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Found Jamieson!

M

Mithras

SOC-14 1K
AE van Vogt; The War Against the Rull.

"Man has conquered space and spread throughout the galaxy. Many civilisations on several thousand planets are joined in a vast confederation ...

Story opens on a 'skyraft' that has baled out of a crashing starship, Trevor Jamieson is dangling from it while his foe threatens to knock him down into the jungles of Eristan II below.

And the 'adventure' begins with Jamieson stuck in those harsh jungles hunted by monstrous beasts (bit like the killers in Avatar), a cross-world trek that just resembles one of those early Marc Miller scenarios like Mission on Mithril, Bright Face, Marooned Alone etc.

Written 1969 its certainly Marc's era. I feel like I'm reading a book which 'sparked' an idea. I know though, that these ideas need to snowball ... this book is probably just a tiny part in what became Traveller. Its cool reading about the adventures of Jamieson...

Great read though!! I'm on page 30 and loving it.
 
I remember reading that back in the late 70s/ early 80s and thinking, "Air Raft!" too.

I like to read SF from that era, and make a monthly pilgrimage to a used book store about an hour's drive from here to buy a small stack of paperbacks. Many of them just scream, "Traveller!" (which is why I like them). I just picked up an old Ace double novel by A. Bertram Chandler. The hero becomes skipper of a Serpent class courier!
 
That is very cool I may have to dig some of those up. By chance do you have the title of the bertram novel?
 
"The Hard Way Up". It was less a novel than a sequence of short stories. Lt. John Grimes of the Survey Service starts off on another ship, then gets command of the courier Adder. Because he has a nose for trouble, his superiors can't decide if he's talented or a complete screw up. Each story begins with Grimes called on the carpet after a previous misadventure, with an admonishment to keep his nose clean. Of course, he finds trouble, or it finds him, in about a page and a half. Mine was packaged as a double novel with "The Road to the Rim".

I found a good Chandler bibliography here:
http://www.rimworlds.com/rimworldssummaries.htm

Naturally, I kept thinking, "This would make a great setup for a Traveller campaign!"

edit: Also, on that link, check out the rest of the Rim Worlds Concordance, including this nifty map:
http://www.rimworlds.com/rimworldsmap.htm
 
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These kind of books are very exciting to read, you never know what proto-Traveller nuggets you are going to uncover. I dug up a treasure trove full in Space Vikings (a whole Spinward Marches subsector even!) and other bits and pieces in ols novels I pick up from second hand stalls and such ...

Its a bit like SF archaeology :)
 
Oh crap, Bertram Chandler wrote about a planet called Doncaster? That's my home town in jolly old England :) Anybody got an idea which book he mentioned Doncaster, that would be a scream, reading about a Yorkshire mining and railway town as an exotic interstellar location. Cool beyond words!

Doncaster: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doncaster
 
Even tho I've read other Niven-Pournelle books long ago (Footfall*, Lucifer's Hammer), I somehow had missed out on the fact that the Mote in God's Eye was a Traveller influencer until I saw it in a post recently. Just now reading it and having fun seeing all of the mechanics, lingo, and names that made it almost copy and paste into Traveller.

*Reading inside the front jacket of my Mote in God's Eye book (brand new) the list of books by Niven & Pournelle had a book called "Football". :D
 
Doncaster was the setting of the short story "The Subtractor" in "The Hard Way Up" collection. The big draw of the planet is its university. Doncaster is near non-human empires, and a multi-species political party is growing, which some more martial elements think naive and even dangerous.
 
Chandler is one of my absolute favorite Traveller-influencing writers. Even if all the mundane's think I'm talking about a mystery author when I bring him up in conversation.
 
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