“Decent, Aged, Sci-Fi Pulp”
Score: 3/5

Time Mercenaries

Philip E. High

£3.52

I’m not sure how this ended up in my purchases – someone, somewhere must have mentioned it – but I got an old secondhand copy.

It’s not bad. The plot feels very similar to the Destroyermen series of books – a boat and naval crew from current-ish times travels to a very different world and has to fight. In this case it’s a Royal Navy submarine instead of a World War 2-era US destroyer, but the similarities are quite strong.

The major difference is the sheer compression of the story. Where I read 3 of the books in the Destroyermen series, this book packs the whole story into one slimmer volume.

This means the book doesn’t spend too much time on characterisation, but I don’t remember the Destroyermen series having particularly deep characters either. There are far fewer parenthetical issues in this book though.

No bad thing – it was a decent story that was quickly read.