Book review: The Witches of Karres

The Witches of Karres is, in Wiki's words, "a space opera novel by James H. Schmitz. It deals with a young space ship captain who finds himself increasingly embroiled in wild adventures involving interdimensional alien invaders, space pirates, and magic power". The cover I show here is from Wiki; mine is the rather more boring Gollanz "masterworks" edition.

Overall, good lightweight fun with a slightly surreal feel.

I have no knowledge of JHS, and had when I read this no idea when it was written, which made for an interesting no-info reading experience. A review says, "the plot isn't really defensible", but no more so than many another such; the author happily sprays around made-up terms and names, but it all fits together more coherently than at first appears. And it is all very "light", in the sense that when bad-ish things happen, they aren't allowed to linger too long before good triumphs. Overall it is naive-ist, but so was a lot of 1960's stuff.

Apparently the book was expanded from a short story / novella, which may explain the slightly weird-in-retrospect intro: Our Hero picks up three child "witches", and yet these witches - and the planet they are from - subsequently turn out to be immensely powerful and quite able to take care of themselves.