Theatrical poster for An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe
An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe is an hour-long film in which four Edgar Allan Poe stories are recited by Vincent Price. Originally made as a television play (and in a way which suggests it was based on a theatrical production, albeit with the addition of some new visual effects), it’s reminiscent of the BBC’s A Ghost Story For Christmas segment, and I was recently asked to view it as a possible acquisition as a teaching tool by my university’s English Literature department.
The Cask of Amontillado
The programme is split into four segments, in each of which Price recites a different Poe short story. Fairly predictably, these are “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Sphinx”, “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Pit and the Pendulum”. Each segment is performed with Price in character as the narrator of each story, with appropriate costuming and sets. Although Price does show a decent range in playing different characters, they’re all very much within Price’s repertoire as an actor, so, although none of the performances are bad, there are no real surprises to be had here.
The Sphinx
I felt the best segment was “The Cask of Amontillado”. Price really seems to relish the role of Montressor and plays him with a wicked twinkle in his eye, surrounded by luxurious draperies and furniture and a banquet-table of food. The weakest for me was “The Sphinx,” which struggled to hold my attention, though it did have an effective use of special effects when we briefly see a skull overlaid over Price’s face at a crucial moment.
The Pit and the Pendulum
By contrast, “The Pit and the Pendulum” was a good enough dramatization of an exciting story, but the problem was that the producer seemed to feel it needed jazzing up with effects shots of Price falling into the pit, Price helpless before the pendulum, Price faced with colour separation overlay ("chroma-key" to yanks) flames, and so forth. The rats were far too cute, with inquisitive little faces and glossy fur, for me to find them horrific.
Finally, “The Tell-Tale Heart” was a good choice as the opening story, told simply with the set a bare garret, with Price steadily ramping up the hysteria as the narrator follows his path into murder and madness.
The Tell-Tale Heart
One great benefit I can see from this production is a chance to show audiences who may just know Poe from the cinematic productions loosely based on his work, just how skilled a horror writer Poe was in real life. The issue with something like “The Pit and the Pendulum” is that one can’t really get an entire 90-minute film out of it without adding a lot of material, which, while it can work as a movie, means you lose the terrifying economy of the original story (although if anyone wants to adapt “The Cask of Amontillado”, I think one could spend at least 90 minutes exploring the buildup of resentment in the two characters’ relationships that led up to the final murder). For this reason, I’m recommending that the English Literature department acquires a copy, and would also say that, if it turns up on TV in your region, it’s worth a watch.
3 out of 5 stars.
by Victoria Silverwolf
There's A Signpost Up Ahead . . .
Two films I caught recently reminded me of Rod Serling's late, lamented television series Twilight Zone. Let's take a look.
The Moebius Flip
Less than half an hour long, this skiing film is the sort of thing that might be shown at a college campus, before the main feature in a movie theater, or to fill up time on television in the wee hours of the morning. The brief running time isn't the only thing that reminds me of Serling's creation.
We begin with scenes of people skiing, edited in a jumpy way. Jazz, rock, and folk music fill up the soundtrack. The skiers also fool around in the snow, eat some fruit, and so forth.
Suddenly, we see a news announcer. He tells us that scientists have determined that every subatomic particle in the universe has reversed polarity. I'm not sure what that means, but let's see what happens.
Somehow, this is supposed to change the way people perceive things. That means the film turns into a negative of itself.
This goes on for a while, then the movie goes back to normal. Once in a while, it turns back into a negative. I guess that's a Moebius Flip. Along with more skiing, we get folks at an amusement park and eating in a restaurant. This part of the film features some pretty impressive and scary scenes of dangerous winter sports. People ski over huge crevasses, wind up on top of a tower of snow, and hang from cliffs.
Is it worth twenty-odd minutes of your time? Well, if you like psychedelic images or are a big fan of skiing, it could be. The science fiction premise is just an excuse to reverse the colors of the film, and there's no real plot at all. I've never been on a pair of skis, so I can only appreciate the athleticism on display here as an outsider.
Two stars.
Sole Survivor
This is a made-for-TV movie that aired on CBS stations in the USA earlier this month. It begins with five men in World War Two uniforms standing around a wrecked American bomber of the time. They seem to be in pretty good shape, given that they're in a desert wasteland. Things get weird when we find out they've been waiting to be rescued for seventeen years.
The crew of the Home Run.
It quickly becomes clear that they are ghosts, waiting for their bodies to be found so they can stop haunting the wreck.
I should note here that the premise is inspired by the case of the Lady Be Good, a bomber that crashed in the Libyan desert in 1943 and was not discovered until 1958.
The real wreck.
Fans of Twilight Zone will remember the episode King Nine Will Not Return, which was also inspired by the fate of the Lady Be Good. That tale goes in a different direction, however.
Two men in an airplane discover the wreck. (By the way, the fact that the ghosts have been waiting for seventeen years means that the movie takes place in 1960 or so. There's no other indication that it's set a decade ago.)
The discoverers, who look more 1970 to me.
This leads to an official investigation by the United States Army. (Remember that the Air Force was part of the Army, and not a separate branch of the service, until a few years after World War Two.) Two officers are in charge of the mission.
William Shatner, fresh from Star Trek, as Lieutenant Colonel Josef Gronke and Vince Edwards, best known as Ben Casey, as Major Michael Devlin.
They pay a visit to the sole survivor of the Home Run. This fellow parachuted out of the plane and landed in the Mediterranean Sea, managing to make it out alive to continue his military career. (More details of what happened later.)
Brigadier General Russell Hamner, as played by Richard Basehart, recently the star of the TV series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
Hamner agrees to accompany the two officers to the North African desert. He claims that all of the crew of the Home Run bailed out into the ocean, so the plane must have continued without them for several hundred miles before it crashed. Unlikely, but possible. Flashbacks tell us the real story.
Hamner as the navigator of the Home Run during the war.
The bomber was damaged in an attack by the enemy. The captain ordered Hamner to plot a course back to base, but he panicked and bailed out against orders. Without a navigator, the crew went off course and the plane crashed.
Tension builds as Devlin casts doubt on Hamner's story, and Gronke tells him not to make waves, lest he ruin his career. Both officers have their own concerns about their pasts, adding depth of character. Without giving too much away, let's just say that the truth comes out because of a harmonica, a rubber raft, and Hamner's guilty conscience. There's a powerful and poignant conclusion.
The last ghost faces an eternity playing baseball alone.
This is quite a good movie, particularly for one made for TV. I like the fact that the ghosts appear as ordinary men, rather than being transparent or something. The actors all do a good job. You'll never hear the song Take Me Out To The Ball Game again without having an eerie feeling.
Four stars.
by Brian Collins
Over the past several years, AIP has adapted stories by H. P. Lovecraft for the big screen—or at least the drive-in. The results have been mixed, but they could certainly be much worse. The first and still the best of these was The Haunted Palace (adapted from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward) back in '63, directed by Roger Corman, with a script by the late Charles Beaumont, and starring an especially tormented Vincent Price. It was a very fine picture. Now we have the latest entry in this "series," The Dunwich Horror, taken from the Lovecraft story of the same name, although it's a pretty loose adaptation.
The Dunwich Horror
One warning I want to give about this movie, one which has nothing to do with sex or violence, is that, aside from being generally a pretty strange film, there are several scenes featuring flashing lights, or a color filter changing rapidly to give one the impression of a strobing light. Some people (thankfully not many) are susceptible to epileptic fits if subjected to such stimuli.
Now, as for the film itself, once we get past what I was surprised to find is an animated (as in a cartoon) opening credits sequence, we start with what seems to be a flashback of a woman giving birth, surrounded by two elderly sisters and an old man. We then flash forward to Miskatonic University, that college of the occult and Lovecraft's making, in Arkham. Nancy Wagner (Sandra Dee) is a student who, in the college's library, meets a good-looking but unusual young man named Wilbur Whateley (Dean Stockwell), who is terribly interested in the Necronomicon. I'm sure his interest in the accursed book and his strange deadpan way of talking are perfectly innocuous. A certain professor at Miskatonic, Henry Armitage (Ed Begley), gets a bit of a hunch that Wilbur is up to no good, but for now does nothing about it.
The Necronomicon, kept in a cozy glass case.
"The Dunwich Horror" is one of Lovecraft's most celebrated stories, but it's also one of his trickiest. As with "the Call of Cthulhu," Lovecraft wrote "The Dunwich Horror" as if it were a report or an essay, a work of journalism or academia, rather than a fiction narrative. There's no protagonist, properly speaking, although Wilbur is certainly the story's nucleus. This remains sort of the case with the film, although Nancy and Armitage now serve as our eyes and ears, or rather as normal people in what becomes an extraordinary situation. However, it's not Sandra Dee or Ed Begley who caught my attention, but Dean Stockwell as Wilbur, who gives almost what could be considered a star-making role (to my knowledge his most high-profile roles up to now were film adaptations of Sons and Lovers and Long Day's Journey into Night), if not for the movie that surrounds him. Unlike his short story counterpart Wilbur here is not physically deformed, but instead talks in a strangely deadened tone, as if human emotions are foreign to him. Stockwell as Wilbur manages to be uncanny simply through how he talks and acts, which is a major point of praise.
Dean Stockwell as Wilbur Whateley and Sandra Dee as Nancy Wagner.
Director Daniel Haller and his team of screenwriters have opted to streamline Lovecraft's story while giving it a sort of romance plot, as well as a dose of sex and violence. Sex and Lovecraft have always been uneasy bedfellows, even in something like "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" which explicitly involves sex in its plot. Wilbur is one of two twins, the other having supposedly died in childbirth, with the father being unknown, and his mother having been kept in an asylum for the past two decades. Wilbur lives with his grandfather, Old Man Whateley (Sam Jaffe, who some may recognize as that one scientist in the now-classic The Day the Earth Stood Still), who seems convinced his grandson is also up to no good, but arbitrarily (the film does nothing to explain this) does nothing about Wilbur being a scoundrel. For his part, Wilbur sees Nancy as a pretty fine girl—for a dark ritual, that is. The idea is that if he can steal the Necronomicon and impregnate Nancy (the implication, via a mind-bending scene, is that he rapes her), he can bring one of "the Old Ones" into the human world.
Sam Jaffe as Old Man Whateley and Ed Begley as Professor Henry Armitage.
As this point the plot splits in two, with one half focusing on Wilbur and Nancy's "romance" while the other sees Armitage tracking down the mystery of Wilbur's birth, since it becomes apparent the young man and the Necronomicon are somehow connected. One of the strangest (sorry, "far-out") scenes in the whole movie is when Armitage goes to see Wilbur's mother (Joanne Moore Jordan), who apparently had lost her mind many years ago upon giving birth to Wilbur and his dead twin. When it comes to this movie, there are two types of strange: that of the unnerving sort, and that of the cheesy sort. There are parts (sometimes moments within a single scene) of this movie that do a good job of spooking the audience, and others where it's rather silly. With that said, the nightmarish effect of Jordan's performance combined with the changing color tints in this scene make it one of the most effective. This is a movie that generally shines brightest when it focuses on Stockwell's performance and/or the Gothic cliches (including a creepy old house) that clearly also influenced Lovecraft's writing. Maybe it's because they didn't have the budget for it, but the lack of an on-screen monster for the vast majority of the film's runtime also works in its favor.
Joanne Moore Jordan as Wilbur's mother, who's spent the past two decades as a mental patient.
When Old Man Whateley finally decides to take action, Wilbur kills him for his troubles, along with imprisoning one of Nancy's friends and turning her into some kind of abomination. Meanwhile Wilbur gives his grandfather a heathen burial and in so doing provokes the wrath of the Dunwich townspeople, who never liked the Whateleys anyway. It's revealed, or rather speculated, that Wilbur's twin may not have died after all, but instead gone to the realm of the Old Ones while Wilbur got stuck on Earth as a human. Armitage and the townsfolk succeed in stopping Wilbur from completing his ritual with the unconscious Nancy, Armitage being well-versed enough in the Necronomicon to use the book against Wilbur, killing him with a blast of lightning. So the last of the Whateley men is dead. Unfortunately, the final shot, eerily showing a fetus growing inside Nancy (which is odd, because she's probably only been pregnant a day or two), implying an Old One may be born after all.
Dean Stockwell at his most devilish.
Lovecraft purists will surely be much disappointed with this movie, and even as someone who is not exactly a Lovecraft fan, I have to admit it's by no means perfect. Even at 90 minutes it feels a bit overlong, and it tries desperately to contort one of Lovecraft's more unconventional stories into having a three-act structure. I also get the impression that the addition of blood and breasts was to appease those (people my age and younger) who are suckers for AIP schlock. Not too long ago we had Roger Corman's so-called Poe cycle, which for the most part did Edgar Allan Poe's (and in one case Lovecraft's) fiction justice on modest budgets. I would say The Dunwich Horror is on par with one of the lesser of Corman's Poe movies.
A high three stars.
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
by Brian Collins
You may look at the byline for today's book of mine and wonder if your eyes are deceiving you; but no, that really is T. L. Sherred, who some older readers may remember as having written a few SF stories more than 15 years ago. Indeed, it has been so long since Sherred last appeared that it seems as if JESUS CHRIST HIMSELF had been born and then crucified in the interim, what with how much the field has changed since 1955. Now Sherred comes to us with what is apparently his debut novel.
Alien Island, by T. L. Sherred Cover art by Carol Inouye.
