Cosmic Corsairs
Hank Davis and Christopher Ruocchio, eds.
Baen
Trade Paper $16.00
Ebook $8.99

When Hank Davis and Christopher Ruocchio said, “Cosmic Corsairs”, I said, “I’m there.”

Aside from the fact that space pirates are among my favorite things to read about, the anthologies these two gentlemen have put together in the past have been well-worth the investment, which meant I bought this book as soon as I could get my grubby little hands on it and started it immediately.

I am a satisfied customer. 

This anthology contains fifteen stories, three original and a dozen reprints. While a couple are a bit creaky, such as the Silverberg entry, Cosmic Corsairs is a solid anthology. There are even stories by James Blish and Fritz Leiber that have never been reprinted since their initial publication. That’s one of the nice things about Davis and Ruocchio’s anthologies; they often contain unreprinted tales. Granted the Leiber story isn’t among his best, and science wasn’t believable even by the standards of the early 1940s. But it’s still Fritz Leiber, who was better than most writers even when he wasn’t hitting on all cylinders.

Here are some of my favorites:

“A Relic of Empire” by Larry Niven is one of his early Known Space stories, and by early I mean one of the first written. It had been years since I last read it, and it held up quite well. A scientist has some pirates drop in on him. Unfortunately for them, they don’t k ow enough about the planet’s environment to recognize the dangers, something the scientist exploits to his advantage.

Christopher Ruocchio’s “The Night Captain” is an incident involving his protagonist Hadrian Marlowe, although Marlowe isn’t the narrator.The Night Captain, the officer in charge while most everyone on board is in  cryochamber.  While stopping to refuel, a group of pirates attempts to steal the cryochambers containing some of the crew to hold for ransom. They picked the wrong ship. This story was my favorite, although a few others came close. This story is original to the anthology.

One of those that came close was Gregory Benford’s “Redeemer”. The setup has some similarities. The idea that a colony ship will be overtaken by a later ship with more advanced propulsion has been around for a while. In this one, the pirate isn’t after cryochambers but frozen DNA. There’s been a war, you see, and, well, the surviving gene pool isn’t what it used to be. As is typical of Benford, this one is smart and not everything is quite what it seems.

DNA and genetics plays a role in “Trading Up” by Sarah A. Hoyt and Robert A. Hoyt. This is one of the originals to this collection. What is a pirate to do when he wants to go straight? Take on one last job that pits him against a family member. This one is smart and entertaining.

Katherine MacLean takes us back to the solar system in a clever tale of pirates taking over a traveling general store in the asteroid belt in “Collision Orbit”.

James L. Cambias takes us to the “Barbary Shore”, which in this case turns out to be in southeast Asia, where a pirate is remotely stealing shipments of helium from the Moon using remote controlled satellites. Too bad the person setting out to capture him is a former lover with a grudge.

“The book ends with James H. Schmitz’s “Captives of the Thieve-Star”. It’s hard to go wrong with Schmitz. This story isn’t part of any of Schmitz’s series, the Agent of Vega stories or the Hub. But it was still a lot of fun. It was one of the Schmitz stories that I haven’t read before. At least I didn’t recall it. A man with aspirations to join the Imperial Secret Service finds out his heroes have feet of clay.

This was a great anthology, and I’m looking forward to the next offering from Davis and Ruocchio. Check this one out.