Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Wow, gentle reader. It has been sixteen years since I picked up a Tarzan book; I read Tarzan of the Apes and The Return of Tarzan. Perhaps not long after I got the books, although back in those days I was not dilligent about posting my purchases for future me to review. Also, I was not posting the scans of the covers–probably expecting the Amazon link below to carry the weight of it–so I can’t easily review how awful this brutal 1960s covers were. Ugly.

At any rate, in this, the eleventh volume of the series (originally from 1927), Tarzan is not really the main character. In it, a group of Arabs have come down into the heart of Africa looking for a fabled treasure city, and there’s some intrigue amongst them. One fellow is in love with the sheikh’s daughter, but he’s framed for attempted murder and escapes before he is killed. Meanwhile, an expedition with a couple of Americans, a young naturalist out to photograph the wildlife and a wealthy man out to hunt exotic game, and they fall out due to the brutality of the wealthy man. The young man wanders into a hidden valley, a lost world where Crusaders have taken up a defensive position and think that they’re surrounded by Saracens. But the residents of the valley are broken into two factions in two cities, and they have an annual tournament instead of war. The young man falls for the princess of one of the cities, but she’s stolen away by the leader of the opposing city. And these threads come together as the Arabs find their way into the valley. Tarzan has his moments, but the greater part of the book is given over to the other characters.

So it blends several different genres of pulp: The jungle adventure, the lost world adventure. The prose is, of course, deep and learned in a way that gets thinner in time–learned but terse in the 1940s, a little learned but thinner in the 1960s, and then mostly unlearned but thick with unnecessary description and extraneous scenes in the modern era.

I have one or two more of these paperbacks in the stacks somewhere, and I’ll look forward to reading them maybe in the near term.

After reading Mid-Flinx, I picked up this other mid-80s Alan Dean Foster paperback for a quick read. Which was a bit of a mistake as it was not especially quick at all.

In it, a large Corporation conducts a quick, overnight cleanup of a longtime toxic waste dump in a California valley which was not adequately distanced from the parent company. So a corporate executive fixture oversees the project, and it goes flawlessly except for a bit of a cancer cluster amongst the residents of a shantytown on the hill beside the dump. The company finds/relocates a number of them, but one old man, who has lived there his whole life, doesn’t want to go. When the fixer visits him, the old man shows him a couple of tricks that indicate he might have special powers as a result of living by and playing in the dump as a youth. So the fixer hopes to bring him into a black site corporate lab for testing, but the old man, who has a heart condition, takes off–his grand niece, the crippled sole survivor of a school bus accident, has telepathy and counsels him as he flees from the corporation to meet her in Texas. But the corporation through its regional offices are hot on his trail, culminating in kidnapping and murder to get a hold of him.

So: I was not really sure where it was going, and the setting of the middle 1980s southwest was not as exotic as, say, a forest planet. The prose was serviceable, but the story not especially gripping. Kind of Firestarter, actually. With toxic waste instead of a government program behind it. And toxic waste was really a big concern in the 1980s, ainna? We sure got a lot of pop culture from it: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Toxic Avenger, C.H.U.D., and so forth.

At any rate, thinking about it and researching this post made it clear how Foster kind of recycles current tropes, themes, and setting from not only his own work but the culture at large. I mean, Midworld takes place on a forested planet (like Mid-Flinx). Codgerspace features older protagonists (although so does Cocoon which comes out later). Maybe I’m reading too much into it.

But I might want to hold off on picking up another Foster soon. And given how I’ve apparently paced them out so far, it might be a decade.

I bought a bunch of these Pip and Flinx (or Flinx and Pip) books in Fairfield Bay, Arkansas, in 2023. They might have been together on the bookshelves at one time, but now they’re scattered amongst the stacks. I figured that after a year and a half, I would jump on them, hoping I would get them in some sort of order.

At first, I thought it would not matter when I started the book. It seemed episodic at the outset: Flinx, an empath, is on a remote planet, hiding from as much sentient contact as he can to keep from getting empath headaches, when a local big shot comes into the restaurant/pub, confronts an attractive worker there, and then decides he wants to “buy” Pip, an exotic miniature dragon. Flinx rebuffs him and flees to his ship, which is a pretty spiffy ship for a twenty-year-old (results of a previous adventure), but the spoiled and single-minded wealthy merchant bushwhacks him in orbit. Flinx sets the autopilot for the first inhabited planet on the current heading and flees.

There he finds an uncharted planet covered in extremely tall trees, a planetary jungle on many levels where flora and fauna predators abound, and every flower is probably deadly. He finds some preprimitivizing humans who have grown and adapted to live amongst the third level of the forest canopy. A mother, two children, and their extremely sympathetic furcots agree to help him find a collection of metal and he offers to help them find their way to their home tree in exchange.

