Robert Irwin
Consuls & Catwomen
Time, a Falconer: A Study of Sarban
By Mark Valentine
Tartarus Press 138pp £25 order from our bookshop
Sarban’s best-known novel, The Sound of His Horn, is set in an alternate future one hundred years after the Nazis have won the war. A vast enclosed forest is presided over by a sadistic Jägermeister, an avatar of both Herne the Hunter and the hunt-obsessed Hermann Goering. Young women and men from the inferior races are pursued for sport. First published in 1952, the novel was acclaimed by science-fiction enthusiasts and has been frequently reprinted. The 1960 edition carried an introduction by Kingsley Amis in which he noted that abnormal fantasy was the driving force of the novel:
The whole notion of hunting with girls as the quarry; the use of savage dogs in the pursuit; the selective nudity of the girls’ costumes; the details of the way they are trussed up before being handed over to their captors; the cat-women, similarly half-undressed, but with taloned
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