The Goddess of Ganymede

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ODD REVIEWS BY ODDCUBEOpinions on the Obscure, Off-Beat, and Outdated

The Goddess of GanymedeHello, and welcome to the column! Yup, you guessed it, everybody’s buddyOddcube here with another article about the unfortunately unremembered, as that’s whatI’m all about. Yessiree, I find cool stuff new and old that may have slipped under theradar and bring it to your attention…basically so you know what you’re missing. See?It’s kind of a public service! Aren’t you glad I’m here?This time, I’m talking about a book. Yeah, yeah, I know. Reading is square! Butwith a name like Oddcube I simply can’t cut corners! But I digress (and I do it well!)…The title of the book is

The Goddess of Ganymede

, written by some guy calledMichael Resnick. If you’re square and read, too, then you may have heard of him. Cuzwhen I looked him up on the internet I found out that he has written a whole boatload of books, has won five Hugo awards, and been nominated for several more. He’s writtenover two-hundred novels, edited tabloid newspapers and men’s magazines, and producedregular columns on horse racing and breeding collies. His wife, Carol, and his daughter,Laura, are also writers, but that’s got nothing to do with this book.Apparently, the book was first published in 1967, but I have a reprint from 1968 published by the Paperback Library. I found it one time when I took my Poor Old Mother ™ to one of the local used bookstores. It appeared to be good B-Movie cheese; completewith a watercolor cover by J. Jones of a Man with Sword Raised High protecting aScantily-Clad Chick from a Big Blue Monster (With Hoofs!) under a tree amidst grassyand rocky terrain. The tag line declares the story is a “Fantastic, barbaric adventure onJupiter in the exciting tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs”. Now who could ask for better than that? Now, for the record, I’ve read exactly one Edgar Rice Burroughs book and thatwas

A Princess of Mars

. Yes, I know there are other books in the series, I am collectingthem, but haven’t read them yet. I also have

Pellucidar

, of which I have only read the prologue. Now, I read

A Princess of Mars

and I liked it, but it seemed to me there wassome vocabulary words in there I hadn’t covered in English class, and that he was a littlelong-winded…usually in the wrong spots. But, you know what? I basically find thatabout English literature in general, and it gets worse the farther back you go. I mean, Ican read Poe, but his writing style, contemporary and trendy back in his day, is old-fashioned and kinda weird now. I usually understand what’s going on with only a littleeffort. Shakespeare I have to completely translate; might as well be a clay tablet coveredin Egyptian Hieroglyphics. So, maybe I’m just a dumb high-school drop-out. Or maybeI’m just a modern victim of pop culture, having suffered through too many action filmsand video games. And the casualty, of course, is my short atten...what was I talking

about? Oh yeah, this book I read!So, at the beginning of the book, this guy Resnick dedicates the story toBurroughs fans everywhere and “Hopes we enjoy reading this Burroughs pastiche asmuch as he enjoyed writing it.” Now, I thought a pastiche was when you took the guy’scharacter and world and wrote your own stories. Sort of an official version of fan fiction.That’s not what this is, though. I think it’s more of an homage. Whatever it is, it does agreat job, I think, of evoking the atmosphere of John Carter of Mars.You know how Burroughs likes to start off in a pseudo-biographical way saying“I put this ham radio together wrong and communicated with a man in the center of theearth,” or “I was sitting on the rocky shore minding my own business when a bottle floatsup to me, inside it is a manuscript written by some poor shmuck stuck on an island with a bunch of dinosaurs,” and… well, that sort of thing? Well, that’s how this story starts, too.So the author gets a ham radio as a gift from a well-meaning relative. But he’s notechie, and puts it together wrong. Then, one dark and stormy night, it works! But itdoesn’t work right… He’s picking up a guy who claims to be radio-ing from one of themoons around the planet Jupiter! The author, of course, listened to his story, andeventually wrote it down, and that’s the book we’re reading.So here’s the sitch: the story is set in the 60s, and NASA has three top-secret projects going on: to put a man on the moon, to put a man on Mars, and to put a man onJupiter. We were racing against the Soviets, and pressure was put on all three projects.Project Jupiter had sent two separate astronauts into space, but lost all radio contactsomewhere beyond the asteroid belt. So they decide to get someone expendable for thenext trip.They find world-traveling adventurer, Adam Thane, who jumps at the uniqueopportunity. So they shoot him into space, he loses radio contact and continues on toJupiter. He manages to land on the moon of Ganymede.Turns out that Ganymede is a habitable planetoid with breathable air andeverything. The gravity of Ganymede is lower than that of Earth, and Adam’s muscles areso strong that he is capable of certain super-human feats: most notably; his jumpingability has been magnified.While exploring the forest he crashed into, he gets followed by some dangerous beast that hides in the shadows. While eluding the beast, he loses his sense of directionand cannot find his ship. But he gets found by a very tall red man with wings, who takesour hero to the rest of his people.These red wingy people are Kroths (which is almost “Thark” backwards… I guessit is, phonetically). Adam is given to a chick named Kraala, who teaches him the standardlanguage of Ganymede. The King of the Kroths, Bular, kinda likes him and explains thatthe Kroths are about to go to war with the city of Rombus. He says to Adam, “I’ll give yaa choice, either enlist in our army, or we’ll just have to kill ya now.” Adam says, “Youmake a persuasive argument, Kingy, where do I sign up?”

