Barnum System Series #2-#5 by Ron Goulart
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Overview: Ron Goulart was a historian of pop culture and a speculative fiction author. He was born January 13, 1933 in Berkeley, California, and passed from this plane of existence on January 14, 2022, one day after his 89th birthday.
He published about 35 short stories in the magazine Fantasy and Science Fiction before the publication of his first SF novel, The Sword Swallower (1968), which features the Chameleon Corps of Shapeshifting agents. The book – like much of his ensuing work – is set in a vast Space-Opera arena known as Barnum System universe; urbanized, helter-skelter, crazed and balkanized, the planets of this system, where the Corps originates and operates, are populated in large part by traditional comic stereotypes.
Genre: Fiction » Sci-Fi/Fantasy
02 Clockwork’s Pirates
They came howling out of the darkness, firing pistols, swinging cutlasses. Reeking of steam, and with machine oil splashing from their joints, the robot raiders sacked the ship.
John Wesley Sand was thrown overboard along with the captain. The governor’s daughter was abducted for ransom. And then, despite wizards and sorcerers, the pirates reneged on the deal and packed her off to the slave markets.
What’s wrong with this story? Everything, you say? Nay, not on this planet. Here nothing is illegal except—robots…..
03 Shaggy Planet
When a secret agent disappears in the most backward and fouled up territory of the most backward planet in an entire solar system — and the government will do nothing to get him back — his wife turns to an undercover agent for help.
Murdstone if the most backward planet in the entire Barnum system, and peluda is the most backward and fouled-up territory on Murdstone. Sensible people avoid Peluda – unless they are fond of disappearing at unpredictable moments. When that happens to a Barnum secret agent, his frantic wife finds that his government will do nothing to get him back, so she turns to the notorious Mirabilis agency. And that turns loose free-lance undercover agent Peter Torres on one of the wildest chases of his career, where the bad guy keep helping him out of trouble and the good guys are out to kill him, in the funniest novel yet to come from the fertile imagination of Ron Goulart.
04 Spacehawk Inc.
Welcome to Malagra, the pesthole of the universe–your task, fix it.
In the Barnum system, Malagra was considered to be the most uninviting planet of them all. In fact, among the engineers and androids of Kip Bundy’s set, it was known as the pesthole of the universe. Which made things quite sticky when Kip’s rich uncle assigned him to Malagra to make certain top secret reforms. Because Kip was no Hercules, and this task would have balked even that nythical fixer. But then there were compensations – if you could call them that – a sex-mad photographer, a couple of lovely maidens in distress, and the ardent guerrillas on the Boy Scout Liberation Army.
When Kip Bundy’s rich uncle gives him an assignment on the uninviting planet Malagra he is unprepared for the problems he will find.
05 The Wicked Cyborg
The situation bore an alarming resemblance to the classic Gothic situation. But since it was taking place on the planet Esmeralda in the Barnum system, there were differences.
There was a disputed inheritance — an interplanetary robot-making business. There was the uncle who had taken charge, a cyborg now, fifty per cent human, fifty per cent machine, and one hundred per cent smiling deceit. There was the innocent young heir, the boy, Tad, in the clutches of this uncle and his sinister household. Even the weather was foggy and gloomy, and Tad could find no friend to help him from what seemed certain doom.
That is until he stumbled upon the wreckage of the family’s greatest engineering triumph, the super-robot Electro. With nothing better to do, he secretly repaired it. And then, once Electro was on his feet and ticking electronically away, wicked cyborg uncle — watch out!
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