Buck Rogers Books I’ve Read

Over at the Other McCain, Wombat-socho posts about books with Oriental antagonists and talks about the original Buck Rogers books:

The most famous of these is, of course, Philip Nowlan’s Armageddon 2419, which introduces us to Anthony “Buck” Rogers, veteran of the Great War and hero of the Second American Revolution. Rogers wakes from a 500-year-long sleep induced by a radioactive gas pocket to find that the United States he knew is long dead, but scattered gangs of Americans carry on the war against the decadent Han, having developed new technologies to aid them in the fight. Rogers brings to the table forgotten tactics that prove lethally useful, and provides a leader the mutually suspicious gangs can follow. Nowlan’s original novel and its sequel (The Airlords Of Han) are both available for free on amazon and through Project Gutenberg, but the Ace paperback edition combines them into one novel.

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I really wanted to like Buck Rogers: A Life In The Future, by Martin Caidin. I really did. Unfortunately, Caidin plays fast and loose with the original plot, and instead of Anthony Rogers leading the gangs of America to victory against the Han, instead he gets dragged along on a number of pointless adventures and meaningless contests, and zzzzz…oh, sorry. The worst part of all this is that Caidin is a decent writer who’s written a bunch of exciting books, and this just feels like he phoned it in to TSR. Not recommended.

Hey, I read Armageddon 2419 in 2007 and Buck Rogers: A Life In The Future in 2004.

He fails to note the latter was to drum up support for the TSR roleplaying game. TSR game-promoting fiction was a mixed bag. You got the Forgotten Realms works and Dragonlance, but you also got this as well as the Greyhawk books (which I overpaid for when I bought four for a dollar.)

At any rate, I just wanted a book quizzish post that I scored better on.