Rim Worlds

Out past the last crowded starfields, where the galactic lens frays to a scatter of dim suns and then to nothing at all, lie the Rim Worlds — Lorn, Faraway, Ultimo, Thule, cold frontier planets hung over the intergalactic dark like ports at the edge of a black and shoreless sea. This is working-sailor space opera, the void run the way a merchant officer knows a sea lane: by watchkeeping, by manifest, by the smell of a ship gone too long between planetfalls. The man who charts it is A. Bertram Chandler, master mariner before he was a writer, and it shows in every riveted deckplate. His anchor is John Grimes — an officer of the Federation Survey Service who resigns for the Rim and climbs to Commodore of its ragtag reserve, a pipe-smoking, rule-bending Hornblower of the spaceways. Around Grimes turns a long, salt-stained body of work: the early Derek Calver voyages that opened the frontier, the young-Grimes adventures, and the later Commodore years, dozens of novels and stories written across decades and out of order. Ships ride the Mannschenn Drive, a faster-than-light rig of precessing gyroscopes that warps time itself — and out on the Rim, where reality wears thin, crews glimpse Rim Ghosts: alternate selves, doorways into parallel worlds, the uncanny leaking into an otherwise plainspoken universe. The pleasure here is brisk and unpretentious, adventure told at a sailor's clip, shadowed by the genuine melancholy of the edge of everything. Newcomers do best entering Grimes's story at the beginning of his life, in The Road to the Rim, though the saga first reached print with The Rim of Space. Either way, ship aboard and mind the dark to starboard.