Not a review; more of a rumination, really...

Meteor Menace by Kenneth Robeson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A friend's older brother loved Doc Savage and loaned me a couple. That's how I was introduced to the series. I loved the covers from the start, but never really got into the stories. I tried, though. They seemed dated, back in the 70s, being about 40 years old at that point. Now they're twice as old, but somehow don't seem any more out of date. Not sure why I think that...

Every once in awhile I read another one. They're always kind of interesting, sometimes for the action, sometimes for the exotic settings, but more often because of a sense of nostalgia that hangs around the characters and the books themselves. There is also the amusement of seeing quaint science--radio-controlled airplanes and the like--treated like wonders. It's a window into 1930s imagination, and that has its rewards.

You can't expect too much from such novels. The plotting is almost always linear, with surprises that seldom surprise. Most of the time, the author(s) told the stories and recounted the action in the most straightforward way. Sometimes, the language rises above serviceable to quite nice, actually. Here is a somewhat overwritten (in the best way, as action stories should be) description of the titular blue meteor:

"It came up awfully out of the east. It might have been a thing spawned by the Andean mountain fastnesses. Only the faintest of ultramarine flushes marked its first appearance. But the balefire brightened with appalling swiftness, and there became audible the tiniest of whistling noises, which might have been the note of some distant, harpy piper. The sibilant note loudened."

I like passages like that, written in an Indiana Jones action adventure kind of way.

That's about as good as it gets, though. For a pulp novel, that's got to be enough.

This novel, like the rest, is meant to be a quick read, coming in at only about 40,000 words (since it was originally published in a magazine), but it's not exactly low-brow; the audience is men, mostly, the nerds of an earlier era, those who like adventure novels but are also interested in engines and electrical devices and Popular Mechanics-type technology. That's a near-miss for me; I'm not quite the right kind of nerd for that. That's why I still read a Doc Savage novel every couple of years and like it just enough to keep a few on my shelf and figure I'll maybe read another a couple years from now. (Some of the comics are, IMO, very entertaining. Maybe a better medium for Doc Savage stories, though I don't want to start any fights.)

Every lover of genre fiction--science fiction, fantasy, adventure--should read one or two of these popular pulp novels. Give it shot, just for grins. If you like it, you'll be glad to find there are about 180 other titles, and you can find lots of them on eBay real cheap. :)

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