The gist of it is that humanoid aliens, called the Regans, have come to Earth, in the name of a kind of cultural exchange; it just so happens that they've landed in Sherred's home state of Michigan. Dana Iverson holds part-time jobs as a barmaid and cafeteria worker, but secretly she works for the CIA, thus acting as our eyes and ears for the story that unfolds. A barfly buddy of Iverson's, Ken Jordan, gets randomly (or at least it seems random) selected as Earth's ambassador for the meeting with the Regans. For the Regans' part, they've provided the unrealistically gorgeous space captain Lee Kay Lukkari. The idea is that Jordan and Lukkari merge personalities and memories, quite literally, such that they learn of each other's cultures in about as direct and intimate a way as one can imagine. The neutral ground, which Jordan soon enough transforms into a kind of Xanadu, is the island of the book's title, positioned on the US-Canada border, just outside Michigan.
What could possibly go wrong? Actually, quite a lot.
Readers with good memories may recall a very good story of Sherred's from a very long time ago, "E for Effort," which involves a seemingly innocuous invention (a time-viewer that the characters use to their economic advantage) but which soon comes to have apocalyptic consequences. I have to say I'm a bit confused as to why Sherred, who for all I know has spent the past 15 years selling used cars, should suddenly emerge from hibernation with this specific novel. It's not that Alien Island is a bad novel exactly, but rather that while it follows a similar trajectory to that minor classic of Sherred's that I mentioned, and while it seems to come from the same place of pessimism regarding humanity's future in the wake of the atomic bomb, this is a narrative that doesn't benefit whatsoever from being rendered a novel. Certainly it would have worked better as a novella, given the small cast of main characters, the claustrophobic setting, and the single-mindedness of its message. The sad part is that it's by no means a bad message.
The other question I have to ask is why Sherred waited until, say, the past few years to write this novel of his. True, there are passages wherein the characters discuss sex, in a pretty inoffensive fashion (those expecting steamy human-on-space-babe intimacy will come away disappointed), but the language is more or less clean. I will say, it's not often you read an SF novel by one of "the old guard" these days and have the protagonist/narrator be a woman; that much of Iverson's conflict comes from her jealousy of Lukkari and her ill-hidden affection for Jordan is not as steep a price to pay as it sounds. Another thing to its credit is that Alien Island is a satire with a point to make, which I understand is going off of a low bar, but it still distresses me how many alleged satires strike me as utterly vacuous. Similarly to "E for Effort," this is basically a story about the pinhead humanity stands on, between nuclear annihilation and possibly ascending to a higher place. With "E for Effort" it was a time-viewer, whereas with Alien Island it's intervention on the part of some benign, if hard-to-read aliens.
One more thing: Without giving away specifics, I was worried that Sherred's novel would repeat the black hole of nuclear doom that "E for Effort" headed for by its end; but this novel's ending, which has a strangely biblical resonance, could be considered cautiously optimistic. Incidentally, "cautiously optimistic" is how I also feel about Sherred returning to the field after so long.
This month’s Ace Double gives us the fifth story set in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover universe. A standalone story, The Winds of Darkover requires no prior knowledge of the series.
Generations removed from the colonists from whom they descended, the people of Darkover, a little waystation planet, live in an archaic feudal society lorded over by a ruling class with psychic abilities. Deep in the mountains, one of these noble families is thrust into turmoil when a bandit tribe lays siege to Storn Castle, and to save her family Lady Melitta of Storn is forced to flee in search of aid.
Seemingly unrelated, high above the planet a disgraced spaceport dispatcher named Dan Barron is unceremoniously relieved of his position after a paralyzing psychic vision renders him useless in an emergency and endangers the lives of several pilots. To salvage his employment he is sent on a humiliating planet-side mission at the request of the Darkovan Lord Valdir to instruct his men in the construction of lenses used in telescopes. Barron agrees reluctantly, but the psychic visions that cost him his job continue to plague his mind and body.
Bradley’s setting is dazzling; Darkover is unmistakably reminiscent of the Middle Ages, but filled with enough alien wonders and ancient history to give the impression that this world is much bigger than the little story it contains. The story, unfortunately, does its world little justice. Each event feels cobbled together out of necessity, and the sum of the parts is a story that jerks from one scene to the next with little regard for cohesion. The third act is so brief that the resolution feels unearned. My biggest issue, however, was the baffling choice to write one of its main characters out of importance.
Melitta of Storn is driven from her besieged home with the fate of her family entirely dependent on her wit and bravery, and seems like the obvious candidate for the heroine of a pulp fantasy. Rather than do the obvious, however, Bradley is apparently content to allow Melitta to gradually fade into the background with little impact on the plot. Until, of course, it is time for her to be the milquetoast half of a romance with Barron so under-baked I found myself checking to make sure I hadn’t accidentally skipped any pages.
The Winds of Darkover is a serviceable but ultimately skippable installment in the Darkover saga. It is buoyed only by its fantastical setting, and the story a disappointingly uninspired patchwork of genre fantasy staples. Two stars.
The other half of this Ace Double is The Anything Tree by John Rackham, and I found myself enjoying this one a lot more than I thought I would upon reading the opening pages. The first few paragraphs describe the heroine flippantly enough that I thought the rest of the book was going to be dismissive of her, but once the plot picked up I was pleasantly surprised.
Selena Ash is a covert agent sent on a mission by her father’s company to locate the planet of a tree with miraculous properties, and she does so under the guise of a thrill-seeking socialite who enjoys interplanetary racing. A mysterious sabotage sends her ship crash-landing onto a lush forest planet that she believes to be uninhabited… until she runs into Joe, a fellow explorer who has inexplicably “gone native” and made this planet his home, loincloth and all. Joe acts as Selena’s guide as they traverse this obscure planet to escape her adversaries, and she slowly begins to understand that Joe has a certain kinship with the plant life that populates this planet. As she grows to share his affinity for the friendly alien flora, she realizes that his solitary existence might be less lonely than she had initially believed.
Some of the inciting incidents of the plot feel a little contrived, but I was more than willing to suspend my disbelief and enjoy this fantastically verdant paradise of a planet. Selena’s awareness of the existence of a kind of sapience possessed by the plants, not so much intelligence as base creature instinct, grows gradually enough to coax the reader along into an unwitting empathy with vegetation. Even the romance feels earnest and sweet, as the two protagonists are brought mentally and spiritually into togetherness by willingly joining the plants in their blissful existence. This unfamiliar way of existing is joyful in its inhumanity, compelling enough for me to ignore any plot contrivance or cliché and just be one with the greenery.
Maybe the contempt at the beginning of this story was justified, by Selena and all of humanity, me included. Rackham’s reverent wonder for the criminally unappreciated plant rings clear as a bell, compelling enough for me to set aside my dumb human logic and be reminded by the flowers of the joy of existing as a living creature. Four stars.
Today, 230 young women are undergraduates beginning their Spring semester at Yale where this time a year ago, none were. The education of women is a profession as old as learning, but has only recently been taken up by a range of our nation's institutions of higher learning. Stories about young women's minds, as opposed to their bodies or the uses men find for them, are as welcome and necessary as air.
Enchantress from the Stars is a story of a young woman's exploration of her world through the worlds – and worldviews – of others. This story has three alternating perspectives but Elana's view is the central one, with scenes through Jarel and Georyn's eyes weaving around it but never overwhelming the forthright and careful way Elana approaches her story.
This is a story fans of Star Trek would deeply enjoy, with its Federation and moral imperatives not to interfere, its mix of timelines and technologies, and most of all, its earnest heart. It brings a duty-bound respect for and curiosity about all living things that fans of Nurse Chapel and Lieutenant Uhura – as well as Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Sulu, and Chekov – might enjoy.
Elana's world is divided into thirds, with her society at the top, as those who have control over the power of both machines and minds. Jeral's society is second tier, with control over mechanicals like space ships and mining engines and laser weapons, but no psychic powers. Georyn's world languishes in the bottom third of the power hierarchy, medieval with no machines and no mental powers, but he does hold a belief in magic that allows him to understand the world around him in some ways that are initially lost on Jeral.
The "dragon" that appears early in this story shows the deep potential for this tripartite frame. First, we hear of a dragon from Georyn and the number of people who have gone to fight it and never returned. Then we see through Jarel's eyes it is a fire-breathing forest clearing machine from the empire he serves in a junior capacity, and that the people Georyn has lost to the "dragon" are actually imprisoned by Jeral's colonizers. Finally, and most complexly, we understand the dragon through Elana's eyes, as both the monster of myth and of man, its terribleness and terror flowing from both wellsprings.
Enchantress from the Stars invites readers to engage in the kind of profound and transformative empathy that the best of science fiction and fantasy can draw from us. We see events from our own views as readers, from hers, from those of her father and coworker and the people she seeks to protect and those whose aggression she seeks to defuse. As I read, I found myself reinterpreting everything Georyn and Jeral said through Elana's view, a pleasant mental and emotional stretch that only grew more satisfying the more practice I had at it.
That juxtaposition between science fiction and fantasy is in a way at the heart of what makes Enchantress from the Stars so magical and remarkable, because the genre shifts depending on who is telling the story. Georyn's fantasy is Jeral's horror is Elana's science fiction. Most books ask us to walk in one stranger's shoes, and leave us better off for doing it; Enchantress from the Stars invites us to several views and gives us the tools to truly understand them.
In this moment where professors are having to learn to address their students as "ladies and gentlemen" and not merely "gentlemen," I believe we could all use as much practice expanding our worldviews as possible, to include new genders, new perspectives, and as many new ways of being as we can in a never ending effort to fully understand what it means to be human.
Americans today live under a constitution that does not once include the word "she" or "woman" or "girl." It has been nearly 50 years since the Equal Rights Amendment was first introduced and it still, still has not passed. Maybe some of those young women at Yale will get it passed or their colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley, which is celebrating its 100 year anniversary of admitting women this year, will see it through.
Like Elana's world, ours is unequal. It is full of dangers and arbitrary death, patriarchies that bind and urge conformity and restrict human potential. It is also full of girls like Elana, boys like Georyn and Jeral, young people who are willing to challenge what they can see with their own eyes is wrong in the world. Who are willing to take what they are given by their fathers, older brothers, commanders, and societies and say: no, this is not for me; for me, I choose another way.
Enchantress from the Stars gives them and us the time and space to question, to discern what our worlds are and should be and can be. It is a novel that gives us readers a breath of time, a bare string of moments, to consider: what have we received today that we will reject, reform, and remake tomorrow? Who will we teach ourselves and others to be? Who will we become?
Who do we want to be?
(Four stars)
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
A generation or two from now, the Earth is recovering from a devastating war between the Western World and the Chinasian alliance. At first, the latter was winning, surging into Australia and with a plan to cross the Bering Strait. Then things bogged down. Eschewing the use of nuclear weapons (for an unexplained reason), the death rate became fantastic.
One day, the war just stopped. Or, more specifically, someone stopped them. Sounds like a positive development, but whoever did it is now exerting dictatorial control over the globe, futzing with governments, economies, even population growth rates and somehow slowing the age of human maturity!
Now, a decade after the war, Michael Standard, a battered veteran of the Australian front, is the one man who can stop the war-stopper. He is equipped with a prosthetic arm which is set to fire its hand like a cannon when face to face with the entity who styles himself "The Rim".
In many ways, Earthrim is a conventional action yarn, not too different from the series hero paperbacks like the new "Executioner" series. Standard is an irascible brute who lurches from fight to fight, surviving by animal cunning and will to live. The world Nick Kamin (a new author) creates is not particularly visionary. There is one lady character, and she is a prostitute, existing for the sole purpose of 1) being Standard's lover, and 2) getting Standard to Rim.
But Kamin does some interesting stuff. He begins the story with a compelling hook: Standard is put under to have his prosthetic arm's shoulder put back into its socket, which brings a hapless doctor into the plot. Then we get scenes from Standard's past, woven in quite deftly, making his character more interesting and his personality a bit more palatable (though how he acts like a moron most of the time, but can whip out an erudite observation on topology is a bit strange).
The other characters are actually well drawn, from Jeannine the prostitute to Dr. Graystone. Even the cops on the trail of Standard get decently fleshed out, though their role is somewhat incidental. Kamin is also a compelling author. He's got the modern style down pat, and the lurid mode works well for Ace Doubles.
The biggest problem with the book is the revelation at the end that no character has exercised free will. Everything that happens is ultimately the will of Rim or Condliffe, the fellow who equipped Standard with the arm-gun. The journey is interesting. The writing is good. But the story is a steel lattice that the characters can only inhabit, not change.
Three and a half stars.
Phoenix Ship, by Leigh and Walt Richmond
by Jack Gaughan
The Richmond husband-and-wife team (supposedly, the wife does the typing, with the husband sending telepathic instructions from his living room easy chair) has another Ace Double for us. Stanley Thomas Arthur Reginald (S.T.A.R.) Dustin is an Earther, nephew to an asteroid belt-dwelling rabble-rouser named Trevor Dustin. Stan's dad wants his son to be nothing like his uncle, so he enrolls him in an arctic university for a proper indoctrination…er…education. Said education is most unusual. Stan gets weekly "inoculations" and then is given a series of exams. The questions are highly technical—impossible to answer without years of classes. Yes somehow, unconsciously, Stan seems to have the answers floating in the back of his mind.
Not content to let his hindbrain do the work, Stan spends all of his waking hours studying so that he could pass the tests even without the mysterious, subconscious aid. As a result, after four years, Stan has one of the most remarkable minds in the solar system. He finishes his schooling just in time for his uncle to lead a rebellion against Earth, winning independence for the Belt through a series of brilliant space naval maneuvers.
This makes Stan persona non grata on Earth, whereupon the school's headmaster sneeringly informs Stan that he has been drafted into the Marines, and he will have to report for duty in two weeks as one of Earth's finest. Well, Stan won't stand for that—he skips town, heads to orbit, and then off to the Belt…where he has a date with destiny and a second war with Earth.
