The hero, the villain, and Astrogold’s managing director are all products of the Prometheus Institute, a ‘school of hormonal engineering’, which has enhanced their abilities at enormous expense; yet they reveal no difference from fairly commonplace people today. This is not because human beings have somehow mutated into pitiable lumpishness, counteractable only by expensive intervention: Des Marston and Yetta Ferris, characters who do display resourcefulness and responsibility, have never been modified (except, that is, for Des’s having his legs amputated above the knee after a childhood accident, while Yetta is a dwarf from untreated achondroplasia).

Credibility is further damaged when – in the midst of accounts of an asteroid’s low gravity, the strange unnatural gait required, the catastrophes attending any sudden untutored movement – a girl on the second day of her visit spontaneously jumps up and runs to meet her sister, without ill effect. Still more incredible are the ‘domeheads’: clever girls, selected in their teens and endowed with high plastic skulls, a humped back accommodating an ‘in-body computer’ – and no neck! This extraordinarily perilous amputation might aid transmission between computer and brain, but it abolishes the windpipe, greatly reduces scanning capacity (by making the head immovable), and thus endangers the whole organism, in which so many millions of dollars have been so kinkily invested.

Domehead, dwarf, Institute-hero and amputee end by surmising that they are in the vanguard of humanity’s eventual differentiation into ‘hundreds of different species’; but, despite Whiteford’s skill in presenting a climax of killing, sabotage, space-effects, and mind-boggling escapes, the book as a whole will leave many readers somewhat dissatisfied.

Russell Blackford’s The Tempting of the Witch King (Cory & Collins, 266 pp, $4.95 pb), on the other hand, builds to a completion which, when finally unveiled, distinctly satisfied this reader. The book’s ending made me laugh aloud in mingled outrage and admiration; it even made me indulge in some minor meditations on good and evil.

Blackford’s work belongs to the Heroic Fantasy (or Sword and Sorcery) sub-genre. The Witch King is Logi Fuesway, the only one of the four immortal rulers of the elements who has not yet disgustedly abandoned the mortal world. Sailing ships and horses serve men for transport; armour and sword and shield for fighting; burning torches for light-but mortal witches have the power to ‘dislodge’ an object in ‘time’, in order to hide it, and they know a special language for enlisting the co-operation of the universe.

Civilisation is now being overwhelmed by the armies of Had-Janal, God of Darkness, who openly participates in battle. The Witch King’s only chance of driving him off is to use the Mace of the Prophet (which no Higher God may wield); yet even a Witch King will be hard-pressed to resist the evil sway which the Mace exerts over its users ... The rearranged extract on the back cover is not representative of Blackford’s prose; in fact he writes lucidly, producing images that are vivid, varied and memorable (like Had-Janal’s surprising use of the archetypal mushroom cloud).

A. Bertram Chandler describes his latest novel, Kelly Country (Penguin, 344 pp, $5.95 pb), as ‘an If-Of-History Novel’. If you were a science-fiction writer named Grimes, and were sent back to share your great grandfather’s consciousness as he waited with the Kelly gang for the special train to arrive at Glenrowan, could you resist tripping up Curnow, the informer? And if you couldn’t, what kind of revolution might Ned Kelly’s survival have brought about in Australia?

Chandler has thoroughly researched the political and military possibilities of the period; he has dealt with misgivings as to whether Kelly had the drive to establish a dynasty of Hereditary Presidents, each one respectfully spoken of as ‘the Kelly’; he has provided astonishing adventures, constant shifts of scene, and a final revelation which casts an ironic light on history-which highlights an uncertainty very few men can be immune to-and which paradoxically shows the final Kelly (the one who wiped out Hanoi with nuclear weapons) to be a greater-hearted man than the reader has believed.