Meet Douglas Hill and Lindsay Brown...

Douglas Hill ‘The Best Kids' SF of the Last Decade’

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Is that an extravagant claim to make for Douglas Hill's books about Keill Randor? Now that the third novel, Day of the Starwind, has maintained the standard of the first two, Steve Bowlescertainly thinks it's justified.

Keill Randor is the only survivor of the Legions, the people of Moros who lived by selling their fighting skills to nations needing their help. They were destroyed by a surprise attack with a weapon which made their planet's atmosphere fatally radioactive. Returning late from a mission, Keill escapes alive but dying slowly from his brush with the radiation. His hope is to avenge his people before he dies. The search for the enemy is interrupted when he's kidnapped by a 'strange, secretive group of brilliant elderly scientists', the Overseers, who cure him by completely replacing his diseased bones with a new, unbreakable alloy. Keill is highly sceptical of their story about a mysterious 'Warlord' making a grab for galactic domination but in tracking down and killing some men masquerading as Legionaries, he learns that it's true. With Glr, a winged telepathic alien who has sided with the Overseers, he sets out to destroy the Warlord and his underlings.

Stylistic difficulties arise from the vocabulary of technology, descriptions of terrain and the need to work in essential background detail. Some potential readers will inevitably be lost but Douglas Hill always seems aware of the problem and does a great deal to minimize it. Galactic Warlord, for example, starts with Keill extracting information from some thugs who are foolish enough to try mugging him. The destruction of Moros is a flashback and the slowish section with the Overseers is only reached once the story has you gripped. Though each novel is a self-contained adventure, those who've enjoyed Galactic Warlord will undoubtedly want to get Deathwing and Starwind as soon as possible and they're unlikely to be disappointed in them. These build more gradually into the main drama but the narrative never goes flat and there are tasters of conflict to keep the least involved happy. Starwind, in particular, develops relentlessly once Keill makes contact with the Warlord's men.

The regard they display for the chosen audience is perhaps the most impressive thing about Douglas Hill's books. Adult fans of Andre Norton have for years tried to interest kids in her work but, beyond occasional fanatics, it's been hard going. For me, there are distinct echoes of Norton in Keill Randor's adventures, especially with regard to their convincing picture of a colonized universe. But the differences - relatively slim volumes, big doses of violent action - make them much more enticing to a general teenage readership. There have been compromises, it's true. To adults, the books can seem over-written in places and some aspects push credulity too far. One must remember, though, that they're not for widely-read aficionados alone. As a bridge to more sophisticated SF novels, they're invaluable and virtually unique.

Galactic Warlord,
Gollancz, 0 575 02663 4, £3.50 Piccolo, 0 330 26186 X, 80p

Deathwing Over Veynaa,
Gollancz, 0 575 02779 7, £3.95

Day or the Starwind,
Gollancz, 0 575 02917 X, £4.50

Meet Lindsay Brown...

For a fourteen-year-old to have a novel published is remarkable. Last month, approaching her fifteenth birthday, Lindsay Brown saw her second novel come out in hardback and her first is just out in paperback. We talked to Lindsay about herself and her writing.

Lindsay and her younger brother Rupert get on very well. She's always told him stories. Two baby-sitting sixth formers read one and showed it to their English teacher whose husband, the writer Maurice Lindsay, sent it to his publishers, Robert Hale. The Treasure of Dubarry Castle appeared in 1978, just before Lindsay's thirteenth birthday. It has everything: a circus, vicious villains, smugglers, and a ruined French castle with secret passages. The adventure doesn't get started until half way - Lindsay is busy establishing her eleven-year-old characters (Sarah, Jack and Anna) - but the narrative moves at a spanking pace. It sold well; Lindsay read it on Jackanory, and Robert Hale encouraged her to try another.

So in the summer holidays last year Lindsay wrote The Secret of the Silver Lockets, another fast-moving adventure, in which cousins John (15) and Michelle (14) get caught up in a terrifying 'treasure hunt' involving rival gangs of ruthless murdering criminals. The central characters are older because Lindsay is; but the books seem to come out as appealing most to 8-12s. Rupert, now twelve, is the test: 'If he says it's good, it's a good sign.'

Lindsay is learning the craft. Silver Lockets didn't need cutting because she knew how long to make it. But it needed revision - very tedious. 'There were lots of loopholes: sometimes the criminals' plans weren't very plausible.' Dad helped her with that and 'with grammatical things'. She likes writing descriptions; 'but lots of children don't like them, so I space them out.' And she tries to have 'an exciting bit at the end of every chapter'.

Michelle is 'partly me. She's shy and she has a lot of my opinions.' Bits of Rupert are in John ('he's a cricket fan'); but the villains came out of her imagination. She gave them 'all kinds of bad habits (smoking, drinking and not washing)'.

This novel, reasonably enough, is better constructed than her first. It's a remarkably well-sustained story from such a young writer, inventive and full of action. There are also some moments (John near drowning in a Norwegian fjord) where the power of the writing lifts the experience right off the page.

Lindsay herself is pleasantly modest, 'My English teacher says I use too many adjectives. I do fend to over-write,' and unaffected. She tells with evident delight how the headmaster of her school (Cleveden Secondary - a 500 pupil comprehensive in Glasgow) announced the publication of her novel in assembly. 'He got my name wrong; he called me Lesley!' Apart from writing she enjoys drawing and painting, and is torn between university and art school. She admires Val Biro's illustrations for her books. 'The characters look just as I imagined them.

And he got the details right. Some illustrators don't seem to have read the book.'

For reading she likes mainly adventure and mystery (Malcolm Saville and Agatha Christie); but she doesn't think she'll end up a full-time writer - it's so difficult to think of a good plot.

*The Treasure of Dubarry Castle, Piccolo 0 330 26210 6, 85p