Things Hunting Men

Starhunters #2

by David Drake (Editor), Theodore Sturgeon (Contributor), Arthur Porges (Contributor)

So, Monkey Boys, killing helpless aliens is just good clean fun, is it? Then try This!

From the creator of Hammer's Slammers comes a great new series: STARHUNTERS. In Vol. I, Men Hunting Things, David Drake showed what it's like to have a gun in your hand and an alien in your sights. In Things Hunting Men the tables are turned on the killers from Planet Earth. This time it's the monkey boys who are on the receiving end of all that good clean "fun"...

In at the kill are Gordon R. Dickson, Robert Silverberg, Theodore Sturgeon, A. E. van Vogt, and of course, David Drake himself.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Collections

307 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1988

About the author

David Drake is an American author of science fiction and fantasy literature. A Vietnam War veteran who has worked as a lawyer, he is now one of the major authors of the military science fiction genre.

Reviews

[Peter Tillman]

DRAFT/in progress

An interesting old collection put together by David Drake, which I came across in the used bookstore yesterday. TOC & story comments, http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?5... :

• IT• (1940) • novelette by Theodore Sturgeon. 5+ stars, one of Sturgeon's best. This is the shambling monster that kills a man's dog & then the man. Drake remarks that the story "scared the hell out if me." Ayup.
• The Ruum • (1953) • short story by Arthur Porges. Pretty good story of an ancient robot specimen-collector. Not an author I recognize. 3.3 stars
• Happy Ending • (1948) • novelette by Henry Kuttner. Pulpy, dull, implausible. DNF. 1.5 stars, at best.

[Ron]

An interesting collection of authors write tales where men are the targets, not the aliens. Ellison, Sheckley, and Kuttner are just of few of the contributors. A nice contrast to Volume I: Men Hunting Things.

[Giovanni]

A thing that is not alive hunts to sate a cold, clinical curiosity; a man flees an ancient alien probe; an alien youth tracks an elusive offworld beast; an explorer must bluff an alien hunter into believing him a god; a deadly predator tries to use a passing starship as passage to new hunting grounds.

Whereas Men Hunting Things has humans as hunters of the nonhuman, this anthology reverses the roles and features human characters stalked, chased, and otherwise pursued by alien things. It's also a rather fun collection, and features some classic stories in the lot -- in particular, "It!" and "Black Destroyer" are both worth reading if nothing else for their influence on later science fiction, horror, and pulp works. On their own merits, I particularly liked "It!"'s portrayal of a coldly emotionless entity that kills without malice, and "Hunting Problem" for having the hyper-advanced alien predator basically be a Boy Scout trying to earn a merit badge. "The Ruum" and "Rough Beast" also have excellent twist endings to cap off nicely tense pursuit stories.

[Garick Cooke]

I'm giving this second entry in the Starhunters series five stars for sentimental reasons: because it contains two of my all-time favorite pieces of short fiction: "Greenface" by James H. Schmitz, and "The Hunting Ground" by David Drake himself. On re-reading "The Hunting Ground" prior to this review, it struck me again that the protagonist Lorne is left in a very precarious position. The alien predator has escaped into another dimension, and all other evidence of its presence has presumably been destroyed in the church fire. So, Lorne is left on the scene with a lot of dead bodies as the police close in. I wish Drake had written a sequel.

Also quite good is Theodore Sturgeon's leadoff story "It." And "The Ruum" by Arthur Porges and "Black Destroyer" by A. E. Van Vogt are considered classics. That's at least five good-to-great stories in one anthology, which is considerably better than average, IMO.