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A small attempt to honor Fred Saberhagen and his input to my reading life.

Every now and again I remind myself that this a literary web site -- not the ongoing soap opera of my banal fascinating life as I perceive it to be.

Admitedly the last 'classic' I read was right here on LitNet--Jack London's The Sea Wolf. I wanted to read it as an adult and see if London had something to say that I did not appreciate back in the teen days. While more enjoyable then when first read one memory played me false. As a child I remembered or I thought I did some discussions of philosophy that I now realize I was mixing up with Orwell's 1984--because London does short shrift with the arguments Wolf and Humphrey are having and in that I was disappointed. Plus for all of Larsen's animal magetism he doesn't seem that overwhelming a force to be feared. Or I'm jaded from too many viewings of Swartzenegger's Terminator movies. That's a force to be feared. They should have done an Aliens vs. Terminator movie.

The Countess decides this entry is a loser and goes looking for shaving cream for a wayward catapillar. She would be the smart one. Not sure she's into science-fiction.

For all my lifelong love for Flash Gordon Sunday comics (as drawn by Mac Raboy) (NOTE: It was years before I got to read Alex Raymond's material with Ming the Merciless in all his glory) mind you my real reading is more along the lines of adventure fiction. Edgar Rice Burroughs was the predominant author, followed by Rider Haggard and Doc Savage reprints. Rafael Sabatini was my concession to historical novels. I remember a brief period when Kenneth Roberts diverted my attention from Sabatini but I quickly exhausted his output--what I could find that is. C.S. Forester's Hornblower met my needs for a series character as I love those best.

In 1979 I bought a copy of Destinies (Vol 1). It was an attempt by the publisher to put out a very thick paperback on a bi-monthly(?) basis and presented itself as a magazine in intent. I liked to have representative genres in my library and the prospect of a growing sampling of the current sci-fi authors was appealing. Basically I was treating it as a comic book collection. In the first volume I met Fred Saberhagen and his Berserkers in a short story that kept me reading for about the next five years.

Fred Saberhagen, in my very uninformed opinion, was never on the "A" list a la Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov. But I believe he deserves more recognition then he received. He had several series going on. The two I concentrated on were the Berserker and Dracula stories.

The Berserkers are robot spaceships travelling from planet to planet with just one objective. Destroy all life. In the many novels and short stories Saberhagen pits man against machine in an ever ending duel of wits and the suspense is to see how and if the characters (locales and casts change regularly as the war spans the galaxies) survive or how they cope with doom hanging over them. What appears to be a one trick pony started in 1963 and lasted up to now.

Dracula was a ten book series (11 if you count the movie adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dacula) that tells Dracula's story in several time periods. Two books involve Sherlock Holmes. The Dracula Tape was a hilarious retelling of the original novel from the Count's point of view showing how misunderstood he was and unfairly maligned. Further books dip in and out of history and protray a Dracula almost as a Highlander type trying to have a life while people he knows, loved, hated grow old and die. Any serious Dracula fans should not miss these. Personal favorite was An Old Friend of the Family.

Fred Saberhagen passed away last month at the age of 77. He wrote some 60 odd novels and numerous short stories. He entertained me in the early days of my marriage along with Adam Hall Quiller novels and I was thinking about him last night when I hit Yahoo and discovered my loss. My son has the Draculas--I confess a small plot point in the book titled Dominion offended me so I dropped him and a slightly similar one in Berserker Blue Death and I took this as a sign that the author was trying for a 'PG" almost "R" rating in that ol so competitive reading market so I wrote him off as another fallen idol and dropped him-to be honest. With that in mind I can safely recommend him with the occasional lapse in taste. But I tend to be prissy about my heroes anyhoo.

To Fred--a distinguished career. His Berserkers will live on. They weren't the first killer robots from space but they were the best imagined (and yes Trekkie--this was years before that Ultimate Weapon episode from Star Trek--I suspect ST borrowed from Saberhagen. Steal from the best is Hollywood's motto.