Written in a much (much!) more juvenile vein than the Kamin, this is an odd duck of a book. With its cardboard characters, mustache-twirling villains, perfunctory inclusion of a single female (to be the love interest, natch), and its basic plot, it feels like something out of the 30s. On the other hand, the loving detail lavished on things like weightless maneuvers, dealing with explosive decompression, and space station construction are pulled from the current pages of Popular Science. There are tantalizing details on living in the Belt. Most interesting was that virtually all of its denizens are scarred or deformed, testament to the hostile environment, but no less human for it. Anderson and Niven have written about Belters, but the Richmonds have taken the first, if clumsy, steps to flesh out living in the Belt, I think.
The problem is neither Anderson nor Niven wrote this book, and the Richmonds really weren't up to it. The subject matter required twice its length. At the hands of a Heinlein, it could have been a second The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. As is, it's an occasionally entertaining, but largely turgid and by-the-numbers throwaway.
Speaking of husband and wife writing teams… Lord of the Stars is a new juvenile sf adventure co-created by the husband-and-wife team of Jean and Jeff Sutton. Stars is readable and fun, but lacks the fire and flash of the best juveniles.
Like many juveniles, Stars is a coming-of-age story which tells the story of how a young boy discovers a world around him much more complex and interesting than he ever could have expected. As in many of these types of books, Danny has a destiny to fulfill, and as he learns of his destiny, the boy also learns the creature who had mentored him is evil, and he meets his true friends along the way.
Hmm, it occurs to me there is a lot of familiar archetyping in that description. That archetyping is a big part of the strength and weakness of this book. Because sophisticated readers know basically how a story like this will proceed, we're looking for signposts that indicate a different viewpoint or more complexity – as in the recent Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin. But the Suttons aren't after the same level of complexity as Panshin was, and that leaves this book as merely an average juvenile sf yarn.
Cover by Albert Orbaan
The Suttons center Lord of the Stars around Danny June. As we meet Danny, he's all alone on a mysterious planet. He's been lost on the planet since his parents' colonist ship blew up, wandering the planet with the help of an amazing telepathic octopus-creature named Zandro. Zandro has incredible abilities and is extremely intelligent, guiding our boy in his means to survive the planet, and seeming to groom Danny for a greater fate.
But others want Danny as well. The great Galactic Empire, spanning thousands of stars, is after Danny. In chapter two we are introduced to the 17th Celestial Sector of the Third Terran Empire, led by Sol Houston, who see Danny as the kind of creature who can destroy their empire.
That aspect of the book is dully familiar, but at least the Suttons bring in a bit of playfulness with the names of the Galactic leaders. For reasons lost in the fog of time, the names Sol and Houston are legendary, so the leader of the empire is named Sol Houston. And so on, names explained in fun and clever asides which added to my pleasure with this book.
Similarly, there's an amusing tangent in which a set of Empire bureaucrats try to figure out what they can do to affect the lives of Danny and his friends. The bureaucrats fall into an almost talmudic debate about which regs to follow, which rules can be broken. It's in those moments one can see real-life arguments with governments and school boards made manifest. (Jean Sutton works as a high school teacher while Jeff Sutton works as an aerospace consultant, so both know plenty about bureaucracy).
But the core of the book centers around Danny, his great psychic powers, and the attempts by his friends and allies to break Danny away from Zandro's influence. Along the way, Danny battles the plans of Gultur, Lord of the Stars; communicates psychically in subspace with a group of androids; and makes friends.
All of this is quite fun, since the Suttons bring just the right amount of seriousness to bear with Lord of the Stars. This is also a well-written, crisp little novel — no surprise since Jeff Sutton has written fiction and nonfiction since he left the Marines after the War. Still, Danny comes across as bit of a cipher and the plot machinations are a bit creaky.
Overall, a pleasant novel that's a bit of a throwback but still is worth the read.
Three stars.
by Victoria Silverwolf
The Best Laid Schemes o' Mice an' (Space)Men
Two novels in which interstellar voyages gang agley (with a tip o' the Tam o' Shanter to Bobby Burns) fell into my hands recently. One is by a Yank, the other by a Brit. Let's take a look at 'em.
The Rakehells of Heaven, by John Boyd
Wraparound cover art by Paul Lehr
Atlanta-born Boyd Bradfield Upchurch writes under the penname listed above. He's whipped out a couple of previous novels quickly. The Last Starship from Earth came out last year, and The Pollinators of Eden just a few months ago.
This latest work starts with a psychiatrist interviewing a spaceman who came back from his voyage too early. More concerning is the fact that it was supposed to be a two-man effort, and his partner isn't with him.
The text quickly shifts to first person narration by the astronaut himself. His name is John Adams, better known as Jack. (I'm not sure if his name is supposed to be an allusion to the second President of the United States or not.) He's a Southern boy, just like the author.
His missing buddy is Keven "Red" O'Hara, a stereotypical Irishman who has a toy leprechaun as a good luck charm and wears underwear with green polka dots. (The latter is actually part of the plot.)
We get quite a bit of background about their days before the spaceflight. Suffice to say that, after an encounter with an old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone preacher and his nubile daughter, Jack gets religion and Red gets the girl. (He actually marries her but, as we'll see, that hardly ties him down.)
Their mission takes them to a planet in another galaxy. (There's no real reason the place has to be so far away. In other ways, this isn't the most realistic space voyage ever to appear in fiction.) The inhabitants are very human in appearance, the main difference being very long, strong legs that are used in about the same way as arms.
The aliens live in a logical, technologically advanced society with no apparent form of government. Society is made up of what are pretty much universities. The two Earthmen are welcomed, and even allowed to teach classes.
It should be noted that the locals wear extremely short tunics and nothing else, not even underwear. This very casual almost-nudity (which really conceals nothing) goes along with the fact that they consider sex to be no big deal, just something they do when they feel like it. Children often result, of course, and never know who their fathers are.
For Red, this is an opportunity to have relations with as many of the beautiful young women surrounding him as possible. Jack, on the other hand, wants to convert the natives to Christianity. That includes dressing modestly, courting the opposite sex chastely, etc.
Can you guess that this is going to backfire?
Complicating matters is the fact that Jack falls in love with one of the aliens. It seems that Earth doesn't consider extraterrestrials to be human unless they meet a long list of very specific conditions. That includes being able to defend their planet from invaders. (Obviously this is a cynical ploy on the part of Earthlings to be able to enslave any aliens who are weaker than they are.) In essence, Jack is marrying an animal, legally, unless he can prove they meet all the conditions.
Things reach a climax during the performance of an Eastertime Passion Play, meant to convey the story of Christ's sacrifice to the aliens, who are entirely without religion. (Red, nominally a Catholic, goes along with Jack's evangelism, mostly because he enjoys putting on shows.)
Yep, that's not going to go at all well either.
This is a satiric novel, not quite openly comic although it's got some farcical elements. There's also quite a bit of sex. This may be the only science fiction book I've read with a detailed description of a woman's genitalia.
The last part of the novel, which goes back to the psychiatrist, has a twist ending that doesn't quite make sense. Maybe the best way to describe this odd little book is to compare it to an episode of Star Trek combined with a dirty and blasphemous joke.
Three stars.
The Black Corridor, by Michael Moorcock
Cover art by Diane and Leo Dillon
Prolific author and controversial editor Moorcock needs no introduction to Galactic Journeyers.
A fellow named Ryan is aboard a starship heading for a supposedly habitable planet orbiting Barnard's Star. The trip will take five years, and three have already gone by. He's the only person awake on the ship. In hibernation are his wife, their two sons, and other relatives and friends.
(We'll find out, by the way, that a couple of the men have two wives each. This drastic change in Western European society [everybody is British] is taken for granted, with no discussion.)
Flashbacks take us to a future Earth that is rapidly disintegrating into chaos. Tribalism rears its ugly head. Ryan, the manager of a toy company, fires a kindly employee just because the fellow is Welsh. Things get much, much worse as the book continues. Ryan and the others hijack the starship in order to escape Earth, which they feel is doomed.
Aboard the ship, Ryan suffers nightmares. These are often surrealistic. At times, the text turns into words in all capitals that are placed on the page to form other words. These typographical tricks contrast strongly with the main parts of the narrative, which use simple language to convey truly horrific happenings.
It's hard for me to say much more about what happens, because Ryan is quite obviously experiencing a mental breakdown. You can't trust that what you're told is real.
This is a very dark and disturbing book. The New Wave narrative technique associated with the nightmares is a little gimmicky, but otherwise the novel is compelling in its portrait of both individuals and society in general falling apart.
(It should be noted that, according to scuttlebutt, many of the scenes set on Earth were written by Hilary Bailey, who is married to Moorcock. He rewrote that material, and added everything set in space. The resulting work is credited solely to Moorcock, apparently with Bailey's consent.)
Four stars.
by Brian Collins
Only one book from me this month, and unfortunately it's not a very good one. It's also, for better or worse, a familiar face. John Jakes has been writing at a mile a minute this year, with The Asylum World being what must be his fourth or fifth novel of 1969. Unlike some previous Jakes novels (a couple of which I reviewed), which lean more towards fantasy, this one is very much science fiction. If anything, the changing of genres is for the worse.
The year is 2031, and while mankind still lives on Earth, to an extent, a widespread race war between blacks and whites (I am not kidding) has resulted in not only Earth being split into Westbloc and Eastbloc (obviously a futuristic equivalent of our current cold war with the Soviets), but, I suppose on the bright side, a Noah's Ark of humanity has been established on Mars, where people live in domes, more or less in racial harmony. Sean Cloud is young, brash, and a "subadministrator" of this Martian colony. He's also hopelessly in love Lydia Vebren, who likes Sean but is hesitant due to his mixed racial heritage. Sean is half-black and half-white, is apparently unable to pass as the latter, and Lydia has a prejudice against black men.
There's also another, larger problem: a fleet of alien ships is making its way through the solar system, to Mars, possibly for peace, but also possibly to make war. The Martian colony does not have the armaments to defend itself, so Sean and Lydia are sent to Earth to bargain with the leadership in Westbloc, which itself is on the verge of turning to shambles.
The back cover says The Asylum World is satire, which strikes me as a bit odd, because in my experience satire is supposed to a) be humorous, and b) provide a topic on which the author may try to prove a point. No doubt this novel is Jakes's attempt at providing commentary on the current political climate in the U.S., especially racial strife over the past decade, not to mention that yes, tensions between the Americans and Soviets have resulted in us nearly blowing ourselves to bits at least once already. The problem is that I'm not sure what the hell he is trying to say, other than to make some center-of-the-road statements such as, for example, bemoaning the irrelevance of the family unit in this not-too-far future. There's a general sentiment of "Why can't we just get along and learn to speak honestly with each other?" which is all well and good, but men around my age and younger are dying. Sean's mixed racial heritage, which seems like it should be fodder for symbolic meaning (he is, after all, the offspring of two races, and now he must join Westbloc with Mars), but Jakes does very little with this.
I could continue to berate Jakes's political naivete, and I could also delve into how even at 170 pages this novel spins its wheels a fair bit (it really could have been a novella); but instead I'll focus some on how, despite taking place several decades into our future, The Asylum World strikes me as having been written only in the past year, maybe in the span of a month or two (why not? Michael Moorcock has written novels in a matter of days), and that I do not see how it could remain relevant in say, another ten years. When Sean comes to Earth he spends most of the novel at the "Nixon-Hilton." Sure. There's also the "Statue of the Three Kennedys." The bubbling conflict between Westbloc and Eastbloc is more or less what we are now dealing with, despite the very real possibility that the Soviet Union may not exist in 2031. Or indeed the United States. This seems like a novel written specifically to be published in 1969, so that readers may "get it" while it still gives the impression of being timely—at which point, having finished the novel in a day or two, said readers will toss it aside. At least Jakes is now slightly less at risk of having to beg for money on a street corner.
Thirty years ago, Arkham House was founded as a small but luxurious publisher, with the intention of preserving the works of H. P. Lovecraft via hardcover editions that would last through the decades. Lovecraft died in 1937, before the vast majority of his work got to be published in book form, and indeed some of his finished work, such as The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, would not see publication at all until after his death. Arkham House's ambitions soon grew, and it's still going strong, even if works by the old pulp writers are now seeing affordable paperback releases.
Cover art by Lee Brown Coye
Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos is a bulky new anthology, here to celebrate four decades of weird fiction in connection with Lovecraft; and while it has a limited run of some 4,000 copies, you should consider yourself one of the lucky few if you can acquire it. Because of its length, and also it combining reprints with original stories never before published, the reviews are split between me and my good colleague George Prichard, I focusing more on the reprints while he takes most of the original stories. This should be fun, and a little spooky.
The Cthulhu Mythos, by August Derleth
Derlath has been the primary chronicler of Lovecraft’s career for the past thirty years, ever since he co-founded Arkham House with Donald Wandrei all those years ago; so it only makes sense he would provide a history (as he sees it, anyway) to the so-called Cthulhu Mythos. As Derleth points out, Lovecraft never referred to the Mythos as such, but it was a name those in his circle were keen on adopting—those in the circle including Robert Bloch, Robert E. Howard, the much missed Henry Kuttner, among others. Bloch wrote “The Shambler from the Stars” when he was but a teenager, and Lovecraft wrote “The Haunter of the Dark” as a response to Bloch’s story. Both are included here, along with a distant followup from Bloch titled “The Shadow from the Steeple,” all three presented “for the first time together in chronological order.” Otherwise Derleth sought to present these stories more or less as they appeared in publication order, the Mythos thus being showcased in a mostly linear fashion.
No rating for this introductory essay.
The Call of Cthulhu, by H. P. Lovecraft
Cover art by C. C. Senf.
First published in the February 1928 issue of Weird Tales.
