Before John Jakes was a best selling author of historical fiction he was a trashy pulp magazine story teller. Jakes was into S&S and to my mind the best fantastic adventure writer – after Howard and Leiber. One of his short stories that I read in the 60s in the pages of Fantastic Magazine impressed me so much that I analyzed it sentence by sentence in order to figure out why it worked. I have tried to write my own version of it several times over the years and a decent unfinished story that uses the Jakes algorithm sits in my WIP pile waiting to be finished.

The Mask of Chaos (1970) is not S&S, but rather a very well done Space Opera. It is so much like a video game that I can’t believe that no one has licensed it. I find it hard to believe that Doom and Quake do not give Jakes credit for many of the elements ripped off from Mask of Chaos.

The story is about a man who has been turned into a cyborg and a woman of dubious virtue who are abandoned on a strange planet. They are forced to participate in a game that is televised to the whole planet and is the planetary national game. Think of a couple forced to work their way through the levels of Quake without the monsters. There are tricks and traps and red herrings. They accumulate money, find food and solve puzzles. They survive through the wits of the woman and the cyborg strengths of the man.

There is a part where a stairway changes to a 45 degree ramp and the woman slides towards a fan that is supposed to chop her into pieces. I swear that this is a trap that also exists in the Quake video game. There is no mention of Jakes in the Quake credits and I doubt that it is a case of parallel development.

I have about 20 pages to go, and I am sorry that I will have finished this by the time I get home. It is a page-turner and I am temped to wander off for a while and hope no one comes looking for me so that I can read some more of it. The story has just taken a very existentialist turn and I want to see how it comes out. The plot is good, the characters are well developed and I am emotionally invested in the outcome. This is what I consider a good book.

The copy I have is a decrepit Ace Double. I finished the other side yesterday. The picture above is much nicer than my copy. Ace books fall apart over the years. The one I have is held together by scotch tape and it sheds paper chips every time I open it. I like the Jack Gaughan cover with the vintage computer boards – no integrated circuits, just a few germanium type transistors!