Like I mentioned in my reviews of Ensign Flandry and The Onion Girl, my interests in gaming, together with interests in science fiction and fantasy have led me to reading some older works and getting more of a sense for where my favorite genres have been in the past.I first learned about The Winds of Gath from a post by Mythic Mountains RPG about what they’d do differently as a new Classic Traveller Referee. From there I also saw references to a post by Rocky Mountain Navy Gamer about how many concepts from the Dumarest Saga show up in Traveller. And the Dumarest Saga does show up on the Traveller Wiki’s Recommended Reading List.It took me a while trying to track down whether I could get a copy of The Winds of Gath through interlibrary loan or Overdrive or track it down through second-hand book store trips, but eventually I just picked up the current ebook edition from Gateway Essentials.The Winds of Gath was originally published in 1967, and is the first book in E.C. Tubbs’s 33-volume Dumarest Saga, which saw its final entry in 2008, just two years before Tubbs’s death in 2010.The thoughts section will have some spoilers for the story.PremiseThe premise of The Winds of Gath is that Earl Dumarest, a penniless space traveller has found himself on the planet Gath, and wants to find a way off the planet to continue his search for a way back to his home planet. From there, he gets ensnared into plots and intrigue of space nobles.ThoughtsOne thing that I’m always caught off-guard by when I read older science fiction is how snappy the pacing is. It’s a refreshing change of pace from slower stories, but the slower and more languid pacing in modern stories leaves more room for characters and situations to develop. Two different ways of going about it, but both get the work done.The world has some pieces that are weirdly progressive for the 1960s, like the Matriarchs of Kund having control over multiple star systems, though their rules about which pieces of life the Matriarchs must eschew do reveal some aged ideas about the exact nature of femininity. There was also a section where a space prince is pensive about whether the blood sport he is sponsoring will be gruesome enough to get the noble woman he wants to pursue turned on enough to accept his advances. And then he drugs and kidnaps her instead. Plots from the 60s are weird.Dumarest is really mostly the Every Man protagonist who has this gruff but mostly blank personality, sort of like a Sam Spade in Space. He’s great at things, but like not so great that you can’t relate. Especially as you get to the point that his travels are all about finding clues to find his way back home to Earth, which at this point in the far future is mostly forgotten.The story definitely has spots where it shows its age, but Tubbs’s snappy writing and the way the sort of episodic structure of this works has me wanting to read more of the Dumarest books. I want to see if he finds his way home. Also, the way this episode just ends isn’t really a cliffhanger in this story but definitely leaves you with a “but what happens next” vibe.
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