A brilliant supervillain has dreamed up the ultimate secret weapon ... a desperate masterstroke that will assure victory for the Kaiser -- or obliterate mankind from the face of the earth! Young Clark Savage and his team come together for the first time in this action-packed saga of World War I. Though only sixteen, he's the real Doc -- hard fisted, cerebral, the compassionate Man of Bronze. Shot down behind enemy lines. Captured by a German baron and his exotic mistress. Escaped. Recaptured. Finally imprisoned in escape-proof salt mines -- where the baron's experiments on human guinea pigs could result in a sinister weapon of total destruction. It's Doc's young mind against evil's keenest intellect. And unless Doc wins, the war could end for the Allies -- in a blaze of genocidal fury!

I do like Doc Savage's pulp novels, those little jewels of naive, wonder-ridden escapism.

I appreciate some of P.J. Farmer's works, especially his vernian Pastiche and the 'biography' of the man of bronze.

However this savagian apocrypha I find unconvicing, much as the attempts at dishing out new stories of Conan the Barbarian (as you may not from my addy I am a diehard of R.E.Howard too..)

Especially the idea of portraying Imperial Germany as an ebyronic 3rd reich I find ( the genocidal plans, the fact that the Loki prison camp is near Berchesgaden, where later Hitler had his Berghof built...) is absurd, anti-historical and cryptoracist too.

WWI was no 'crusade aganist evil' as often (and with more credit) WW2 is portraied but a clash of contrasting greeds and power-lusts.

I did not read this novel, but how I want. I'm a great fan of PJF, yet sometimes I don't like his theories. So, please let me say to Paolo Marcenaro (who write a nice comment about this novel) that when PJF show a German Empire like a 3rd Reich avant la lettre, maybe he was not thinking on real Germany but the WWI universe of G-8 and his Battle Aces...
What you think about?

I was looking forward to this one but I found it ultimately disappointing. The graphic, bloody violence and explorations of Doc's sex life just aren't what Doc is all about. And there is no great mystery/threat to be solved. Just a prison breakout. All of the elements one associates with Doc Savage aren't present in this book. It seems to me that Farmer is more interested in making Doc Savage his own than being true to the original concept and he's about 60 years to late to pull that off. Although there are some Doc elements in the story, the novel just does not read like a Doc Savage adventure. Very disappointing.

I thought this was a great book and I waited years to read it after Farmer mentioned in the early 70's that he would someday like to write a story about the groups WWI adventures. Although it was written in the Farmer style (IE lots of sex and violence) and a more emotional Doc than we are use to, it is still good. Think about it, Doc is a teenager, of course he will act differently than the Doc we see in the Man of Bronze when he is in his 30's. How many of us act the same way we did at age 16?
The WWI background was inaccurate, but we got to see Doc and the gang prior to the "Man of Bronze". I recommend it to anyone.

I enjoyed "The Mad Goblin" by Farmer so much that I was really looking forward to this book. I was profoundly disappointed. Farmer somehow had forgotten the "spirit" of Doc Savage (or the briskness and color of Dent's writings) that he instead wrote a hum-drum novel with just a few interesting ideas about how Doc met his aides. I found the prose dull, the plotting inane, and nobody called WWI the "Great War" until it was over. I never finished this book, but instead went back and read "The Mad Goblin". That was very much better and shows really what a student of Dent and Doc Savage Farmer was. But in this book, he seemed to set all that aside and just pound something out. What a waste.

17.01.06

I am a Swiss boy and I'm speaking french. I already know the 40 bookds of Doc Savage Marabout in French. The Lefrancq editions had in 1995 edited the beginning of the Doc Savage stories but they stopped 4 years ago because of costs. Please indicate to me if you know how I could influence sombody to translate the other stories in French. Best regards

Frédéric Jordan
1747 Corserey
Switzerland

Please, indicate to me if you know somebody who is speaking French.

Thank you for your cooperation

To Jordan: I am French canadian and read most of the French translations when I was young (i.e. over 20 years ago). Now I have most of the books in English. Your English sounds good, you don't think it is good enough to read the books?

regards

Patrick