It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

… it just has to sound plausible


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The Night Manager, John le Carré

I recently watched the second series of The Night Manager and was dissatisfied with it. It didn’t feel like something le Carré might have written, and I didn’t like the ending. So I decided to read The Night Manager (1993, UK), the actual novel by le Carré, on which the first series, broadcast in 2016, was based.

I was, it turned out, both right and wrong. For the right and wrong reasons.

The first series of the television adaptation follows the basic beats of the novel’s story. Ex-Army officer now hotelier Jonathan Pine is given reason to hate international arms dealer Richard Onslow Roper, and is recruited by a UK government agency to infiltrate Roper’s inner circle. For obvious budgetary reasons, the setting for the TV series was moved from the Caribbean and Central America to the Mediterranean. Likewise the change, but perhaps more due to the number of years since publication than budget, from South American cartel villains to Middle Eastern ones. Pine’s handler, Burr, was also gender-swapped from man to woman – which was a good call (especially as she was played by Olivia Coleman). Other changes were less understandable. Roper’s girlfriend Jed is, in the novel, a vacuous upper-class English deb, but in the TV series she was re-imagined as American, and with a secret kid. Some of the characters names were also changed.

Events from the plot of the novel are there in the TV series – the murder of Sophie in Cairo, the fake murder in Cornwall, the staged kidnapping of Roper’s young boy, the incident with lobster salad… Sections were also cut-out in order to streamline the story. Pine’s adventures in Canada. His time in Cornwall is also shortened, and its nature changed – in the book, he’s well-liked and the “murder” he commits comes as a shock; in the TV series, he’s a not very convincing villain from the day of his arrival.

And then there’s the ending. In the novel, Burr’s operation to bring down Roper is being derailed by corrupt officials in the UK and US intelligence communities. They out Pine to Roper, but Burr manages to stage a monumental bluff which saves both Pine and Jed. In the TV series, Roper is brought down by Burr and Pine. To be honest, I prefer the TV ending. It’s also telling that in the book Pine is tortured and beaten before being released, but in the TV series it’s Jed who is beaten.

But then I don’t think The Night Manager is an especially good le Carré novel. He was a bloody good writer and his chosen genre has likely obscured how important he was. He was always anti-establishment, much more so in later years, but the cast of The Night Manager are, well, establishment caricatures. They’re ineptly corrupt, they talk like Harry Enfield lampooning 1950s Whitehall mandarins, and le Carré layers on the contempt so heavily it’s hard to take them seriously. In real life, members of the British establishment are corrupt or paedophiles or both, and have always been seen as such by the working class. And they have always been untouchable.

Which is why Roper remains untouched at the end of the novel.

All of which, ironically, are reasons why I didn’t like the second series of The Night Manager and accused it of not feeling like le Carré… When it’s set in South America, much like part of the original novel, and Roper escapes unscathed as he did in the book. Which actually makes it closer to le Carré’s novel than the first series…

The ebook edition I read includes an essay by le Carré on the various adaptations of his novels. He thought his work better served by TV than film, and in general agreed with the changes made to The Night Manager. Having now read the novel, I suspect he would have been happy with series two, even though strictly speaking it’s not an adaptation.


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Atlas Alone, Emma Newman

Atlas Alone (2019, UK) is the fourth and final book of the quartet which began with Planetfall (2015, UK). It was followed by After Atlas (2016, UK), Before Mars (2018, UK), and then Atlas Alone. The first book is set at a colony on an exoplanet, founded next to an enigmatic and seemingly deserted alien city. The mission was led by the Pathfinder, who invented FTL and then promptly went looking for God – and found it in the alien city.

After Atlas is set on Earth after the Pathfinder had left. It starts out as a murder-mystery, but becomes a conspiracy thriller in which a technocratic cult based in a theocratic USA secretly builds a second ship based on the Pathfinder’s. Before Mars takes place at a base on Mars. The narrator spots clues which suggest all is not as it seems and she has been there before but cannot remember it.

