Teaser

Terrans and Sirians are locked in a deadly stalemate. Earth has the technology to win, but the Sirians have numbers on their side. What Earth needs is a distraction. What Earth needs is a wasp . . .

Review

Wasp is a book that I’d eventually have picked up based on premise alone. I mean, one man taking down an empire just by being an annoyance? Count me in. It’s also one of the books chosen to be part of the SF Masterworks project by Gollancz, though the edition I read predates that decision by several decades. That’s about as close to a certification of quality as you get in the SF world, so reading Wasp was really a no-brainer. Especially when, as I did, you stumble across a cheap second-hand copy.

Turns out this was a great purchase. At a price of about two pence per page, it was hard to go wrong, granted, but it actually went very right. Wasp is a very good novel, and absolutely deserves to be discussed more than it is. Going back to that core concept, we have one big question. Just how much damage can one man do. At the start of the novel, our protagonist is just a random man plucked off the street and pressganged into service. As is often the way of older books, that background doesn’t matter a whole lot. It’s just the means by which we get one man alone against the enemy. He could have crash-landed on an alien world and much of the novel would remain the same.

It’s once he’s arrived that we get to the good stuff. The idea of someone acting as a wasp within the Sirian empire is good, but the execution is even better. It’s essentially a step-by-step guide to how one operative can level the playing field. We start off with intelligence gathering, then quickly spiral into murder, forgery, and terrorism. Russell has a great hand for writing duplicity, and no matter how convoluted the scheming may be, it’s always easy for the reader to understand. That’s no mean feat. There’s also a fair bit of humour in here, mostly of the wry, gallows variety. A personal highlight for me is having a fake insurgency registered as an official political entity. It’s not a comedic novel, but there’s a thick vein of raised eyebrows running through it nonetheless.

Like a lot of (essentially all, in fact) older novels, Wasp does occasionally read as the product of its time. The Sirian empire rarely feels that different to Earth of the nineteen-fifties, for all the alien accents and space travel. As is so often the case, it feels as though Russell has primarily drawn from the Second World War for inspiration, though that was far less a cliché when the book was written sixty-five years ago. Dated elements aside, however, Wasp still holds up. You could easily transpose the theme to another war, be it First World, Cold, or any of today’s conflicts. Somethings are sadly timeless.

All things considered, Wasp deserves a lot more attention than it gets. An under-read classic of the genre.

Deeper Dive: Short and Sweet

One of the remarkable things about this book is how much it achieves in less than a hundred and fifty pages. If it were printed today, it would be classed a s a novella. If it was released as a novel in 2023, it would be padded out. No doubt our protagonist would spend more time wondering about his family. or we’d have the perspective of the Kaitempi agents pursuing him. These are things that many modern readers would expect, but they would only serve to dilute the book.

This is one of those books that is based around an idea rather than a character. It takes one idea, runs around, plays with it for a while, and then finishes. Nothing is wasted, least of all paper. Sometimes, it’s better that way. Not everything needs to be a ten book series. Short standalones are important too.

Book Stats

• A Standalone Novel
• Published in 1958
• Published by Panther
• Military SF
• 143 pages