This 1983 pulp fiction paperback combines two novellas published in 1979 in Asimov’s Amazing SF Adventure Magazine. Each novella consists of several brief stories about the misadventures of Carl Bok, a young man from Springworld, a high-gravity world populated with fast, hungry predators that challenge survival. While three meters tall and 360 lbs, Carl’s naivete borders on the stupid.

In the first novella, Starschool , Carl convinces himself he has a debt he must pay, despite arguments to the contrary, and agrees from one dangerous gladiator-style fight to another to earn the necessary funds. Carl sustains life-threatening injuries in each battle, but medical science remedies the damage in a day or two, enabling him to blunder into another encounter.

The second novella, originally titled Starschool on Hell, follows the same pattern. This time the students are enrolled in a boot-camp style school for warriors and placed in one survival situation after another. Then Carl and his companions are sold into slavery and forced to fight in a proxy war between two rival factions from a planet named Spicelle.

Some imagination is apparent in the description of the fight scenes and survival situations, but the basic outline is unimaginatively repetitive. The scenario is described, Carl, and sometimes his friends, fight for survival, Carl is grievously injured but manages to survive, and medical science quickly returns him to full health. Otherwise, nothing happens. There is no significant overarching story to maintain injury, and the book becomes tedious. ( )

It's a good adventure tale, but not a lot of inner character to our hero, if you get me. Still enjoyable. ( )

Carl is a student from Springworld on a tour of many different planets. When he’s charged a ridiculous entry fee to Earth because of his large size, he begins an attempt to earn the money back that leads him to fight animals, men, and his own stubborn pride. The end kind of whirls off in a very different direction due to an alien encounter; didn’t hold together very well. ( )

As much as I love Joe Haldeman, this tale is for kids. It was first published by Ace in 1955 and, while it is still fun, it is not really a book that today's adults are likely to enjoy.

I received a review copy of "There Is No Darkness" by Joe Haldeman (Open Road Media) through NetGalley.com. ( )

My reactions to reading this novel in 2004.

I find it interesting that most of the stories, with the exception of the ones in Joe Haldeman's All My Sins Remembered, set in the Confederación universe are narrated in the first person -- a favorite viewpoint of Joe Haldeman (the influence of Ernest Hemingway?) and that several of their titles are taken from Shakespeare: All My Sins Remembered is from Hamlet, this novel's title is from Twelfth Night, and "A !Tangled Web" is also from Shakespeare.

This is an effective adventure tale with moral questions that is the best sort of work Joe Haldeman does. I haven't read enough of his brother to get a sense of his style. I seem to recall Jack C. Haldeman II liked sports tales so he might have made contributions to the several gladiatorial combats fought in the first third of the book. Joe Haldeman's combat experience and study of history probably accounts for the war-as-game theme of the part on Hell. It also reminded me of some of the war as formalized, bloody sport stories in the anthology he edited, Study War No More.

The two brothers dedicate the book to their parents, but they could have dedicated it to Robert Heinlein since it captures the flavor of some of his juveniles. Protagonist Carl Bok learns, in his various combats on Earth as he attempts to pay back a tax others are willing to pay for him, that life isn't easy but that one must strike a balance between self-reliance and giving and receiving charity. His time on Hell teaches him the darker side of humanity as he gets shangaied into a mercenary army. The part on the alien Construct, as he encounters a bunch of different aliens, including several not seen before, reminded me of the end of Joe Haldeman's Guardian.

It's difficult to construct a chronology of the loosely connected Confederación stories, so it's hard to know if Construct was discovered before any of the stories except "The Mazel Tov Revolution". Though there are no aliens in the first two-thirds of this Confederación installment, the last thid is loaded with all sorts of alien species we haven't met before. Carl Bok and his friends (and I like how the students grow closer in each installment as they come to trust each other with their lives) help change human society (again, it's hard to fit this in to the timeline of the other stories) when their encounter with the alien Lobsters gives them and humanity precious knowledge -- somewhat accidentally -- when they undertake to save the life of their Dean.

It's interesting to note that, as with the other alien-human encounters in this series, there is no outright implacable alien hostility, just misunderstanding even in the most extreme case of the aliens in "Seasons". This represents Haldeman's comment on sf with alien-human interaction and, I suspect, his belief that violence between sentients is the result of misunderstanding or innate human violence. ( )