And so to Atlas Alone. Which takes place immediately after the events of After Atlas, but onboard Atlas 2, which is the second FTL ship. The ship is heading for the exoplanet where Planetfall takes place. It is staffed mostly by fundamentalist Christian Americans. And, as they left Earth, they killed everyone left behind with nuclear bombs. The narrator, Dee, is a last-minute addition to the thousands aboard, as is her friend Carl, the detective from After Atlas.

Dee is a gamer. An anonymous superhacker invites her to play a “mersive”, which proves to use details from her own life. The game ends with her finding a man about to destroy London. She suspects he is one of those responsible for the nuclear bombs on Earth, so she kills him. In the game.

Except he dies in real-life, and Carl is tasked with discovering how he died and who killed him. Meanwhile, Dee is offered a data analysis job by one of the senior crew, and then invited to team up with her new boss in another mersive, which again uses details from Dee’s background – thanks to the anonymous superhacker.

It’s not hard to figure out the identity of the anonymous superhacker, and it’s easy to sympathise with Dee’s mission to kill off the leadership of Atlas 2 once she discovers their plan to set up a God-fearing colony on the Pathfinder’s planet, with themselves as the gods and everyone else fearing them. 

Perhaps back in 2019 when Atlas Alone was published, it might have felt a little implausible and OTT, but not now in 2026, with a cabal of apocalyptic Christian fundamentalists and paedophiles in charge of the US, secret police taking people off the streets and putting them in concentration camps, a president funnelling billions from the US Treasury into his own pockets, and a government that has long since lost touch with anything resembling truth.

Atlas Alone pulls a final bait and switch before ending, which, in hindsight, is probably the least satisfying part of the novel. But the book is a fitting end to the quartet, and if I thought its corporatised indentured slavery future Earth was a bit tired and banal these days, other parts of the world-building were much more interesting. But, on the whole, four books worth reading, although the first and third were the best.


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Alliance Unbound, CJ Cherryh & Jane S Fancher

Alliance Unbound (2024, USA) is the second book of the latest Union-Alliance series, the Hinder Stars trilogy, co-written with Cherryh’s long-term partner Fancher. Cherryh has a whole timeline worked out for her novels, which even includes the stuff that doesn’t, at first glance, seem to fit into her Union-Alliance universe, like the Faded Sun trilogy. But this new trilogy definitely does fit in.

There’s Earth, and Earth Company (EC), and it set up a series of stations orbiting nearby stars. Initially kept supplied by near-speed-of-light pusher ships, but then one station discovers FTL, and two breakaway polities form, one based around Cyteen and the other around Pell. The EC was unhappy with this, and this kicked off the Company Wars. All of this is covered in earlier novels by Cherryh.

The Hinder Stars are those stations closest to Sol. In the book preceding this one, Alliance Rising, the EC wants to reassert control, takes over Alpha (Barnard’s Star) and builds its own massive FTL troop carrier. Meanwhile, a FTL route was discovered between Alpha and Sol, meaning pusher ships will no longer be the sole link between Earth and the expanding number of stations, which by now are carrying on very happily by themselves.

Alliance Unbound is set after those events. While visiting Pell Station, the crew of Finity’s End, a FTL megaship, which is on a mission to sign up all the merchant ships and stations to its Alliance, becomes suspicious of some luxury items it finds on the station. Which leads them to a supposedly mothballed station. And it turns out the EC is secretly supplying it with pusher ships, in the hope of… taking over the stations in the name of the EC.

At times, the prose felt almost like distilled Cherryh. It’s always been brusque and direct, but here more so; and yet there’s a lot of interiority, a lot of guessing and second-guessing. But the plot rolls on relentlessly, which makes for a fast read. I’ve read a lot of Cherryh’s novels, some of them so long ago the details are a little hazy… But even so, it felt like there was some retconning going on here. It’s intriguing stuff, and gives more of an insight into Cherryh’s universe, even if some of the details didn’t quite line up with what I remembered from other Union-Alliance novels.

It’s not like this has never happened before in fictional universes – cf John Varley’s Eight Worlds and Steel Beach (1992, USA) – and it’s more or less inevitable as authors dig deeper into previously unexplored areas of their own universes. Having said that, the pusher ships as described in Alliance Unbound struck me as a fascinating concept to explore – cut off for years, while in the outside universe decades pass. And yet I don’t believe Cherryh has written a novel about the pushers. The first explicitly Union-Alliance novel she wrote was Downbelow Station (1981 USA), which won the Hugo, and that’s set during the Company Wars.