While not strictly the first Mythos story, Derleth considers “The Call of Cthulhu” to be the proper genesis of this loose series, so it goes first. I’ve read this story a few times over the years and find myself warming up to it more with each reread. It’s one of Lovecraft’s more unconventionally structured stories—what we might call a compressed novel rather than a traditional short story. An anthropologist rummages through the papers of his recently deceased uncle and uncovers, gradually, a conspiracy involving an ancient cult, a young sculptor whose fever dreams were telepathically linked to unrelated parties, a Norwegian sailor who narrowly survived an encounter with one of the “Great Old Ones,” and of course, a statuette of the many-eyed and -tentacled Cthulhu. The opening paragraph is perhaps the most iconic in all of weird horror, a perfect mission statement on Lovecraft’s part. His obvious disdain for non-European cultures can be nauseating, but it’s also hard to deny the sheer density and sense of foreboding with his writing here.
One last thing: I noticed the narrator mentioning Arthur Machen and Clark Ashton Smith by name—the latter for his poetry, as at that time (Lovecraft wrote “The Call of Cthulhu” circa 1926) Smith had yet to break through with his prose fiction. But he would, soon enough.
Four stars.
The Return of the Sorcerer, by Clark Ashton Smith
Cover art by H. W. Wesso.
First published in the September 1931 issue of the long-forgotten Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror. I highly suggest tracking down copies, as H. W. Wesso did really striking covers for all seven issues.
Here we have the first of two Clark Ashton Smith stories, and this one is delightfully gruesome and gothic. A down-on-his-luck narrator agrees to work for the eccentric John Carnby as a typist and translator. Carnby lives in a decrepit mansion by himself, where supposedly there’s a bit of a rat problem—only the strange noises the narrator hears at night turn out to not be rats. His job is to type up many pages of manuscript, but also to translate passages from the Necronomicon, a cursed book penned by “the mad Arab” Abdul Alharred. (Readers may know, of course, that the Necronomicon is a fictitious text of Lovecraft’s invention.) Smith is often a joy to read simply for the elaborateness of his style, which seems to have its own kind of hypnotic pull; but the main draw of “The Return of the Sorcerer” is how Smith weaves together a narrative about a haunted mansion (haunted not by ghosts but rather a dark past), a man obsessed with the occult, and a creeping revenge plot. There’s also a surprising amount of gore, and while the twist is easy to anticipate, the execution of it is exquisite.
Four stars.
Ubbo-Sathla, by Clark Ashton Smith
Cover art by Margaret Brundage.
First published in the July 1933 issue of Weird Tales.
Paul Tregardis is a normal Londoner, except for his fascination with antiquity and the occult—a fascination that may well spell his doom. A chance encounter with a strange crystal in an antique shop will send Paul on a voyage the likes of which he could not have anticipated. This is a short moody piece that serves first of all to stitch together the Mythos with Smith’s own Hyperborea series. Hyperborea itself is an alternate distant past in which magic and sorcery ruled, and one sorcerer in particular, Eibon, was able to contact unspeakably ancient horrors for his own ends. Eibon himself is more spoken of than seen, although we do meet him in Smith’s “The Door to Saturn.” But The Book of Eibon, mentioned in “Ubbo-Sathla,” is perhaps Smith’s biggest contribution to the Mythos. Smith at his best can compress a mind-bending trek through time and space into just a handful of pages, and the climax here, in which our hapless protagonist travels backwards through time in a “monstrous devolution,” stands out as one of his most pyrotechnic and hallucinogenic passages.
Four stars, especially if read while on mind-altering substances.
The Black Stone, by Robert E. Howard
Cover art by C. C. Senf.
First published in the November 1931 issue of Weird Tales.
The creator of Conan the Cimmerian also wrote a few stories which clearly took after Lovecraft, with “The Black Stone” being the best of them. An unnamed narrator ventures out to Stregoicavar, an obscure village in the mountains of Hungary, a totally unassuming place if not for an ancient black monolith that lies just outside of town. About four centuries ago the area of the village belonged to a people of mixed ancestry, “an unsavory amalgamation,” who tormented the people in the lowlands, i.e., the ancestors of those who now live in Stregoicavar. But there was a war, in which the Turks had invaded and exterminated the mixed-race people, with only some ruins and the Black Stone to show for the ordeal. What separates “The Black Stone” from most of its ilk, indeed what it does better than the vast majority of horror now being written, is its sense of location and history. I had read this story before, when it was recently reprinted in a Howard collection, and on a second reading it’s still immensely eerie and mysterious. What the narrator witnesses when he spies on the Black Stone on Midsummer Night is one of the more disturbing passages in classic weird fiction.
Basically a masterpiece. Five stars.
The Hounds of Tindalos, by Frank Belknap Long
Cover art by Hannes Bok.
First published in the March 1929 issue of Weird Tales.
This is sometimes considered the first non-Lovecraft Mythos story, although Long’s own “The Space-Eaters” predates it by a year. Lovecraft would incorporate the titular hounds in at least one later story of his, and it’s not hard to see why. This is a story concerned partly with a topic I’m sure some of us are familiar with: drugs. Frank is a normal man who happens to be friends with Chalmers, a scientist-mystic who, in concocting an experimental drug, seeks to break down the fourth dimension (time), which he hypothesizes is an illusion. Needless to say the experiment goes very badly. We never see the hounds, although the late great Hannes Bok did depict them quite memorably once upon a time. They are, in keeping with Mythos lore, amoral more than anything, “beyond good and evil as we know it.” What could be a formulaic horror yarn is much elevated by Long’s admirable attempt at combining cosmic fear with scientific rationalism, resulting in a story that bends the mind as both horror and science fiction. It may have helped inspire Lovecraft to take a more SFnal direction with later Mythos stories like “The Dreams in the Witch-House” and “The Shadow Out of Time.”
Four stars.
The Space-Eaters, by Frank Belknap Long
Cover art by C. C. Senf.
First published in the July 1928 issue of Weird Tales.
Here’s Long again, this time with a less conventional (but also less satisfying) tale of unseen horror. This verges on being more of an autobiographical commentary on Long’s friendship with Lovecraft than a fictional narrative, but Long does not take the leap that would have pushed it over the edge. If Chalmers in “The Hounds of Tindalos” was a bit of a stand-in for Lovecraft then the narrator’s friend in “The Space-Eaters” is much more so: he is even named Howard, and is also a writer of weird fiction. There’s something about a creature with tendrils lurking in the woods, which similarly to the hounds moves through extra-dimensional space (although not through angles), such that normally it goes unseen. A local drunk falls victim to the titular eaters, with a strange gaping wound in his head, before the narrator and definitely-not-Lovecraft run the risk of meeting the same fate. As a story it’s a bit of a mess, and a bit too long, not to mention that this is more obviously an early Long story; but as a glimpse into the early days of the so-called Lovecraft circle, it’s certainly worth a read.
Three stars.
The Dweller in Darkness, by August Derleth
Cover art by Matt Fox.
First published in the November 1944 issue of Weird Tales.
Apparently not content to include other people's stories, Derleth took it upon himself to include two of his own, which are both connected with the Mythos. "The Dweller in Darkness" is the slightly stronger of the two and easily the longer (bordering on a novella), but I can't say Derleth's skills as a writer have been sorely missed as of late. This one involves Rick's Lake, a shunned area in rural Wisconsin (a favorite locale for Derleth, understandably given he's from there), two educated friends trying to solve a mystery, and an enigmatic professor of the occult named Partier. There's also an unfortunate local "half-breed" named Old Peter who is deathly afraid of what may be lurking in the area, and who gets taken along for a ride—of sorts. The atmosphere is quite rich, and I suspect Derleth took some inspiration from the Loch Ness monster mystery/hoax with both the locale and the lengths the narrator and his college friend go to witness the hitherto unseen horror. Unfortunately it's overlong, and the payoff is a little too reminiscent of Lovecraft's "Cool Air," only without the tragic grotesquery of that story's ending.
A high three stars.
Beyond the Threshold, by August Derleth
Cover art by Margaret Brundage.
First published in the September 1941 issue of Weird Tales.
Once again Derleth, and once again in rural Wisconsin. The narrator and his cousin visit their grandfather's mansion to study leftover papers from a deceased relative—one who had gone "beyond the threshold," perhaps ventured into another dimension. The grandfather is perhaps a little too determined to follow his leader, and the results are predictably tragic. This one starts off promisingly but then becomes a perfectly serviceably cross between Gothic and cosmic horror—a mixture I think Clark Ashton Smith pulled off with far more elegance and spectacle in "The Return of the Sorcerer." Something I didn't mention with "The Dweller in Darkness" is that both of Derleth's stories take place in a world where Arkham and Miskatonic University are real places, yes, but Lovecraft's fiction is also real, which I found to be distracting. For example the narrator will read a copy of The Outsider and Others, which Derleth himself had published. A little self-congratulatory, yes?
Barely three stars.
by George Pritchard
“The Shambler from the Stars”, by Robert Bloch “The Haunter of the Dark”, by H.P. Lovecraft “The Shadow from the Steeple”, by Robert Bloch
I am grouping these three stories together, as they are interlinked. As in the Derleth stories (and, later, the J. Ramsey Campbell one), Lovecraft's stories are both real, and exist in the world. Unlike my fellow reviewer, I found this added depth to the work. Perhaps it is simply due to my own experience, or that Bloch is a better author than Derleth is — both are possible. The three stories describe the accidental summoning of a creature (the titular Shambler), its aftermath, and partial defeat. Robert Blake, a Weird Fiction author from Milwaukee and a stand-in for Bloch, takes center stage for much of the first two stories, until his death at the Shambler's tentacles. From there, the narrative is taken over by William Hurley, who reaches out to Lovecraft himself to find out what happened to this "Blake" fellow!
I can think of no better tribute, from one horror writer friend to another, than dramatically killing each other off at the dastardly tendrils of a blood-soaked horror.
Four stars.
“Notebook Found In A Deserted House”, by Robert Bloch
This story, written in the form of a journal entry, suggests a sharper miniature of “The House on the Borderland”, with a strong American voice coming through. The USPS is apparently familiar with shoggoths.
Bloch’s great strength, amongst Weird Fiction authors, is his Artful Dodger-like ability to “do the voices”. Different characters sound different, speaking and thinking in distinctive ways that nevertheless seem natural to them. Too often, the characters in Weird Fiction “sound” the same, having similar cadences to whichever author is writing them, from Machen to Hodgeson. Furthermore, Bloch is willing to write characters further down the class ladder than other Weird Fiction authors. The genre may love M.R. James and the Decadents, but that mistrust for anyone who wasn’t an Oxford man of good standing has left marks that may never be worn away.
Four stars.
by Brian Collins
Hello again. I still have one more reprint, plus an original story here.
The Salem Horror, by Henry Kuttner
Cover art by Margaret Brundage.
First published in the May 1937 issue of Weird Tales.
Kuttner died in 1958, tragically young like Robert E. Howard (Howard shot himself, and Kuttner was struck down by a heart attack at only 42), but he wrote a great deal in a short time. "The Salem Horror" is very early Kuttner, and admittedly I sense some DNA left over from his very first story, "The Graveyard Rats," what with the claustrophobic setting and the close encounters with rats.
A novelist in the midst of writer's block moves to Salem to stay in a house that belonged to a witch, many decades ago, and which has since become a place of ill repute in the already-infamous town; but the novelist is convinced he may find inspiration there, and he may be more right than he knows. Kuttner was not a poet like Lovecraft or Smith, or even Howard when he was really trying; but the pulpy vividness of his style gives this tale of dark corners and growing obsession an immediacy that elevates what is mostly a one-man show into one of gripping eeriness. Kuttner, in trying to pay the bills, could repeat himself, but "The Salem Horror" very much builds on the sort of dread introduced in "The Graveyard Rats" rather than simply rehashing it.
A light four stars.
The Haunter of the Graveyard, by J. Vernon Shea
Elmer Harrod owns the house closest to a "disused" cemetery, which nowadays mostly is visited by vagrants and young lovers. Harrod himself hosts a late-night TV show in his own home, having the right setting for such a thing—a Gothic mansion that seems out-of-place in the 20th century. He shows and commentates over trashy horror movies, some of which are based on Lovecraft's fiction. (Yes, this is another story where Lovecraft's writing exists in the world of the story, but it's used to more interesting ends here.) Immediately you can tell "The Haunter of the Graveyard" was written in the past few years partly because of the role TV (and made-for-TV movies) plays, but also it very much takes place in a world (one very much like ours) where the Mythos stories have not only been vindicated to some degree but have even inspired other works of horror. Unfortunately the ending is a letdown, and I feel like Shea could have gone farther with his premise; but putting that aside, it's a little "far out," in a good way.
A high three stars.
by George Pritchard
“Cold Print”, by J. Ramsey Campbell
Sam Strutt is a compellingly loathsome figure. A PE teacher in England, he spends his free time seeking out transgressive gay pornographic literature, and being disgusted by the grime and filth of the world around him. He enjoys his work in a particularly sadistic fashion, both on and off the clock, though this is derived from Strutt’s personality rather than his sexuality. And yet, Campbell writes so that there is something compelling about Strutt, about his dedication and knowledge to the seeking out of the books he loves. Horror readers may recognize themselves in that seeking out of the awkward, the hidden, the forbidden, no matter the cost to oneself or to others.
An understanding is sought out, and an understanding is achieved…
And now, if you'll excuse me, my thoughts on this piece:
We exist in a world after Hemingway. After Hemingway, after Steinbeck, and after Jackson.
We exist in a world where Edward Bulwer-Lytton is no longer one of the most influential authors alive, and there are greater monsters than Joris-Karl Huysmans. While hugely popular during his lifetime, Bulwer-Lytton is now best known for contributing the phrase "It was a dark and stormy night…" to Peanuts. Huysmans, meanwhile, codified not only the descriptions of sexually charged Satanic ritual in the modern day through his novel Las-bas, but the type of character now referred to as "the Lovecraft protagonist" comes from his Decadent novel Against the Grain.
