George H. Smith (fiction author)

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George H. Smith (1922-1996) was an American science fiction author. He is not to be confused with George H. Smith, a libertarian writer, or George O. Smith, another science fiction writer.

[edit] Works

• Kar Kaballa (1969)
• The Second War of the Worlds (1976)
• The Island Snatchers (1978)

'Kar Kaballa', 'The Second War of the Worlds', and 'The Island Snatchers' were published by Ace Books in the Ace Double Novel line. They are a loosely linked series, featuring a protagonist named Dylan Macbride, and set in the land of Avalon.

In Earth legend, Avalon is the place where King Arthur was taken. In Avalon, Earth is a place of legend, separated from Avalon by a dimensional gateway, and what is legend in one place is real in another.

In Kar Kaballa, Dylam Macbride, the son of a famous explorer in Avalon, attempts to warn the Empire in which he lives (broadly similar to the late-Victorian British Empire) - of an impending invasion by the Gogs. The Gogs are a nomadic race equivalent to the Mongols, living on a continent separated from Avalon by a narrow sea. They worship a deity named Kar Kaballa, who demands human sacrifice, and wishes to emerge and consume the world.

Macbride gets nowhere in his attempts, because the Empire assumes the Gogs cannot cross the sea barrier that separates the continents, and in any case, the Navy would stop them. Macbride's explanations that the sea barrier that separates the continents freezes over once every fifty years, in a cycle related to sunspot activity, that the freeze is due to happen again, giving the Gogs ready access to Avalon, and the the Navy will be powerless to stop them fall on deaf ears. Thus, the eqivavalent-Victorian culture must anachronistically contend with the invasion of a barbarian horde similar to that of Attila the Hun or Genghis Han (but armed with formidable up-to-date weapons).

Macbride must team with the lovely Clarissa McTeague, a sorceress who worships the goddess Keridwen, a naval officer, and a strange fellow who is apparently from Earth, trying to sell a new weapon called a Gatling Gun to the Imperial authorities, to attempt to stop the Gogs, and prevent Kar Kaballa from emerging from his underground lair and consuming the world.

It's a lighthearted tale, combining the "Yellow Peril" popular in old pulps, a great old one ala Lovecraft, and elements of Celtic mythology, with a strong dose of humor.

In quite a different vein is Smith's nuclear war novel Doomday Wing. It shares many plot elements with the more famous film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, but with revesed allegiances - where the film depicted a fanatic anti-Communist American general launching an attack on the Soviet Union on his own, in the Smith novel it is a fantaic Russian Communist attacking America without any authorisation.

[edit] References

• George H. Smith at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database