Siege Perilous

By -
Siege Perilous, by Lester Del Rey

In the not-too-distant future, Earth has an orbiting space station, which is meant to ensure world peace (especially for the nation that built it) under shifting alliances within a Cold War that never really ended, but which currently has Russia allied with the US against Eurasia.  Most of the staff are there for only a few months at a time, since living in space is hard on the mental health, but Fred Hunter has been there for ten long years, ever since the station was built.  He built quite a lot of it himself, in fact, before the accident that rendered him unable to return home.  Fred is always and forever homesick, but he has stubbornly remained sane.

Then the station is invaded and taken over in a matter of just a few hours, but who are the guys wearing those spacesuits?  Not Eurasia.  A small, scrappy nation?  The invaders' suits are out-of-date, so maybe...but then when they speak, the mystery deepens.
"Mount your cayuses and ride out if you don't want a bellyful of hot lead!"

 "All right, you guys. You were real cute.  But we're through playing around, see?"
Where could these invaders possibly have come from?  Nothing they do makes sense.  Fred, Sandy, and Callaghan are the only station staff who didn't get caught, and if they don't want the Earth destroyed, they'll have to figure something out fast.

I guess spoilers for a novel written in 1966 don't matter, so I'll tell you the solution: the invaders are underground dwellers from Mars, and have been watching old Earth movie broadcasts for years.  But, like the Thermians in Galaxy Quest, they don't understand story-telling and so are convinced that Earth people are cowboys and gangsters intent on invading Mars.  Their tactics are entirely based on melodrama.

It's a fun setup, and involves a good deal of MacGyver-esque improvisation as well, so I liked it.




Comments

  1. reeseJanuary 13, 2020 at 11:39 AM

    I'm not much for old sci-fi, but 'Siege Perilous' caught my eye. But is there any Arthur and the Round Table connection?

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanJanuary 14, 2020 at 9:44 PM

    Not really, though I was looking for it! It is a pun, though, in that Fred is in a perilous seat and also they're under siege, which is perilous. Though I guess all sieges are pretty perilous, this is a particularly perilous siege!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more