Planet of Mystery

Old school, pulp adventure. Appropriately enough, I read it serialized in Fantasy and Science Fiction. A great vacation book. ( )

Old school, pulp adventure. Appropriately enough, I read it serialized in Fantasy and Science Fiction. A great vacation book. ( )

Old school, pulp adventure. Appropriately enough, I read it serialized in Fantasy and Science Fiction. A great vacation book. ( )

This is one more of the novellas published in separate books from PS Publishing. The story had been published in 2006 in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction but this was the first time I read it -- I was still not subscribing to any magazine in 2006.

The story is hard to be categorized - it starts as SF but moves very fast through Fantasy and then into the realms of the Weird.

The first man-operated ship to land on Venus is surprised from what they see on Venus - instead of the hostile planet that all probes had been showing, they end up on an Earth-like planet. Except that centaurs are real and there is something like Amazons - with a queen that is as two-dimensional as it can be. And our main character is not even sure that all this is real (and mentions it often enough to be annoying). Add to this a flying saucer, a strange robot and a treat to Earth and the story really delves into the Weird. Add a 'sacrifice' so the captain can be saved, a love story and a technology that we had been told cannot be used that is getting used and all of the cliches are covered. The end of the novella is wrapping the things up in some way so that (almost) everything sounds logical.

It was an interesting story - I could not put it down before the end. But at the same time it was way too weird. The starting pages sounded as a classical science fiction and then things started changing. Which in most cases is not a trouble for me but this story just went strange once too often. I think I would have liked the story much more without the whole love story... and all the consequences from it, including who survived at the end. ( )

http://www.terrybisson.com/PlanetMystery.pdf

Amazon Queen of Venus versus the Flying Saucer.

http://freesf.blogspot.com/2008/10/planet-of-mystery-terry-bisson.html ( )