It is frustrating, then, to see re-imaginings, re-writings, and reckonings of Weird Fiction through the lens of Lovecraft, as though the genre had only been composed by one hand, for good and for ill.
I would be the first to admit that Weird Fiction has always lagged behind when it comes to depictions of sexuality. Some of Arthur Machen’s stories have had elements of sex, such as in “The White People”, and “The Great God Pan”. And I confess that Lovecraft’s own “Dagon” has always set both my Jungian and Freudian tendencies abuzz. But most often, Weird Fiction has enshrined its horror in physical and mental solitude. (Putting this at Lovecraft’s feet gives M.R. James short shrift, as well as avoiding Weird Fiction’s long standing conversation with the Decadent literary movement. How strange, to have this peculiar little offshoot outlast the others! One thinks of the relation between elephants and the common hyrax.)
What makes “Cold Print” so refreshing is that it doesn't shy away from sexuality. This has been a decade of seismic shifts, one of the greatest of those being in regards to portraying sex on the page, or speaking openly about it, putting sexuality and desire forefront in SF and fantasy fiction. Some of these examples have been better than others, but it is Ramsey Campbell’s “Cold Print” which has finally allowed Weird Fiction to put its hat in the ring. Let the other fellow beware—this is a "Campbell" worth watching.
Five stars.
“The Sister City”, by Brian Lumley
A kinder, yet more engaging, version of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”. After this, I am sure that I will not be the only one wandering the fens, hoping to encourage the Second Change!
Four stars.
“Cement Surroundings”, by Brian Lumley
Giant centipede vs. Gatling gun. Need I say more?
Four stars.
“The Deep Ones”, by James Wade
A psychic researcher arrives in San Simeon to help with dolphin research. But trouble is in the waters — a peculiar love quadrangle begins to form between the psychic researcher, the project head, the comely assistant, and their prize dolphin! All the while, a mysterious hippie group wants the research to end. But why?
This is not strictly a bad short story, but in comparison to the rest of the collection, it’s definitely the weakest. What it lacks is a full sense of focus. “The Deep Ones” is not sure if it wants to be a serious yet dreamlike story, or a parody of Ballard, Lovecraft, hippiesploitation, and Weird Fiction. When you write something like this, you need to either fish or cut bait.
Three stars.
“The Return of the Lloigor”, by Colin Wilson
A deliberate rundown of Weird Fiction’s greatest hits, eagerly gathering them into a true culmination of a “mythos”. All the density of the genre’s best, without the awkward meandering! Unfortunately, about halfway in, the author reveals that he has not bothered to update any of the story’s politics since Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. A strong beginning, and a weak end.
Three stars.
Summing up
Many Weird Fiction authors are fascinating in their own right, regardless of how well they are remembered today. William Sharpe, for all his activism in life, has dropped to the bottom of the proverbial stack; while Robert Chambers’ one slim volume has outlasted his numerous romances. I am overjoyed that I have been allowed to help welcome in a new generation of the Weird, of what is now being called the Cthulhu Mythos. With no story in the collection dropping below three stars, I highly recommend you run (or swim and crawl, slither or creep or ooze) to purchase a copy of this work. Let nobody say that August Derleth does not extend his influence as wide and deep as the King in Yellow himself!
Two new science fiction novels that fell into my hands are similar in many ways. Both are by British writers and might be classified as action-packed adventure yarns. Each features a rather ordinary hero who gets involved in a secret scientific project of epic proportions. Both protagonists fall in love along the way. Each has a touch of satire and a cynical attitude about politics.
The main difference is that one takes place in the present and the other is set some centuries from now. Let's take a look at the first one.
Our hero has just lost his job and his live-in girlfriend. He worked as a security expert at a research facility, but certain parts of it were off limits to him. A fellow claiming to work for the United Nations hires him to do some unofficial investigating of the place.
I should mention at this point that everybody the protagonist meets refuses to tell him everything that's going on. I suspect this is a way for the author to keep the reader in suspense. It's also worthy of note that the hero, who is also the narrator, casts a jaundiced eye on the world around him.
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union and members of the Warsaw Pact send troops into Czechoslovakia to suppress the liberal reforms known as the Prague Spring. This part of the novel is torn straight from the headlines.
As the Cold War heats up, things get complicated. There's an accident at the facility that causes two ambulances to rush away from the place, although there's apparently only one victim. The hero runs into a mysterious woman who knows more about the situation than she lets on (like a lot of characters in the novel.) She's also suffering from some kind of disease she won't discuss. As you'd expect, love blooms.
Add in a gigantic hidden complex of underground tunnels and automated submarines. The big secret behind everything involves Mad Science at its maddest. The protagonist and a few allies battle to stop World War Three from breaking out, and we'll finally learn what the numerical title means. (I suppose it's also an allusion to George Orwell's famous novel 1984, but that's not all.)
Not the most plausible plot in the world. You have to accept the fact that there could be a secret project extending over many miles without anybody finding out about it. If you can suspend your disbelief, it's a very readable page-turner.
Let's jump forward hundreds of years. People are rigidly assigned to different levels of society, with their jobs chosen for them. They can't even marry until the powers that be allow them to do so. There are some folks living in the wilderness outside this system. If the previous novel tipped its hat to 1984, this one owes something to Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.
Our hero works for what seems to be the planet's only news agency. His job is only vaguely described, but it seems to be some kind of editing or proofreading position.
The daughter of the boss fancies herself one of those Spunky Girl Reporters from old black-and-white movies. (That's my interpretation, not the author's.) Somehow she came across a reference to something called (you guessed it) the Weisman Experiment. This happened a few decades ago, and the government has repressed all knowledge of it.
The boss tells the protagonist to help his daughter investigate the mysterious experiment. As soon as they set out, somebody tries to kill them. Whenever they track down one of the few surviving people who remember the Weisman Experiment, that person is murdered.
The hero and the daughter (who will, of course, eventually fall in love) are separated by the powers that be before they get too far. The protagonist goes through some brainwashing to straighten him out, but it doesn't quite work.
The rest of the novel takes us to North Africa, where the hero acquires an ally. (This character is a bit embarrassing, as she speaks in an accent and ends almost all her statements with I theenk.) Next we go to an underwater facility, where he's reunited with the daughter. Eventually, we wind up at the estate of an incredibly wealthy fellow, where we finally find out what the heck the Weisman Experiment was all about.
Like the other novel, this is a fast-moving tale with something to say about the way society is set up. Worth reading once.
Three stars.
by Brian Collins
We have two short novels from very different authors, one being a promising young writer and the other one of the more reliable workhorses in the field. Neither novel is all that good, but at the very least I needed something less demanding after I had recently covered Macroscope.
Vinge has written only one or maybe two short stories a year so far, but all of them have been interesting, if not necessarily good. Grimm’s World, his debut novel, is itself an expansion of the novella “Grimm’s Story,” which appeared in Orbit 4 last year. The novel is split into two parts, with the first being “Grimm’s Story,” which as far as I can tell Vinge did not change significantly. If I was just reviewing the first part, I would say it’s fairly good, certainly in keeping with Vinge’s other short fiction. High three to a low four stars.
Unfortunately it doesn’t stop there.
The short of it is that Svir Hedrigs is an astronomy student who gets roped into a scheme by the notorious Tatja Grimm and her crew, those who make the speculative fiction (although here it’s called “contrivance fiction”) magazine Fantasie, a publication that is so old (centuries old, in fact) that its oldest issues seem to have been lost to time, if not for maybe a handful of collectors. The world is Tu, a distant planet that, like Jack Vance’s Big Planet, is vast and yet poor in metals. (Indeed this reads to a conspicuous degree like a Vance pastiche, albeit without Vance’s sardonic humor, and thus it’s not as entertaining.) Something to think about is that characters in an SF story are pretty much never aware that they’re inside a work of SF, and indeed SF as a school of fiction is rarely mentioned, much like how characters in a horror story are often blissfully unaware (for the moment) that they’re birds in a blood-red cage. Yet in Grimm’s World, what we call speculative fiction these days is held as the highest form of literature. It’s a curious case of characters in SF basically realizing that their world itself is SFnal, and therefore the possibilities are near-endless.
Of course the scheme to rescue a complete collection of Fantasie turns out to be a ruse, with Grimm usurping the tyrannical ruler of the single big land mass on this planet, on the falsehood that she is descended from the former monarchy. It’s at this point that the first part ends, and there’s a rather gaping hole in continuity between parts, the result feeling more like two related novellas than a single work. The second part is considerably weaker. What began as a nice planetary adventure turns into something more military-focused, as the people of Tu are terrorized by a race of humanoid aliens, whom Grimm may or may not be in cahoots with. Said aliens take sort of a hands-off approach with the Tu people, provided that their technology doesn’t become too advanced (a high-powered telescope, “the High Eye,” becomes increasingly an object of fascination as the novel progresses), and also that the Tu people reproduce at a rate to the aliens’ liking. What the aliens intend to do with the human surplus is absurd and raises some questions which Vinge never answers. There’s also a love triangle (or perhaps a love square) that I found totally unconvincing, if only because Svir seems to get a hard-on for whatever woman is within his field of vision.
I liked the first part but found the second part a bit of a slog.
Anderson’s writing is comfortable and comforting: rarely surprising, but often (not always) a mild stimulant that can help one during trying times. Just when I think everything might be going to shit, there’s a new Poul Anderson novel—possibly even two of them. The Rebel Worlds is short enough that it could’ve easily made up one half of an Ace Double, except this is from Signet. A few years ago we got Ensign Flandry, which saw the early days in the career of Dominic Flandry, clearly one of Anderson’s favorite recurring characters (although he’s not one of mine). The Rebel Worlds takes place not too long after Ensign Flandry, with Flandry now Lieutenant Commander and with more responsibilities, but still very much the playboy.
Hugh McCormac, a respected admiral of the Empire, is imprisoned, only to break out and go rogue, taking those loyal to him along for the ride. The prison breakout blossoms into a full-on rebellion across multiple worlds, which is a rather big problem for the Empire. Flandry, despite knowing that the Empire is on the brink of collapse and that “the Long Night” will begin soon enough, stays aligned with those in power—perhaps a sentiment Anderson himself shares, given he supports the war effort in Vietnam despite said war effort turning more sour by the week. Indeed Flandry’s seeming contradiction, between his extreme individualism and his allegiance to what he knows is a dying government, is both the core of his character and something he shares with his creator. We also know, from other Flandry stories, that the Empire will in fact soon collapse and that the Long Night, a centuries-long era of barbarism and disconnect across many worlds, will soon commence. And we know that Flandry is in no imminent danger, for better or worse. The real tension, then, lies in McCormac and his wife Kathryn, who has been taken captive by the Empire on the basis that she might cough up valuable info on her husband.
Something I admire about Anderson, despite sharply disagreeing with his politics, is that he’s evidently fond of anti-heroes (Flandry, Nicholas van Rijn, David Falkayn, Gunnar Heim), but he also sometimes concocts anti-villains, in that these characters are technically antagonists but meant to be taken as sympathetic or noble. Despite being a thorn in the Empire’s side, McCormac is basically a good man who cares about those who work for him, never mind he also loves Kathryn very much. Much less sympathetic is Snelund, a planetary governor who is horrifically corrupt, and who also wants to put his filthy hands on Kathryn while she is his prisoner; yet this man also watches over Flandry’s assignment. It should not come as a surprise then that Flandry rescues Kathryn and hides out with her on the planet Dido, which has some unusual alien life. It also shouldn’t be surprising that the two fall in love, although understandably Kathryn still cares for McCormac and isn’t eager to be swept off her feet. (I also must say Anderson tries what I think is a 19th century Southern aristocratic accent with Kathryn, and it’s a bit odd.)
So business as usual for Flandry.
The major problem with The Rebel Worlds is that it’s too short. This is a problem Anderson’s novels sometimes have, but it seems to me that scenes and maybe entire chapters that would have fleshed out the conflict are simply not here. Sure, the plot is basically coherent, but we’re far more often told about things than shown them, to the point where I wonder if Anderson was working with a deadline that he struggled with, even with his near-superhuman writing speed. It’s a fine novel that could have easily been better, with some more time.
A solid three stars.
by Cora Buhlert
A New Chancellor and a New Era
Willy Brandt is sworn in as chancellor of West Germany.
In my last article, I mentioned that West Germany was about to have a federal parliamentary election. Now, that election has come and gone and has led to sweeping political change. Because for the first time since the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, i.e. twenty years ago, the chancellor is not a member of the conservative party CDU.
Since 1966, West Germany has been governed by a so-called great coalition of the two biggest parties, the above mentioned conservative CDU and the social-democratic party SPD. The great coalition wasn't particularly popular, especially among young people, but due to their large and stable majority, they also got things done.
When the election results started coming in the evening of September 28 and the percentages of the vote won by the CDU and SPD respectively were very close, a lot of people expected that this meant that the great coalition would continue. And indeed, this is what many in the CDU and even the SPD would have preferred.
At home with the Brandts: West Germany's new chancellor Willy Brandt with his Norwegian born wife Rut and their youngest son Matthias.
However, SPD head Willy Brandt, former mayor of West Berlin and West German foreign secretary and vice chancellor in Kurt Georg Kiesinger's great coalition cabinet, had different ideas. And so he chose to enter into coalition negotiations not with the CDU, but with the small liberal party FDP. These negotiations bore fruit and the 56-year-old Willy Brandt was sworn in as West Germany's fourth chancellor and head of a social-democratic/liberal coalition government on October 22.
