Years ago an infamous couple had been executed for selling solar secrets to an intergalactic enemy... then the sentence was reversed and the victims resurrected. The two had stowed away a planet's ransom from their treason and their heiress had long disappeared with the loot. So Soldiers of Fortune Inc went to John Wesley Sand and asked him to find the missing maiden, who was last seen in the Hellquad sector. To Sand, however, Hellquad meant, in his own words, "slavers, space pirates, welfs, mews, madmen, psychotic cyborgs, lunatics at large, brokedown andies, lycanthropes, alfies, senile servos, zombies, the dregs of every other planet in the universe." But the money was too good to pass up and so Sand took the job—and found everything he expected, plus some mind-boggling things that he didn't!
Author
Pseudonyms: Howard Lee; Frank S Shawn; Kenneth Robeson; Con Steffanson; Josephine Kains; Joseph Silva; William Shatner. Ron Goulart is a cultural historian and novelist. Besides writing extensively about pulp fiction—including the seminal Cheap Thrills: An Informal History of Pulp Magazines (1972)—Goulart has written for the pulps since 1952, when the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction published his first story, a sci-fi parody of letters to the editor. Since then he has written dozens of novels and countless short stories, spanning genres and using a variety of pennames, including Kenneth Robeson, Joseph Silva, and Con Steffanson. In the 1990s, he became the ghostwriter for William Shatner’s popular TekWar novels. Goulart’s After Things Fell Apart (1970) is the only science-fiction novel to ever win an Edgar Award. In the 1970s Goulart wrote novels starring series characters like Flash Gordon and the Phantom, and in 1980 he published Hail Hibbler, a comic sci-fi novel that began the Odd Jobs, Inc. series. Goulart has also written several comic mystery series, including six books starring Groucho Marx. Having written for comic books, Goulart produced several histories of the art form, including the Comic Book Encyclopedia (2004).
