Ian Wallace was the pseudonym of John Wallace
Pritchard. Although he published one non-genre
novel during the 1950s, his career essentially
started with the publication of Croyd (1967), a
wildly imaginative but scientifically unsound blend
of space opera and time travel. Croyd is a supersecret agent of the future who can move forward
and backward in time, with some limitations, but
who nevertheless manages to get into trouble trying to head off the conquest of Earth by aliens. He
thwarts a second effort in the sequel, Dr. Orpheus
(1968), whose plot is so complex and occasionally
implausible that the reader is best advised not to
examine it too closely. Wallace introduced a female
secret agent in Deathstar Voyage (1969), in this
case employed as bodyguard to a visiting political
figure during his journey back to his home world.
Claudine St. Cyr’s career would later intersect
with the Croyd series, but she continued her solo
adventures in pursuit of a missing heir in The Purloined Prince (1971).
After creating yet another variation of the
same dynamic character in Pan Sagittarius (1973),
Wallace returned to Croyd for A Voyage to Dari
(1974). Once again Croyd single-handedly defeats
an alien plot, which on this occasion includes an
attempt to kidnap Croyd himself in order to make
use of his unique mental powers. Croyd goes into
retirement after this exploit, but returns to action
in Z-Sting (1978) when the device he used to safeguard humanity malfunctions. He teams up with
St. Cyr to solve a murder mystery in Heller’s Leap
(1979) and has his last outing in Megalomania
(1989), in which he saves the entire galaxy from
destruction. St. Cyr had one additional adventure
as well, The Sign of the Mute Medusa (1977), in
which she visits a planet so despoiled by pollution
that only a privileged aristocracy living in a domed
city has a chance to survive.
The remaining novels are both singletons. An
alien found frozen in a comet in The Lucifer Comet
(1980) may be the original of the legend of Satan,
and powerful aliens attempt to steal the sun and
doom the Earth in The Rape of the Sun (1982).
Wallace was never interested in the plausibility of
his science, and he mixed up galaxies with star systems, obviously having no comprehension of the
actual physical properties of the universe. His
characters are archetypal rather than realistic, and
his plots are as complex as those of the early A. E.
VAN VOGT. Those considerable faults notwithstanding, he was interesting because of his untraditional plots and his distinctive prose style, which was often more interesting in its use of imagery
than for the story it conveyed.