That may be true--I don't know Aarons as well as Hamilton. As
much as
I admire Hamilton, I will admit that there's a watershed
around the year
1977, after which the Helm books changed and had lost some of
their
punch. From what I can tell, Hamilton temporarily abandoned
the Helm
series (for a period of about five years) while he worked on
his only
"blockbuster" novel, entitled THE MONA INTERCEPT (1982). It
reads more
like an Arthur Haley novel than a Hamilton, and it wasn't a
success, in
spite of some good things imbedded in the spam. He returned
to Helm in
the early middle '80s, but by now the novels had the same
sprawl that
MONA had, but they'd lost much of the tension that the early
Helm novels
had. I rarely read these post 1980 Helm novels after the
initial
read--but I return to those first dozen over and over. When
the man was
on his game, he had no equal.
-- ************************************** Robert E. Skinner, Director Xavier University of Louisiana Library 7325 Palmetto Street New Orleans, LA 70125 (504) 483-7303 (voice) (504) 485-7917 (FAX) e-mail: rskinner@mail.xula.edu ************************************** # # To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to majordomo@icomm.ca. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.vex.net/~buff/rara-avis/.