Teaser

It starts with law enforcement tracking down some runaway teens, only to encounter an alien spaceship. It ends with a trip to another universe, far deadlier than man could possibly imagine . . .

Review

My final review for Junk or Jewel month comes courtesy of my recent eBay book haul. I’d never have given this book a second thought if I’d seen it on the shelves, but books in my house exist to be read, and so that’s exactly what I did, even if it – judging by its low number of GoodReads ratings – few other people had the same inclination.

I’m in two minds about this book, and that’s because I’m not entirely sure what it’s trying to do. That’s the problem with stumbling across books outside of context. No doubt marketing and the publishers had a goal in mind when they plonked this book on shelves, and certainly Rowley had some inclination of the reception he hoped to meet while he was writing it. But I don’t have any of that information, which leaves me in something of a quandary. Am I supposed to take this book seriously, or not?

If it’s a straight-faced space opera as I initially assumed, then it is a woefully tropey and at times even silly one. If, as I later came to suspect, it is intended as a parody of Golden Age space opera, then it fares a little better, even if it’s not as biting as I like my satire to be.

There’s a famous quote from (I believe) Galaxy magazine, about how space operas should not simply be horse operas (what we would call westerns) transposed into space. Right from the outset, Golden Sunlands defies that rule. The opening stages are somewhere between western and old school Americana, with frontier towns and sheriffs and runaway teens galore, all accompanied by names as folksy as the values they espouse. There’s even an attempted lynching, aborted only by an alien invasion.

When the aliens turned up, they’re the sort of bug-eyed monsters olf SF warned us about, with names that may as well be the result of thumping one’s hands across a typewriter. Yet just as soon as you get to that idea, we are once again thrown into a new sort of story. This time it’s a very traditional space opera idea – a feudal world in space. Once there we get to read about valiant battles, tyrannical royals, and – inevitably – some ghastly sex scenes involving the local maidens.

In many ways, this is a terrible, terrible book. It’s proficiently written, but there’s not a shred of originality to be found. Everything is plucked, if not from the old pulp magazines themselves, then from the cultural idea of the pulp era. Monsters, maidens, and madmen, oh my. If this is intended to be taken seriously, then it was written about forty years too late.

Yet it is so absurd that I think to myself, surely this is a parody. It’s the only explanation that makes sense. The problem there is that I derived no joy from it. I was not entertained. I recently listened to Simon R. Green’s Deathstalker which, aside from being a little too long, was much more successful in skewering the tropes on display in Golden Sunlands. Whatever the case, both books are clearly drawing on the same rich well of science fiction history. Deathstalker, however, has something new to say. Parody or homage, Golden Sunlands has precious little to add to the conversation.

Book Stats

• A Standalone Novel
• First Published 1987
• 340 Pages