Thursday Review: ADVENTURE CONSTANT by Jon Mollison

ADVENTURE CONSTANT: A Tale of the Planetary Romantic, by Jon Mollison

The explanation of the title of this exuberant adventure comes about three-fourths of the way into the book, and is so original and droll—well, and so outlandish—that when I came to it I laughed out loud. By that point, our hero, Jack Dashing, has been in, oh, a half-dozen fights, several chases, a couple rescues, and put a roomful of pompous asses in their place…always acquitting himself honorably and well.

The action begins early, the minute Dashing, a NASA astronaut, finds himself shifted into this parallel Earth as the result of an experimental FTL spacecraft not operating as expected. He is immediately caught up in international intrigue in a mission to rescue beautiful Princess Okanamokoa from the  nefarious agents of the Red Collective, and along with that to find the ambiguous Dr. Abduraxus, the only man who could understand how he came to be here and might get back home. The pace continues throughout the book, which I guesstimate at about 70,000 words, and the conflicts are varied and interesting. It might be easier and less spoilerific to list what it does not have. No vampires; no werewolves; no airplane dogfights. That’s all I can think of offhand.

The characters are colorful and memorable, if not particularly deep: good guys are honorable and sympathetic and you care what happens to them, bad guys are despicable and you're pleased when they get what's coming to them. But I didn't note any agonizing moral choices to be made that would reveal and develop them.

But this book is more about action and adventure and the panoramic setting of Mollison's parallel Earth: a globe divided into the Red Collective, the Shogunate of the Red Dawn, the Machine Empire of Europe, the Allied States, the Hashishim Moonies, and undoubtedly more not yet mentioned (hopefully there will be sequels). The world’s history resembles our own just enough to be vaguely familiar, but as if it had been conceived by a Martian counterpart of Edgar Rice Burroughs creating a setting for tales of exotic derring-do on the Blue Planet.

And that’s the whole idea, of course: Jon Mollison is one of the pulp revolution’s most enthusiastic participants, and hits his stride in this one. ADVENTURE CONSTANT only begins to sample the possibilities of this world, and while it wraps up the story by the book’s end, it still leaves enough characters with mysteries unrevealed that I’m eager for a sequel.