Rating: WARTY!
This is not by The Bertram Chandler but by A Bertram Chandler, so beware of false authorship of sci-fi! Initially when I first saw this I thought the author's name was John Grimes. You know how those publishers and maybe authors like to promote the author as though she or he is the story? Well they're not. The story is the story, so I tend to be skeptical of novels which have a hugely-emblazoned author's name at the top and a tiny title at the bottom. This was not the case here, but in the end it made no difference.
Unfortunately, the novel was so trashy as to be awful. It felt like it was written in the fifties, whereas it was actually written a whole decade later! This is actually a collection of four stories written from '64 through '71. I didn't get past page 28 of the first of these, when John Grimes, rim runner (and that tediously overused sci-fi phrase is not meant in a sexual sense), having set his spacecraft on course, sat down with his senior officers and started smoking a pipe. I should never have read that far.
The warning signs were already in place. All the senior jobs were held by men, all the junior jobs by women. The only woman who wasn't in an inferior position was the female main character who was defined solely by her looks and so sexualized as to be unreal. In fact, I should have never got past the cover, but I don't hold authors accountable for their covers unless they self-publish. The cover in this case featured a tough-looking, rugged male in your usual overblown and impractical space cowboy outfit. He was, of course, holding the bigger gun; in fact, he had two guns! And hilariously, he's posed rigidly like a GI Joe doll. The frosty-faced woman was wearing the tight scarlet outfit with the scoop neck, the better to expose her cleavage. In yet another case of the cover artist having no clue whatsoever what's in the novel she was depicted as a brunette whereas the actual character is blond (of course).
This book is not to be missed; it's to be avoided like the plague. There are those who would say that you cannot hold a book written half a century ago to modern standards, but actually, yes, you can! And even if you can't, I will. I give it a hulk-sized thumbs-down.
