This wraps up Isaac Asimov's 'Lucky Starr' series at six books, even though New English Library had it numbered at five. What are the odds that "book five" references book six in a footnote? Pretty good, I'd say, and sure enough, there's one on page six and another on page eight. Sigh. I have no idea what NEL was thinking.

Oh, and it also wraps up the series even though there were planets within our solar system still to be visited. There's nothing in the book itself to suggest that there wouldn't be another but we can easily read between the lines to see that the author had other things on his mind. In fact, he had been evolving the series from the first book onwards and here, I guess, was when it became clear to him that he was evolving it into a junior version of what he was already doing elsewhere and so put this distraction on his energy to bed.

If you'll recall, it started out as a science fiction version of 'The Lone Ranger' to then be adapted for television. That TV show never happened and the masked superhero angle, sparked by the gift of a mask that serves as a personal force shield by Martians who have become pure energy, went away quickly. Instead, Asimov kept his secondary initial genre of mysteries within a science fiction setting, Starr sent to yet another planet to solve yet another mystery. He was always a detective, even as a Councilman for the Council of Science, but he was only occasionally an action hero at the same time.

This approach worked pretty well, with Asimov using all the scientific knowledge available at the time not only to flavour the mysteries but to be inherent to their solutions. The theme under all of it is that hard science should be trusted more than anything else. People are flawed, with their judgement often inaccurate and their inclinations often biased. Science, however, is never wrong, even when it is. What science says is always based on the best information available at the time, as Asimov did when writing these books in the fifties. When better information is obtained, what science says is updated accordingly. If only people did that too! Of course, to do that in novels like these means apologies Asimov wrote for the seventies NEL editions.

There's a mystery here, albeit a skimpy one built around a true MacGuffin, something everyone in the story cares deeply about but which eventually proves as irrelevant as we think all along. Here, we aren't even let in on what it is because Hector Conway, Chief Councilman, doesn't even know. It seems likely to be information about Earth's network of spies stolen by a Sirian agent working for Acme Air Products, a suitably generic name for a suitably generic MacGuffin. What Conway knows is that it's important and that it's speeding away from the Earth on a fast ship called 'The Net of Space' in the hands of that agent, Jack Dorrance, Agent X.

What's important to know is that the Sirians aren't that far away any more. Sure, their home is a vast distance away, fifty trillion miles, which is a quaint Imperial translation for kids from 8.6 light years. However, they've also established a base on Titan that's only seven-hundred-million from Earth. Even more importantly, they've now claimed Titan as theirs. While the traditional take by the Federation has been that establishing a presence in a solar system effectively claims all of it, the Sirians are now arguing that what really matters is being the first to any particular planet or moon. They got to Titan first, so it's theirs.

Of course, that means that there isn't much time to catch up to Agent X. Off goes Lucky to do just that because, if anyone can, he can. As you can imagine, these early scenes are dynamic and tense even though there's no real action. We imagine it coming later once everyone's in the same place, but that isn't what happens at all. The section that we expect to be action turns into strategy, as Agent X gets to Saturn first only to dive into its rings and promptly explode, after jettisoning the MacGuffin. Now it's about searching for it but that turns into politics, because the Sirians show up and order Lucky away because the Saturnian system is now theirs.

There are no spoilers there, because everything I've just mentioned happens early in the book to set up what follows, but I've been very careful to include certain key information that's relatively easy to miss while reading. We see it and we acknowledge it but we may not catch what it means to the bigger picture unfolding in our solar system. I have to confess that I didn't see the specific solution to the problem at hand coming, even though I had all the information needed to do so. I would therefore suggest that this is probably the best plotted book in the series, even if it shifts its genre so often.

It started as a tense action thriller; turned into a game of strategy that ends with a brief cat and mouse affair appropriate to the terminology of spies; then a political thriller with a telling focus on superiority through selective breeding, with some notable action scenes and a clever dilemma reliant on the Three Laws of Robotics; but it ends up as a galactic legal drama. That's a lot for any book but it's especially a lot for one that wraps up in fewer than a hundred and fifty pages or one that ends a series. And, of course, there's still mystery and the setting is science fiction.

