The Broken Cycle (John Grimes, #4) by A. Bertram Chandler

The Broken Cycle (John Grimes, #4) Reviews

• 
  Tentatively, Convenience

  review of
  A. Bertram Chandler's The Broken Cycle
  by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - April 26, 2023
  
  I tend to be reading several bks around the same time. There're usually at least 2 or 3 sitting on or near my bed. For a time, I had one sitting near my front door that I'd take outside to read in warm weather. Then there're the ones that're small enuf to fit in my pocket for when I go on a walk & stop to read on a bench or whatnot. Fascinating, right? NOT (probably). I picked this one to read b/c the other bks I was reading at the time weren't small enuf for my pocket.
  
  I like Chandler, I've read & reviewed at least 25 of his bks prior to this one. He's in my canon of favorite SF writers. I don't exactly find his work profound but I always find it entertaining & worldly-wise. They seem to've been written mostly in a serial-like fashion but I've just read them pell-mell & I don't seem to've suffered a mental breakdown as a result. Looking online to try to make sense of the order in wch the John Grimes bks might be most linearly readable I get confused. On the "Book Series in Order" website, where the people obviously understand what's going on better than I do, I find the Grimes stories divided into 4 categories: "Commander Grimes Books", "Grimes in the Rim World Books", "Grimes in Federation Service Books", & "John Grimes Saga Books".
  
  Publication Order of Commander Grimes Books
  
  Rendezvous on a Lost World
  (1961)
  
  The Rim of Space
  (1961)
  
  The Ship from Outside
  (1963)
  
  The Deep Reaches of Space
  (1967)
  
  Catch the Star Winds
  (1969)
  
  The Far Traveler
  (1977)
  
  To Keep the Ship
  (1978)
  
  Matilda's Stepchildren
  (1979)
  
  Star Loot
  (1980)
  
  The Anarch Lords
  (1981)
  
  The Wild Ones
  (1984)
  
  The Last Amazon
  (1984)
  
  Tramp Captain
  (1990)
  
  Lieutenant Of The Survey Service
  (2000)
  
  Survey Captain
  (2002)
  
  Rim Runner
  (2004)
  
  Reserve Commodore
  (2004)
  
  
  Publication Order of Grimes in the Rim World Books
  
  Into the Alternate Universe
  (1964)
  
  Contraband from Otherspace
  (1967)
  
  The Rim Gods
  (1968)
  
  The Dark Dimensions
  (1971)
  
  Gateway to Never
  (1972)
  
  The Way Back
  (1978)
  
  
  Publication Order of Grimes in Federation Service Books
  
  The Road To The Rim
  (1967)
  
  False Fatherland / Spartan Planet
  (1968)
  
  To Prime the Pump
  (1971)
  
  The Inheritors
  (1972)
  
  The Big Black Mark
  (1975)
  
  The Broken Cycle
  (1975)
  
  Star Courier
  (1977)
  
  
  Publication Order of John Grimes Saga Books
  
  To the Galactic Rim
  (2011)
  
  First Command
  (2011)
  
  Galactic Courier
  (2011)
  
  Ride the Star Winds
  (2012)
  
  Upon a Sea of Stars
  (2014)
  
  If I were to try to organize them all together, a daunting task for me, I'd probably just try to have them all lumped in one sequence. Anyway, I've gotten into this b/c I wanted to figure out what bk preceeded this & what follows it. It appears that The Big Black Mark (I reviewed that on June 18, 2016:
  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3... ) preceded it & that Star Courier (I appear to've not read this one yet) followed. The point is that while I was reading it things were familiar but I didn't really remember the specifics.
  
  Chandler, having been a ship's captain in his non-fiction-writer life, often has his Grimes character called something like 'the Horatio Hornblower of sci-fi'. That's fair enuf, I suppose. Hence, don't be surprised (or even a little ruffled) when I call this a swashbuckling adventure. Fairly early on, Grimes & his work companion start to enter a spaceship only to have it blow to smaller bits than smithereens - a fate that shd've included them but that instead drove them into a different time & space, stranding them in parts & time unknown.
  
  "Aboard the ship, for many, many months, the miniaturized Carlotti receiver had been waiting patiently for the signal that, owing to some infinitesimal shifting of frequencies, had never come. The fuse had been wrongly set, perhaps, or some vibration had jarred it from its original setting, quite possibly the shock initiated by the explosion of either of the two warning bombs. And now here was a wide-band transmitter at very close range.
  
