Just in case there was any lingering doubt in your mind, the cover art confirms it. The villain--the leering one with the satiny robe and the arrogant, crooked eyebrow--is holding a broadsword. The colors are faux-faded, with the red ink turned brown and the blue turned pale, leaving the green to dominate. Finally, the folds of the dust cover show fake wear, just like the paper cover of any 50-year-old book on your shelf.
Yes, this is a self-consciously retro bit of futurism. This is golden age space opera recreated. This is an SF novel with the highly improbable title Space Vulture. The phony aging is a lie so obvious, it becomes a kind of über-truth in advertising. Having scared off all fans of hard-SF, post-cyberpunk, or any other up-to-the-minute, super-sophisticated sub-genre, this book makes a promise to all who remain: read me and I will give you that same golden feeling you had when the world was young, you were twelve, and science fiction was the coolest thing you could possibly imagine.
Alas, it doesn't quite deliver. Not quite.
In the plot department, you really can't complain. The action relentlessly propels you down a beautifully greased chute toward the conclusion. Character development is simplistic, but that is completely, atavistically in the spirit of the primordial pulps (in a way that this sentence, for example, is not). Furthermore, in plot-character interaction, Space Vulture scores bonuses: you've got the impossibly perfect hero plus an anti-hero in addition to a strong heroine and a couple of cute kids who are way too resourceful to be mere kidnap bait (although the authors don't leave that plot device under-utilized; they are way too smart to overlook that golden opportunity).
A final gold star goes to the authors for an excellent villain, the key to any good yarn. Actual, real thought went into inventing a scenario whereby the eponymous baddie is not only the smartest, but also the strongest and most devilishly handsome, being in the universe. It gets to the point you catch yourself thinking, "you know, this is almost sort of plausible."
So, what's wrong? I just couldn't forgive the failings of the story on the level of its prose style. Yes, space opera is supposed to be crudely written. But it's supposed to be crudely vigorous. Unfortunately, you read passages like this:
The lieutenant tossed the two of them a salute. She had been at the top of her academy class, and her salute was still sloppy. It was indicative of the general lack of military precision that pervaded Star Patrol. "You've got my respect. We've been chasing that scoundrel for a long time. My superior officers will be happy to know he's out of commission.
If you've read the rest of the book, you know Star Patrol has a terrible reputation. The sloppy salute could have been a neat, efficient way to remind us. Instead, the authors pounded the point home one more time. Then, the lieutenant says, "you've got my respect," which sounds like she's reading her lines right off the authors' three-by-five cards. Please, gentlemen, have her say something that shows she's feeling respectful, rather than having her tell it.
I'm not asking for much; these kinds of edits are first-pass improvements. One suspects the bad influence of the good, but inexperienced, padre. (Yes, you read the cover right: one of the co-authors is the Catholic archbishop of Newark, N.J.) His Grace is a prime suspect especially in the attempt to introduce religious impulses in the good characters. That could have been a way to add a dimension of realism, but here it falls flat.
So, one more question nags: maybe they fell short of recapturing the spirit of the pulps because the quest is impossible. Can that golden feeling ever be relived? Plenty of times if we return to a cherished "classic" we are shocked at how bad it is, and we which we could forget the re-read. We've all had that experience with a relative who went into some horrifying decline in the end--dear sweet Aunt Lucy, who got cancer and her face fell off...Cousin George, who got bit by that stray dog and got all foamy at the mouth...Granny Smith, who won the lottery, so we had to stone her to death...Uncle Jack who spent a winter with his family in that creepy hotel in Colorado and things ended badly--and SF novels from our youth can be just like that. My list of I'd-rather-remember-them-as-they-were-before novels include The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress--which on second reading turned out to be a bit creepy in the experimental marital relations department--and Journey to the Center of the Earth--which lost me because of its suffocating verbosity.
(And these examples are not even true pulps--they're classics! I could even mention Ursula K. Le Guin's thoughtful and inspiring Earthsea books, which I found shockingly leaden in their pacing once I knew how they would end.)
Some juveniles have aged well. For me, Heinlein's Have Spacesuit, Will Travel and even Donald Wollheim's Secret of the Martian Moonsare examples that transcended their improbable plots (spoiler alert for both books: boy! astronaut! saves! the! universe!) with vigorous plotting, plucky protagonists, and sorta-kinda plausible speculative elements. So it turns out, our memories were not always wrong. There really is a magic in those old space operas, and today's authors ought to keep reciting the incantations; some day, the magic will work again.
-The Fredösphere