Entities: The Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell
NESFA marches on in its campaign to spring sf pioneer Russell's work from out-of-print limbo. This follow-up toMajor Ingredients(2000) includes five novels: the military sf classicWasp;Next of Kin, about a misfit in a space war;Sentinels from Spaceand another variation on the theme of alien invasion,Call Him Dead, that is akin to John W. Campbell's great story "Who Goes There?" and Jack Finney'sThe Body Snatchersin that it makes riveting reading out of raw, dripping paranoia; and Russell's take on Charles Fort and his annals of macabre "natural" phenomena,Sinister Barrier. Three short stories left over fromMajor Ingredientsfill out this fat book. Sometimes Russell's stuff is rather dated, and sometimes his satire hits hard enough to crack both target and the reader's patience, but the novels' length staves off the longueurs of repetition that plagued the all-short-stories previous volume.Roland GreenCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved