Escape from Loki

I've read tons tons tons of Doc Savage books, but this one is different. In the best of ways. How many times do you really need to see Doc blast into a room with six guys and beat them up? I've read it many, many times, so why bother recreating the same stories right out of 1939? Here is a sixteen year old Doc Savage, set in a viseral World War I, with great fun and adventure, lots of flying and narrow escapes, and even a simple recipe for making a seismograph. Great stuff. But there are a hundred books about Clark Savage Jr.'s strengths. Here, he's a kid, so we see Farmer examine his weaknesses. He's got lots of strengths, but in anyone our flaws are more interesting, more fun, more fascinating. Philip Jose Farmer is one of the last great science fiction authors. Back in the 70's sci-fi was spit on and degraded by critics. Philip Jose Farmer is right up there with Heinlein, Clark, Asimov, Lem. But I like the fan boy in him. You see that in "Escape From Loki," which was a real prison for hardcases in World War I, a salt mine. Farmer gives it a great villain, right up there with Doc's best, as well as a possible biological weapon. There's a seductress, too. (!)

In this well-crafted novel, Philip Jose Farmer, best known for his Riverworld novels, chronicles the earliest known adventure of 1930s and '40s pulp hero Doc Savage. Young Clark Savage, shot down while balloon-busting over WWII Germany, finds himself a captive in Camp Loki, a prison camp specially designed for incouragible escapees. Doc pits his super abilities against Camp Loki's commandant, the wiley Baron von Hessel, a complex, nihilistic creature who ranks high on the list of Doc's most undaunting foes. The novel provides insight into Doc's motives for his later life of crime-fighting, made more intense by Farmer's ingenious weaving of disguised characters from other works of popular literature. Farmer, who once wrote fictional biographies of Doc Savage and Tarzan, was well qualified to pen this prequel which stands on firm ground with the original Doc Savage series by Kenneth Robeson.