G.W. Thomas on Fred Saberhagen’s Berserkers
Ace SF blogger G.W. Thomas, working atop a demon-haunted tower in Alberta, has been digging deep into a lot of my favorite old SF paperbacks, including C. L. Moore & Henry Kuttner’s Earth’s Last Citadel, Murray Leinster’s Get Off My World!, and Space Operas You May Have Missed.
But I think my favorite recent piece was his two-part series on a writer who’s largely forgotten today: Fred Saberhagen, author of The Book of Swords, Empire of the East, and The Dracula Tape, and his most enduring creation: the galaxy-roving Berserkers. which appeared in some seventeen volumes.
[Click the images for Doomsday Machine-sized versions.]
Magazines containing early Berserker tales by Fred Saberhagen: Worlds of If,
January 1963, Worlds of Tomorrow, December 1963, and Worlds of If,
August 1967. Cover art by Schelling, Bruno, and Gray Morrow
Gary provides a better synopsis than I could:
Fred Thomas Saberhagen was thirty-three when he started selling to If. A veteran of the Korean War, he worked as an electrician for Motorola before working on writing encyclopedias and finally becoming a full time writer. His first sale was actually to Galaxy but his first important series was the Berserkers, and they were (mostly) in If. Fred would go on to write some incredible bestsellers including the Vlad series and the Swords series. But he never forgot his Berserkers.
Before all the huge novels, including one of my personal favorites, Empire of the East, Fred wrote about the killer machines that haunted the spaceways. Berserkers are robotic killers, self-replicating war weapons invented for a conflict lost aeons ago. The machines, huge stations (that may have inspired the Death Star in Star Wars) are designed to do only one thing: kill. They can destroy an entire planet. The robot servants they send out (that many feel were the inspiration for Star Trek‘s Borg) are bent on only one thing, to destroy all life.
Over the course of two lengthy articles, copiously illustrated with vintage art from the original magazine appearances, Gary surveyed many of the classic stories that laid the groundwork for the rich lore of the Berserkers.
Art for “The Winged Helmet” (Worlds of If, August 1967) by Wally Wood
Here’s a sample:
Fred set all this up in the first story, “Fortress Ship” (aka ”Without a Thought,” If, January 1963). In this story a pilot (Fred had flown planes in Korea) must devise a way to keep control of his ship when the Berserker affected his brain with its powerful brain attacks. The story is essentially a puzzle story and a very minor piece in the Berserker saga. It is the kind of story that would have appeared in Astounding (now Analog) a decade before.
Things really get going in “Goodlife” (Worlds of Tomorrow, December 1963). Here Saberhagen isn’t worried so much about a gimmick as the humanity of his characters. Goodlife is a man who has been kept alive by the Berserker since he was a small child. The machine has twisted his mind to hate humans. But his humanity is drawn to the two new captives, a man and a woman. There is still a bit of puzzle since Hemphill has to figure out how to blow up the Berserker but the power of this story is emotion not logic.
“The Winged Helmet” (If, August 1967) saw introduction of time travel into the Berserker saga. this allowed Fred to really utilize the Scandinavian origins of the word “Berserker.” As he would again in Berserker Planet, Fred’s love of heroic fantasy comes through. Who better to illustrate a Sword & Sorcery type story than Wally Wood?
Art for “The Winged Helmet” (Worlds of If, August 1967) by Wally Wood
Read both articles at Gary’s blog, Darkworlds Quarterly:
Fred Saberhagen’s Berserkers, Part I
Fred Saberhagen’s Berserkers, Part II
Our last piece on Gary was G.W. Thomas on Science Fiction of the 30s by Damon Knight.
Man. It’s weird. I really, really loved Empire of the East and enjoyed the Swords series back in the day and not once did I get the urge to pick up any of the Berserker books. It is a shame though that Saberhagen isn’t as widely known/read as he should be. Thanks for the memory jog!
Hi Pete,
I had a quick look online and found Saberhagen still has a handful of books in print, 17 long years after his death. They include;
The First and Second Book of Swords (from JSS Literary Productions, Fred’s family press)
Empire of the East (from Tor)
The Dracula Tape and sequels (from Tor)
plus a handful of later Tor fantasy titles. Sadly, the Berserker books are long out of print, but I did find Kindle versions of a few of them on Amazon.
Thanks for the article. I will have to look out for the berserker books – can’t pass up a 60’s era short story collection. I recently picked up “Berserker Planet” but it doesn’t seem to share the robot theme – we’ll see. I read a couple of the Empire of the East thanks to the mention of “Changeling Earth” in Appendix N and really enjoyed them.
I’ve always meant to some of those books but it’s hard for me to read older sci-fi cause they don’t usually hold up.
Thanks for the article I’ll have to check out Dark Worlds articles.
Wow, looking at those illustrations for “The Winged Helmet”, all I can say is that I hope Mr. Wally Wood got some royalties from James Cameron’s “Terminator” movies, never mind what they owed to Mr. Saberhagen, as well.
John, it is exceedingly great to see you on the website again. No disrespect to the other excellent Black Gate writers, but I have missed my regular “Vintage Treasures” fix. Although this post is not explicitly labeled as such, I’ll submit that it falls squarely in the same territory.
Thanks Librarius! It’s good to be missed. With the flurry of popular bloggers who joined us this year — including Neil Baker, Charles Gramlich, Jeffrey P. Talanian, David Soka, and others — something had to give, and I stepped back from my regular columns to give our newest contributors a chance to shine.
But at long last the backlog of submissions we have in backlog has started to thin out a bit, so hopefully I’ll be able to sneak in a VINTAGE TREASURE post on random Saturdays in the new year, when a slot open up. I miss doing them.