West German president Gustav Heinemann and the new chancellor Willy Brandt shake hands.
Personally, I could not be happier about this development. I've been a supporter of the SPD for as long as I've been able to vote for them (sadly, I spent the first years of my voting age life under a regime where there were no elections) and I have liked Willy Brandt since his time as mayor of West Berlin. What is more, Willy Brandt is not a former Nazi like his predecessor Kurt-Georg Kiesinger, but spent the Third Reich in exile in Norway and Sweden. Of course, "not a former Nazi" should be a low bar to clear, but sadly West Germany is still infested with a lot of former Nazis masquerading as democrats. And indeed, the one blemish on the otherwise positive results of the 1969 federal election is that the far right party NPD, successor of the banned Nazi Party, managed to gain 3.8 percent of the vote, though thankfully the five percent hurdle keeps them out of our parliament.
Willy Brandt and his (very male) cabinet pose for a photo on the steps outside Villa Hammerschmidt, seat of the West German president.
In one of his first speeches as chancellor, Willy Brandt said he and his government want to "risk more democracy" and promised long overdue reforms. He also wants to initiate talks with East European governments to thaw the Cold War at least a little. I wish him and his cabinet all the best.
A Magical Mystery Tour: The Unicorn Girl by Michael Kurland
During my latest trip to my trusty import bookstore, I came across an intriguing looking paperback in the good old spinner rack called The Unicorn Girl by Michael Kurland. From the title, I assume that this would be a fantasy tale along the lines of The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. The Unicorn Girl, however, is a lot stranger than that.
The Unicorn Girl starts off not in a far-away fantasyland, but in a place that – at least viewed from this side of the Atlantic – seems almost as fantastic, namely a coffeehouse cum performance venue called the Trembling Womb on the outskirts of San Francisco. Our hero Michael (a.k.a. Michael Kurland, the author) is sitting at a table, trying to compose a sonnet, while his friend Chester (a.k.a. Chester Anderson, the author of The Butterfly Kid) is performing on stage, when all of a sudden the girl of Michael's dreams walks in – quite literally, because this very girl has been appearing in Michael's dreams since childhood.
Michael does what anyone would do in that situation: he gets up and talks to the girl. Turns out that her name is Sylvia and that she's looking for her lost unicorn. Michael understandably assumes that Sylvia is playing a joke on him, especially since he had addressed her in the sort of pseudo-medieval language you'd hear at a Renaissance Fair. Sylvia, however, is deadly serious. She tells Michael and Chester that she's a circus performer and that her unicorn Adolphus ran away, when they stepped off the train. There's only one problem: train service into San Francisco ceased six years before. As far as I can ascertain from this side of the Atlantic, this isn't true and San Francisco does have train service, as befits a major metropolis, all which suggests that Michael and Chester live in the future, even though their surroundings seem very much like something you could find in San Francisco right now.
When Michael and Chester ask Sylvia, what year it is, she replies "1936", so Michael and Chester assume that time travel is involved. However, the truth is still stranger than this, for Sylvia seems to have no idea where she is. True, San Francisco today is very different from San Francisco in 1936, but you'd assume that Sylvia would at least recognise the name of the city. The fact that she keeps calling California "Nueva España" is also a clue that Sylvia hails from further afield than our version of 1936.
When Michael, Chester and Sylvia head out to look for the missing unicorn, they are met by some Sylvia's circus friends: Dorothy, an attractive but otherwise normal human woman, Giganto, a cyclops from Arcturus, and Ronald, a centaur. Upon seeing this strange trio, Michael and Chester immediately assume that they are experiencing drug-induced hallucinations – as do two random bystanders. It's a reasonable assumption to make, though two people normally don't experience the same hallucinations, even if they took the same drugs. And Chester swears that he hasn't slipped Michael any drugs…
Methinks we're not in Kansas – pardon, San Francisco – anymore
Before our heroes can get to the bottom of this mystery, they split up to search for the missing unicorn, only to find a flying saucer. There is a mysterious blip and Michael, Chester, Sylvia and Dorotha suddenly find themselves elsewhere and elsewhen, namely in the early Victorian era or rather a version of it that is very reminiscent of Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy stories. I guess they should count themselves lucky it wasn't "The Queen Bee" instead.
The sojourn in the Victorian era according to Randall Garrett ends, when our heroes find themselves falsely accused of jewellery theft (and the way the true culprits accomplished those thefts is truly fascinating). During their escape, there is another blip and our heroes find themselves in World War II in the middle of a battlefield…
For most of its pages, The Unicorn Girl is a picaresque romp through time, space and dimensions. Literary allusions abound, for in addition to the Victorian era according to Randall Garrett, our heroes also briefly visit J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth. It's all great fun, though eventually, there needs to be an explanation for this weirdness. And so, Michael and Sylvia, who have been temporarily separated from Chester and Dorothy, figure out – with the help of Tom Waters, a friend of Michael's and Chester's who'd disappeared earlier – that the blips always happen in moments of danger and crisis. They provoke another blip and finally land in a world that at least is aware that there is a problem with visitors from other times and universes showing up in their world, even if they have no idea why this is happening.
Turns out that all the different time lines and universes are converging, which may well mean the end of this world and any other. Luckily, there is a way to fix this issue and send everybody back to their own universe. The drawback is that solving the problem will be very dangerous. What is more, Michael, Chester and Tom on the one hand and Sylvia, Dorothy and the unicorn (with whom Sylvia has been reunited by now) on the other will return to different universes, even though Michael and Sylvia as well as Chester and Dorothy have fallen in love amidst all the chaos…
A Trippy Delight
The Unicorn Girl is not the sort of book I would normally have sought out, since I'm not a big fan of psychedelic science fiction. However, I'm glad that I read this book, because it's a true delight.
The novel is suffused with humour and wordplay, whether it's the tendency of the Victorians from the Randall Garrett inspired world to speak in very long, very complicated sentences or Michael parodying a wine connoisseur by evaluating plain water. The dialogue frequently sparkles such as when Sylvia asks, "Do you not travel to far-off planets?" and Chester replies, "We barely travel to nearby planets."
No, this is not Galactoscope, which is still a week-and-a-half off, but a review (I suppose in keeping with the subject's rather large girth) presented on its own.
Last year, I believe almost to the day, we got Piers Anthony’s previous novel, Omnivore, which I reviewed a few months later. (There are so many paperbacks out now…) I didn’t like it, but it was, at the very least, a step up from Chthon and Sos the Rope—mind you that the bar was basically on the floor. I was not looking forward to Macroscope, his latest novel, and yet I have to admit, when I weighed this new paperback in my hands (480 meaty pages, courtesy of Avon), I was… morbidly curious. Macroscope is longer than Anthony’s previous two novels combined, and while it certainly feels that way, it also shows Anthony putting a very different level of effort in his writing craft. For better or worse, it will no doubt be one of the most memorable SF releases of 1969.
Ivo Archer is a 25-year-old wanderer who has been struggling to make it in life, on account of being visibly of mixed racial features (taboo today and apparently still the case in the 1980 of the novel’s world), but he’s about to be given some direction when he reunites with an old friend, Brad Carpenter. Ivo and Brad were classmates of a sort, in what is only called “the project,” an ambitious eugenics program in which, over the course of two generations, people were carefully bred to have mixed racial heritages, in the hopes that such a program would produce geniuses. It did not—for the most part. Ivo has a pretty decent IQ of 125, but Brad is a genius, with an IQ of over 200, the only problem being he hides his intelligence (as well as the fact that he isn’t completely white) around his current girlfriend, Afra Glynn Summerfield. Afra is a Georgia girl with (by her own admission) prejudiced views on race, as well as a strange preoccupation with intelligence: people less intelligent than her bore her, but then she also resents people who are too smart, hence Brad’s secrecy. For Ivo it’s love at first sight with Afra, which is hopeless given that Afra is already taken, is a racist, and would find Ivo’s intelligence unimpressive.
This brings us to the macroscope, which itself ends up being rather tangential to the plot, but the idea is that it serves the exact opposite function of a microscope: rather than give detailed images of extremely small objects it gives detailed images of extremely large objects that are also extremely far away. It also serves as a kind of time viewer. The macroscope doesn’t use light, but rather a particle Anthony made up called macrons, which provide both efficiency and clarity, allowing people on the macroscope station to not only view life on other worlds vividly but to view these worlds as they were thousands or millions of years in the past. The good news is that there is (or at least was) intelligent life on other planets; the bad news is that these alien races have invariably gone downhill, even resorting to cannibalism on a mass scale. Why? The answer seems to be a one-way signal coming from an unknown distant planet, no doubt an intelligent race, called “the destroyer,” which if intercepted would turn any intelligent being with an IQ of over 150’s brain to jelly. The higher one’s IQ, the harsher the effect. Brad finds this out, quite tragically, although Ivo suspects his friend wanted to commit mental suicide. But with the loss of one of the station’s top minds, and perhaps more importantly a visiting US senator with a similarly high intelligence, the UN looks to dismantle the station, and so the macroscope will be lost.
Unless it can be hijacked, somehow.
The barrier to entry with Macroscope is a bit high, because if what I just said regarding its plot sounds like gibberish, it is gibberish to some extent. This is the kind of mind-melting and yet far-ranging pseudo-science that A. E. van Vogt excelled at two decades ago, which sadly he no longer seems capable of delivering; but that doesn’t stop Anthony (truly an unexpected successor to van Vogt) from picking up that torch with grace. Nearly every type of science fiction you can think of worms its way into this (admittedly loose) narrative, from time travel (of a sort), to contact with aliens, to robotics (a helpful non-sentient robot named Joseph), to space opera, and even beyond all of those. Astrology, a total non-science which Anthony treats with a kind of disarming (or annoying, depending on who you are) reverence, is discussed extensively through Harold Groton, who spends much of his time lecturing Ivo and Afra (not to mention his wife Beatryx) on horoscopes and the intricate symbolic implications of star signs. Despite the monstrous length of the thing, we’re mostly stuck with four characters (Brad being written out after the opening quarter), although there is a fifth, named Schön, whom Brad hopes can act as a workaround for the destroyer. Schön is a “primitive genius,” which is to say he is unspeakably intelligent but with the emotional maturity of a five-year-old, acting as the Kurtz to Ivo’s Charles Marlow, or as the mischievous god Pan lurking in the woods. There are so many twists and turns in how character relationships change over the course of the novel that I would be writing a dissertation in trying to describe them; and anyway, seeing Anthony get a surprising amount of mileage out of such a small cast of characters is part of the fun.
In terms of scale, Macroscope is easily the grandest SF novel I have read this year, to the point where it becomes dizzying. The closest I can think of as a comparison, aside from van Vogt’s glory days, would be John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar; but whereas that novel is a panorama, Macroscope is much more like a sandbox, in which Anthony has given himself some very fine toys to play with. This is by no means a perfect novel, of course. For one, its jack-of-all-trades approach to subject matter means that aside from maybe astrology, nothing is dwelt on for too long or too thoroughly. A recurring issue I’ve had with Anthony also rears its ugly head, if only for a relatively short time here, in the form of his ogling at women. There’s a protracted and rather wince-inducing scene in which, for plot-related reasons, Ivo is “forced” (by that I mean the author is forcing his character’s hand) to feel all over Afra’s body, in great detail. Thankfully nothing quite like this happens again, but I suppose Anthony had to do such a thing to remind us that it was indeed he who wrote this novel. On the positive side, while Afra starts out as a pretty thorny piece of work, she ends up being by far the most psychologically complicated of Anthony’s female characters (I understand that, again, the bar was low), to the point where she becomes as much a protagonist as Ivo. The length can also border on terminal, with the final chapter alone being over a hundred pages long(!), and this last stretch being (excuse my French) such a "clusterfuck" that the reader may become worried about whether there is a light at the end of that tunnel.
As you can see, this is a lot of science fiction for $1.25. Anthony had enough ideas for a few short novels but decided to weave them together in a way that borders on masterful. It is, if nothing else, deeply intriguing and intoxicating, even taking the bogus science into account. It’s a novel that somehow tackles both inner and outer space, being a space opera that’s also a voyage to the center of one man’s psyche. It is like 2001: A Space Odyssey if written by someone who is much more enthusiastic about “free love” and astrology than Arthur C. Clarke can ever muster, being basically a fable about mankind’s maturity and finding a place in the known universe. Macroscope is such a deeply strange and ambitious novel that even its flaws mostly retain a certain nobility, as if those flaws were reasons for buying a copy in the first place. I didn’t think Anthony had such a work in him, and there’s a decent chance he may never write another novel of this caliber.
It almost pains me to say this, but four stars. I see it getting a Hugo nomination, and possibly a Galactic Star nomination as well.
[And now, for your reading pleasure, a clutch of books representing the science fiction and fantasy books that have crossed our desk for review this month!]
by Victoria Silverwolf
Ye Gods!
Two new fantasy novels, both with touches of science fiction, feature theological themes. One deals with deities that are now considered to be purely mythological, the other relates to one of the world's major living religions. Let's take a look.
Fourth Mansions, by R. A. Lafferty
Cover art by Leo and Diane Dillon.
The title of this strange novel comes from a book written by Saint Teresa of Avila, a Spanish Christian mystic of the sixteenth century. This work, known as The Interior Castle or The Mansions in English, compares various stages in the soul's spiritual progress to mansions within a castle. From what I can tell from a little research, the Fourth Mansion is the stage at which the natural and the supernatural intersect.
(I'm sure I'm explaining this badly. Interested readers can seek out a copy of Saint Teresa's book for themselves.)
I understand that Lafferty is a devout Catholic, so this connection between his latest novel and what is considered to be a classic of Christian literature must be more than superficial. Be that as it may, let's see if we can make any sense out of a very weird book.
