markk

Manly Wade Wellman's book ended up being closer to my expectations for a Golden Age SF novel than Aldiss's. In it, a daring young man undertakes a scouting expedition into alien territory fifty years after they devastated the world and took over control of large portions of it. To defeat the "Cold Creatures" (whose invasion of such an environmentally inhospitable planet must have inspired M. Night Shyamalan's Signs), Wellman's protagonist has to demonstrate such an implausible amount of good fortune that the author keeps remarking on it throughout the book. It's the sort of thing that makes me wonder if the book was a contractual obligation which Wellman just wasn't that interested in writing,