In my quest to find and review forgotten SF writers from the classic period of the 1950s - 1970s I'm always happy when I find a good one. I had never heard of Phillifent or his SF pen name John Rackham.

He was a UK writer who wrote some of the "Man From U.N.C.L.E novels in the 1960s. In the 1970s he frequently used the Rackham pen name and wrote SF novels. This is one of those novels.

I was pleasantly surprised. Frequently lesser known UK writers, of the period, filled their stories with idioms and words used only in the UK. This can be fun at first but eventually wears thin. Stories with over use of "fortnight", "busman's holiday" and "not cricket" can limit readership and does not age well. A popular English trope was a subplot of the main the character's wife sleeping with other characters. When this style spilled over to Science Fiction it frequently led to very few readers in the USA and Canada. Like Clarke and other successful UK writers Phillifent's stories are region-less and age well.

This is a fun and interesting people story in a future setting. I will look for more books by this author. ( )

This is a well-constructed adventure story which I enjoyed more than I had expected to. The science and technology assumed by the book are absurd, but this doesn't matter because it's only there to set up the exotic environment and strange circumstances required for the plot.

The summary below the line is just a bit spoilery.

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Our protagonist, John Lampart, has been a space explorer employed by a large mining company to find asteroids and planets worth mining for the minerals so much needed by Earth industry. The planet Argent, which he has discovered, seems from orbit extremely rich in valuable metals, though its surface is so inimical to life that it would be necessary to mine it expensively using remotely controlled equipment. Nonetheless, when the story opens, we find Lampart living on the surface and threatened by indigenous lifeforms. How his survival is possible will be explained in flashbacks.

Lampart's employer, whom he has good reason to hate, has given him the job of surveying Argent to establish whether it really is as good as it seemed, but he wants to spend the rest of his life as "King of Argent", so he is carefully faking his survey reports so that they show remote mining to be marginally unprofitable. The employer, however, is no fool and has foreseen that Lampart will try to cheat him, but by some ingenuity and rather a lot of luck Lampart gets the employer's countermeasures to work against each other.