Three collections in Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker Saga: Berserker, Brother Assassin, and The Ultimate Enemy
(Ace Books, September 1978, December 1978, and September 1979). Covers: Boris Vallejo and Michael Whelan

Ace SF blogger G.W. Thomas, working atop a demon-haunted tower in Alberta, has been digging deep into a lot of my favorite old SF paperbacks, including C. L. Moore & Henry Kuttner’s Earth’s Last Citadel, Murray Leinster’s Get Off My World!, and Space Operas You May Have Missed.

But I think my favorite recent piece was his two-part series on a writer who’s largely forgotten today: Fred Saberhagen, author of The Book of Swords, Empire of the East, and The Dracula Tape, and his most enduring creation: the galaxy-roving Berserkers. which appeared in some seventeen volumes.

[Click the images for Doomsday Machine-sized versions.]

Magazines containing early Berserker tales by Fred Saberhagen: Worlds of If,
January 1963, Worlds of Tomorrow, December 1963, and Worlds of If,
August 1967. Cover art by Schelling, Bruno, and Gray Morrow

Gary provides a better synopsis than I could:

Fred Thomas Saberhagen was thirty-three when he started selling to If. A veteran of the Korean War, he worked as an electrician for Motorola before working on writing encyclopedias and finally becoming a full time writer. His first sale was actually to Galaxy but his first important series was the Berserkers, and they were (mostly) in If. Fred would go on to write some incredible bestsellers including the Vlad series and the Swords series. But he never forgot his Berserkers.

Before all the huge novels, including one of my personal favorites, Empire of the East, Fred wrote about the killer machines that haunted the spaceways. Berserkers are robotic killers, self-replicating war weapons invented for a conflict lost aeons ago. The machines, huge stations (that may have inspired the Death Star in Star Wars) are designed to do only one thing: kill. They can destroy an entire planet. The robot servants they send out (that many feel were the inspiration for Star Trek‘s Borg) are bent on only one thing, to destroy all life.

Over the course of two lengthy articles, copiously illustrated with vintage art from the original magazine appearances, Gary surveyed many of the classic stories that laid the groundwork for the rich lore of the Berserkers.

Art for “The Winged Helmet” (Worlds of If, August 1967) by Wally Wood

Here’s a sample:

Fred set all this up in the first story, “Fortress Ship” (aka ”Without a Thought,” If, January 1963). In this story a pilot (Fred had flown planes in Korea) must devise a way to keep control of his ship when the Berserker affected his brain with its powerful brain attacks. The story is essentially a puzzle story and a very minor piece in the Berserker saga. It is the kind of story that would have appeared in Astounding (now Analog) a decade before.

Things really get going in “Goodlife” (Worlds of Tomorrow, December 1963). Here Saberhagen isn’t worried so much about a gimmick as the humanity of his characters. Goodlife is a man who has been kept alive by the Berserker since he was a small child. The machine has twisted his mind to hate humans. But his humanity is drawn to the two new captives, a man and a woman. There is still a bit of puzzle since Hemphill has to figure out how to blow up the Berserker but the power of this story is emotion not logic.

“The Winged Helmet” (If, August 1967) saw introduction of time travel into the Berserker saga. this allowed Fred to really utilize the Scandinavian origins of the word “Berserker.” As he would again in Berserker Planet, Fred’s love of heroic fantasy comes through. Who better to illustrate a Sword & Sorcery type story than Wally Wood?

Art for “The Winged Helmet” (Worlds of If, August 1967) by Wally Wood

Read both articles at Gary’s blog, Darkworlds Quarterly:

Fred Saberhagen’s Berserkers, Part I
Fred Saberhagen’s Berserkers, Part II

Our last piece on Gary was G.W. Thomas on Science Fiction of the 30s by Damon Knight.