Star Smashers
of the Galaxy Rangers

To defeat the Lortonoi, you need courage! You need fortitude! And you need cheddar cheese!

	Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers
	By Harry Harrison
	First Printing 1973

Review by Adam-Troy Castro

erry Courteney and Chuck Van Chider are two typical, all-American college students with the physiques of Greek gods and enough brains to shame the entire Manhattan Project. Rivals for the heart of lovely Sally Goodfellow, they are nevertheless steadfast partners in adventure and nuclear physics.

One fine day, tooling around their backyard laboratory, they accidentally irradiate a chunk of cheddar cheese and create cheddite, the secret of faster-than-light travel. They plan to experiment on the school 747, but before they have a chance, they and Sally are hijacked by the school janitor, Old John, who is not the shuffling, harmless black man he seemed, but the deadly and ruthless Johann Shwarzhandler, an undercover spy for the KGB. With their infinite heroic resourcefulness, they manage to seize back control of the plane, but not without accidentally activating the cheddite projector and transporting the entire plane to low orbit over the Saturnian moon Titan.

Fortunately, a few patriotic words from Sally turn John from slavering Communist bad guy to heroic good-guy American. Even more fortunately, the guys are able to rescue her from the multitentacled horrors that attack them on Titan. But when another accident with the cheddite launches the 747 deeper into interstellar space, the three intrepid heroes (and one frequently fainting female) find their greatest challenge ahead of them--for the peace-loving worlds of the galaxy are all under attack by a mysterious warmongering species known only as the Loathesome Lortonoi!

Can the three intrepid heroes (with one female around to cook) unite the intelligent races of the cosmos in the Galaxy Rangers? Can they defeat the Loathesome Lortonoi and get back to Pleasantville University in time for the big game? Will Sally ever get tired of making sandwiches? Only this book has the answer!

A good novel in camp clothing

Harry Harrison has enjoyed a long and accomplished career writing serious science fiction, but he's also indulged himself with several romps in the domain of the deliberately camp. His Bill the Galactic Hero and Stainless Steel Rat books are his best-known excursions into this mode, but the stand-alone Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers is more than just the funniest book he's ever written; it's also one of the funniest books the field of science fiction has ever produced.

As a story, the book is sheer lunacy, with our three intrepid heroes (and one never-very-helpful female) battling their way out of one cliffhanging situation after another. Along the way, Sally is frozen solid, Chuck is sold into slavery and transformed by torture into a baby-talking moron, and our heroes accidentally exterminate 95 percent of the wrong alien race. Our heroes (except for the perky Sally) are all competent in every area of human endeavor. Every alien race is either telepathic or knows English from listening to our radio broadcasts. Every principle of physics is bent beyond the breaking point. Bizarre--but internally consistent--logic is king.

As a parody, the book is even better. We've all encountered the book so bad that it becomes perversely entertaining in spite of itself. We've all also noted that such awfulness is rarely funny when done deliberately. But Harrison pulls off a minor miracle in Galaxy Rangers, by writing the entire novel is a superheated version of the gosh-wow, boy's-adventure-fiction prose of a hack SF juvenile. He makes the exposition as clumsy as possible, the dialogue as far from human speech as possible and the characterizations as flat and chauvinistic as possible--all in a manner instantly recognizable to anybody who remembers the kind of SF novel tolerable only to readers who stopped maturing at age 12. It is a splendid high-wire act, which works not only as a laugh-out-loud farce, but also as a devastating critique of the kind of writing that, for so long, gave science fiction writing a bad name. It even achieves an undeniable power in places, most notably when its most put-upon characters (Sally, for one) rebel against the assumptions that the hack formula would prefer us to make about them.

A slim novel by today's standards, Galaxy Rangers nevertheless delivers so much wackiness on a page-by-page basis that readers might despair of Harrison's ability to provide a punchline capable of topping everything that's gone before. Don't worry. Even as our intrepid heroes make it back to Earth, the book still has one last bombshell to drop--and oh boy, is it a beaut.

People lucky enough to encounter Galaxy Rangers while it was in print tend to be messianic about it. I know folks who buy up every used copy they can find. I've gone through half a dozen, and rarely get it returned. A new edition would be nice. -- Adam-Troy

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