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Zero time!
Twenty-five years before, Lucky Starr’s parents had been destroyed during a pirate raid on the Terrestrial Empire. Lucky had since brooded, awaiting a chance to avenge their deaths. Now the vermin of space once more threatened the empire’s safety and tranquility. The time for sweet vengeance was near.
Lucky was at the helm as his space ship, the Atlas, was being readied for takeoff. The Luna City exhaust pit yawned as the ship’s main rockets blasted their fury into it. Slowly and with majesty the Atlas lifted and moved upwards, its speed increasing, its mission underway. It pierced the black sky, shrinking until it was only a star among stars, and then it was gone.
“One man against the pirates of the asteroids,” Lucky’s friend, Conway, mused sadly. “Soon the ship will be a rain of molten metal,” he thought. “Lucky Starr and the Atlas are doomed!”
Review
Here we have the second of the “Lucky” Starr books. As with the first, it is neither Asimov’s best nor his worst. Although (frankly) not much better than David Starr: Space Ranger, it does have a slightly more convoluted plot and is slightly more interesting as a result.
It is, moreover, one of the few "Lucky Starr" books not to be battered beyond recognition by the astronomic discoveries of the last forty years.
Beyond that, there is little to say. Characters are not much developed beyond the point they were left at in David Starr: Space Ranger, and the action is not much more exciting or coherent. It is a competent book—worthy of television, but not entirely worthy of Isaac Asimov.
Last updated: JHJ