  "Circuits came alive, a hammer fell on a detonator, which exploded, in its turn exploding the driving charge. One sub-critical mass of fissionable material was impelled to contact with another sub-critical mass, with the inevitable result." - p 39
  
  What wd you do in such a circumstance?! Why, head for whatever signal you cd pick up in hope of rescue, of course.
  
  "At intervals of exactly twenty-three minutes and fourteen seconds the signal continued to come through. It was the same message every time, the same words spoken in the same high-pitched, unhuman voice. Dizzard waling torpet droo. Waling torpet, waling droo. Tarfelet, tarfelet, tarfelet.. It was no language either or them knew, or, even, knew about." - p 55
  
  They land on an unknown planet.
  
  "He strained his eyes to try to catch some glimpse of human or humanoid or even unhuman figures on the ground. But there was nobody. The whole planet seemed to be no more than a great, fully automated factory, running untended, manufacturing the Odd Gods of the galaxy alone knew what." - p 78
  
  Probably cell-phones.
  
  Well, if you don't watch out, the next thing you know you'll be inside an alien.
  
  ""Panzen."
  
  ""Are you . . . invisible?"
  
  ""No.."
  
  ""Then where are you?"
  
  ""Here."
  
  "Grimes neither believed or disbelived in ghosts. And there was something remarkably unghostlike about that voice, "Where the hell is here?" he demanded irritably.
  
  ""Where I am." And then, with more than a touch of condescension, "You are inside me."" - p 81
  
  Well, what's going to happen next?!
  
  "They took inventory. With one exception, the life support systems were untamperd with. That exception was glaringly obvious. Whatever had taken off their helmets had also uncoupled and removed the air bottles, and there were no spare air bottles in their usual stowage in the storeroom. The pistols and ammunition were missing from the armory, and most of the tools from the workshop. The books were gone from their lockers in the control cabin." - p 100
  
  That's a fine fettle of a pickle kettle!
  
  'Inevitably', I think of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five.
  
  "["]Suppose we're taken to a zoo, somewhere . . . Can't you imagine it, John? A barren planet, metal everywhere, and a cage inside a transparent dome with ourselves confined in it, and all sorts of things—things on wheels and things on tracks and things with their built-in ground effect motors—coming from near and far to gawk at us . . . 'Oh, look at the way they eat! They don't plug thmselves in to the nearest wall socket like we do!' 'Oh, look at the way they get around! Why don't they have rotor blades like us?' 'Is that the way they make their replacements? But they've finished doing it and I can't see any little ones yet . . .' "" - pp 106-107
  
  Yes, Grimes's companion, Una, is a woman. She was protected against fertility for awhile but that wore off.
  
  ""Keep away, you fool!" Then her manner softened, but only slightly. "If you must know—and you must—I'm a re-entry in the Fertility Stakes. From now on, lover boy, no more fun and games. We got to bed to sleep. And we don't sleep together, either."" - pp 124-125
  
  Haven't these people ever heard of oral & anal sex?!
  
  Anyway, you get the idea.. or AN idea. This was fun to read but I forgot about it almost immediately after finishing it.
• 
  Megan

  Yikes these books are bad. Grimes is the worst main character ever, he only thinks about himself and what he wants. He is constantly thinking about sex, especially when there is a female character close by. The whole plot of this book revolved around Grimes being marooned in space with a policewoman. I was hoping that because Una was a policewoman, she would have been a better character than all the previous female characters. Ha, no such luck, she's just as dumb as all the others. There are a few scenes of attempted rape, on both sides, that were not necessary for the story and helped ruin the book. It would be really nice if any of the stories about John Grimes would involve something other than him trying to chase after women. 2 out of 5 stars.
• 
  Brian

  So bad it was almost good.
  
  
  Almost.
• 
  David

  The John Grimes novels were among the more entertaining of the sci-fi series that many authors churned out in the 80s. I remember they ranged from being so-so to very good, with lots of gratuitous sex, weird aliens, and violent space battles. I have vague memories of this novel being one of Chandler's weirder ones, like something someone on drugs would come up with, but it was still a fun read.
• 
  Karen-Leigh

  John Grimes is in between ships and sent on a salvage operation which blows up in his face sending him and a female companion into another universe where they are captured by a winged centaur machine god who sets them up in a Garden of Eden to be fruitful and multiply but Grimes pisses him off and they are sent back to their own universe and end up on an abandoned planet awaiting rescue.
• 
  Norman Howe

  The young John Grimes finds himself in trouble with a young woman. As usual.
• 
  Heather

  Annoying robots and a self entitled pr*ck of a main character. Why can't I stop reading these?
• 
  Brenda

  Science fiction retelling of the Garden of Eden, kind of, but it was enjoyable.