Mercenary by Mack Reynolds (free)

free eBook Mercenary by Mack Reynolds

"Every status-quo-caste society in history has left open two roads to rise above your caste: The Priest
and The Warrior. But in a society of TV and tranquilizers—the Warrior acquires a strange new meaning...."

That quote is the first line of the free eBook from Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org, and probably a blurb from the back cover or an ad for the book. I added it because it is a nice summary and it truly describes the feel of the story. Mercenary was written in the early 60s and it has a bit of that 50s square hair, martini totting vibe typical in books of that era. I do not typically like those sorts of books and the first few pages of Mercenary had me worried; however, I ended up really getting into this book, once it got going.

The story is an alternate history where society is based on a caste system and large corporations settle disputes through fighting a small war called a Fracas. These Fracases are fought under strict rules limiting the equipment used to 1900 technology and they are televised. These battles are a major source of entertainment for the general public who, at least the lower castes, watch them via TV while high on a drug called "Trank".

Though Mercenary was written over 50 years ago, the premise of the story eliminates detailed descriptions of science and technology and limits opportunities for the characters to exhibit chauvinistic attitudes towards women, and I feel it is very readable today. The main character Joe Mauser has a little of the handsome, confident hero who always knows what to do prevalent in 50s and 60s sci-fi, but it is kept to a minimum. The caste based society premise helps with this a little. The hero, Joe, was born with a low status which makes everything he has to do more difficult if not impossible, somewhat limiting his ability to be a superman.


The Plot

The story follows veteran fighter Joe Mauser as he joins, and fights for, the underdog in a fracas. He has a non-conventional idea to win this battle and hopes, if he can implement it successfully, that it will greatly improve his status. He has a history of taking chances like this to climb in society and has been successful in the past. He Started life as a Mid-Lower and then literally fought his way to High-Lower and finally to Low-Middle where we meet him. In the coming battle, he hopes to jump two levels to Low-High, through a twist on the rules he has worked out in advance. However the conservative command structure in the company he joins may make this impossible.

I do not want to give away more than that as the plot is pretty basic and the few surprises should be surprises. Mr. Reynolds describes the people and their lives at the various levels of society, and the interactions between them, very well and it made the book fun to read. For instance, Joe starts with one selfish goal, but we see him change a over the course of the book. I am not sure if this was a conscious goal for the story but it made the main character click for me, even though he is a bit of that perfect hero type of the era. I thought the premise was pretty original too, and was surprised that I had never read anything written since that had similar themes. It is highly possible that there is a whole genre like this, however, and only I am unaware of it. This was a fun read for me anyway.


This book is not a great book but good and super readable today. With very little modification, it could be a contemporary work and I think it would make a pretty good movie, actually. Also it is a free eBook so, really, the only cost is time and since I was looking to kill some time with a book, I was not disappointed at all with Mercenary. Gutenberg says it was published in Analog in April of 1962 as Mercenary and then later as Mercenary From Tomorrow in novel format, and I am assuming the two versions are the same as the free eBook from Gutenberg seems complete and about short novel length. It also says this is the First book of Mack Reynolds' Joe Mauser series. The 2nd book of the series is also available at Gutenberg and I will read that one pretty soon and do an entry on it if good. The link to the second free ebook is included in the links below, if interested.


Free eBook download:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24370



More info about the book and Mack Reynolds:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercenary_from_Tomorrow
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mack_Reynolds


I will be trying the next book in this series soon (also a free eBook at Gutenberg):
 The Earth War, 1963. Reprint of "Frigid Fracas."  Mack Reynolds
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/31008

The Moon Pool by Abraham Merritt (free)

Free ebook The Moon Pool by A. Merritt

This is a review of another free ebook that is available at Gutenberg, and probably any other free ebook repository as it is in the public domain. The book was written by Abraham Merritt and originally published in All Story Weekly in two parts, in 1918 and 1919.

