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He Do the Time Police in Different Voices
A collection of Langford parodies and pastiches incorporating the whole of The Dragonhiker's Guide to Battlefield Covenant at Dune's Edge: Odyssey Two (1988, long out of print) plus some 40,000 words of additional material.
- GenresScience Fiction
224 pages, Paperback
First published April 5, 2003
37 people want to read
About the author
David Langford
200 books43 followersBritish science-fiction author, editor and critic. He publishes the newsletter Ansible.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 30, 2011
There seems to be a temptation among reviewers to go off the deep end with this book, but I shall refrain. He Do The Time Police In Different Voices is a collection of 25 style and theme parodies from science fiction, all written by David Langford, a usually funny guy who I was first introduced to via his collaboration with Brian Stableford.
I think I consumed this entire book in about four hours-- not bad considering it cost me $10, so in general it was the price of a movie, and my time was better spent. There are several pastiches in the collection that just had me laughing to tears, most notably "Outbreak," a direct parody of James White's Sector General series, and "The Last Robot Story," a send-up of Asimov that recognizes the real problem with robots. Being a serious fan of James White, I had to admit that Langford more or less accurately nailed the hanky-panky that we all knew was going on at Sector General, although the bit about Doctor Prilicla had me shuddering with horror.
"The Gutting," was a great exercise in both disgusting the reader and illustrating how pointless such activity is in modern horror novels, but the description of the character is worth the price of admission. The E.E. Smith pieces are precise and agonizingly on-target, the Lovecraft is so clever it gets away with it, and the Herbert piece brilliantly shows just how Herbert could turn five lines of dialogue into an ocean of paranoia.
And I have to admit, that's a helluva title.
I think I consumed this entire book in about four hours-- not bad considering it cost me $10, so in general it was the price of a movie, and my time was better spent. There are several pastiches in the collection that just had me laughing to tears, most notably "Outbreak," a direct parody of James White's Sector General series, and "The Last Robot Story," a send-up of Asimov that recognizes the real problem with robots. Being a serious fan of James White, I had to admit that Langford more or less accurately nailed the hanky-panky that we all knew was going on at Sector General, although the bit about Doctor Prilicla had me shuddering with horror.
"The Gutting," was a great exercise in both disgusting the reader and illustrating how pointless such activity is in modern horror novels, but the description of the character is worth the price of admission. The E.E. Smith pieces are precise and agonizingly on-target, the Lovecraft is so clever it gets away with it, and the Herbert piece brilliantly shows just how Herbert could turn five lines of dialogue into an ocean of paranoia.
And I have to admit, that's a helluva title.
May 5, 2009
I suppose I would have gotten more out of the book if I was familiar with all of the authors parodied--still, all the stories were well written and entertaining.
July 27, 2017
The Net of Babel
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews