The Great Planet Robbery

Colonial Marines Lawrence Dobbs and Timothy Muldoon are the last of a dying breed of adventurers in a Federation that has tamed dozens of wild planets and is becoming increasingly civilized. When an old astronaut offers to sell them a map that will take them to a legendary planet promising rivers of gold, they recruit a crew of misfits for one last great adventure.

They will rob an entire planet.

They soon realize they haven’t just discovered gold, but the very secret of alchemy. To keep it, they just have to fight millions of hostile natives, a team of elite bounty hunters, a combat-assassin android named Bova and the emperor of a dead civilization.

 

“DiLouie flavors Kipling’s ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ with a dash of Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War to create this rollicking military SF farce … DiLouie spices up Dobbs and Muldoon’s adventures with loony ideas, from a computer virus that plays dice games with fate to a doomsday machine containing the maniacal consciousness of the last emperor of planet Xerxes. Fans of humorous science fiction will find plenty to enjoy in this time-traveling, galaxy-crossing romp.” –Publishers Weekly

“Highly recommended to science fiction fans everywhere and deserves a place on community library sci-fi shelves.” –Midwest Book Review

“This is a fun-filled, hard to put down novel which is both a riff and an homage to classic pulp adventure SF … There are so many hilarious moments that punctuate the dry, ironical, matter-of-fact narration that it’s hard to stop laughing quite often. The above sounds like ’50s pulp reinvented for our times—as people write once in a while, though SF moved beyond that a long time ago. However, The Great Planet Robbery is actually a very self-ironic, post modernistic tale told through all the pulp cliches you want. This is what I would call ‘picaresque SF’ more than anything else, though with full modern sensibilities beneath the pulp-like content … The ending is superb, quite funny and in the spirit of the book. If you want a fun romp that also challenges the adventure-SF tropes, this is the book for you …” -Liviu, full review here