Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe

My wife and I found this among other old fifties/sixties paperbacks at an estate sale. They were stored in a cardboard box tucked away in the garage. The book started as if it were a boring political thriller on a colonized planet, but it hits the starting line running and does not stop. The promised struggle over a mind-control serum is almost false advertising as it only really plays a part two-thirds of the way through as a means for the rebelling fascists to fight off the aliens that they had originally struck a deal with, in order to pull a planet-wide coup off. The mind-control formula, which is used to sell the book on its cover, gets set up in the very beginning, gets used to defeat the aliens, and then only gets mentioned again in the last third as the former government’s leaders figure it out after seeing the invasion footage being used as propaganda. Basically, it just raises the stakes and is not really that central to the story at all save for that single incident.
The story also ends very abruptly, as soon as the leaders make their way via the 300-year-old city sewer system into the fascist leader’s, Recman’s, office the story just stops. The narration states that the planet-wide fascist movement would die without Recman to lead it and then it does.
Yet again, the story I set out to read was not the story that I got. The title Beyond the Barrier of Space was more than a little misleading, the only space involved was that that the aliens flew their ships through to invade. Even if it were referring to the boundless human mind, the mind-control/personality-mutating drug only appears at three points in the story like Chekov’s Gun. It was an action-movie version of a political thriller on another planet where the politicians and an elderly marshal are the heroes.
It was an easy read though. I would have read it all in one go had I not been called to dinner halfway through, I came back and finished it after. I enjoyed the first two-thirds but the first bit of the last third did drag a little and the ending was just sudden with no build-up, or even any attempt at suspense at the success of the politicians’ plan. I did not get a sense of any greater message here other than fascists are bad and will always fail in the end but the fact that the fascists were voted into a coalition government was never addressed at all. It’s a very shallow book. I would only recommend this book for its kitsch value other than that I did not mind it but it has the elements of a better story in it.
… (més)

Para todos, Anzas era un personaje chiflado, un científico excéntrico. Nadie prestaba demasiada atención a sus experimentos. Cuando empezaron a suceder cosas extrañas alrededor de su abandonado caserón y el joven teniente que había emprendido la investigación de lo sucedido desapareció sin dejar huellas, la IPF (Fuerza Interplanetaria) mandó a otro agente, que también se esfumó como por encanto.
Entonces se determinó un ataque a gran escala, que fue rechazado antes de empezar. Anzar siempre estaba dispuesto.
¿Estaba realmente loco Anzar? ¿Qué extraño poder poseía su niebla amarilla? ¿Qué había sucedido con los hombres que fueron enviados en su captura? Y, sobre todo, ¿qué gran misterio yacía encerrado en el gran cilindro de acero?… (més)

The story is pretty simple, but in a way that's okay for a cheap paperback. The tension isn't very well expressed, but a few scenes can be exciting with some effort on the part of the reader. At times though, the book tries to get into philosophical territory and it's pretty bad. The main character will be doing something when the narrative suddenly cuts away and the author goes into a ramble about the nature of man. It's always small-minded and never made me think or reflect on anything.

The author wrote these books at an extremely fast rate during the 60s, and it's plainly evident in the writing. The whole thing feels rushed and low-quality.… (més)

This novel is generally considered, with great affection, to be the worst science fiction novel ever written. If you were rolled up in a carpet and left in a darkened room with a tape recorder running and what you said was typed up and published, this is the kind of novel you would produce. Indeed, I undertand that this was exactly the production method used, during a period when the Reverend Fanthorpe was producing a novel every twelve days. I urge you to read it. It's amazing and so bad it's enjoyable. You can see where he's changed his mind during the composition. He'll tell you all about what some character has done only to say that of coure he didn't do that, what he really did was... There are so many other heart-warming examples I could give you but we don't have the time if you're going to maake it to the bookshop before it closes.

I wouldn't say it's the worst ever written because it's such an astonishingly enjoyable read. Any of the Lensman novels; they'd get my vote because not only is the writing poor, the author lacks moral fibre. You can see from the choices he makes on the fly that Fanthorpe is actually a decent human being.… (més)