Our hero is Fred Foley, a reporter who is said to be not very bright, but who seems to have some kind of special insight or perception as to events beyond the mundane. (A sort of Holy Fool, perhaps.) He gets involved in multiple conspiracies of folks, who may be something other than just ordinary human beings, out to change the world.
There are four such groups, said to be not quite fit for either Heaven or Earth. Each one is symbolized by an animal.
The Snakes, also known as the Harvesters, are a group of seven people who blend their psychic powers to influence the minds of others. They are intent on bringing about a sort of hedonistic apocalypse. Their connection to Foley and other characters allows for telepathic communication, and sets the plot in motion.
The Toads are folks who are reincarnated, or somehow take over new bodies. (It's a little vague.) Foley's investigation into one such person starts the novel. They intend to release a plague, wiping out most of humanity and ruling over the survivors.
The Badgers are people who are something like spiritual rulers of a kind of parallel world that most ordinary people can't perceive. Foley pays a visit to a couple of these seemingly benign people for information. In one case, this involves a trip to a mountain in Texas that shouldn't be there.
The Unfledged Falcons are would-be fascists, military leaders trying to take over the world by force. Only one such person appears in the book, a Mexican fellow named Miguel Fuentes. He gets involved when the Snakes try to influence an American named Michael Fountain (see the connection in names?) and wind up entering his mind by mistake.
I would be hard pressed to try to describe all the bizarre things that happen. Lafferty has a way of describing extraordinary events in deadpan fashion. (We're very casually told, for example, that one character brought a dead man back to life when he was a boy. One very minor character is a demon, and another one is an alien.)
The book's combination of whimsey and allegory is unique, to say the least. There's a lot of dialogue that sounds like nothing anybody would ever say in real life. Did I understand it all? Certainly not. Did I enjoy the ride? Yep.
Four stars.
Creatures of Light and Darkness, by Roger Zelazny
Cover art by James Starrett.
Zelazny's recent novel Lord of Light offered a futuristic twist on Buddhism and Hinduism. This one makes use of ancient Egyptian gods, as well as a bit of Greek mythology. There are also a lot of original concepts, making for a very mixed stew indeed.
The time is the far future, when humanity has settled multiple planets. Don't expect a space opera, however.
We begin in the House of the Dead, ruled by Anubis. He has a servant who has lost his memory and his name. Anubis gives him the name Wakim, and sends him to the Middle Worlds (the physical realm) to destroy the Prince Who Was A Thousand. Meanwhile, Osiris, who rules the House of Life, sends his son Horus on the same errand.
You see, Anubis and Osiris keep the population of the Middle Worlds in balance, bringing life and death in equal amounts. The Prince threatens this system with the possibility of immortality. Although the two gods have the same goal, they are also rivals, so their champions battle each other as well as the Prince.
This is a greatly oversimplified description of the basic plot. A lot more goes on, with many equally god-like characters. There's a sort of scavenger hunt for three sacred items, with the protagonists hopping around from planet to planet in search of them.
Zelazny experiments with narrative techniques, from poetry to a play. There's some humor, as demonstrated by a cult that worships a pair of shoes. (They actually play an important role in the plot.) The pace is frenzied, with plenty of purple prose.
Full understanding of what the heck is really going on doesn't happen until late in the book, when we learn the actual identities of Wakim and the Prince. Suffice to say that this requires a lengthy description of apocalyptic events that took place long before the story begins.
Some readers are going to find this novel disjointed and overwritten. Others are likely to be swept away by the richness of the author's imagination. I'm leaning in the latter direction.
Roger Zelazny’s been busy this month! His new novel Damnation Alley expands his novella of the same name into an action piece which is exciting enough but ultimately unsatisfying, a sort of postapocalyptic pony express with futuristic vehicles and implausible characters.
Cover of Damnation Alley by Jack Gaughan
The story is set in a relatively near-future USA after a nuclear war which has split it into isolated states within a radiation-ravaged wasteland, the only relatively safe passage through which is a corridor known as Damnation Alley. There are pockets of radiation, giant mutant animals and insects, tornadoes and killer dust storms. The descriptions of these is the book’s real strength, with some of them verging on the genuinely poetic. Our protagonist is Hell Tanner, a former Hell’s Angel who is offered a pardon for his crimes by the State of California, if he’ll deliver a shipment of vaccines to Boston, which has been hit by an outbreak of plague. Of course, this necessitates driving through Damnation Alley, but never fear, Tanner is also driving a super-tough vehicle bristling with weaponry.
The whole thing is almost laughably macho in places, and I say that as someone who really quite likes both cars and adventure stories. Tanner is that implausible archetype, the bad guy who nonetheless somehow has other people’s best interests at heart. However, there’s also some nice contrasts set up between Tanner and the criminal world he inhabits and the much more normal parts of society he encounters on his journey, where people seem to be on the whole generally decent and kind, making Tanner’s casual violence seem all the more out of place.
The book has a lot of problems. Some are clearly the result of padding it out to novel length, with several episodes which go nowhere and add little to the story. The characterisation of everyone aside from Tanner is weak to nonexistent. In particular, the main female character, Cordy, is a frustrating cipher: she is a woman who Tanner essentially abducts, and yet she shows none of the emotions one might expect under the circumstances, while Tanner seemingly comes to think of her as his girlfriend despite neither of them making any moves in that direction.
However, the biggest problem is that there are too many holes in the story for it to stay afloat. Despite the devastation of the land around it, the state of California somehow still has the resources to build giant armoured cars bristling with every kind of weapon from bullets to flamethrowers. Only two human beings are apparently capable of making the trip from California to Boston, which is surprising given the aforementioned level of technology and that there is clearly no shortage of young men with a death wish. Tanner makes it almost to Boston before encountering anyone who makes a serious effort to steal the vaccines, which I also find somewhat implausible. And so on, and so on.
Damnation Alley held my attention for the duration of a train journey and had nicely surreal, well-paced prose in places, but it was just too unbelievable for me to really enjoy it. Two and a half stars.
by Brian Collins
Since he returned to writing some half a dozen years ago, Robert Silverberg has tried to reintroduce himself as a more “serious” writer. This is not to say his rate of output has slowed down in favor of more refined work; if anything the past few years have been the busiest for him since the ‘50s. This year alone we have gotten enough novels from Silverberg that a bit of a catch-up is in order. The first on my plate, Across a Billion Years, hit store shelves a few months ago, from The Dial Press (I believe this is Silverberg’s first book with said publisher), and it seems to have flown under the radar—possibly because there’s no paperback edition, and also it might be aimed at younger readers. The second book we have here, To Live Again, is from Doubleday, and it too is a hardcover original; but unlike Across a Billion Years, To Live Again is a new release, fresh out of the oven.
It’s the 24th century, and humanity has not only spread to other worlds but encountered several intelligent alien races along the way. Tom Rice is a 22-year-old archaeologist on an expedition to find the ruins of a bygone race called the High Ones, who apparently lived a billion years ago (hence the title) but who have since vanished. Whether or not the High Ones have gone extinct is one of the novel’s core mysteries, although Silverberg takes his time raising this question. The novel is told as a series of diary entries, or rather messages Tom sends to his sister Lorie. In a curious but also frustrating move, Lorie is arguably the most interesting character in the novel, yet we never see or hear her, as she’s not only away from the action but stuck in a hospital bed for an indefinite period. Lorie is a telepath, and enough people are “TP” to make up their own faction, although telepathy only works one-way and Tom himself is not a telepath. The one positive surprise Silverberg includes here is finding a way to tie telepathy together with the mystery of the High Ones, but obviously I won’t say how he does it.
As for bad surprises, well…
Even taking into account that Tom is a young adult who also has personal hang-ups (his father wanted him to enter real estate), his treatment of his colleagues is abhorrent in the opening stretch. He dismisses the aliens on the team as mostly “diversity” hires and has a standoffish relationship with Kelly, the female android on the team, whom he more than once compares to a “voluptuous nineteen-year-old.” Why someone of Tom’s age would make such a comparison is befuddling…unless you were really a lecherous man approaching middle age and not a recent college graduate. There are a few other humans here, but the only human woman present is Jan, whom Tom gradually takes a liking to—just not enough to do anything when he sees Leroy, a male colleague, sexually assault Jan near enough that he could have intervened. This happens early in the novel, and I have to admit that Tom’s indifference regarding Jan’s wellbeing, a weakness in character he never really apologizes for, cast a cloud over my enjoyment of the rest of the novel. I kept wondering when the other shoe would drop. That Tom and Jan’s relationship turns romantic despite the former’s callousness only serves to rub salt in the wound. The bright side of all this is that while some of Silverberg’s recent work has bordered on pornographic, Across a Billion Years is relatively tame, almost to the point of being old-fashioned.
Indeed, this feels like a throwback to an older era of SF, even back to those years when Silverberg (and I, for that matter) had not yet picked up a pen or used a typewriter. In broad strokes this is a planetary adventure of the sort that would have been serialized in Astounding circa 1945. We’re excavating alien ruins on Higby V, a distant planet where High Ones artifacts have been supposedly found. During a drunken escapade one of the alien diggers stumbles upon (or rather breaks into) a piece of High Ones technology, something akin to a movie projector, not only showing what the High Ones look like but revealing a clue as to the location of their homeworld. This should sound familiar to most of us, and I suspect Silverberg knows this too, because this novel’s biggest problem and biggest asset is how it uses perspective. We’re stuck with Tom as he sends messages to Lorie, recounting events in perhaps more detail than he has to, knowing in advance that his sister won’t receive these messages until after the fact. As with a disconcerting number of Silverberg protagonists, Tom can be annoying, and honestly quite bigoted; and since he is the perspective character we’re never relieved of his oh-so-interesting remarks. But, and I will give Silverberg this, he does put a twist on the epistolary format very late in the novel, which does the miraculous thing of making you reevaluate what you had been reading up to this point.
In other words, this is not an exceptional novel, but it does have its points of interest, and with the exception of an early scene and its ramifications (or lack thereof), nothing here made me want to throw my copy at a nearby wall. For the most part this is inoffensive—possibly even decent. Three stars.
Those who want a bit more sex with their science fiction can do worse than this one, which looks to be the fourth (or maybe fifth—I’ve lost count) Silverberg novel of 1969. It’s the near-ish future, and the good news is that for those with enough money, death is not necessarily the end. Courtesy of the Scheffing Institute, a person can have their memories stored periodically, making copies or “personae” of themselves, which can be transplanted to the brain of a living host. The host and the persona will cooperate, lest the latter erase the former’s personality and become a “dybbuk,” using the host’s body as a flesh puppet.
The infamous businessman Paul Kaufmann has recently died, with his persona waiting to be claimed. Paul’s nephew, Mark, and Mark’s 16-year-old daughter Risa each see themselves as ideal candidates for Paul’s persona, but one of the rules at the Institute is that close family members can’t host each other’s personae: the implications of, for example, a teen girl hosting her grandfather’s persona, would be…concerning.
While we’re on the lovely topic of incest, let’s talk more about Risa, who must be one of the thorniest of all Silverberg characters, which as you know is a tall order, not helped by the fact that Silverberg describes, in almost poetic detail, every curve of this teen girl’s nude body—and she does strut around naked a surprising amount of the time. Risa is such a depraved individual, despite her age, that she at one point tries seducing an older male cousin and rather openly has an Electra complex (they even mention it by name), which Mark is understandably disturbed by—with the implication being that Mark has lustful thoughts about his own daughter. This is the second Silverberg novel I’ve read in two months to involve incest, which worries me.
The only other major female character is Elena, Mark’s mistress, whom Risa sees as a rival for her father’s affections and who (predictably) starts conspiring against Mark. Not content to ogle at just 16-year-olds, Silverberg also takes to describing the nuances of Elena’s body in wearying fashion, which does lead me to wonder if he was working the typewriter one-handed for certain passages. It’s a shame, because there’s an intriguing subplot in which Risa acquires her first persona, a young woman named Tandy who had died in a skiing accident—or so the official record claims. Tandy, or rather the persona of Tandy, recorded a couple months prior to her death, suspects foul play. Of the women mentioned, Tandy is the least embarrassingly written, but then she is only tangentially related to the plot and, what with not having a physical body, Silverberg is only able to ogle at her so much.
I’ve not even mentioned John Roditis and his underling Charles Noyles, business rivals of Mark’s who are clamoring for Paul’s persona. You may notice that this novel has more moving parts than Across a Billion Years, and certainly it’s the more ambitious of the two, the problem being that its shortcomings are all the more disappointing for it. Silverberg raises questions that he can barely be bothered with answering, and he alludes to things that remain mostly unrevealed. Much of To Live Again is shrouded in speculation, which is to say it uses speculation as a night-black cloak to cover things we sadly never get to see.
Another rule at the Institute is that a persona has to be of the same gender as its host, a rule that characters mostly write off as bogus. And indeed why not? Why should a male host and female persona not be able to coexist? Or the other way around. The prohibition has to do with transsexualism, which is certainly uncharted water for the most part. There has been very little science fiction written about transsexualism or transvestism—the possibility of blurring and even crossing gender lines. Unfortunately the novel does little with the ideas it presents. There are multiple references to religion and mythology (the word “dybbuk” refers to an evil spirit in Jewish mythology), including lines taken from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. There’s a minor subplot about white Californians appropriating Buddhist practices, in connection with the Institute, but this is so tangential that the reader can easily forget about it.