I think I’ve said before that I enjoy exploring science fictional universes, and will often forgive most, but not egregious, deficiencies in the writing while doing that. Happily, there’s nothing here by Cherryh to forgive. She’s an excellent writer, and still going strong, if Alliance Unbound is any indication. She has a huge back-catalogue to explore, and that’s not including the 20+ Foreigner novels, and it’s definitely worth doing so.


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Glory Season, David Brin

I remember reading Brin’s Uplift novels many years ago and quite enjoying them, although something about them never sat quite well with me. I no longer remember what that was, although I’ve never made an effort to seek out his novels since. But Glory Season (1993, USA) was nominated for the Hugo Award, and is set on a world of cloned women, so it sounded like it might be worth a go.

So I was surprised to discover Brin is actually a pretty bad writer – sloppy, a tendency to stretch his story long past what the narrative can bear, with a handful of good ideas buried under a mass of banal detail. Characters change hair colour between paragraphs, a woman described as Chuychin (one of the cloned women clans) becomes half-Chuchyin a couple of sentences later. The writing is mostly clumsy, but occasionally manages an easy readability.

The world of Stratos was settled millennia before by a group who wanted to create a society that was safe for women. They needed men to “spark” their parthagenetic clones, but they limited the male libido to a single season of each year, and allowed them to also produce non-clone children (needed to replace the men, of course, but also daughters). The clones live in clans, each of which fulfils some sort of “niche”, or specialisation, in Stratoin society. Non-clone daughters, known as vars, hope to find niches and so get permission to start their own clans of clones.

Maia and Leie are twin vars, who leave their clan on their majority to seek their fortune. They sign aboard a pair of coal hauliers travelling down the coast. Maia stumbles across a conspiracy to supply a drug to men which triggers their libido out of season. From there, it spirals into a plot between two hardline factions, at the centre of which is a recently-arrived scout from the interstellar society the founders of Stratos left millennia before. Maia learns more about her world’s history, about the Game of Life, which is important to the men of the world, and about humanity on worlds other than Stratos.

In the best of hands, that’s a lot to cover, but Brin still manages to make it drag over 600 pages. At one point, Maia and her companions are trapped in a room with a hidden exit, and Brin spends over twenty pages explaining how they eventually discover the exit. For huge chunks of the book, Maia has no agency, and is little more than a witness to elements of the world-building Brin wants to show off. It makes for an aggravating read.

There are also many similarities between Glory Season and Mary Gentle’s Golden Witchbreed (1983, UK). The plots are vaguely similar, although Brin’s novel is told from the perspective of a native of the world, not a visitor – but the same lost past, a high tech war fought thousands of years earlier, and an ancient high tech citadel… Coincidence, or did Glory Season simply “borrow” elements of Golden Witchbreed‘s plot? Glory Season may have been nominated for the Hugo, but Golden Witchbreed is greatly superior (it was nominated for the BSFA, but lost to Tik-Tok (1983, UK)).

Discovering Brin was a worse writer than I’d remember was not a surprise. Spotting the resemblances between Glory Season and Golden Witchbreed was. I’ve no idea if Brin had knowledge of Gentle’s novel. I would like to think not, but it was definitely published in the US. Even so, on its own merits alone, Glory Season is not very good: overly long, and its poor writing works against its few good ideas.


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Comanche Moon, Larry McMurtry

This is the fourth and final book set in the world of Lonesome Dove, but is actually the second prequel, predating the events in the original novel. The series in publication order is: Lonesome Dove (1985, USA), Streets of Laredo (1993, USA), Dead Man’s Walk (1994, USA), Comanche Moon (1997, USA). But the stories chronologically are: Dead Man’s Walk, Comanche Moon, Lonesome Dove and Streets of Laredo. It’s worth noting that Lonesome Dove was adapted as a successful television miniseries in 1989, and a sequel TV series was broadcast in 1993… which may or may not have prompted McMurtry to write an actual sequel himself, and its subsequent success may have then led to the prequels…

Certainly, Lonesome Dove was a fun novel, surprisingly funny, and while brutal in parts, mostly optimistic. Streets of Laredo closed off some of the characters’s stories, and added a little more brutality. The first prequel, Dead Man’s Walk, was unremittingly grim, with little of the humour or optimism of Lonesome Dove. And so it is with Comanche Moon, a direct sequel to Dead Man’s Walk.

