Space Slaves

by James Rusk Jr.

From the front cover: "Beautiful women wanted as slaves on another planet."

From the back cover: "They came with a phenomenal fog: MOTHS. Marking the beautiful women. Causing chaos in the cities. ... When official agencies rebuff the truth, only science fiction believers can solve the mystery and save the victims."

220 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Dr. James Rusk, Jr. has graduate degrees in several sciences, and he brings this esoterica to bear on all his literary works. Publishers often find that highly specialized people fail at writing exciting novels. This is not the case with Dr. Rusk. He writes excitingly of exciting, even mind-blowing subjects, and does it with a literary savvy that will keep readers up very late at night.

Reviews

[Cloudy · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the biggest crock of shit I have ever read.
Some backstory: one of my hobbies is finding strange, obscure science fiction books at my local second hand bookstore. This was one of my finds: Space Slaves. The title was so bizarre and silly that I had to pick it up.
What awaited me was ~220 pages of bad grammar, spelling mistakes, sexism, weird comparisons to the enslavement of black people and hundreds of run on sentences.
The main character, John Norman; is the biggest Mary Sue/wish fulfillment character I have ever had the displeasure of meeting within the pages of a book. He's a science fiction author with a beautiful actress wife. His beautiful actress wife is branded by a large black moth. When the brand gets hotter she goes to a clinic... which turns out to be a trap for all the beautiful women who have been branded. Our bastion of knowledge, John Norman; figures out pretty smartly that aliens are involved. He works for nothing... he just figures stuff out because plot. Because he's a famous sci fi author he contacts his fan club and together this rag tag bunch of neckbeards create an army to go against the alien slavers. All these blokes kindly refer to the kidnapped women as 'the herd.' Nice.
Oh and for what reason have these women been kidnapped? Sex slaves for alien aristocrats. What else could it be?
All the characters in this book are the same. The men are all ultra smart and infallible. The women are all pathetic and stupid. They all have basic white people names. Any coloured characters only appear for one scene where John wonders why black women have been branded too.
In the end... Gary Stu's army of nerds beats the aliens with the help of the FBI. John rescues his wife. Everything is good again... until the ending where the alien moths return. Sequel bait...
When I did some research into the author James Rusk Jr... I found nearly nothing about him. He wrote one other book called 'Tug of the Dwarf Star.' He was briefly suspected by the FBI to have been involved in the Patty Hearst case... that fun fact alone is more interesting than this bloody book.

[Sam · Rating 1 out of 5]

Failure is a bit too harsh but this is one of the worst books ever. When I read the first chapter, I put it down and looked out the window for a while before realizing what I was doing. This book is really bad because it's an unoriginal, yet predictable story that outright plagiarize other books. In fact, the whole concept of the book is a clear rip-off of something I don't even remember the name of...you know, that science fiction thriller, the one with the thing...I don't remember what it's called.

The book isn't even exciting, making it really boring. Plot holes and sub-plots go out of nowhere, and it has TONS of filler. I don't think we need to see all this pointless filler interfering with the story line when it in fact has 90% of filler (no joke). Also, little of what in this book makes any sense whatsoever. In addition the pacing and tone is inconsistent. There are even several brief parts poking fun at great, iconic science fiction novels. Because you know, no one ever did that before. And, despite being marketed to its target audience, the book contains swear words and violence. It also cannot seem to decide who its audience really is.

The main characters, John and Gail, are idiotic, selfish sociopaths that made villains look much more likeable and good-natured. The more insufferable of the two frequently spouts "wisdom" that contains glaring logic issues and performs pointless acts of cruelty. Even so they are still deemed heroic. The characterization is uncharismatic, and John leaves his girlfriend who is named Gail behind to her fate, somehow "forgot". I mean, how can someone have a memory THAT bad? What's worse is that John's parents are pricks and at the same time, so is John.

In one scene in the book, everybody is screaming and everything is dramatic...yet when the city realizes they're charred, and they've lost everything, all the author wrote was how they were very upset. That's it? The author must show, not tell. The book gave great emphasis to explaining that food and drink were provided, so as to give energy and prevent thirst. Isn't that mundane?

ABOVE ALL THAT HAS ALREADY BEEN SAID, the author has no understanding of how to partition paragraphs properly, as the book has a single paragraph for each page. ALL OF THEM. Also, many words are randomly CAPITALIZED, italicized, bold, or have "unnecessary quotation marks" and other unnecessary punctuations. In addition to this the book contains numerous spelling errors and grammatically incorrect sentences as well as redundant or repetitive sentences. There are even lots of other real spelling errors, and this error propagates to the entire book. The descriptions can only be described as very weak and absurd; the antagonistic empire is literally called "Evil Empire" and one of the villains is described as "tall and evil". The horrible writing, however, can be unintentionally funny and entertaining.

Thanks for reading this and think about it before voting.