But the merchant has gathered a band of mercenaries and has followed Flinx. So they search for him, and they’re picked off one by one by the jungle. They still manage to capture Flinx and the other humans, but the furcots help them to escape. But! A military expedition of a lizardian race somehow also has found Flinx, and they want the secrets of his ship. So the jungle and the furcots start picking them off until they can escape. And then they discover the secret of the metal–an unauthorized colony that failed–and they lead them to the home tree and then back to his ship, where he finds a Thranx-ex-maquina has eliminated the threat of the lizard military. He, too, wants to learn more about Flinx, his ship, and a vision that Flinx might have had about a dark spot in space which might be evil.

So, at the outset, it was episodic: Flinx and Pip on the run on a remote planet and then on the forest planet, with a lot of time given over to the description of the jungle and the creatures there in–almost too lushly described, actually. But when we make the turn from the in-book bad guys to the previous book antagonists, it gets into series lore a bit which is less than optimal since it’s been a while since I read one of these books. If I ever have; I recognized the title The Tar-Aiym Krang, written in 1972–so it’s possible that I’ve read that book, the first written in the Humanx Commonwealth universe, in sixth grade, where the M. Gene Henderson Junior High library had a lot of older Del Rey paperbacks in library bindings, and I want to say this was one of them. I could be mistaken, and I might just remember the name, or I might have read it in high school. I don’t have it in my book library database, which means it’s not on my read shelves, which includes the paperbacks I owned in middle school, such as The Moment of the Magician, a Spellsinger novel by Foster.

Foster’s prose is pretty good. Easy to read, moves along, offers novelty in the plotting and worldbuilding. He’s been writing in the series and in the Humanx Commonwealth universe for over fifty years, so I guess they can’t be too reliant on series lore and drama–it would be hard to remember some of the things you read in 1985 when it was fresh–but I think they’re more like small series, even the Pip and Flinx books, within the larger series. So maybe I should be more careful when I pick out another Foster book in the near future. And it should not be too long now that I’ve cracked back into this series (after what might have been forty years).

I took this book off of the shelf for the Fantasy category in the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge, but I did not finish it at the time (instead opting for a aftermarket Conan book).

Because…. Well, gentle reader, to start with, the book is printed on low-luminosity paper with a bit of a green tint and art at the edges designed to make it look like an old book or perhaps a book from the video game Myst. I guess I didn’t mention it when I reviewed Ghost Mine last year, which had an image background (only really impeding the edges of the text, but under the text nevertheless) on the first page of each chapter, and although this is novel, it really makes reading the book harder. Especially coupled with the low luminosity paper. I must be getting old to keep slagging on design decisions and paper luminosity, but there you go. Maybe the latter book is designed to be read on ebook readers, but that wouldn’t have been the case with this thirty-year-old book based on a thirty-year-old video game.

So: The D’ni, who I guess are the civilization under the earth who produced the red herring books for the video game, are tunnelling upwards and are considering making contact with the surface and the primitives up there. A mysterious quake halts the effort. Thirty years later, a young woman explorer and her father find evidence of this abandoned effort in an unusual geological formation and a small cave. When the father dies, the daughter goes into the cave and encounters the D’ni. Some of them think she’s no more than an animal, but she learns the language with the help of some friendly D’ni aristocrats, including one Aitrus who falls in love with her. His close friend and mentor, though, continues to oppose her, and through some machinations of a D’ni Philosopher banished for forgery, the entire empire is destroyed, but the girl and her half-human, half D’ni son manage to escape to the surface.

That’s one paragraph that pretty much covers it. The book is 322 pages long, and it’s about one-third setup and world-building (although it expects the reader to be invested in the world already), and then it’s more than a third of the intra-D’ni intrigues, and then a fairly chop-chop fall of the D’ni.

In addition to the green-tinted paper, the book is split into seven parts which segment the action, but each part lacks actual chapters. Instead, you have sections which are one paragraph to several pages separated by a glyph. That kind of annoyed me, too.

The video game Myst was huge back in the day; it was the best selling game of all time until The Sims came out. I remember that I recommended it to my my girlfriend’s mother (now my mother-in-law), and she really got into it and even bought the sequels. Myst spawned a whole genre that was pretty big before the smartphone came out and casual gamers had even more casual games to become addicted to. And, I’d like to point out, according to Wikipedia, the game has been remade and sequelated for thirty-one years now, with VR versions and remakes all the way up to 2024 (so far). And Myst and its progeny have spawned a trilogy of books–this is the middle books–and has been considered for film, television series, and theme park treatment. Which is awful good for a relatively simple game.

I won’t be running out to buy the other books in the series, and I’m not really inclined to pick up the recently updated set of games. However, I am glad to have it off of my to-read shelves.