The Hard Way Up

The John Grimes tales of A. Bertram Chandler.

I first encountered John Grimes and A. Bertram Chandler in the pages of Galaxy magazine. Our school library had a stack of back issues that included some of these tales, along with the first appearance of Frank Herbert's Dune Messiah and many other memorable tales.

But Grimes. Poor Grimes. Plying the spaceways in his flying darning needle, he always ended up in a mess. By the end of each tale he managed...more or less...to extricate himself. Equally expected to end up as the youngest person to reach flag rank, or to command a third-rate ship on the Rim of the Galaxy, the tales were a ton of fun.

Some time later, I encountered my first Grimes novel (The Big Black Mark) from DAW Books. I accumulated several, as the local drugstore stocked them (my only source of books then). When I went to college, I found several omnibus editions from Ace Books. With Chandler's eventual passing, the books went out of print, alas.

But now they are available again to a whole new generation of readers. The Science Fiction Book Club has brought out a quartet of omnibus editions, each covering a different part of the career of the spaceways own Horatio Hornblower (others have laid a claim to the title with their characters, but Chandler was first). And Baen Books, through their Webscription service, has started coming out with the tales in multiple electronic formats (more importantly, free of any crippling DRM!).

The Road to the Rim (Baen Books, ISBN 978-0-4417-3100-8. Cover artist not indicated.)

To Prime the Pump (Baen Books, ISBN 978-0-2071-1607-0. Cover artist not indicated.)

The Hard Way Up (Baen Books, ISBN 978-0-4413-1755-4. Cover artist not indicated.)

Made up of: With Good Intentions; The Subtractor; The Tin Messiah; The Sleeping Beauty; The Wandering Buoy; The Mountain Movers; What You Know.

Counts as seven entries in the 2007 Year in Shorts.

The Broken Cycle (Baen Books, ISBN 978-0-87997-496-1)

Spartan Planet (Baen Books, ISBN 978-0-4411-1555-6)

The Inheritors (Baen Books, ISBN 978-0-4413-7062-7)

The Big Black Mark (Baen Books, ISBN 978-0-879-97726-9)

The Far Traveller (Baen Books, ISBN 978-0-87997-444-2)

Star Courier (Baen Books, ISBN 978-0-87997-292-9)

To Keep the Ship (Baen Books, ISBN 978-0-87997-827-3)

Matilda's Stepchildren (Baen Books, ISBN 978-0-87997-845-7)

Star Loot (Baen Books, ISBN 978-0-87997-564-7)

The Anarch Lords (Baen Books, ISBN 978-0-87997-653-8)

The Last Amazon (Baen Books, ISBN 978-0-87997-936-2)

The Wild Ones (Baen Books, ISBN 978-0-886770-31-0)

The Way Back (Baen Books, ISBN 978-0-8799-7532-0)

Into the Alternate Universe (Baen Books, ISBN 978-0-4413-7109-9)

Contraband from Outerspace (Baen Books, ISBN 978-0-4413-7108-2)

The Gateway to Never (Baen Books, ISBN 978-0-4413-7064-1)

The Rim Gods (Baen Books, ISBN 978-0-4413-2401-7)

Alternate Orbits (Baen Books, ISBN 978-0-4411-3783-1)

The Dark Dimensions (Baen Books, ISBN 978-0-4417-2403-1)

Read in 2007...

The Road to the Rim shows us a painfully young and inexperienced John Grimes, on his way to his first assignment, still wet behind the ears. He gets involved in an incident of piracy and encounters the first bump in what should have been a smooth ride to his rank of Admiral.

The Hard Way Up is a collection of those tales that I remember so fondly from Galaxy. After a tale in which Grimes plays the part of the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, they cover the Grimes' career as a commander of a "flying darning needle", a small courier ship. Each story has Grimes and his crew encountering a new passenger that may or may not be what they claim to be. There's the cook with some extra skills and a fondness for garlic. The robot with delusions of grandeur. And then there was the time that Grimes lost a major tourist attraction.

Read in 2008...

To Prime the Pump has Grimes as a Lieutenant on a larger ship. This book takes place before The Hard Way Up (but I read it out of sequence). The ship gets a call to assist at the fabulously rich planet of El Dorado, a secretive place that does not allow the common rabble of the galaxy to approach, let alone land. It seems that they are having some reproductive problems. Some strange stuff in the book about magic and spirituality and probably, in my opinion, one of the weaker entries into the Grimes canon.

The Broken Cycle finds Grimes and a female "sky cop", Una Freeman cast into another universe when they are approaching a hijacked ship to defuse a booby-trap made out of an atomic bomb. A fair bit of sex in this one, some encounters with strange aliens and a strange god-like creature (or machine).

Read in 2010...

Spartan Planet: Grimes finds a planet of men, modeled on a distorted version of ancient Greece (Greece with high technology). Weird parallels abound between Star Trek and Lois McMaster Bujold (I was reading her novel Ethan of Athos at the same time, and it was interesting to see the similarities and differences).

The Inheritors: Grimes find a planet of almost humans. The commercial line that discovered the planet is there, looking for commercial opportunities and Drongo Kane is there, looking for...somewhat harder-edged commercial opportunities. An homage to Cordwainer Smith. Fun stuff.

Great stuff. Many thanks to the folks at Baen for bringing these back. I'm enjoying myself all over again. You think James Kirk scored a lot? Wait until you meet John Grimes!