The Hooded Swan series

The Halcyon Drift
Rhapsody in Black
by Brian Stableford

During the 1970s, Brian Stableford wrote a series of books about Star pilot Grainger and the starship The Hooded Swan. Grainger has been inhabited by a mind symbiote, whom he dislikes, but occasionally takes advice from. The Swan is the newest, fastest ship in space, and Grainger and crew are sent of on new and interesting missions in each book.

These books are enjoyable if minor mid-list SF – a type of SF that really isn’t produced these days. Until the late 1970s or early 1980s, there was a thriving market for the type of SF adventure book that could be easily read and enjoyed within a few hours. Enjoyable, fun, not great – and, importantly, in the 120-190 page range or so. Today, books in that part of the mid-list are more likely to be 350 pages than 175 pages. I don’t typically read them. This isn’t just because they are worse – often they are, as the stories would be better if told more concisely. But sometime they are as well written as the older books. But while I’m willing to invest the time it takes to read a 175-page light read, I’m not willing to invest the time to read a book of similar quality that’s two or three times as long. There is too much to read and too little time to use up my reading time that way.

In any case, The Halcyon Drift and Rhapsody in Black are the first two books in the Hooded Swan series. I hadn’t read any of these in a number of years, and, tired from moving and not wanting anything that took more energy, these were fun light reads. The first of these sets stage. Grainger is shipwrecked for two years alone on a deserted planet, where the mind symbiote inhabits him. He’s rescued but forced into what seems like lifelong debt to pay for the rescue. His one out is to become pilot of the new ship The Hooded Swan, and pilot it into a dark nebula called the Halcyon Drift to find a ship and cargo lost many decades earlier. In the second book, Grainger and crew travel to a planet where a group of religious zealots, living in an underground series of tunnels, have discovered something that could impact galactic civilization. They capture the crew, Grainger escapes, and the rest of the book follows him as he seeks to reverse the planet-wide situation.

Grainger is an interesting character – a somewhat-crotchety loner who doesn’t really like most people much, yet who is bright and things his way out of most situations. Unlike heroes in so many books, he doesn’t like guns (feeling that they are more prone to make the situation escalate into more violence than to help), and prefers using his intelligence to solve problems, not in blasting his way out.

The books are flawed, in that at times Stableford seems to forget about the symbiote except when really needed for the plot. But overall they are fun: a good way to spend an evening when you want to relax, unwind, and let your muscles and your mind rest a bit.