Dire Planet

To receive occasional emails informing you of Joel Jenkins' latest publications, pre-order discounts, and Christmas giveaways sign up for his email list at http://eepurl.com/uqKDL

Other Books by Joel Jenkins:

Dire Planet Series:

Dire Planet

Exiles of the Dire Planet

Into the Dire Planet

Strange Gods of the Dire Planet

Lost Tribes of the Dire Planet

Tales from the City of Bathos Series:

Escape from Devil’s Head

Through the Groaning Earth

The Gantlet Brother Series:

The Nuclear Suitcase

The Gantlet Brothers Greatest Hits

Gantlet Brothers: Sold Out

Damage Incorporated Series:

The Sea Witch

Denbrook Supernatural:

Devil Take the Hindmost

Children’s Books:

The Pirates of Mirror Land

Arthurian Fantasy:

Island of Lost Souls

Biography:

One Foot in My Grave: One Man’s Fight Against Cystic Fibrosis

Collections:

Weird Worlds of Joel Jenkins

Dire Planet Copyright © 2005. Joel Jenkins 

1st printing 2005. CyberPulp Press

2nd printing 2006. RageMachine Press

3rd printing 2007. PulpWork Press, New York.

4th printing 2012. PulpWork Press, New York.

ISBN 978-0-9797329-4-2

Cover illustration by Mats Minnhagen

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Introduction:

Introduction:

The promotion of this book will no doubt include the phrase “in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs”. It is both true and a kind of short-hand for customers. If you liked Burroughs’ Barsoom novels and wish there were more, then this book will please. And it does please in spades.

I’ve thought long on why that should be. It’s not a pastiche of Burroughs. You won’t find John Carter or the egg-laying Dejah Thoris here. Joel Jenkins has obviously grown up on the same books I did—tales of interplanetary romance written for the early Pulps like Blue Book and Argosy-All-Story. But it’s not pastiche.

Some may wonder at my distinction. A pastiche is by definition an author trying to copy another. It’s a fake. Like a bad Frazetta copy it shows off where the pasticher fails in the master’s shadow. I don’t as a rule like pastiches.

What is better—and Joel Jenkins has succeeded at this—is when an author takes the spirit of another and lets their own imagination, their own sensibilities, their own time and place in reality, filtered through that excitement, tell a great story. This is the difference between another tiresome Lovecraft copy and a great new Cthulhu Mythos story. One you meet with a groan of “not again!” and the other makes you so excited that you want to go back and re-read all the books in your library. “Sticks” by Karl Edward Wagner was one such story. Written in Wagner’s own voice, it is stunningly creepy, wonderfully Lovecraftian.

Dire Planet is also such a tale. Filled with daring escapes and long, spectacular punch-ups, (Garvey Dire’s battle with the Galbrans is epically entertaining. You wonder “how can they ever survive?” but you know they will and you will not feel the writer has pressed too hard on your credibility.) Dire Planet is a love-song to scientific romance. But it is also couched in our own time. There are no fainting beauties or head-smacking stupidities for plot sake.

Edgar Rice Burroughs was truly great, but his tools are not the tools of today. Joel Jenkins is a writer of 21st Century as well as a fan of the 20th. What he does here will bring a familiar smile to your face, even if you haven’t smiled it for decades.

Let’s hope he has as many sequels in him as Burroughs did.

G. W. Thomas