"E. C. Tubb - Dumarest 32 - The Return" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tubb E. C)

to the Earth, and the conspiracy to remove all clues to Earth's
location from official data banks. Earth is proscribed — a pariah
planet. Why? Herein lies the answer to those bone-headed
smartass critics who wondered why the Cyclan didn't just lay a
trail to Earth in order to find and trap Dumarest. There
obviously had to be a reason, and the critics put their feet in
their mouths by their temerity in suggesting that Tubb had
simply slipped up, or was too stupid to realize his obvious
mistake. As usual, he was way ahead of them.

But it would appear that an enlightened outlook was beyond
most critics, and it may have been their whinings and snipings
that abruptly prompted Wollheim to ask Tubb to bring the series
to a conclusion. And therein lies the rub, and considerable irony.
Originally, Tubb had never intended the search for Earth to
continue indefinitely. That came about because of commercial
considerations and editorial directives. As I conjectured in 1979,
writing in The Science Fiction Collector (No. 8), once Dumarest
reached Earth, "then arising out of the revelations that follow
will come a new quest for Dumarest, and a new cycle of
adventures (on Earth) will begin all over again." Tubb has
recently confirmed this. So that, when Wollheim asked for the
series to come to a final conclusion in a single climactic novel, he
was asking the impossible. The logical unraveling of the strands
of mystery Tubb had carefully laid out required several novels at
least. And why should he kill off his most successful character
when there was logically no need for him to do so?

Sadly, the impasse with DAW Books was never resolved, and
the subsequent illness of Wollheim in 1985, put paid to any
possibility that it might be. With the transfer of control and
power that year, Wollheim's heirs then took DAW Books into
radical new feminist directions, eschewing macho male heroes
completely. In the UK, Arrow/Legend, who had always been a
few years behind with the reprinting of the Dumarest canon, had
the perfect opportunity to continue the series when they
eventually published numbers 30 and 31 as a double volume in
1989. They could, and should, have published no. 32, and
commissioned the concluding part of the cycle, Dumarest on
Earth. That they failed to do so is as regrettable as it is
inexplicable. The suspicion has to be of editorial and/or
corporate changes, with a personal editorial agenda switch that
has so bedeviled science fiction authorship. The 32nd novel did
eventually appear in print in 1992 —but in the French language.
French critics have always been independently minded, and they
recognized the true quality of the Dumarest series. This
prompted Gerard de Villiers (Plon/ GECP Publishing) to begin
printing the entire series from number one, in 1986. Their
beautiful uniform editions were issued under the banner L
'Aventurier des Etoiles , with high quality translations by