Wolfling
The last time I was at Pandemonium, I picked up a couple of those yellowed old pulp novels, the ones that cost more used than they did new. Since I read so much Golden Age and pulp sci-fi in my misspent youth, I’ve tended to focus on the last decade or two in my recent reading. Sometimes, though, I long for the pulpiness of a simpler age.
Wolfling by Gordon R. Dickson (1968) was just what I’d been looking for. The hero is your standard inscrutable, antisocial, independent man. He finds his Earth subsumed in a newly discovered galactic human empire, ruled by a master race of High-born from the mysterious Throne World. The High-born are genetically superior to other humans, yet they have their own weaknesses which Our Hero hopes to exploit to free Earth. Despite several clues along the way, I managed to be surprised by the twist at the end.
I’m not saying there was any literary merit to this novel, or even anything of scientific interest beyond the one anthropological observation made by Our Hero late in the story, yet it exceeded my very slight expectations for a disintegrating Dell paperback with a half-naked guy on the cover.