elfs | He Do The Time Police in Different Voices, by David Langford

There seems to be a temptation among reviewers to go off the deep end with this book, but I shall refrain. He Do The Time Police In Different Voices is a collection of 25 style and theme parodies from science fiction, all written by David Langford, a usually funny guy who I was first introduced to via his collaboration with Brian Stableford.

I think I consumed this entire book in about four hours-- not bad considering it cost me $10, so in general it was the price of a movie, and my time was better spent. There are several pastiches in the collection that just had me in tears, most notably "Outbreak," a direct parody of James White's Sector General series, and "The Last Robot Story," a send-up of Asimov that recognizes the real problem with robots. Being a serious fan of James White, I had to admit that Langford more or less accurately nailed the hanky-panky that we all knew was going on at Sector General, although the bit about Doctor Prilicla had me shuddering with horror.

"The Gutting," was a great exercise in both disgusting the reader and illustrating how pointless such activity is in modern horror novels, but the description of the character is worth the price of admission. The E.E. Smith pieces are precise and agonizingly on-target, the Lovecraft is so clever it gets away with it, and the Herbert piece brilliantly shows just how Herbert could turn five lines of dialogue into an ocean of paranoia.

And I have to admit, that's a helluva title.