by security forces and hiding from the invincible boosted men.

This one was less violent and more light-hearted than the first installment, with Hook spending much of his time running around in hyper-speed naked bonking guards on the head. Great fun, and can only complain that it didn't get more mileage out of it's clever plot devices.

Paperback from Amazon

Spaceways 2: Corundum's Woman by John Cleve

Spaceways 2
Corundum's Woman
by John Cleve (Andrew J. Offutt)
1982 Playboy

"I've got your slicer trapped up my stash, jacko!"

Janja continues her space adventures, this time with Captain Corundum, and seeking revenge on her former slaver Captain Jonuta. This is as close as a plot as you're going to get.

We get a lengthy scene of Jonuta haggling for slaves before escaping space cops in orbit, to be followed by Corundum haggling for mining equipment before escaping space cops in orbit. Janja and Corundum go drinking, Jonuta gets his bank accounts frozen, and Janja ends up in the ship of another pirate, Hellfire. I guess there's going to be a running device of Janja ending up with a different crew at the end of each installment.

And then there's the sex. More sex, and nastier, than the first, and Offutt finally makes use of the Jarps, an alien race of sex crazed hermaphrodites, but he gets tired of it after the first couple sex scenes. We end up in a situation where the minimal story just gets us to the sex scenes, and he skips over those to get back to the story, leaving us with not much else.

Paperback from Amazon

Michael Kane 2: Blades of Mars aka Lord of Spiders

Michael Kane 2
Blades of Mars aka Lord of Spiders
by Michael Moorcock as Edward P. Bradbury
1965 Compact

Michael Kane returns to ancient Mars, landing on a different part of the red planet. He encounters the blue giants, who are more civilized in this area, and assists a prince to fight off invaders. They find laser wielding ghouls in a desert fortress, find an airship built by ancient advanced technology, are blown off course, fight spider men, then return to pick up the plot.

The femme fatale Horguhl from the last installment shows up and Kane uses a magic mirror to thwart her plans of domination. Strongest in episodic adventures, less so when the main plot takes over.

Paperback from Amazon

Series Showdown: Cap Kennedy vs Simon Rack

Cap Kennedy was more focused and had a better story structure (barely), but Simon Rack had a castle siege with exploding intestines. You do the math.

Simon Rack 1: Earth Lies Sleeping by Laurence James

Simon Rack 1

Earth Lies Sleeping
by Laurence James
1974 Sphere/Zebra

Simon Rack, agent of the futuristic Galactic Security Service, is sent to Earth for a mission involving freeing up trade of an element necessary for space travel. Earth is stuck in the middle ages, and there's kind of a Prime Directive thing about not using advanced technology, but not really. Simon and crew hang around taverns, get captured, escape through elaborate death traps, and generally go through the motions of a sillier D&D campaign.

There's a decent pay off at the end where Rack leads a rebellion, featuring a castle siege with advanced weapons which make your intestines crystallize and explode out of your stomach. His first novel, this one felt like James already had a first draft of a medieval novel and rewrote it when his editor wanted scifi. Curious how the rest of the series plays out.

As of this writing, a cheap edition available for Kindle on Amazon.

Cap Kennedy 9: Earth Enslaved by Gregory Kern

Cap Kennedy 9
Earth Enslaved
by Gregory Kern (E.C. Tubb)
1974 DAW

Cap Kennedy is a space opera series similar to Perry Rhodan. Kennedy is our square jaw leader who leads a crew through space in his ship, the Mordain, investigating and facing dangers to Earth. In this installment, Kennedy and his crew pass through an artificial asteroid called the Torus into an alternate timeline where women rule Earth on the ground and aliens controlled the skies, using cyborg space forts run by the brains of male human slaves.  Kennedy has to repair his ship, find a way around the alien defenses, and destroy the Torus before it destroys both Earths.

This could have stood to be longer, as there are some interesting concepts but not much room to play around. Cap mainly runs around shooting people unconscious with his sedative needler gun. Not much in the way of description; we have no idea what the aliens look like, and in future alternate Earth you can hitch a ride in a truck or steal clothes from a line of laundry. The end is resolved way to quick by hacking the alien defenses in a more believable manner than Independence Day.

Paperback from AbeBooks

Alien Nation 1: Day of Descent by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens

Alien Nation 1:
Day of Descent
by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens
1993 Pocket Books

Alien Nation was a 1988 film about an alien slave ship that lands in the Mojave Desert. About 300,000 Tenctonese slaves, called Newcomers by earthlings, are assimilated into Los Angeles. The film and subsequent TV series is about human cop Matthew Sykes and Newcomer cop Sam "George" Francisco. The series was developed by Kenneth Johnson of V fame, and explores social issues like racism, cultural assimilation, and immigration.

The series ran for one season, ended on a cliffhanger, and was continued in 1994 as a series of made for TV movies. In between, this book series came out.  This first book is a flashback to before the ships landed, though with a wraparound of events just after the last episode. The other novels are based on the original scripts that eventually became the films, creating the unusual situation of the novelizations coming first.

Day of Descent has two separate stories that kind of combine at the end. In space, we see George and his family and their involvement with the rebellion that causes the ship to land on Earth.  On Earth, Sykes investigates his first case as detective - an astronomer is murdered after discovering an object heading to Earth.

Both are excellent, especially the half in the ship, though the pacing is a bit off.  Both stories wrap up and we switch gears to the story of the Newcomers' first days on Earth, something that felt like a brand new story.  The voice of the characters matched the series well, down to George's son Buck being a piece of crap.

My opinion of the book went down a notch or two a week later after watching the eighth episode of the series, "Contact".  The Sykes storyline is a direct lift from this episode. Again, the book isn't a novelization of that episode, nor is it in it's own continuity. It even has a forward where the stories fit in the chronology of the series.

Aside from that bit of business, this does what the best of tie-in novels do - add depth to the fictional world while keeping true to the original.

Paperback from Amazon

Series Showdown: Mathew Swain vs Star Quest

  I wanted to like the Star Wars knock off, but there just wasn't anything there. Mathew Swain lives on to take another case.