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Title: The Complete Hok the Mighty
Series: ----------
Authors: Manly Wade Wellman
Rating: 2.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Fantasy
Pages: 265
Words: 99K

Synopsis:

Table of Contents

Novels

The Day of the Conquerors, Thrilling Wonder Stories, January 1940

Short Fiction

Battle in the Dawn, Amazing Stories, January 1939

Hok Goes to Atlantis, Amazing Stories, December 1939

Hok Draws the Bow, Amazing Stories, May 1940

Hok and the Gift of Heaven, Amazing Stories, March 1941

Hok Visits the Land of Legends, Fantastic Adventures, April 1942

The Love of Oloana, Pulse Pounding Adventure Stories #1, December 1986

Untitled Hok Fragment, Echoes of Valor II, August 1989

My Thoughts:

This review is Dedicated to Mrs Muggrage, because she's the only person I know who is really interested in Neanderthals. And this book has a lot of them in it. That being said, Mrs M, I wouldn't recommend this book to you at all.

The short and dirty is that this is a book of fictional pre-history and Hok the Mighty is a cromagnon man who does All the Things, Invents all the Things and Thinks All the Things. He invents the kiss, is the indirect cause of Atlantis being destroyed, invents the bow and arrow and fights pteradactyls while defending a tribe of Piltdown people. He also unites several tribes and drives out a tribe of Neanderthals who spend the rest of the book trying to take their area back.

So, the Piltdown tribe. If you didn't know, the Piltdown Man was supposed to be evidence of the missing link (which have to exist if you think evolution is true) only it turned out to be a massive fraud and only survived scrutiny as long as it did because its adherents wanted it to be true. So having a story about a tribe of them just made me laugh my head off. Poor Wellman. Don't believe everything scyenzetists tell you, you fool. They are people too and as such, just as scheming, corruptible and capable of lying as you are.

The neanderthals were presented much like how Crichton presented them in Eaters of the Dead, ie, brutish subhumans that were an evolutionary dead end branch on humanity's tree. Bestial and degraded with just enough cunning to be dangerous. And that is why I don't recommend this book to Mrs M. She can tell you all about how that portrayal is simply dead wrong on so many levels and from what I gather, evidence is pointing more and more to neanderthals being fully human and the differences no different than the differences between me and some guy from Africa.

So-so adventures that weren't bad but didn't age well because of the advance of knowledge. I would REALLY like to find the Silver John books by Wellman but as I noted in The Last Mammoth, they simply aren't available at prices I can justify. Maybe some day when I'm rich I'll track them down. But for now, I'm stuck with Hok the Mighty (and the Mighty Eyeroll of Bookstooge).

★★✬☆☆ ( )