It is written, by Abraham Merritt, as a "true" account of incidents reported by an organization calling themselves: "Executive Council of the International Association of Science" and they say they contracted Abraham Merritt to rewrite the notes of Dr. Goodwin so they can be understood by the layman.

The Plot

The story centers around 4 main characters: A scientist, Dr. Goodwin (main character), a Dr. David Throckmartin, his wife, and their associate Dr. Charles Stanton. who have supernatural experiences and visit a lost civilization deep underground.

It starts when Dr. Goodwin meets his friend Throckmartin on a boat and they share a supernatural experience with some sort of moon energy thing, and Throckmartin shares a story of his previous research trip to a remote location in the Pacific, where it seems he lost his wife and Dr. Stanton. The thing they saw is said to use moonlight to operate and is searching for Throckmartin.

In Throckmartin's tale, The group, including Throckmartin, stumbled into the area of a thing they call The Moon Rock, which hid an entrance to something underground. This rock reacts as if electrified when touched and they suspect it is a door of a sort though to what they do not know. They all have some sort of strange experience at that location. Later, one of the team disappears from camp, and they find part of her handkerchief stuck under the edge of the Moon Rock. So they know it is a door, and suspect their friend was taken thorough it. They try to open it but are unsuccessful, and suspect it opens only at night. They decide to wait for night, in hopes it will open as it did before. The door opens but they are unsuccessful due to more supernatural stuff happening and they loose Stanton. They plan to wait the next night, and this time Throckmartin is successful getting in. He sees the Moon Pool inside and he is just in time to see his wife taken into the pool by a supernatural phenomenon (floating lights). Throckmartin then escapes the Moon Pool cave, and eventually out too sea in a small boat, where he was picked up by the large boat Goodwin was on. Shortly thereafter the moon lights take Throckmartin from the boat.

Goodwin decides to go after Throckmartin and the others. He gets a boat and coincidently finds an old acquaintance named Olaf Huldricksson tied to floating wreckage of a boat, who lost his wife and daughter to the same lights and was half crazy from the experience. They then find even more wreckage in the sea, this time a hydro-airplane, and its pilot Larry O'Keefe. Thus, the little band of adventures is gathered and off to the Moon Door and behind it the Moon Pool.

I am not going to give away much more of the plot and ruin it. From here, in the world beyond the Moon Pool, the heroes encounter supernatural beings, and a lost civilization and eventually fight a battle between good and evil that threatens the entire world.

The plot is a sort of old timey lost civilization adventure / fantasy story, in the style of Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, or Edgar Rice Burroughs. Though, since it is set in the time it is written in, and takes place mostly in a lost underground civilization, it does not have much in it to date it. It reminds me of watching an old adventure moving like King Kong. In that movie, we know they are in 1933, or there abouts, though once we are in the jungle, the story is mostly about man against nature, without too much reliance on any sort of technology to date it.

The story is crazy, but engaging and fun. The characters are interesting and some are super intense. I cared about the characters and always wanted to know what was going to happen next; I was totally hooked once I got into it. There are a lot of spooky moments, and even some very creepy things, even by todays standards, and especially for the period when it was written. Over all it is a good book, not a great book but good. I liked Mr. Merritt's follow up called The Metal Monster better but still I am glad I read this one. It is available as a free ebook after all so I cannot complain of course. I may have said this in other reviews but I must reiterate that to find a good free ebook like this one, I had to read many that I do not want to remember or write about. Some were not worth the cost in time and some may have scarred me for life. To find these gems I have suffered at the hands of even good authors like Manly Wade and Doc E Smith, and worst of all for my sanity there were a few bad/terrible ones form my favs Andre Norton and Rider Haggard. I will not review books on this blog that I cannot recommend as, like I said, I do not want to remember them and they are not worth my time, or the reader's, even if they were a free ebook.

I had never heard of Abraham Merritt, but tried to get more of his work as soon as I finished this. Gutenberg have one other book of his, the follow up to the Moon Pool called The Metal Monster. The Metal Monster is only a follow up to The Moon Pool, in that it also has Dr. Goodwin as one of the main characters, and the events of that book are not really related to the events of the Moon Pool. I will write a review for The Metal Monster later. That is also a great tale.

