Divide and Rule by L. Sprague de Camp
94 pages
Published 1939
Read from December 29 to December 30
Rating: ★★ out of 5
After Gold Fame Citrus, I needed something light and fun. This close to the end of the year, too, I didn't want to start something I might not finish before the ball drops -- I'm weirdly particular about making sure each year's reads stays entirely within that year. Besides, it was my last opportunity to beef up the tally for 2015.
Divide and Rule came bundled with my copy of The Sword of Rhiannon (has it really been since July that I read that one?), part of a presumably brief attempt on the part of Tor to revive the "science fiction double" circa 1990. Divide was originally published, much like de Camp's own oft-reprinted "The Gnarly Man" (read and reviewed here), in the short-lived but seemingly ahead of its time magazine Unknown. The period between the scientific romances of Wells (which shifted more and more in the direction of didactic utopias by the early 1910s) and the classic post-war pulp of the Silver Age is a blank spot in my SF history, one I'm eager to fill in. Divide, alas, rather neatly fit my desire for frivolous adventure, and offered nothing of the precocious urban fantasy of "The Gnarly Man." What could be more fun than armored knights and boastful cowboys crossing paths in the Hudson Valley, joining the Adirondack resistance to overthrow Earth's alien overlords? What could be cornier than the means with which humanity finally liberates its planet from the dastardly space-kangaroos? (Spoiler: It's fleas.) There's even a love triangle around the sole female character. The first half of the novella is the best -- it's pretty much de Camp playing around with knights and cowboys in New York -- while the remainder kind of just peters out from the lack of substance. A cute trifle, really, which may have been exactly what I wanted at this moment, but adds nothing to my picture of sci-fi's purported Golden Age.
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