I finished James H. Schmidt's The Witches of Karres. It is a funny one (as, in, slightly odd) to review, and its certainly not top draw. It has a reputation as being one of the classics of space opera, but it is in fact deeply flawed. The opening 100 pages features three witches, none of which are well introduced, and which take part in sudden, episodic, disjointed 'adventures' in a manner that reminded me of van Vogt, but without the sense of wonder or characterful writing. Deus ex machina's abound. I understand this made up a 1949 novella of the same name, which Schmidt expanded in 1966 to novel length. This first novella section is terrible, unfortunately. Then it segues into the second section, the extended 250 pages that made it novel length. It not even immediately obvious where the cutoff is to be honest, as there is a not a clear and satisfactory conclusion for the novella section. Perhaps to expand it into a novel, Schmidt ditched the originally novella ending. Anyway, the second section features most only one witch, and follows a single plot, and reads as though it were written by a completely different (and much more capable) author. Unfortunately, its not very good either, really, as SF. The ideas are derivative and the scientific explanation of the strange powers at work are entirely hand-wavy that it's basically fantasy in space. If you like it when your heroes ditch their spaceship on some random planet in the middle of nowhere and start wandering round the place without a spacesuit or consideration of changes in gravity, etc, then this may be the book for you. I didn't really care for it much, although it had it's moments of tension, I guess. If it had been written more concisely thirty years earlier, it might have got away with it, but basically it's a pot-boiler. It seems odd that I made it all 350 pages through it - its probably the longest bad book I've finished! 