So we have three books, of which Comanche Moon is the last written, likely only produced to capitalise on the success of the first, and while they feature the same cast they have lost the humour and enjoyment of the original.

Woodrow Call and Gus McCrae are still members of the Texas Rangers. Buffalo Hump (whose actual Comanche name apparently translated as “erection that won’t go down”) is still a thorn in their side. As is superlative Comanche horse thief, Kicking Wolf. McCrae and Call are members of Colonel Scull’s troop. When Scull’s Shire horse is stolen by Kicking Wolf, Scull sets off on his own in pursuit. Which leads to him being captured by psychopath Mayan bandit Ahumado.

McCrae and Call become captains in the Texas Rangers. They rescue Scull. Buffalo Hump is killed by his son, Blue Duck, another psychopath, who appeared in Lonesome Dove and Streets of Laredo. A lot of the narrative dwells on the tortures and violence inflicted by Blue Duck and Ahumado. The Comanche slowly disappear as the whites drive them from their lands. The American Civil War takes place but it doesn’t impact Call or McCrae much.

I really didn’t care for Comanche Moon – this is a series with diminishing returns – even though it finishes before Lonesome Dove begins. The first book I’d happily recommend, but I’d also recommend stopping there. The treatment of the Comanche and Apache and Mexicans in all four books is pretty racist. Everyone except the whites, and the one black character, are also complete psychopaths. Yet the myth of white colonisation of North America is built on the backs of sociopaths and psychopaths. It’s why US culture valorises such people. It’s why the US is like it is now.


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Uncommon Danger, Eric Ambler

I first saw mention of Eric Ambler on Paul Kincaid’s blog. He praised him as a superior writer of thrillers. For some reason, I had the impression he was a 1960s and 1970s writer like, say, Hammond Innes. In fact, Ambler is from an earlier generation, published chiefly in the 1930s and 1940s. And the plots of his novels reflect that period. At least, Uncommon Danger (1937, UK), his second novel, certainly does so.

Kenton is a freelance journalist in Europe, based mainly in Germany. After losing money in a game of poker-dice, he catches the train to Vienna to borrow money from a friend. Enroute, he’s asked to carry suspicious documents across the Austrian border, which he does for money. But then the owner of the documents is murdered and Kenton is the chief suspect.

The documents are copies of a Soviet plan to invade Bessarabia (now part of Moldova) and take over its oil fields. (History fans will already know Stalin led the Soviet annexation of Azerbaijan, which was famous at the time for its oil fields.) The Soviet plan is actually speculative, rather than intended, but a UK oil company plans to use it to hoist a right-wing government into power in Romania, which will then give them majority rights to Romanian oil.

None of which helps Kenton, who is wanted for murder in Austria. He’s helped by Zamenhoff, a Soviet agent, and Zamenhoff’s sister, and the three team up to retrieve the stolen documents and scupper the oil company’s plan, as managed by “political saboteur” Colonel Robinson and his sadistic sidekick Captain Mailler.

The end result is a solid thriller, like early Graham Greene, and very much of its time. There are telephones, but they’re not ubiquitous (no mobiles, of course). Long distance travel is chiefly by train. Kenton eludes capture by the police simply by eluding individual police officers. There’s no way the plot could be transposed to the present day – Kenton wouldn’t last a minute.

Which is not a complaint. The book was published in 1937 and that’s what the 1930s were like. The politics may not have changed much, but technology and infrastructure certainly have. Ambler’s prose is good, with an interesting tendency to delve into detail. The story is surprisingly violent for its time – more so than Greene, from what I remember of his books. Perhaps the characters are a little broad brush-stroke, and the story a little predictable – although explaining the underlying plot in a prologue is unusual.

