THE READING RHEUM: STAR OF DOOM (1983)

In the early 1980s Ace Books brought out new editions of REH's Conan books, while also publishing two serials of new novels based on REH characters. Andrew J Offut wrote six paperbacks about the adventures of the Gaelic warrior Cormac MacArt, while the team of David C Smith and Richard L Tierney wrote six for Red Sonja. Technically, the Sonja here is not the version Howard created, but the one Marvel reworked into a denizen of Conan's Hyborian world, complete with brief references to the comics-character's origin. I would imagine Ace made some sort of arrangement with Marvel, though that would depend upon the nature of Marvel's contract with the Howard estate.

I recall having read two other books in the SONJA series, and found neither memorable in terms of being very good or very bad. I'd never read STAR OF DOOM, the last in the series. But it may be that Smith and Tierney were on their last legs when they reached their DOOM, for it's an appalling waste of time, even for quickie junk fiction.

It's hard to believe anyone would craft a sword-and-sorcery story with so little action. DOOM is a talkfest that spends most of its time with Sonja discussing strategies with her small cast of characters. The menace is a pale retread of the old "meteor that crashes to Earth holds alien visitor" trope but altered to accord with the magical matrix of Sonja's world. An unnamed entity within a fallen "star" is captured by a mad magician, who finds that he can leech magical power from the visitor, enough to possibly conquer the world. However, it takes the magician over ten years to gain mastery of the ET's power, during which time his sanctum is under siege by enemy soldiers. Sonja and her male comrade-in-arms Daron come up with a possible way to enlist a powerful sorcerer to root out the world-conqueror before he takes whatever fiendish plan he has in mind.

Not surprisingly, since Daron was the creation of the authors, he gets the lion's share of the drama, while Sonja is bland and unmemorable. In their world, Daron is the first man Sonja ever loves, but he's never especially appealing, so DOOM is far from a grand romance, in addition to being light on blood-curdling action. Smith and Tierney suggest that the magical figure that Sonja saw before she became a warrior-woman may have been a manifestation of her own ego, but their execution of this idea-- slightly suggested in the Marvel origin-- is mediocre. The only real point of interest in DOOM is this odd line spoken by Sonja about the futility of making war for a "noble cause."

Self-survival or greed; that's all most noble causes turn out to be.

This relates to my interpretation of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, but since I've already done a similar meditation on that subject here, there's no need to repeat my observations here.