Quest for Home

E.C. Tubb was a prolific author that populated the mid-list in the 1960's and 1970's both under his own name and a number of pseudonyms. I first encountered his Cap Kennedy series in the spinning wire racks of magazine stores and drugstores of my youth, but the series that attracted my attention the most was his Dumarest of Earth, a sprawling space opera series that led across multiple publishers and multiple revivals in our world, while visiting multiple worlds in the galaxy of the story.

Earl Dumarest was born on Earth and spent several decades traveling ever further and further from his home by the time the story opens in The Winds of Gath. The books in the series are both standalone and linked, and very formulaic. The standard Dumarest tale could have worked equally well as a horse opera: the enigmatic hero blows into town, encounters a variety of characters and is presented with a problem. He is aloof, but due to a strong moral streak, gets involved in the local trouble. He may fall in love, but he will either lose that love or leave that love when he moves on. The problem is resolved, usually messily and with consequences, to our hero is forced to move on again.

The linkage comes from story elements that come in and out of play throughout the series. Dumarest is questing for Earth. The Cyclans, a galaxy-wide organization of cybernetic humans seems to want to conceal Earth and opposes Dumarest and acts as one linkage across the series. Another linkage is the Church of Universal Brotherhood, a religious order that opposes the Cyclans. That makes them an occasional ally to Dumarest.

The series interested me after I initially started reading it in the mid-1970's because of the influence it has had on the science fiction roleplaying game Traveller. Not only does Dumarest appear as a nonplayer character in one of the game supplements, but the game adopts some of Tubb's terminology, most noteably the High, Middle (or Working) and Low Passages for starship passengers (and Traveller, of course, even uses that spelling used by Tubb). A High Passage is one that you spend the journey in relative luxury. Middle Passage means you're working for the ship. A Low Passage has you spending the journey in cold sleep or suspended animation, hoping that you don't burn off too much muscle mass and you wake on the other end and don't find that a less-than-honest handler has stolen all your goods.

My initial reading of the series was somewhat sporadic. As stated above, the series jumped across publishers, over time. I'm not sure if any publisher, until Gateway Essentials, published the whole run in the USA. I recall volumes from Ace, DAW and Pyramid, plus possibly one UK publisher in the paper copies I had.

As with the starship types mentioned by Andre Norton or the mercenary Bond Authority of David Drake making their way into the game, it's nice to find this linkage here.

The books are now out in eBook format, including the final volume that wraps the quest up (long impossible to find in the United States of America). These editions (mostly) lack cover art and suffer (to an extent) from the occasional shoddy production found in other books from Gateway Essentials. On the plus side, it's nice to read a non-doorstop volume in a few hours that provides entertainment, and it is really nice to visit with old friends again.

The Series: Volumes Read (This Time Around)

001: The Winds of Gath

The Series: Volumes Not Yet Read (This Time Around)

002: Derai
003: Toyman
004: Kalin
005: The Jester at Scar
006: Lallia
007: Technos
008: Veruchia
009: Mayenne
010: Jondelle
011: Zenya
012: Eloise
013: Eye of the Zodiac
014: Jack of Swords
015: Spectrum of a Forgotten Sun
016: Haven of Darkness
017: Prison of Night
018: Incident on Ath
019: The Quillian Sector
020: Web of Sand
021: Iduna's Universe
022: The Terra Data
023: World of Promise
024: Nectar of Heaven
025: The Terridae
026: The Coming Event
027: Earth is Heaven
028: Melome
029: Angado
030: Symbol of Terra
031: The Temple of Truth
032: The Return
033: Child of Earth

2017 saw the announcement of a television show. Will we ever see it, or will it ever be trapped in development hell?

For a fan website dedicated to the series, please see this link. TV Tropes even has a page dedicated to the series, please see this link.