It had been my intention to write separate reviews of the six novels in this omnibus, and then bring them together as a single composite review relating specifically to this volume. I started out by producing a reasonably extensive review of the first novel, 'Halcyon Drift'; my review of the second, 'Rhapsody in Black' was rather shorter; but by the time I'd read and digested the third, I was already part-way through the fourth and realised that this wasn't going to work.

The thing is that, from our modern perspective of doorstop-sized novels, each of the 'Hooded Swan' novels can now be seen as comparatively short excursions into Stableford's imagined universe; and as I read the later novels, where the characters and world-setting were increasingly developed, I began to see each novel as being very heavily connected to the earlier ones. Characters - the central character, the star-pilot Grainger in particular - would make frequent reference, either in conversation or in his own internal dialogue, to events and personalities of the earlier novels, in such a way as to make those novels integral parts of the same story. And this shouldn't come as a surprise. Stableford wrote these six novels over a period of three years, to meet the deadlines of a publishing industry where the mass-market paperback was replacing the pulp magazine as the primary medium of published science fiction, and where publishers wanted a ready supply of product.

That's not to say that the 'Hooded Swan' novels are pulp novels, churned out on a production line for easy consumption and rapid disposal, though it may have seemed a bit like it at the time to their author. But there's more going on under the surface. Brian Stableford was a science graduate and a well-rounded product of Britain's post-war liberal education system, which allowed him to veer between the hard and soft sciences and change direction, all the time finding new areas of interest to explore.

This is reflected in the 'Hooded Swan' books. There is no shortage of technobabble in them; indeed, the cosmology and the physics of Stableford's faster-than-light starships and the continuum they fly through is probably unrelated to any other ideas in either science or science fiction, and the reader finishes the last book no clearer about what makes his spaceships go very fast than when they started. But this doesn't really matter, because Stableford's scientific discourse is on a different level, bringing in areas of biology and other soft sciences to challenge the reader.

The rest of Stableford's galaxy is resolutely 1970s. Indeed, the turns of phrase he puts into the mouths of Grainger and the other characters are staight out of colloquial British English of the 1960s and 1970s, which given that he had sold the books to Donald Wollheim in the USA probably seemed as alien to readers in America as colloquial American English seemed to British readers in the same years!

Grainger, his central character, goes through his own arc of development across the six novels. 'Halcyon Drift' opens with him stranded on an uninhabited, un-named world after a crash of their two-man ship which left his engineer dead and him marooned. He has no-one to talk to for two years but the wind; at some point in that time, the wind begins to talk back to him. This is an alien mind parasite who takes up Grainger as a host; their relationship, never either clear nor easy, evolves into a sort of co-existence until, in the final novel, 'Swan Song', it reaches an ending of sorts. The relationship is never a traditional, pulp SF one of "alien mind control", but rather a study of two consciousnesses finding an accommodation with each other; certainly, the alien (who Grainger refers to as "the wind" throughout, a nice touch) inherits much of Grainger's sardonicism.

Stableford's aliens are not characters in funny hats, but rather properly different and sometimes hard to understand in their motivations and objectives, though Grainger counts some aliens amongst his few friends. Only the first and last novels are about starflight; the middle four are more planetary romances, with Grainger and others from his crew thrust into puzzling situations that they have to think themselves out of. Perhaps the other major character in all six novels is Grainger's employer, Titus Charlot (though I did have difficulty not reading his surname as 'Chariot' throughout). He starts out as the archetypal Nasty Boss, and although he remains the Nasty Boss in Grainger's eyes, nonetheless he goes through his own arc of development in the course of the stories. We also see Grainger experiencing this and understanding the character better, even if not liking him any more.

All in all, a surprisingly enjoyable read. I started out by thinking that, as an omnibus of six novels, I could choose to put it down at some suitable point and pick it up again later on; but I became so engaged with Grainger, his crew, and the situations he was thrust into, normally through little fault of his own, that I found myself contantly wanting to get on to the next novel, and then to see the whole thing through to its conclusion. This omnibus was published by a now-defunct UK small publishing house, Big Engine; it would be nice to think that some other publisher might pick the rights up for a new edition of this omnibus, because the stories deserve it.

see http://www.sfsite.com/10a/sw137.htm ( )