Star Smashers Of The Galaxy Rangers

Small but important correction: ISBN 9781932100761 belongs to Oracle by Mike Resnick. The 2006 BenBella edition of Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers appears to be ISBN 9781932100839. I would check the number printed inside your copy before listing it.

College students Jerry Courtenay and Chuck van Chider are brilliant scientists, magnificent athletes, fearless adventurers and splendid examples of the sort of square-jawed young men who once populated science-fiction stories without ever experiencing uncertainty, acne or an overdue library book. Working in a homemade shed, they accidentally invent a faster-than-light drive powered by Cheddite, a miraculous substance created by irradiating cheddar cheese. Humanity’s journey to the stars has seldom begun with a more convincing commitment to dairy produce.

In Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers, Harry Harrison takes the extravagant space operas of E. E. “Doc” Smith, the boy-inventor adventures of Tom Swift and several decades of heroic scientific nonsense, places them inside an unstable reactor and turns the dial to “parody.” The result is a cosmic adventure in which every scientific impossibility can be overcome by confidence, improvised equipment and another paragraph of authoritative gibberish.

Jerry and Chuck initially smuggle their experimental drive aboard the college football team’s aircraft as a prank. This already raises questions about university supervision, aviation security and the appropriate use of revolutionary technology. The machine activates, the prank exceeds its planned geographical limits and the aircraft is transported to Titan, the frozen moon of Saturn. Student humour was evidently more ambitious in the 1970s.

Accompanying them are the beautiful Sally Goodfellow and kindly old caretaker Old John. Sally occupies the traditional pulp role of desirable female companion, while Old John proves to possess considerably more history than his broom and amiable expression suggest. Soon the party is contending with hostile creatures, interplanetary danger and the discovery that first contact becomes awkward when nobody has read the cultural briefing.

Titan is merely the opening inconvenience. The travellers are hurled across space and time, encountering bizarre alien species, implausible civilisations and an intergalactic conflict threatening the future of the universe. Fortunately, Jerry and Chuck possess precisely the combination of scientific brilliance and uncomplicated American confidence required whenever the universe finds itself unable to manage its own affairs.

Harrison fills the novel with impossible inventions, instant solutions, monstrous villains, helpless populations and heroic speeches delivered by people who have not paused to consider whether any of their assumptions are correct. The narrative moves with the breathless determination of a pulp serial whose author has just remembered that the galaxy must be saved before the next issue goes to press.

The comedy comes not only from ridiculous events but from Harrison’s imitation of old-fashioned science-fiction prose. Everything is bigger, faster, deadlier and more astonishing than everything immediately before it. The heroes do not simply enter a room when they can stride boldly into its gleaming metallic interior, every finely trained muscle prepared for whatever cosmic menace awaits. Subtlety has been left on Earth, where it was presumably unable to obtain clearance for the flight.

The book affectionately attacks the conventions of Golden Age space opera: masculine heroes who can build anything, women written chiefly to admire them, aliens arranged into conveniently recognisable moral categories and scientific explanations that become more persuasive as they become less connected to science. Harrison clearly knows the genre well enough to mock it from inside, like a mechanic who has discovered that the engine runs equally well on nonsense.

First published in 1973, the novel also includes playful nods to more contemporary science fiction, showing that no part of the field is entirely safe once Harrison begins looking for targets. Readers familiar with Lensman, Skylark, Tom Swift and the grand tradition of galaxy-spanning adventure will recognise more of the jokes, although prior knowledge is not required to appreciate a spacecraft powered by radioactive cheese.

Beneath all the deliberate absurdity lies a genuine fondness for the stories being parodied. Harrison does not merely stand outside space opera pointing at its silliness; he climbs aboard, activates the Cheddite drive and makes the silliness travel faster than light. The adventure remains brisk and imaginative even while dismantling every heroic cliché it encounters.

This is an excellent choice for readers of comic science fiction, fans of Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat or Bill, the Galactic Hero, and anybody who feels that modern speculative fiction has become unnecessarily cautious about weaponised dairy products. It is short, fast-moving and proudly ridiculous, with enough interstellar mayhem to satisfy anyone whose standards of realism have already left the solar system.

This copy is in Good condition, showing ordinary signs of previous ownership but retaining sufficient structural integrity for renewed exposure to Cheddite. Offered by Crappy Old Books, it is a gloriously overpowered send-up of vintage science fiction in which two college boys accidentally conquer distance, confront galactic evil and prove that the future of civilisation may depend upon keeping a mature cheddar beside the laboratory equipment.

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