Nonetheless, a good read. And for what it is, a between-the-wars political thriller, a good example of its type. I’ve another Ambler on the TBR, which I’ll read – but I’m not sure I’d describe him as a must-read author.


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Chronicles of the Kencyrath 4: To Ride a Rathorn, PC Hodgell

To Ride a Rathorn (2006, USA) is the fourth book in Hodgell’s, to date, ten book series, the Chronicles of the Kencyrath. This is heartland fantasy, so heartland it reads like a dramatised supplement for a fantasy role-playing game. And while main character Jame flips between Goth Mary Sue and emo superhero, collecting power tokens as the narrative progresses, there’s still much to like here. The world-building, for one.

Robert E Howard does this thing in some of his Conan stories where he hints at much greater historical depth than his Hyperborea can realistically carry. I’m not convinced it’s deliberate, but it gives some of his stories an added dimension which offsets their illogical mash-ups of historical periods. Hodgell does something similar – the historical depth, that is, not the mash-up.

The Kencyrath have lived on many worlds since being forced from their home world by Perimal Darkling. Rathillien is just the latest. Jame is a Highborn, and the twin sister of Torisen, lord of the Knorth, one of the Kencyrath houses. Jame was introduced as a thief in the first book, discovered her brother and assisted him in a great battle in the second book, tried to discover her role in the third book, and now, in the fourth book in the series, she’s been made Torisen’s heir and enrolled at Tentir, which seems to be some sort of training school for elite soldiers. Jame is not expected to succeed, nor is her presence appreciated.

Despite this, she muddles through, and even manages to resolve a few issues, some relating specifically to her house, Knorth, and its history, and some related to Tentir’s own history. Such as the rathorn colt – a sort of horse with armour and horns. which has been hunting Jame and which she turns into a reluctant ally. The title To Ride a Rathorn is actually a pun – because the phrase means something like “to grab the tail of a tiger” but there’s also this rathorn which Jame might end up actually riding…

Jame’s specialness gets a bit wearying at times – being the centre of a narrative is one thing, having the entire world revolve around a Mary Sue is another. It also means there’s not much jeopardy – no matter what Hodgell throws at Jame, she’s going to win through. There are, after all, seven more books to go. But the details are fun, the world-building is interesting, and the plot rolls forward with the relentlessness of a, er, charging rathorn.

I’m not a big fan of epic fantasy, or sword & sorcery, or whatever this sort of commercial fantasy is currently called. It’s mostly badly-written, derivative and lacking in originality. The basic template may have moved away from mediaeval Europe in recent years, but that hasn’t made it any more original. Hodgell’s Chronicles of the Kencyrath are no less derivative than a fantasy role-playing game from the industry’s heyday back in the 1970s, but I still think there’s enough of a sideways spin in these books to make them stand out from the rest.

Judged against the whole genre of science fiction and fantasy, they’re perhaps not much. But within the specific space they occupy, commercial European-inspired fantasy, they’re actually not bad, and worth reading.


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The Public Image, Muriel Spark

I read Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means (1953, UK) back in 2010, and judging by the review I wrote on my blog at the time, I didn’t like it very much. I can now add The Public Image (1968, UK) to the list of novels by Muriel Spark I don’t like very much.

It was nominated for the first ever Booker Award in 1969, which is why I read it. The story is relatively straightforward: Annabel Christopher stars in a film by an Italian director and becomes an international star – or perhaps European, given she never makes it to Hollywood. Annabel moves to Rome, with her semi-successful screenwriter husband. She has a baby. Shortly afterwards, her husband commits suicide and in his suicide notes (he wrote several) he accuses Annabel of promiscuity and throwing orgiastic parties. None of which is true. Annabel tries to control the narrative around her husband’s death before the Italian press destroys her career.

And, er, that’s it.

I have watched many 1960s Italian films, not just giallo or poliziotteschi, but also movies by Antonioni, Fellini, Pasolini, de Sica, Rossellini and so on. I’m a fan of the first three directors. So Spark’s depiction of Annabel’s career in Italian cinema never really convinced me. Neither did her husband’s suicide – there was nothing in the narrative to suggest he might take his life. There were clues he resented his wife’s success – but it’s a leap from there to suicide.

