Customer Reviews

After Doomsday

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from the back cover of the September 1986 edition:

Earth has been destroyed.

Which alien race had committed genocide, killing a planet in the process?
The Kandemir were interested in salvage rights.

The Xo had provided two Earth nations with weapons that could do the job.

The Vorlak, an essentially peaceful race, nevertheless had made a firm treaty with the Russians.

The only surviving humans were the astronauts aboard the spaceships Benjamin Franklin and Europa. Men and women together, they would re-establish mankind - but first they must unmask their enemies and defeat them.

Poul Anderson had a strange tendency. When his story could be made into a long novel, he made it small (like this one). On the other hand, when his story could be told in 100 pages (boat of million years) he bloated it into something like 600 pages. This story is of course something poul wrote in 2 months, or rather 1, probably to pay a mortgage or smt. It is a little promising, a little of a pager turner and not much more. The notion of the all male/all female spaceships is dated. The deus ex machina earth physicist who discovers the new physics is a very tired and used to death platitude to overcome SF problems. The aliens are too terrestrial. So, read this only if you don't have to pay for it. But better, skip it for Anderson's best novel Tau Zero.

Poul Anderson can spin a great yarn no matter what. Here he seems to have fun with the silly Adam and Eve story, and turns out a solid, exciting story. Earth is destroyed. By chance a space ship with an all male crew and a spaceship with an all female crew are out exploring and escape the destruction. Their problem is that they don't know the other ship survived. They have to look for survivors and find out how to defeat the enemy. Obviously, if each ship doesn't find the other, the human race will die. Or if they find each other they still have to create a safe place in a hostile universe. With all these problems as background, the result is a good old-fashioned adventure story. And it's extremely refreshing that the women have adventures as well as the men.

The earth has been distoreyed and two survining ships, one with a male crew, one with a female crew, must search for the gilty party.