I liked this one a lot, perhaps because of its schizophrenia. I'm a fan of genrehopping fiction and I appreciated all of these sections on their own merits. Whether you'll follow suit depends on your particular tastes. It's an action tale without much action; a talky political thriller told on a micro rather than a macro scale through a mere handful of characters; and a legal drama that doesn't start its session until the book is almost over, when an interstellar conference is called. Each one of those realities could break this book for you.

My favourite section is probably the most science fiction, with Lucky ordered out of the Saturnian system but sneaking back in again surreptitiously like a spy with Bigman and Wess, usually known as Councilman Ben Wessilewsky. It all feels highly cinematic, dipping into and out of the rings and drilling down through the ice on Mimas to hide from the Sirians.

The primary scene with robots on Titan is pure Asimov too. We know that the Three Laws prevent robots from harming humans; that's why we're supposed to trust Asimov robots, in stark contrast to so much sci-fi in the decades before him, where they're merely scientific monsters. However, on Titan we meet characters like Sten Devoure, who's in charge of the Sirian base. While members of the Sirian Space Service, similar to the Council of Science, are honourable men, like Harrig Zayon and Barrett Yonge, Barrett is a political appointee, as much a nepo baby as Lucky but without any actual ability to back that up and he's an unabashed racist.

You see, the Sirians have bred out "abominations" like Bigman, who he refuses to acknowledge as human. There's no fetishistic iconography here but Devoure plays like a loyal Nazi, embracing the propaganda that Nazis, or Sirians, are inherently superior because of their genetics. He only uses demeaning language to describe Bigman, as if he was a curiosity like a talking monkey, including the pronouns "it/its" instead of "he/him". It's telling that Devoure counts as the very first Sirian that Lucky meets in person, even though they've been the bad guys in the background all the way through the series.

Anyway, Asimov applies this demeaning linguistic approach to the Three Laws. Devoure orders a pair of robots to arrest Bigman, which they promptly do and they suggest that he not struggle, as the "master" might inadvertently hurt himself. Humans are masters to Sirian robots and they use "he/him". Later, Devoure asks robots to kill Bigman, because, to his particular mindset, he isn't a human being, he's "it/its" and the death of a monkey shouldn't offer any inconsistencies with any of the Three Laws. You'll have to read the book to discover how that plays out, of course.

Another interesting note is that there are stronger nods here to the 'Doc Savage' series. I'd seen that connection in the first book but not in any others in between. In 'Space Ranger', Asimov sets up Lucky in superhero terms, so he's an orphan like Batman, he's set adrift in space as a baby like Superman and, while he has no superpowers per se, he's trained from birth to be the best person that science can make like Doc Savage. Here, Bigman and Wess bicker at each other just like Ham and Monk in the 'Doc Savage' series and that's all the more obvious when they pass the asteroid Hidalgo, a rare one with an orbit that ranges from the asteroid belt to the outer solar system. It is a real asteroid and it really moves like that but it isn't the only one and these two nods in close proximity in a mystery series seem like clues.

Bottom line, there's a lot here, more than any of its five predecessors and much more than some. However, that was it. Maybe, in 1958, Asimov had moved so far adrift from the original purpose of the series that he felt a need to call it quits. Maybe, like Capt. W. E. Johns and his 'Interplanetary Adventures' juvenile science fiction series from the same era, he realised that space science was growing so quickly that it was quickly rendering stories like these inaccurate. Having shoehorned robots into the series and increased their focus, he realised that there was far more potential on that front in his work for adults. Maybe the identity of Paul French, a pseudonym he used only for these books, had become too open a secret and he wanted to see his own names on books.

Whatever the reason, it ended here and I must say that I found far more substance and far more enjoyment in revisiting them than I expected to. While they're certainly not up to the standards of his best adult work or indeed up to the standards of Heinlein's juveniles, they're also not books to dismiss. They still work, even if some of them need those apologies. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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