A while back I liked to this article on The Vizier's Second Daughter by Robert F. Young. I have fond memories of Murray Leinster's Gateway to Elsewhere, and the summary of this book reminded me a little of that one. I like Arabian Nights adventures, so I thought I'd read Young's book.
In the future, time travel is simple enough. Not everybody can visit the past, so Animanikins sends its agents into the past to kidnap famous people and bring them back to have animanikins made of them. Then the people are returned to their own times with no memory of what's happened. Mark Billings is sent back for Sheherazade, but he mistakenly grabs her younger sister, Dunyzad. Then he messes up his time-traveling hovercraft (which Dunyzad naturally believes is a magic carpet) and winds up -- elsewhere. Ali Baba shows up, as do the forty thieves, but the real complications are the other things, like rocs, afreets, and djinn. It's all fast-moving and inconsequential fun, but I did have one major reservation. It's the same one I had when I re-read The Door into Summer. Dunyzad is fifteen, and it's clear from the start that she and Billings are falling for one another. It's probably not a major SPOILER to say that things work out in the end, but it's still kind of uncomfortable to read, or it was for me. Otherwise, though, entertaining.
Okay, I'll say right at the start that I have no idea what the title means. Sounds good, but I don't see any connection to the story. But, hey. I don't care.
This is one of those books that I've had for years and had been planning to read for a long time. Somehow it got stuck back behind some other DAW books and forgotten. When I came across it recently, I decided it was past time to read it.
Daniel Ransom is probably best known for his horror novels written for Zebra books back in the Good Old Days, but he also wrote SF for DAW Books (I'll eventually get around to Zone Soldiers). And you probably know already that Ransom is a pen name used by Ed Gorman. Gorman says that this particular book could not have been written without extensive help from Larry Segriff.
I don't know what Segriff's contributions were, but Gorman's style is almost immediately recognizable in The Fugitive Stars. There's an underlying tone of melancholy leavened with humor that seems typical of a lot of his work to me. Ransom says that the book owes debts to a lot of old B&W movies from directors Don Siegel, Jack Arnold, and Val Lewton. SF fans will notice debts to writers like Robert A. Heinlein and Alfred Bester.
Michael Raines is a telepath who's losing his powers. Once a part of an experimental government program, Raines is now on his own, lonely and getting older. A mysterious woman leaves a package at his door, and the action begins. It doesn't let up.
It seems that some astronauts visiting a comet in the year 2011 (the book was published in 1995) have been possessed by an alien something, and now the alien something has begun taking over others. It's up to Raines and the wife of one of the astronauts to stop it and save the world.
The things that happen are like the the things that happen in the old B&W movies, and it doesn't do to think about them too much. Just go along for the ride and imagine the story unfolding in a theater on a Saturday afternoon in 1957. Give it a try, and you'll see what I mean.
