The main character, Grainger, is everything the heroes of the 30s space operas were not. After surviving shipwreck on a remote planet where he picks up a symbiotic inner-voice entity, Grainger, to pay off the costs of his rescue, must indenture himself as the pilot of an untried new research starship, the Hooded Swan. He's doesn't give a rat's ass about the glory of his home world or of his "employer's" goals to collect alien technologies and knowledge, which send him, reluctantly, all over the known universe and other places besides, gathering up information or artefacts. Grainger is a curmudgeonly veteran space pilot, who tries as best he can to refute the adage that "no man is an island." He doesn't rescue/mate with alien princesses, kill evil megalomaniacs out to conquer/destroy the universe, he just gets along with his life and job piloting the Hooded Swan. While Grainger is no deeply unhappy or doomed Cornell Woolrich character, the second novel's title "Rhapsody in Black" and the mildly pessimistic mood of the novels in general certainly suggests that there may be a smidgen of tribute to Woolrich's Black Novels in the Hooden Swan novels.

Unlike much of the early space operas where it was quite clear what current socio-political issues were being paralleled (red-blooded Americans vs. evil cowardly fascists/communists), besides an envisioned threat of business conglomerates running the universe, there isn't a repetitive unifying socio-political agenda. Brian Stableford postulates interesting life forms and societies, which the main characters have to interact with and attempt to comprehend, rather than simply annihilate and move on as heroes. All this said might suggest that Swan Songs is just a step away from the difficult reading of a Olaf Stapledon, but the novels certainly have a healthy dose of rip-roaring action, chases, things blowing up and the like, it just isn't couched in stupid science or outdated politics.

So if you're like me and have grown up past the point of enjoying the majority of pre-WWII space opera, this collection of the complete Grainger novels will make for some light but entertaining reading, with enough edge to the main character to make it clear that he isn't Captain Future (or Buzz Lightyear, if you're under 20) and intelligently enough written that some questions beyond who has the biggest ray-gun do get posed and answered.