Eternal Frontier

by James H. Schmitz

Book Overview

Earth colonists have divided into the Swimmers and the Walkers. Cromwell, born a Swimmer but now a Walker by choice, is caught in the middle as the two sides prepare for war. Then he discovers the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743471903
• ISBN13: 9780743471909
• Release Date: February 2004
• Publisher: Baen Books
• Length: 729 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 4.2" x 6.9"

Customer Reviews

Little known but deserves to be read

I think this one dates from 1973. It is a very good crime story. It has always been obscure and difficult to find but deserves more light of day. I couldn't put this down when I read it. Recommended!

Schmitz was a master of short fiction

This is a comprehensive collection of short works, written between the 40s and the 70s (but mostly in the 40s and 50s). Unlike many of the short stories from that period, these could have been written yesterday.Even the novel included in the book is very short by today's standards, and would be considered a modern "novella".These are all non-Hub, non-Vega, non-Karres stories. Some are even not Science Fiction. But they are all great. As the co-editor Guy Gordon wrote in an earlier book, "There's just something about a Schmitz story..."This is the sixth of a seven-book reissue of all of Schmitz's work. Get it. Get two, in fact, if you even plan to loan it out. It probably won't come back to you if you let someone else get their hands on it!

An obscure Schmitz gem

This novel is one of my two favorite Schmitz titles (the other being The Demon Breed). I last read it back in the early 80's - my hometown public library had a copy, titled "The Eternal Frontier" - and have been looking for it ever since; I'm delighted to see it back in print.It's the story of a group of colonists on an unexplored world, who confront a mysterious and malevolent alien presence. My strongest memory of the book is the creeping sense of suspense the author builds throughout the novel.Unlike the huge majority of Schmitz stories, [The] Eternal Frontier is not part of the Federation of the Hub cycle, so you won't see these characters in any of his other work. Still, it's one of his very best.

Invaluable collection of obscure Schmitz stories

_Endless Frontier_ is the sixth book in Eric Flint and Guy Gordon's project to return James H. Schmitz' work to print. From my perspective this has been a successful and welcome undertaking. This book is particularly welcome, not because it is the best (it is not, not by a long shot), but because it contains some of the most obscure of Schmitz' stories. Fans of Schmitz, like me, spent much time in used book stories finding his work before the recent reprint series -- and in that way it was relatively easy to collect most of the Telzey stories, the Trigger stories, and books like _Agent of Vega_ and _The Demon Breed_. But it was much harder to find stuff like "The Ties of Earth", a long novella only published as a two-part magazine serial, or "Captives of the Thieve-Star", a novelette which prefigures in some way Schmitz' later female characters, but which was only ever published in a 1951 issue of the classic pulp Planet Stories. But _Endless Frontier_ collects all of Schmitz' short fiction that had not previously been reprinted -- including some stories from mystery magazines. It also includes Schmitz last (and by far weakest) novel, _The Endless Frontiers_. My rating for the book is based more on its appeal to its intended audience -- Schmitz fans -- than on its intrinsic merits. It's fair to say that the earlier Baen reprints gathered the bulk of his best work -- it's easy to see why some of these stories haven't seen the light of day in a while. But for those of us who have learned to love his work, this is an invaluable way to get those tantalizing few stories we haven't yet found.That said, there are some very fine pieces here. The above-mentioned longer stories, "The Ties of Earth" and "Captives of the Thieve-Star", are both very uneven, but even if they don't work completely, they have some nice bits. And among the shorter stories are some first-rate pieces. Many of these are in the section the editors have called "Dark Visions" -- Schmitz usually went for fairly conventional happy endings, but in these stories the horrific implications of some of Schmitz' ideas are fully explored. Especially good is "We Don't Want Any Trouble", a very neat SF horror story about an alien invasion. Another fine alien invasion story is "These are the Arts". Schmitz wrote some crime fiction as well, often for the SF magazines, but also in mystery magazines. Stories like "Ham Sandwich", about a slick operator running a psi scam, and "Where the Time Went", about a very different SFnal crime, are clever and enjoyable.Even the lesser stories here are generally breezily enjoyable. This book probably isn't a good choice for your first Schmitz book, but if you try the more famous ones and find you like his stuff, it's a worthwhile purchase.