Review - Berserker by Fred Saberhagen

Berserker is a collection of short stories, the beginning of a saga featuring the titular entities: one of the greatest inventions in science fiction.

Here is how the first story begins:

The machine was a vast fortress, containing no life, set by its long-dead masters to destroy anything that lived. It and many others like it were the inheritance of Earth from some war fought between unknown interstellar empires, in some time that could hardly be connected with any Earthly calendar.
One such machine could hang over a planet colonized by men and in two days pound the surface into a lifeless cloud of dust and steam, a hundred miles deep. This particular one had done just that.
It used no predictable tactics in its dedicated, unconscious war against life. The ancient, unknown gamesmen had built it as a random factor, to be loosed in the enemy's territory to do what damage it might. Men thought its plan of battle was chosen by the random disintegrations of atoms in a block of some long-lived isotope buried deep inside it, and so was not even in theory predictable by opposing brains, human or electronic.

This is probably my favourite collection of science fiction, due to the variety of the stories. The first one is classic puzzle-solving s-f: the protagonist has forced the berserker into a precarious stalemate, and must resist the berserker's mind-beam long enough for reinforcements to arrive by developing a system to trick it--which features his pet monkey (who reminded me of Leinster's Murgatroyd) and an ingenious "programming" solution. A solid story, of a kind that doesn't often get written anymore.

The rest of the stories are nothing like this one; some skew towards space opera, others adventure, horror, fantasy, and even humour; some stories share characters (which lends to the book more continuity then the short introductions to them, written for the book edition), others are stand-alone. This approach may turn off some people, but all of them are great and the variety gives the book an additional, almost mythical depth rarely found in science fiction, even when it is explicitly inspired or emulates mythology.

Consider the excerpt above, describing the berserker; it is the closest thing to an absolutely evil entity, a destroyer of worlds, unequivocally against life but at the same time random and created by unknown beings--it represents anything from death and hate to a cold, indifferent universe and chaos; the berserkers are much like the fomor, or the giants, or the titans; and the stories when read in sequence feel like folklore of the future.

Highly recommend it, and its author, Fred Saberhagen, criminally under-appreciated these days.

Review - The Legion of Space by Jack Williamson

 One of the first, if not the first science-fiction novels I read, I unequivocally love this one, and if it has any flaws I fail to see them.
The novel begins with an introduction that, though largely disconnected from the rest of the novel, introduces the future world and imparts a sense of size and magnitude quite more successful than similar attempts in other novels:

“I was still falling, all right. I was in the same position—but no longer on the Earth. 
All around me was a weird plain. It was blazing with a glare of light, pitted with
thousands of craters, ringed with mountains higher than any I had ever seen. The Sun
was burning down out of a blue sky dark as midnight, and full of stars. There was
another body in the heavens, huge and greenish.
“A fantastic black machine was gliding down over those terrible mountains. It was
larger than you’d think a flying machine could be, and utterly strange. It had just hit
me with some weapon, and I was reeling back under the agony of the wound. Beside
me was a great explosion of red gas. The cloud of it poured over me, and burned my
lungs, and blotted out everything.
“It was some time before I realized that I had been on the Moon —or rather that I had
picked up the last thoughts of a man dying there. I had never had time for astronomy,
but one day I happened to see a photograph of the lunar craters—and recognized
them, and knew that the greenish crescent had been the Earth itself.
“And the shock of that discovery only increased my bewilderment. It was nearly a
year before I understood that I was developing an ability to recall the future. But that
first incident happened in the thirtieth century, in the conquest of the Moon by the
Medusae—the man whose last moments I shared was one of the human colonists they
murdered.
“The faculty improved with practise, like any other. It’s simply telepathy, I’m
convinced, carrying thought across Time and not merely through Space. Just
remember that neither Space nor Time is real; they are both just aspects of one reality.
“At first I got contact only with minds under great stress, like that of the dying
colonist. Even yet, there are difficulties—or I shouldn’t have asked you to examine
me this morning, Doctor. But I’ve managed to follow human history, pretty well,
through the next thousand years. That’s what I’ve been writing.
“The history of the future!"

 This is John Delmar talking to the narrator of the prologue, his doctor. He then goes on, giving a synopsis of the future of humanity and its expansion in space, were his descendants play an important role, up to the year 3000; there, the novel actually begins, in third person and the style you would expect in a 1930's science fiction novel--but a lot better.

Even though I like the writing  in the Lensman series, which is often held up as the finest specimen of this kind of novel, it doesn't compare to Williamson, whose prose is cleaner, livelier, and his ideas quite more wonderful.

John Star, hero of the novel, graduates from the academy of the Legion and receives  his first mission; there is a beautiful girl involved, with a deadly secret; interstellar adventure, escape from prison, survival on a hostile alien planet, interstellar war, etc. I don't want to spoil anything in the book, it's one of the finest "sense-of-wonder" adventure stories of all time. I'd even go as far as to advice you not to read the backcover if you buy it; it will be much more enjoyable this way.

As far as the sequels go, I tried the second one (the cometeers) but for some reason couldn't get past the beginning. I will definitely read them in the future when I have them all.