It turns out that the people of Rombus look like regular human beings, except thattheir skin is golden. Adam Thane is a novelty cuz he’s the only white dude on the whole planet. Some officer is jealous of the attention he’s getting from the King and slapsKraala. Why? To tick off Adam, of course! Adam kills the officer and everyone says,“Well, nobody liked him much anyway.”Turns out that Kraala is King Bular’s daughter (and still the guy slapped her!), sothe King offers the officer’s rank to Adam, who accepts. He is now… sort of a Duke of Kroth, and a leader of its armies.So we march off to attack the city of Rombus, even though we don’t really wantto fight them, and we expect to lose. See, it turns out that these Rombus shmucks killedsome of our people, and then killed the guys we sent to negotiate peace. We got no choice but to attack.Adam Thane says, “Ok, night’s falling, we can attack under cover of darkness…”But other army guys say, “We can’t do that! There might be a God in there, we could killhim by accident, and then we’d really be in trouble!” So while the army waits for dawn,Adam decides to sneak into Rombus and look around.He jumps up to a balcony and enters the palace, wanders around and justHAPPENS to find the local bad-guy, Savus Vir, scheming with his lackeys. Turns out thisshmuck started the war with the Kroths so that, in the confusion, he could kill the King of Rombus, chuck the Prince in the dungeon, marry the Princess and seize the Throne! Theydon’t get much shmuckier than that! And, of course, once they discover Adam, they sicthe guards on him.Adam’s outnumbered and runs away, and just HAPPENS to find the PrincessDelisse fighting off the unwanted sexual advances of Kaz, a visiting God. The shortversion is: Delisse is the most beautiful chick he’s ever seen, so he rushes to her defenseand kills Kaz. Then they get caught by Savus Vir’s guards and Adam gets chucked intothe dungeon with the Prince, Talon Gar.Then we just sorta hang out in the dungeon for FOUR MONTHS! Apparently, thesituation wasn’t bad enough to break out and fix it. But then this guard gets thrown in andtells us that the Princess Delisse was given to Tarafolga, the King of the Gods, inreparation for the death of Kaz. Tarafolga wants to marry Delisse and that’s when Adam jumps up and says “We gotta bust outta here!” So they do.They send the guard to Kroth to tell the red wingy people what’s going on whileAdam and Prince Talon Gar go to Malthor, city of the Gods. We find out that these Godsare not really Gods. They are regular people with a Longevity Elixir so they don’t seemto get old and die like everyone else. Tarafolga, however, has the ability to mesmerize people which is probably why he’s the top falafel.Then we disguise the Prince as a Malthorian guard and, claiming that AdamThane is his prisoner, they boldly try to march right in the front door of the Temple.Unfortunately, one of Savus Vir’s lackeys is there, explaining how they had escaped from

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