Once the population is running around all crazy, he and his men get to work. Shannon is the only person who knows how the drug works. His deal is that he (and his crew, despite the back jacket) will take a contract for some eggs, find a group of people, and hit them with this drug that causes “Mythmadness.” Like I said, the drug is just a hallucinogen so I’m not sure why it’s called that. He doesn’t even grab embryos, just fertilized eggs. He specializes in smuggling human embryos.

If I found anything innovative, it was in what Shannon smuggles, and how. Maybe Kelley’s addition to this chain of not-give-a-damn rogues came early enough that it was interesting in ’73, but I was not intrigued. The only thing that matters is survival, and money is the key to survival, and so on and so forth in a way that we’ve all seen a hundred thousand times. Shannon is that pirate-smuggler type of rogue, flying around the universe giving no craps for anybody but himself. The best I can come up with is that it was supposed to evoke a kind of Joseph Campbell “myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths” kind of deal, but that was never made explicit, so I guess that’s just my own interpretation. It’s a hallucinogenic, sure, but the effects are never described in a way that makes me think of mythology. The only connection is that he has this chemical he uses on people that causes something called Mythmadness, which, again, isn’t an especially useful name.

Nothing he does has anything to do with myths. It lends him a certain something that he doesn’t deserve. Why he’s called the Mythmaster is beyond me. He’s also called the Mythmaster, hence the title of the book. This book was a series of fairly interesting ideas tacked on to a 224-page character study of a character that a) I wasn’t that interested in, and b) wasn’t especially remarkable. In fact, the stuff described on the back jacket is a very small part of the novel. It does capture the plot of the book pretty faithfully, but not all of it. I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with the book. What a cover! Crazy red and yellow stuff that looks like I guess it was going to be fire? Several moons? Naked people with a bare minimum of stuff drawn on to make them not naked anymore? It’s all there! Between the Patrol and the sinister Oxon Kaedler he knew his freedom was a mirage.

Then a supposedly dead man decided he wanted a piece of the action―and the Mythmaster’s body―and the chase was on.

The Patrol that had cashiered him couldn’t catch him now. Stealing lives and peddling them from one end of the galaxy to another for unspeakable uses, the Mythmaster thought he was a free man.

Mythmaster by Leo P. Kelley