Then there’s the writing. Spark was nominated twice for the Booker Prize, and was much lauded critically – she was made an OBE in 1967 and a dame in 1993, for services to literature, and ranked number eight in the fifty greatest British writers since 1945 by the Times in 2008. But The Public Image reads more like reportage than fiction, and over-uses one of my pet hates in writing – the construction “was to be”. There are several auxiliary verbs which can be used in English, there are even grammatical moods available. So many different ways to add nuance and meaning instead of “was to be”. It’s no different to using “get” as a catch-all verb.

So, a lack of authenticity and too much passive voice using weak constructions, especially “was to be”. Not impressed. Annabel may have been reasonably well characterised, but the rest of the cast were ciphers. The Public Image is not a book I can recommend.


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On the Calculation of Volume II, Solvej Balle

Tara Selter woke up one day, and it was the previous day. In fact, for reasons unexplained, she is reliving 18 November over and over again, much like Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day. In the first book – seven are planned – Tara explored the limits of her condition, spending time in Paris in a hotel, where she had slept the night before, repeatedly visiting the same friends – antiquarian booksellers like herself – again and again, even attempting to explain to them what was happening to her. She returned home, and tried the same with her husband. But she discovered the resources she used, food particularly, vanished from 18 November if she used them, and objects would disappear into 19 November if she did not keep them close to her.

In this second book, Tara decides to try and live a year on the same day. She does this by moving around Europe so that the climate matches what it would be, approximately, on each day of the year had she stayed home in her village outside Paris. It’s a neat conceit, but for it to work Balle needs to get her details absolutely spot-on and, unfortunately, in a few places they didn’t ring true.

But that’s a minor quibble. Balle commits hard to her structure, and is rigorous in working out the details of living the same day again and again, even when it comes to travelling about Europe in search of the right climate for each calendar day of the year. The travel stretches Tara’s resources and ingenuity, as she has no knowledge of the previous day wherever she ends up, and Balle considers all the pitfalls and ramifications that might result.

There is something deeply satisfying in Balle’s careful working out of her central premise, and even after only two books in of a planned seven, the series promises interesting explorations of Tara’s situation. 


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The Soft Machine, William S Burroughs

I read the recently-published “restored text” – and the history of the novel and its manuscripts is as barking mad as its story. Burroughs submitted the original novel to Olympia Press in Paris, which promptly published it. But he decided to rewrite chunks for the US edition a couple of years later, but not all of the changes were delivered in time. But they were in time for the UK publication a couple of years after that. So there are three major, and different, editions of The Soft Machine (1966, USA) – and this version is based on the second, with variations from both the first and third versions. All of which are documented in several appendices.

Story-wise… The Soft Machine is the first book of the Cut-Up Trilogy… because Burroughs took the text of many chapters, cut it into pieces and re-arranged it. You would think this would make it almost impossible to read, but it’s surprisingly easier than you’d expect. The plot is part science fiction, part autobiography, part thriller. There’s a secret agent, and time travel, and Mayans, and bits and pieces from the earlier Naked Lunch (1959, USA). It reads mostly like episodes from Burroughs’s life, with science fiction interludes. While the cut-up narrative is not as difficult to parse as I’d expected, the plot of the novel is less easy to follow. To be fair, it doesn’t really matter – the narrative jumps all over the place, and seems to end up somewhere that follows more or less from where it began. 

The Soft Machine is surprisingly funny in places. It’s also very graphic. Burroughs was gay and promiscuous, and so too are his characters. Most of the encounters are fleeting and rough. There’s also lots of science-fictional ideas – some of which are mentioned in passing, but with pay-offs that appear later in the narrative. The cut-up chapters make them a little harder to track, however.

I’ve been a fan of William S Burroughs as, well, as a concept for several years, and I’ve dipped a couple of times into his fiction. I’d read bits of The Soft Machine before, but not the full novel – and I have to admit the “restored text” improved the reading experience, since the footnotes and appendices add a fascinating dimension to the novel.

Restored text editions of The Ticket That Exploded (1967, USA) and Nova Express (1964, USA) are also available.