I definitely plan to read more of Mr. Merritt's work. I wish there were more free ones out there. Gutenberg Australia have others available but these are not public domain books in all countries.


Free eBook Download at Gutenberg:
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/765

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Pool

The Jewels of Aptor by Samuel Delany (free)

Review free eBook The Jewels of Aptor

This is of an old sci-fi / fantasy novel by Samuel R. Delany, and it was originally published in 1962. It is in the public domain and available as a free ebook; there is a link to this book at Gutenberg at the bottom of the post.

This story has an interesting premise but a slow, and confusing plot. I included Mr. Delany's book because it does have some interesting aspects and I am glad I chose to read it. The premise is pretty interesting and there are settings, situations and creatures that I really liked.

It's set in a post-apocalyptic future where people live very primitive lives and trade by sailing ships. There are legends and myths about technology and science the ancients had and speculation about what happened, though access to concrete information is controlled by religious groups. These cults horde the remaining technology and use it to control their people though, even these think of most science and technology as magic. There are also a lot of mutants and creatures, possibly the result of radiation from nuclear wars, though that is never discussed. It was the description of ruined cities and the creatures that inhabit them that kept me interested enough to finish the book. As and example, a ways into the story, the main characters come to an island, or other land across the sea, and stumble on ruins of civilization. I had actually forgotten we were supposed to be in a post-apocalyptic situation by this point and was surprised; the ruins and their discovery were described well. In this same area, they also come into another ruined city and face remote controlled Zombies and a sort of blob of energy thing and all of that was really done well.

The Plot

The plot is confusing and thin in places, though it may be the version that Gutenberg has is to fault. The Wikipedia page for The Jewels of Aptor mentions there was a better version released in 1968:

"From the 1968 edition onwards, Delany's original text has been restored, as the first edition was shortened by about fifteen pages for publication in the Ace Double format."
quoted from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jewels_of_Aptor]

This review is of the free eBook that Gutenberg currently has available, though I will look for other free eBook sites to find the 1968 version, when I have time. I will update this post if I find it.

The book starts with a grim experience an anonymous girl has, all of which will not be explained or related to the story in anyway until much later, but it sets the tone okay I guess and it did hook me. We then meet the maim characters, a 4 armed mute boy, a seemingly supernatural woman, a poet, a tough guy and a gang of sailors. Some of them have just returned from a voyage chartered by the woman, which cost them a lot of men, and they are planning to set out to the same place again to rescue the woman's younger sister (this seems like the pre-68 story based on just this). The lady also wants a jewel the cult holding her sister are likely to have, though her exact motives are never clear. The woman decides she needs the mute mutant, and poet along and gets the poet's large tough friend as a bonus. Nobody involved want to go on this trip but they all agree and head off. Once they get to the land they seek, they start to get involved with two religious groups that are competing for technology or people or something, though it is never really clear what either side hope to accomplish. But our heroes do their best to rescue this girl and the jewel, and have many adventures along the way. I do not want to give away too much or the book will not be fun at all, so I will not relate any more of the plot; it is a pretty thin plot. The story sort of works because, even though it is in a future setting and written in the 60s, the author does not try to explain details of what is now out-dated technology or science. Instead he has the characters treat science and technology as magic or the supernatural. The few cases where he does explain how some device works or deals with something like radiation, it is really bad though. The ending is abrupt and a bit anticlimactic though, at least in the edition that Gutenberg has available. I will have to hunt down the revised book with the original ending to see if it ties things up better than this one.

The bottom line is that the book has some redeeming qualities and I think is worth a read. It is a free ebook so it only cost in time. If you are trying to kill time, this book will help you do it, and entertain you from time to time. I am not sorry I read it, as some aspects were really well done, though it is not a masterpiece of Science Fiction for sure.


Free eBook Download at Gutenberg:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/41981

Misc. links for more information:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_R._Delany
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jewels_of_Aptor