Kenneth Bulmer
The Million Year Hunt

Very often, as happened recently when I had to express an opinion on Truffaut's "Fahrenheit," I emphasize the difference between a work strictly of the science fiction genre and a work that has some content related to sci-fi but a different purpose and is placed in a context not specifically of that type. From this point of view, Truffaut's film may well be a beautiful film, but it does not have those typical characteristics we look for in a strictly sci-fi work that, devoid of any other intention, is inspired by those original reasons and spirit. This clearly does not mean that hybrid works are less interesting, but saying that true science fiction is indeed experiencing a crisis today in literature (as for cinema, it seems mostly dominated by blockbusters) does not amount to lese-majesty. Fortunately, however, the genre boasts a copious history and authors who, particularly between the fifties and seventies, were tireless, writing and publishing stories that still hit the mark today, many years later.

"The Million Year Hunt" by Kenneth Bulmer is a typical genre novel, set in a distant future and on faraway worlds, and like many stories of those years, it features a young protagonist. His name is Arthur Ross Carson. He lives on a peripheral planet where he works dismantling wrecks at the planet's main spaceport. His life passes in a monotonous, boring manner until, by simple chance, he finds himself in an incredible adventure, assuming a central role, as if marked by destiny, in a crisis in the galaxy's balance due to the attempt to dominate by what we can define as a kind of secret police, the "statque" (composed of ineffable and ruthless assassins), which will be opposed with great pride by the forces of the galactic guards, who generally perform regular police duties but will find themselves to be the only ones capable of stopping this revolting act.

According to a typical, almost fairy-tale formula, young Arthur will discover he is not a frog, but a prince and a predestined one. When his body is inhabited by Sandoz, a millionaire alien "parasite" belonging to a species of which only a few specimens remain, he will not only have a powerful ally, thanks to the peculiar and extraordinary special abilities of his new partner, but also an additional mission to accomplish: to find Sandoz's lost mate in some unspecified remote corner of the galaxy, so that the two lovers can reunite after thousands of years.

What to say. "The Million Year Hunt" is certainly not a fundamental work, nor one of the cornerstones of the genre, but the writing of a classic and successful author like Bulmer is smooth, easy, fun, and engaging. Needless to say: imaginative. When it ends, and perhaps it is an ending that is somewhat ruinous in the sequences of the story (who knows whether the famous "cuts" had something to do with it; in any case, it must be said that this is a limitation that can be found in several works of the genre even today) we are a little bit sorry to leave our heroes, even if we know that a couple like them will be hard for any opponent to beat.