The Warriors of the Day. James Blish (Lancer, 60¢). Stealer of Souls and Stormbringer. Michael Moorcock (Lancer, 60¢)

What is James Blish doing writing a book like The Warriors of Day ? Mr. Blish is a writer of excellent qualities: intelligence, logic, complexity, precision, wide knowledge, intellectual rigor (and vigor) and a natural preference for exact and telling detail. Warriors of Day is a bastard sword-and-sorcery cum science fiction novel which resembles nothing so much as a mulligan stew (a little bit of everything with explanations thrown in mostly ex post facto) and it provides a beautiful display of all of Mr. Blish's defects. Swashbuckling demands a certain suspension of the critical sense and an inability to make exact comparisons, neither of which qualities Mr. Blish can acquire any more than he can cut off his own head. He is a speculative realist trying to write a romantic novel; he cannot write it and he will not give it up, so he goes on and on, clashing gears and grinding (my) teeth. Let me give an example. When the hero, early in the story, walks from earth into another world – in a sub-arctic forest – at night – Mr. Blish conveys the strangeness of this experience by comparing it to a sudden passage from the Kodiak forest path to – Times Square. This is a good, functional comparison and it is absolutely anti-evocative. It is dead wrong. And the man does it again. And again. Flowers in the strange world look like daisies but are “cornflower blue” with an undertone of “electric green.” A beast resembles something “in the Berlin zoo.” The motionlessness of a forest “could have been measured with a micrometer … a still photograph.” And so on. When the novel grows exotic or fantastic the style becomes unbelievably sloppy and stereotyped (“ragged men hawked portions of green liquor cupped in transparent skins”) and the word “wrong” is repeated innumerable times in a half-desperate, half-annoyed effort to create a sense of the Strangeness Of It All.

About the characterization I will only say that beyond Mr. Blish's hero you cannot go; he has no romantic insides because Mr. Blish is not able to create that sort of character, and he has no realistic insides because they would blow the rest of the book skyhigh…