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Yvonne Rousseau reviews 'Thor’s Hammer' by Wynne Whiteford, 'The Tempting of the Witch King' by Russell Blackford, and 'Kelly Country' by A. Bertram Chandler

by
May 1984, no. 60

Yvonne Rousseau reviews 'Thor’s Hammer' by Wynne Whiteford, 'The Tempting of the Witch King' by Russell Blackford, and 'Kelly Country' by A. Bertram Chandler

by
May 1984, no. 60

Colonised asteroids, plentiful spaceships, an Astrogold Corporation tower approached by aircar: these are tokens of a world soothingly remote from present-day anxieties. But in Thor’s Hammer by Wynne Whiteford (Cory & Collins, 150 pp, $3.95 pb), the euphoric sense of disconnection has extended rather too far.

It is the twenty-first century, and a renegade from Astrogold has threatened (fairly explicitly) to destroy life on decadent Earth by hammering it with an asteroid. In 1983 it took four hours and twenty minutes for a message from Pioneer IO to travel from Neptune’s vicinity to Earth; yet people in Thor’s Hammer constantly behave as if similar messages between Earth and the asteroid belt were either impossible or unsporting. Instead, the hero is despatched on a six-month space journey, as the only man competent to investigate the looming threat.

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