Martin J. Bird, Destoyer of Worlds (Melville House 2024)
A space fantasy in Douglas Adams style with a truly innovative plot.
The story begins with a great first line: ‘I’m not a deep enough thinker to be troubled by existential conundrums’ followed by many paragraphs of existential conundrum—narrator Rintoul son of Starveall explaining how he came to leave his home planet and became a Black Robe. It’s not always the most exciting place to start, with a bunch of backstory, but this first chapter sets the tone, letting us know that we are in for a humorous ride.
After reciting prayers, ‘a series of sounds without meaning’, and imbibing a dark red narcotic substance made from leather-bark fruit, Rintoul has a mystical vision—a prophecy?
He wears a magical ear circlet ‘communicator’ given to him by his wife Elaine as a wedding gift. Their love story is romantic. He rescues her from shipwreck; she has some kind of magical power.
Bird emulates Adams’ humorous, self-deprecating Voice, not funny ha-ha or jokey, but rather sardonic and witty. The world is vaguely mediaeval, vaguely Celtic, yet the narrative style is modern and colloquial. Rintoul exclaims ‘God’s b****x’, after his vision. His apprentice is ‘freaked’.
Often, this makes for anachronism, but in a sci-fi fantasy makes for a light, comic narrative style. Some lovely metaphors are timeless—’the thread of my thoughts whiffled into thin air’. Some lovely mash-ups: ‘in for a ring, in for a torc’; ‘a few cucumbers short of a jar of pickle’. A cute nod to Mae West: ‘Is that you, or just me thinking it’s you?’
I loved: ‘I was gradually becoming used to the idea of scary technology from other worlds’. I suspect a lot of the computer analogies were à propos, but being a self-professed technophobe, they washed over me. More savvy readers would find them funny.
To world-build without info-dumping, Bird uses the effective and entertaining device of having the narrator commenting on things to ‘you Earthlings’. His wife Elaine and her uncle are outsiders, hinting at a reason for their strange abilities, so they present a world upon which Rintoul’s is the external viewpoint. They reveal their strange abilities and their extra-Themis-estrial origin to Rintoul bit by bit, in the midst of end-of-the-world ticking time bomb suspense, which reminded me of the wacky manic science of a Doctor Who episode. It’s all the more suspenseful as the ETs themselves don’t quite understand what’s going on.
I would have appreciated more action and plot before the story of the vision, which is mostly internal monologue, to give us more time to suspend disbelief and get hooked into the world and the Protagonist. His quest or goal—saving Themis from his prophecy coming true?—could have been clearer, yet he wasn’t clear on it himself. First, we have to figure out what ‘the stone sphere’ is all about—but maybe that is a feature of the Adams-esque genre—wacky stuff happens out of the blue to people in space, and we have to work out why from comedic comments based on the (real Earth) human condition.
In the end, the conclusion is the same as in Hitchhiker’s. Life goes on, much as before, often hilariously, with or without the presence of aliens.
This review first appeared in Reedsy Discovery.
Susie Helme 
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