Far the calling bugles hollo,
I finished Fratricide is a Gas this afternoon. It actually wasn’t so bad, all things considered. Despite his issues with plot and plausibility, Gutteridge is an entirely competent writer. This story avoided most of the really ludicrous stuff from the previous two books. The basic concept is still fairly unreasonable — Mathew Dilke, micro-spy, is sent to rather arbitrarily assist a normal-sized agent on a mission to Peru to look into a lab which may be creating chemical weapons. His mule is killed perfunctorily fairly early on, forcing Dilke back to his roots; that is, a naked man 1/4 of one inch tall, battling insects in a nightmare landscape, etc, etc. This goes on for most of the book, and then he eventually makes his way back to the lab, discovers the truth about the chemical weapons (it turns out that, quite literally, “Fratricide” is the name of a gas: a gas which causes people to go into a murderous rage, attacking everyone nearby) and uses the chemical on its creator and those who would negotiate for its purchase. Then he goes home.
Oh well, at least it went fast.
My next book is The Guardians of Time, by Poul Anderson. It looks cool.