Talents, Incorporated: A Free Book review

Talents, Incorporated (available here as a free audiobook) by Murray Leinster opens with a planet, Kandar, preparing to be conquered: burning sensitive documents, trying to get people out of the area who would be tortured to death by the conquerors, that sort of thing. The Kandarian fleet is going to meet the incoming Mekinese armada and be destroyed.

Then a space yacht pops in, run by a stout gentleman named Morgan and his daughter Gwenlyn, who own Talents, Incorporated--a company that specializes in providing information and services that anyone else would consider impossible. They are there to enable Kandar to defeat the Mekinese Empire. They'll do so largely by providing advance information and the basis for technological advances, almost always accompanied by the phrase, "That's Talents, Incorporated information. You can depend on it!"

The Talents of Talents, Incorporated are normal people with some peculiarity--lightning calculation, lie detection, and so forth. Some are psionic or divinatory, which I admit I don't care for: there is a dowser, for example. However, the story focuses more on Captain Bors, Morgan, and Gwenlyn, and the annoying bits are largely forgetable.

What does Morgan want? Not money, evidently, and while he does collect medals, that seems too small a motive for overthrowing a stellar empire. You eventually find out what his angle is, but not before Captain Bors of the Kandarian Navy discovers how bothersome it is to destroy an armada that was supposed to destroy you. Sometimes the only solution, as Bron Hoddan discovered in The Pirates of Ersatz, is piracy.

While I didn't care for this quite as much as for The Pirates of Ersatz, it has a quirky charm of its own that I found irresistible. You'll enjoy it, too.

That's Talents, Incorporated information. You can depend on it!

Talents, Incorporated:

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Pirates of Ersatz: a Free Book review

The Pirates of Ersatz (available here as a free audiobook) by Murray Leinster, is the story of Bron Hoddan, who intends "in order (a) to achieve splendid things as an electronic engineer, (b) to grow satisfactorily rich, (c) to marry a delightful girl, and (d) end his life a great man."

It doesn't help that his family is a bunch of space pirates. It also doesn't help that Walden, the most civilized planet in the galaxy, doesn't really want an electrical engineer with new ideas, no matter how useful. So he soon finds himself locked away for improving some local equipment (or creating a death ray, depending on who you believe). Perhaps he should try the other end of the scale--a planet like Darth, run by rival warlords with relatively primitive technology. Warlords like Don Loris ("who was prince of this and baron of that and so on"), who has a scheme to take over the planet. He also has a beautiful, willful, and...well, maybe occasionally homicidal daughter named Fani.

As Bron goes from pickle to bigger pickle to Death Dill, he begins to respect the advice and wisdom of his grandfather, and he also keeps finding that people's preconceptions lock them into failure. Will he somehow overcome his own and avoid the same fate?

This story has a number of great quotes:

"It's no use!" it was the custom of his grandfather to say. "There's not a bit o' use in having brains! All they do is get you into trouble! A lucky idiot's ten times better off than a brainy man with a jinx on him! A smart man starts thinkin', and he thinks himself into a jail cell if his luck is bad, and good luck's wasted on him because it ain't reasonable and he don't believe in it when it happens! It's taken me a lifetime to keep my brains from ruinin' me! No, sir! I hope none o' my descendants inherit my brains! I pity 'em if they do!"

"Government, in the local or planetary sense of the word, is an organization for the suppression of adventure. Taxes are, in part, the insurance premiums one pays for protection against the unpredictable." (That kind of reasoning should sound familiar these days!)

The economics presented here is nonsense--so's a lot of the story, really--but it's a good yarn and extremely fun. I'll definitely come back to it later--probably several times.

Once again, that's The Pirates of Ersatz:

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Free audiobook