Sun 3 Mar 2024
SF Diary Review: LARRY MADDOCK – The Golden Goddess Gambit.
Posted by Steve under Diary Reviews , Science Fiction & Fantasy[11] Comments
LARRY MADDOCK – The Golden Goddess Gambit. Agent from T.E.R.R.A #2. Ace G-620; paperback original, 1st printing, 1967. Cover art credited to Sergio Leone.
An inscribed plaque found in ancient Crete indicates that the time-structure of pre-historic Earth is being tampered with, possibly by a member of Empire. Hannibal Fortune and Webley trace the plaque back 10,000 years to an island continent in the Atlantic, unrecorded in history. Kronos, the ruler of his own niche in time, is actually a renegade T.E.R.R..A. agent and has established his own religion, designed mainly to perpetuate his own lineage.
Normi, the girl saved by Fortune from a mob, tells an interesting story of palace politics, which Kronos manipulated to achieve his reign. The beginning of the book is slow, however, and the ending is a muddled mess, hardly worth waiting for. Human breeding has its problems (pages 95-96), so it is doubtful that Kronos could have really affected history. Note that Fortune is taught swordsmanship by a man called d’Kammp.
Rating: **
Bibliographic Update: Larry Maddock was the pen name of Jack Owen Jardine, who wrote a small number of SF novels and short stories under this and several other pseudonyms in the 1960s, including Howard L. Cory, in collaboration with his wife, Julie Ann Jardine .
The Agent of T.E.R.R.A. series —
1. The Flying Saucer Gambit (1966)
2. The Golden Goddess Gambit (1967)
3. The Emerald Elephant Gambit (1967)
4. The Time Trap Gambit (1969)
March 3rd, 2024 at 9:35 pm
At this late date, I no longer remember who Webley was (perhaps a robot or alien sidekick), nor what the letters T.E.R.R.A. stood for. My apologies.
March 4th, 2024 at 9:17 am
Webley was an alien symbiote. He (it?) was featured in three earlier stories in NEW WORLDS in 1960.
T.E.R.R.A. stood for Temporal Entropy Restructure and Repair Agency.
I happened to pick up this book last week and hope to read this “muddled mess” sometime over the next week. Different strokes, you know.
BTW, I was taken aback by the name Sergio Leone. Be assured that the British children’s book illustrator was not the Italian film director. (Leone also did the covers for two of the remaining three T.E.R.R.A. novels.)
March 4th, 2024 at 9:35 pm
“T.E.R.R.A. stood for Temporal Entropy Restructure and Repair Agency.”
Thanks, Jerry. I’m sure the story made it clear what the letters stood for, but it sure didn’t stay with me. Not like U.N.C.L.E. did: United Network Command for Law and Enforcement. (And, ha!, if you think I knew that without looking it up, I have deeds to a bunch of bridges to sell you.)
But it’s pretty clear that the T.E.R.R.A. books were intended to ride the success of the U.N.C.L.E. ones, also by Ace, but it didn’t work out that way.
I don’t think the name Sergio Leone is all that common, or is it? All I can do is to accept it and add it to the pile of strange coincidences that exist in this world.
March 4th, 2024 at 11:14 am
I read this series way back in the 1960s. Muddled mess pretty much covers them. I like the covers though…
March 4th, 2024 at 9:38 pm
“Muddled mess” or not, to quote my much younger self, if I ever came across one of the TERRA books in my collection — and I bought all of them — I don’t think I could resist the temptation to read it, right then and there.
March 5th, 2024 at 7:00 am
Steve, you convinced me. I read the book last night. You’ll find my review this coming Friday as a “Forgotten Book.”
March 5th, 2024 at 7:54 pm
Looking forward to Friday already, Jerry!
March 7th, 2024 at 1:39 pm
I read the whole series when they were new and loved them, but the combination of secret agent and science fiction was right in my wheelhouse back then. I seem to recall reading many years later that Jardine tried to sell Terry Carr an outline for a Man From U.N.C.L.E. novel called THE FLYING SAUCER AFFAIR, and while Carr didn’t buy it in that form, he suggested that Jardine convert it into a science fiction series. I may be totally wrong about that, but that’s what I remember.
March 7th, 2024 at 2:13 pm
I don’t know if the story is true or not, but it sure sounds right to me.
March 8th, 2024 at 5:47 pm
Jerry review was posted on his blog earlier today:
http://jerryshouseofeverything.blogspot.com/
You should read it. Mostly he agrees with me, and where he doesn’t, I mostly agree with him. To demonstrate, here’s the wrap-up summary he wrote:
“A muddled mess to be sure, but it harked back to my personal Golden Age of science fiction when I was twelve or thirteen, a time when logic and literary quality meant nothing when compared to derring-do and strange worlds, a time when Captain Future (and later, Cap Kennedy,) would keep me glue to the pages. Dammit, now I’ll probably go and read the other three books in the series.”
Thanks, Jerry!
March 8th, 2024 at 10:27 pm
Tamed down just a shade and sold as juveniles this likely would be more fondly remembered. I remember Cap Kennedy with more affection. These weren’t good enough or bad enough to really be fun.