Halcyon Drift

Brian Stableford Halcyon Drift (1972)
Back in what I calculate to have been 1978, or 1979 at the latest, my second (or possibly third) year English class was running some sort of book club whereby we could buy cheap books direct from the publishers. Amongst the promotional material we were sent was a poster featuring the covers of thirty or forty science-fiction novels published by Pan including Michael Coney's Brontomek!, Simak's Werewolf Principal, Heinlein's Green Hills of Earth, Dick's Galactic Pot-Healer and others - notably this one. The other side of the poster was Angus McKie's gorgeous cover art for Brian Stableford's Rhapsody in Black, a spaceship called the Hooded Swan which likewise appears on the cover of Stableford's Halcyon Drift, which is the first in a series. The point of this extended digression is that it was this poster which most likely imprinted me with those spacecraft painted by Angus McKie and others, and which has ultimately informed my reading habits for at least some of the last decade; and when I happened across this one in a used book store with that immediately familiar cover, I nearly lost my shit.

Inevitably, Halcyon Drift could never have lived up to four decades of expectation, but it's decent of its kind. It's space opera, essentially a western set amongst the stars, but is well-written, even crafted, and with just the right quota of mind-expanding concepts to keep things interesting and even unpredictable without stretching the genre too far. I'd say it's in the vein of Larry Niven, except I always seem to find myself irritated by Larry Niven; and whatever his crimes may be, Stableford manages very well without them. Being space opera, a genre with which I feel entirely sated by this point, I would say Halcyon Drift does very well in instituting a series that I very much doubt I'll read, but - let's face it - a few more with Angus McKie covers would probably be enough to swing it.

Brontomek!

Michael Coney Brontomek! (1976)
During the late 1970s I was in an English class which had some sort of book club deal going on, and thus was I exposed to a Pan Books promotional poster reproducing twenty or thirty covers from their science-fiction range - Brian Aldiss' Frankenstein Unbound, Philip K. Dick's Galactic Pot Healer, Clifford D. Simak's The Werewolf Principle, Robert Heinlein's The Green Hills of Earth, and Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End being the five which really stuck with me. I was fascinated by this poster, and tried hard to imagine what it would be like to read books of such futuristic promise, yet never quite got there, which was probably thanks to television.

Still, I eventually caught up, seeking out and reading at least those named above, having been primed to do so back in 1978.

More recently, my friend Steve mentioned that he was reading something by Michael Coney. This being an unfamiliar name, I googled and found Brontomek! the cover of which flooded my  nostalgia gland with memory sherbert of a strength I hadn't experienced in a while - an obvious inspiration for the Terra-Meks from the 1979 Ro-Busters strip in 2000AD comic, something that  had also caught my imagination, inspiring many Saturday afternoons spent with biro and drawing pad devising my own highly derivative canon of city-crushing demolition robots.

Anyway, Coney's Brontomek! - much like The Godwhale by T.J. Bass - appears to be one of those novels which enjoyed brief 1970s fame before vanishing without leaving much of a trace. Like The Godwhale, for all that it has in its favour, there is some indeterminate quality pinning it firmly to that decade - beach scenes oddly reminiscent of Jaws, the inference that prolonged bachelorhood will ultimately lead one to steal women's underwear from washing lines, a lead character seemingly played by Harry Enfield's impersonation of Roger Moore, and all the whisky he drinks, and the fact that he names his boat Easy Lady; even in the unlikely event that nocturnal theft of women's knickers will one day number amongst the crimes that continue to plague interplanetary colonists, such details somehow date Brontomek! as profoundly as any of E.E. 'Doc' Smith's spacefaring pipe smokers.

The story, essentially the struggle of the little guy against the corporation, is serviceable but tends to occur as background detail to what might as well be Howard's Way in space - all boat drinks and bachelorhood and a slightly cranky obsession with nautical detail - so that by the time the story actually shows up, it seems too little too late and is in any case eclipsed by the unfolding and slightly bewildering focus on some attempt at breaking a yachting record.

There were some great ideas here, and Coney was clearly a decent writer, but somehow this should have been so much better.