I flew on an all-day courier mission today, so I went through the first two novels in Richard Avery's "Expendables" series. The main concept is a small group of people, many of whom would have been in prison for life otherwise, are sent to explore potentially dangerous new planets to see if they're ripe for human colonization. The first one, The Deathworms of Kratos, set up the premise nicely (and I had never read it before; when I was in high school I read #2 and #4, all the school library had for some reason, and only recently decided to track down the series and see how many there were - only four, alas). The planet Kratos seems perfect, except there were these large mounds of unknown origin that needed checked out - and sure enough, they were the result of the the aforementioned deathworms, monster-worms similar in size to Dune's sandworms. The second book, The Rings of Tantalus, has the team - seven humans and six robots - exploring another potential world, only with the added danger that one or more of the crew may be terrorists trying to destroy the ExPEND mission, so the vast quantities of money the program uses can be spent elsewhere on Earth. Throw in some robot monkeys, and you're got yourself a vintage 1970s science fiction novel.
I'll be moving on to Expendables #3: The War Games of Zelos starting tomorrow.
Johnathan
