After owning for thirty years and admiring the artwork of the “ Hooded Swan “on the cover for as many. It was time to read. It was tough going but I’m glad I read it. The other books in the series I’ve had for years as well may wait a few years longer to be read. ( )

Rummet, engang i fremtiden
Rumpiloten Grainger er styrtet ned på en øde planet med sit rumskib Javelin og hans ingeniør Lapthorn er død. Heldigvis er planeten godt nok øde, men dog til at overleve på. Grainger tænker tilbage på tidligere tider, hvor han og Lapthorn i deres rumskib Fireeater futtede rundt på en planet om en blå stjerne og handlede med eksotiske lyskilder. Senere arbejder de for biblioteket på New Alexandria. Og besøger de andre nye verdener, New Rome, New Israel og Penaflor for at støve bøger op til biblioteket.

En dag kommer et andet rumskib forbi og giver Grainger et lift.

???
De et-benede rumpiloter med træben og en papegøje på skulderen sætter ud med deres stolte rum-galease for at finde skatte-planeten og E.T.'s nedgravede skat. Med andre ord: der er dømt space-opera. ( )

In this first novel of the 'Hooded Swan' stories, the space pilot Grainger is rescued from a deserted planet after an accident which left him marooned and his engineer dead. And in the meantime, Grainger has picked up an alien mind parasite who, during the course of the novel, begins to get as sardonic as Grainger is cynical.

After his rescue (which he ends up liable for the costs of), Grainger is manouevered into taking a job piloting a new type of starship on a hazardous mission. Along the way, we find out much more about Grainger, the various people who form his small crew, and the interesting - if resolutely Seventies - galaxy they inhabit.

I read this novel as a part of an omnibus edition of all six 'Hooded Swan' novels, 'Swan Songs', from the now defunct UK small press publisher Big Engine. Stableford contributes an introduction which sets the writing of these novels and their publication into context, both with his life at the time and with the SF publishing scene. Nowadays, this novel would probably have been straight to ebook publication; but back in the Seventies, there were some publishers out there with a schedule to meet and a target of books to publish. Those were the days, and there were plenty of writers who got their start in professional writing that way.

As a journeyman work, 'Halcyon Drift' shows promise, as long as you aren't looking for star smashing adventure. Stableford had an interesting line in technobabble - as a biologist turned sociologist, he had a sufficiently broad education in the soft sciences to lace the sciencey talk with terminology that for once did not come out of physics - and his view of the various races in the galaxy is at the same time both hard-boiled but sympathetic. His hero, Grainger ("...we never knew his first name, but then again he wasn't the sort of man to have one", as Peter Tinniswood once said) is a cynical, hard-boiled sociopath with a penchent for dry one-liners, straight out of Central Casting. Still, it made a change from the super-competant heroes of most space operas. And the descriptions of the Drift itself, as well as some of the other worlds encountered, sometimes veer off into the surreal.

It is these things that make 'Halcyon Drift' a most unusual space opera, and these are the things that will keep me reading on into the second novel in the sequence. ( )

http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2017/01/review-of-halcyon-drift-by-brian.html ( )

3.5 stars. Originally posted at FanLit.

Grainger, a spaceship pilot, has been shipwrecked on a deserted island in a dangerous star system called the Halcyon Drift. Heƒ??s just about to give up hope when he is unexpectedly rescued by a commercial spacecraft. They charge him for the rescue and take him to court, so now heƒ??s deep in debt. When he arrives on Old Earth, he finds it in decline. Thereƒ??s no hope of getting off or finding lucrative work, so heƒ??s forced to accept a job offer to pilot the prototype of a new hi-tech spaceship, the Hooded Swan. Unfortunately, this means going back to the Halcyon Drift to help his boss, a mad scientist, hunt for the Lost Star, a spaceship that disappeared in the Drift carrying a potentially valuable cargo. This is a very dangerous job, but perhaps Grainger will get some help from the alien parasite that took up residence in his brain while he was stranded in the Drift.

Thereƒ??s so much ... Read More: http://www.fantasyliterature.com/reviews/the-halcyon-drift/
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