Joseph E. Kelleam (1913-1975) was an American science fiction writer of whom I know nothing.
Jack Odin had been an army doctor. The Korean War convinced him that he did not want to be either a soldier or a doctor. Luckily for Jack he has a lot of money so he’s taking some time off to think. Then he receives some mysterious visitors. There’s a lovely young woman named Maya. She is accompanied by four dwarves and a wounded man. Jack patches the man up. His visitors depart but Maya leaves him with a fancy key, assuring him that he will need it.
Much to his surprise Jack is later arrested for aiding and abetting a murderer. That wounded man had killed a very high-ranking general. The case against Jack is flimsy and the charges are soon dismissed.
Then his visitors turn up again. They invite him to visit their land. Jack, being rather bored with life (and being rather taken with Maya’s beauty), accepts.
It turns out that their land is the land of Opal, deep beneath the surface of the Earth. At first it seems like a kind of underground fairy kingdom, complete with a miniature artificial sun.
Opal is neither a utopia nor a dystopia. It’s no better or worse than our world. There is violence and ambition and treachery but to Jack it appears to have a sense of purpose missing in our world.
The dwarves are not human. They are Neeblings. They are the little people of so many legends. Maya is not human either. She is a Bron. The Bron come from a very distant planet. The Bron and the Neeblings share the world of Opal but there are plenty of tensions between them.
The inhabitants of Opal have always avoided contact with humans. Opal now faces a deadly threat and they may mo longer able to avoid such contact. There is also a bitter power struggle going on in Opal. Jack Odin is somewhat caught in the middle and being human he is not entirely trusted by either the Bron or the Neeblings.
It’s the fact that Opal is neither a paradise nor a hell that is this novels’s most interesting feature. The author also throws all kinds of interesting things into the mix - the legends of Atlantis, the folk tales of the little people, sea serpents, dinosaurs, a giant spaceship, Norse mythology and some very advanced technology.
Having been written in 1959 it’s fair to say that to some degree it reflects the anxieties of its time, such as the Cold War. But happily Kelleam has no particular political axe to grind.
There’s some reasonably adept world-building. There is action (including plenty of sword-fights) and there is some low-key romance.
There’s also quite a bit of focus on questions of trust and loyalty. And plenty of emphasis on the doomed (or potentially doomed) lost civilisation angle.
Hunters Out of Time is by no means a neglected classic but it’s reasonably enjoyable and it’s worth a look.
Armchair Fiction have paired this one with Milton Lesser’s rather good Slaves to the Metal Horde in a two-novel paperback edition.
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