Dumarest rescues Kalin of Solis who can see into the future. Once again, their spaceship is disabled and they are dumped on an inhospitable planet and have to win free.

read 9/14/2023 ( )

This 4th in the Dumarest saga was pretty good. The protagonist of the series, Earl Dumarest, is a standard strong-jawed hero. He's tough, smart, competent at pretty much everything. He doesn't think all that much. The novels are chauvinistic, being of a certain era of SF. Go back a few decades and you don't really find a lot of female characters who have much to say. That being said, they are fast, fun space-opera reads. For what it is, I'd rate this one a 5. It's nice to read some SF that you can just read and not have to decypher. ( )

Still good. A quick read. Enjoyable enough to propel me to next book. ( )

For my money, the Dumarest Saga of E.C. Tubb ranks up there as one of the best science fiction series written in English.

Set in the far distant future, when mankind has spread across the galaxy, they feature the inimitable Earl Dumarest, a man with lightning fast reflexes who is forever trying to find the home world he fled as a child and has long since lost: Earth.

The galaxy he travels through is a hard, deadly place for a man with no affiliations and little money. Tubb pulls no punches in his depictions of the many harsh, hellish worlds and people whom Dumarest encounters, and invariably survives, if only just, during his quest.

Perhaps one of the best things about this series (which consists of some 32 books) is that each book is short, with no unnecessary padding; they're generally between 150 and 190 pages long. So they're a reasonably quick read, too.

I recommend reading all books in the series, preferably in the intended order. If you can, though, avoid the Arrow Books editions - the cover illustrations are, to put it simply, the pits. The artists clearly had never read the books, or if they did, didn't bother to note down a lot of details about the scenes they chose to portray in these illustrations, e.g. clothing, weaponry, etc. Shame on Arrow Books for using such second-class amateurs.

Did I mention? Unlike the seemingly interminable Wheel of Time series of Robert Jordan, or the never-ending Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen Donaldson - both of which I find way too verbose, i.e. a lot of words pass by without very much happening - the Dumarest Saga has an actual ending - in volume 32, The Return, Dumarest finds his way home! ( )