Worlds Without End & The Lavender Vine of Death

by Clifford D. Simak, Don Wilcox

Armchair Fiction presents classic science fiction double novels. The first novel, “Worlds Without End” is an edge of your seat sci-fi thriller from one of the masters of the golden age of science fiction, Clifford D. Simak. Dreams can become nightmares. The Dreams Department was supposed to give people the dreams of their choice, to put them into a world of their own. But something was terribly wrong. Dreams clients were not getting what they paid for, and Norman Blaine had to find out the how and why of the mystery—before it cost him his life! The second novel, “The Lavender Vine of Death” is a wonderful interplanetary adventure. It was a monstrous creature that spiraled through the sky. It floated through the skies of the kingdom at night—and it left a wake of death in its path. What was the secret of the terrifying lavender vine, and who controlled it? Only the King, his corrupt Prime Minister, and an elfish little frog-boy knew the real truth about the vine. However, it took a courageous slave and a beautiful girl from Earth to bring these secrets to light and expose a web of interplanetary corruption that threatened even the King himself. If you love epic science fiction adventure, you’ll love this thrilling novel, penned by one of the most prolific science fiction authors of the golden age of pulp magazines, Don Wilcox.

218 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 2, 2011

About the author

"He was honored by fans with three Hugo awards and by colleagues with one Nebula award and was named the third Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) in 1977." (Wikipedia)

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford...

Reviews

[Andy Oerman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three stars if I’m being generous.

Simak is reliably entertaining but Worlds Without End never lives up to its own premise. It’s not unlike a Philip K. Dick story, with people signing up to be suspended in a dream state for centuries and various guilds vying for supremacy. But it gets lost in the politics and in a half-baked mystery without ever exploring the dream angle. And it ends very suddenly, like Simak came to the end of the original pulp’s word count.

The Wilcox story is a charming but nonsensical mix of planetary sci-fi and fantasy. There’s a feckless king on another planet and a slave from Earth who looks exactly like him. There’s a frog boy and a beautiful Earth girl
diplomat who the king’s advisor tries to kill for her jewels, which sets off a Civil War. There’s also the titular Lavender Vine of Death, which looks cool on the cover but is poorly explained. Who controls it, how, why, etc. Also, it’s called the LAVENDER Vine of Death but it’s invisible sometimes. The story is never dull but it is dumb.

Still, both stories kept me turning pages in a sometimes-Gee Whiz way.