REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:         


MURRAY LEINSTER – Operation Terror. Berkley F694, paperback original, 1962. Cover art: Richard Powers.

MURRAY LEINSTER Operation Terror

   Next up, Operation Terror by that veteran boshmeister Murray Leinster. It’s easy to dismiss Leinster as a competent hack from the 60s, but there were all too few who could hack words so proficiently.

   Operation starts off as Earth (or more precisely, Boulder Lake) is invaded by beings from another world, complete with flying saucer and paralyzer-beam, monitored helplessly by one of those competent, thoughtful, quick-thinking scientific type that we readers of sci-fi all imagined ourselves to be.

   But as our hero sets about rescuing a distressed damsel and escaping the aliens, the invasion starts to seem more and more hokey, a development that steps up the suspense as he tries to counteract the alien rays, get to safety, warn the authorities, protect the girl and save the planet, all in the space of about a hundred-sixty tightly-packed pages.

   These days when Sci-Fi has been replaced by multi-volumed tomes of “speculative fiction” we can but look back and admire the terse economy of writing like this.