Berserker Death [Hardcover]

BERSERKER DEATH(2005) is a collection of three separate books, comprising 755 hard-cover pages. Up until now, it has been difficult to determine the best starting-off point for getting into the Berserker series of stories. BERSERKER DEATH provides a fairly good solution to this dilemna. Individual reviews of the three contained books follows:

BERSERKER WARS(1981) ** is itself a novella-sized(215 page) collection of eleven Berserker short stories that were first published in the late 60's and 70's. The older 60's stories were somewhat original in theme when published 40 years ago, but when compared to more modern SciFi, they are seen as generally plodding and sometimes pathetic (THE WINGED HELMET(1969)* is horrible), with poor character descriptions/development and hard to read prose - especially bad are the silly space battle "ramming tactics", the stereotypical 1960's "all-knowing" computers, and the poorly done stories with "time travel gimmicks". The late-70's stories are, on average, much better - notable is SOME EVENTS AT THE TEMPLAR RADIANT(1979)****, a quite good 30-page short story, with intrigue, interesting characters, and a good ending.

BERSERKER BLUE DEATH (1985) ** 1/2 is a 200 page (novella-size) story, based on the classic tale of THE WHALE. The main character Captain Niles Domingo, like Captain Ahab, is obsessed with the destruction of the Blue-tinted Berserker ship that was reponsible for the death of his wife and children, and indirectly responsible for the loss of his left leg. Many Berserker stories include nebula-based situations, and this story takes place mostly in the Milkpail Nebula. By the end of this story, we have a faily good idea of the personalities of the main characters, but we don't have a really good idea of what they look like physically.

BERSERKER KILL(1993) *** has a number of good space combat sequences, but bogs down at times with monotonous contemplations about the moral and ethical implications of raising human zygotes into adult humans for the sole purpose of implanting the memories of exiting adult humans... indeed the author must have grown tired of these contemplations, as the book suddenly changes tack halfway thru, and in Part 2 we find ourselves suddenly 300 years further into the future - and at least we get back into a more action-oriented mode.

COVER - The cover is quite good, but is really specific to the BERSERKER KILL story, depicting the two main characters from that story.

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