Finally, I want to mention that I was reminded eerily of another novel that came out this year, Philip K. Dick’s masterful and deranged Ubik, which I have to think Silverberg could not have known about when he was writing To Live Again. Both take cues from the Buddhist conception of reincarnation, although in Dick’s novel people who have died are kept in a state of suspended animation called “half-life,” whereas Silverberg’s characters die the full death, or “discorporate,” only that their personalities (up to a point) are kept intact. Not to make comparisons, but given that Silverberg’s novel is longer than Dick’s I have to say he does a fair bit less with the shared material. Of course, these are both talented writers, who at their best do very fine work indeed. Silverberg has become a major writer, but sadly he is not firing on all cylinders with either of the novels I’ve covered.
This book made me think of a Bulwer-Lytton novel for the Space Age.
This book could make Damon Knight take back everything he said about van Vogt.
This book made me long for the complexity of Commander Cody shorts.
This book’s style is so out of date that I think it fell out of the TARDIS.
This book wishes it had the character depth of a Lin Carter work.
And yet, I can't hate it the way I hated Light A Last Candle. That book was one mass of forgettable hate, but The Glass Cage is not hateful. It's incompetent at every turn, from line editing to plot development (I really don't know how it got the hardcover copy I received), but the overall effect is an oral record of a children's game.
There's this guy, Stephen, he’s twenty! He's a neophyte to the priests of the computer, TAL! It keeps life going in the city beneath its glass dome! Stephen is a perfect physical specimen, and his only flaw is being too curious about things. But that's because he’s secretly a spy for the Rebellion outside the glass dome!
The sentences are short and rarely have the benefit of internal punctuation. The characters are, generally, exactly how they appear — wicked characters with their close-together eyes, good characters with their strong jaws, straightforward manner, and perfect blonde hair. If this is chosen for adaptation, Tommy Kirk is made for the lead part.
The treatment of nuclear power seems to come from another time, where the leaders of interstellar development are in the Baltimore Gun Club rather than NASA. The giant computer, TAL, is attached to a nuclear bomb, to go off at a certain date, destroying the whole glass dome and the people within! No need to worry, though, Stephen and his various Rebellion people get most everyone out in time, except for the bad guy head priest of TAL, who is determined to die with his machine. Stephen and the gangster leader of the in-Dome Rebellion try to get him out, but to no avail! The nuclear bomb is about to go off, so the two of them hop on their air-sled, turn it skyward, and smash through the glass dome, just as the nuclear bomb goes off! Luckily, the nuclear bomb just pushes them a few miles away from the blast, where they are safe and unharmed.
One point of the book that is surprisingly forward-thinking is its treatment of one of the main characters being severely disabled. Despite being paralyzed from the neck down, he is a leader of the Rebellion, commanding through his immense psychic ability. But that cannot keep me from giving it…
Two stars
[A bit of a downer note to leave on, but at least there's some fine stuff upstream. See you next month, tiger!]
The market has been changing violently over the past few years—perhaps for the better, perhaps not. As someone who came to love science fiction through the magazines little over a decade ago, it pains me to see those magazines either discontinued or struggling to adapt with the times. There are, of course, one or two exceptions. For those who see fresh potential in original anthologies, though, it's hard to argue with the results—even if, say, Damon Knight's Orbit series has offered mixed results.
The latest one-off anthology, Three for Tomorrow (the editor is uncredited, but I've heard rumors that Robert Silverberg is the mastermind behind this volume), features three new novellas from Robert Silverberg, Roger Zelazny, and James Blish, plus a foreword from Arthur C. Clarke explaining the anthology's intriguing premise.
In just a couple pages, the venerated Arthur C. Clarke sums up what the ‘60s will probably be remembered for: a historical text written in blood. Clarke cites, among other things, the Charles Whitman shooting back in ‘63, that massive blackout in the northeast back in ‘65, and of course, Lee Harvey Oswald.
Clarke then asks a rather curious question: “When will some Lee Harvey Oswald attempt to assassinate a city—or a world?” Thus the following stories will presumably share a theme of sorts, although as we’re told in the editor’s introduction, Silverberg, Zelazny, and Blish wrote totally independently of each other.
The first novella is also the longest, at a solid eighty pages. More of a tapestry than a focused narrative, we follow a number of characters in San Francisco after a disgruntled man taints the city’s water supply with an experimental drug—said drug causing selective amnesia. The year is 2003, where robots handle much of the manual labor and people get their news through the “data-net,” the problem now being that not everyone remembers it’s 2003. We follow, among others, a famous sculptor who has sunk into a hilarious amount of debt with several corporations, a magician or “mnemonist” who has an existential crisis after part of his memory has been wiped, a doctor who has been guilt-ridden for the past decade because of a family tragedy he holds himself responsible for, a decorated war veteran who only drinks bottled water out of paranoia (I suspect this is a deliberate reference to Dr. Strangelove’s General Ripper), and I could go on a bit more. None of these characters could be considered “the hero,” but while the story is short on anyone individually sympathetic, we do get a rather colorful ensemble cast as compensation.
Silveberg has been writing at a furious pace for the past few years, apparently having come to maturity since he started writing fiction again back in—was it ‘63? I was impressed with The Man in the Maze when it ran in If last year, and “How It Was When the Past Went Away” further hints at a growing maturity, although it has a few issues that weigh on it.
The most immediate problem is that it is overstuffed for a novella, with more characters than the reader could reasonably keep track of, most of them one-note. The women (the wives and secretaries, as nobody else of the female persuasion seems to exist here) get it the worst. Silverberg is able to conceive a believable future San Francisco in which technology has largely been computerized and creditors come in the form of robots with automated messaging, but for some reason he struggles to conceive female characters who do not exist simply to be stared at. There is a curious subplot in which a husband and wife have forgotten getting divorced, because of the drug, and so work to reform their relationship; but again it feels undercooked, because the wife is written less like a person and more like something to be gained. Overall this story would not win awards for character psychology.
I’m prefacing my complaints just to get them out of the way, because what Silverberg does right is certainly commendable. Between this and some other recent stories (especially the novels), Silverberg has been hunting intellectual big game. The San Francisco of 2003 is vividly and believably realized, sort of coming off as like a Stand on Zanzibar in miniature, but the thematic implications of the drug at the story’s center are ultimately what give it a certain heft and a sense of foreboding. Silverberg seems to posit that if we really value our own happiness that we would choose to forget our past trauma, or at least some of it; yet the fact that characters struggle to come to terms with forgetting part of their pasts implies that we do value something more about ourselves than our happiness. If only we could articulate what that is. Alienation has been a recurring theme for Silverberg since at least “To See the Invisible Man,” but here he tethers it to our sense of memory and how our memories can connect us with other people. The shared amnesia for the people in this story becomes its own moment of collective memory for them, which I have to admit is a lovely idea. If we were able to forget then we would be happier, but then would we also become slightly less human? And would the inverse be true, that by remembering we become more human?
A high three stars, but I feel Silverberg could have very feasibly tweaked it to bring it up to four. I also would not be surprised if we see a novel expansion in the future.
He’s only been around half a dozen years or so at this point, but Zelazny has quickly become one of my favorite writers to have coincided with the New Wavers. I do fear, however, that despite still being quite young he has already taken to repeating himself. To make a long story short, “The Eve of RUMOKO” (so named “after the Maori god of volcanoes and earthquakes”) is about Project RUMOKO, in which nuclear explosives are used deep underwater to raise up volcanic islands. In “How It Was When the Past Went Away” society’s stability is threatened by a tainted water supply, but with Zelazny’s story the underlying problem is overpopulation. Project RUMOKO may provide additional land for human habitation, but the ecological consequences of these new islands could be severe—never mind the effect on societies that already live in undersea domes. Our narrator/protagonist, “Albert Scwheitzer” (he makes it clear that this is not his real name, which we never learn), has been brought on ostensibly as an engineer, but his real job is as a private detective—in the case of Project RUMOKO, to find the culprit behind what seem to be attempts at sabotage.
To give credit where credit’s due, we don’t often see SF and detective fiction cross-pollinating, for reasons that have mostly to do with the fact that you have to provide both suspense and plausibility when writing a mystery in an SF setting. Or to put it another way, how would you provide a plausible mystery in a setting where presumably developments in technology would make it harder to get away with a crime? Zelazny sidesteps this by having the setting be mostly grounded, as in not too different from what we now recognize, other than that humanity has become overcrowded enough that even the aforementioned undersea domes have proven to not be enough. Given how islands are naturally formed, it isn’t too far a stretch to imagine man-made islands as a possible solution to overpopulation. Whatever other problems this story has, at least it remains internally consistent. Zelazny, when he tries, has an imagination that can be disarming.
Unfortunately, while the bones of the story are arguably new territory, the meat and organs are not. “The Eve of RUMOKO” is a Frankenstein monster comprised of at least three previous Zelazny stories, namely “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth,” “This Moment of the Storm,” and “The Keys to December,” each of these a very good story in its own right. The problem is that when you throw these three stories into a stew to form a fourth, the result reads like Zelazny is coasting for the most part. It doesn’t help that “Schweitzer” might be the moodiest and most insufferable protagonist in what is becoming a rather long line of moody and insufferable Zelazny protagonists, all men, all interchangeable: He smokes like a chimney, is cool with the ladies, and is even able to outsmart a couple of goons in a drawn-out interrogation sequence. I’m also becoming tired of Zelazny’s penchant for using mythological symbolism as a crutch, especially (such as here) when he cribs from non-European cultures for his material. Overall I found the experience concerning—not in a vacuum but rather in conjunction with Zelazny’s previous work.
Taken simply on its own it’s a perfectly fine story, perhaps three stars; but with Zelazny I expected a lot more.
Blish’s story is the shortest and darkest of the bunch, both in its premise and implications. It’s also the best. This is the only story of the three which follows through on Clarke’s foreword, in the sense that technology has actually contributed to apocalyptic conditions. Blish speculates here that if humanity is doomed, it’s because of the sheer amount of waste we produce, and how much of that waste can’t be destroyed. We’re told that by the end of the 1980s sea levels will have risen enough to submerge the world’s coasts, including Manhattan, which aside from the crunched timetable (I seriously doubt people will be traveling via canoe in the city in thirty years’ time) sounds plausible enough. The problem is twofold: how much waste we produce and how we might (or might not) be able to dispose of said waste. For example, nuclear power is perhaps more efficient when it comes to producing waste than burning coal, but nuclear waste is hazardous long-term, and there isn’t a foolproof way to dispose of it. Thus, Blish posits, we (or at least Earth) will be doomed in the end.
The protagonist is a union leader who has been called on to pick three men and six women to board a shuttle for the moon—no children allowed. The idea is that while Earth may be doomed, tiny colonies of humanity can be saved. People are chosen based on fertility and each group leader’s personal preference, children and presumably the elderly being left behind. The situation is bleak. I do have a few quibbles first, none of which I could consider a major issue at least by itself. Aside from the crunched timetable there are some odd asides made via the third-person narrator, such as a certain bureaucrat being singled out as “an obvious homosexual,” along with the few female characters at times being described in unflattering terms. Characters are also fluent in what we would call Expositionese, and a fair portion of the wordage is spent on monologues detailing how the world got to this sorry state. I also have to warn the reader that this story stops abruptly, quite literally in the middle of a sentence such that I was unsure at first if this was deliberate or a misprint; but I’ve since come to think the abrupt (and hopeless) ending is quite deliberate.
Something SF and horror have in common is the capacity to ask disturbing questions, in that these questions dislodge the reader’s complacency. Blish asks a simple but brutal one: “Would mankind be able to survive without our possessions, and even our waste?” Would we be able to bury Shakespeare, or even personal items which possess only sentimental value, for the sake of the race’s survival? Blish supposes we wouldn’t. While there is a tangible irony to the plot, along with stylistic flourishes (there’s a cat named Splat!, with the exclamation point as part of the name) that suggest Blish is trying to fit in with the New Wave crowd, the impending doom of “We All Die Naked” evokes the God of Abraham rather than a comedy act. This is Blish at his most merciless, even if his shortcomings as a writer (his inelegant dialogue, his uncharitable attitude towards his female characters) work to form cracks in the armor.
It’s imperfect, but it still has a haunting power. Four stars.
[We received this review of the novel version of "Up the Line" at almost the same time as we received John Boston's commentary on the serialized version. We considered both articles to be worth reading, even if "Up the Line" might not be… -ED]
But we're not done with Silverberg! He's said recently that he refuses to write anything purely for money now, which implies artistic integrity, but that hasn't slowed down his output much. His latest novel, Up the Line, started its serial run in Amazing Stories a couple months ago, but you can now read the full novel, uncensored (it's a very dirty novel) and in paperback. Unfortunately this might be the worst novel Silveberg has written since he returned to writing half a dozen years ago. It's such a misshapen creature of a book that I honestly have to wonder what Silverberg meant by it.
Cover art by Ron Walotsky.
Ever since the invention of time travel, one's notion of objective time has broken down, with only "now-time" being taken into account—in this case now-time is 2059. Judson Elliott III is a new recruit as a Time Courier, whose job basically involves being a guide and babysitter for a bunch of rich tourists. Time travel has been commercialized such that notable events in history are industries unto themselves, especially the deaths of famous people. The crucifixion of Jesus Christ and the assassination of Huey Long are just two examples, in which the crowds gathering around the slain historical figures are at least partly comprised of time travelers.
Silverberg goes to great lengths to rationalize how such a business would work, so much in fact that for about the first seventy pages of this 250-page novel the plot is all but nonexistent. This isn't necessarily a negative, or at least it didn't have to be. We grow accustomed to Jud's new profession, the rules he is expected to follow, and the few friends he makes among the fellow Couriers, including Sam, a white man's idea of a black man, and Capistrano, a melancholy fellow who fantasizes about committing suicide in a rather odd fashion—by going back in time and murdering one of his own ancestors, thereby preventing his own birth.
Up the Line works on the presumption that you, the reader, are already thoroughly familiar with the time travel genre. The Time Patrol, a police faction whose job specifically calls for making sure the Couriers and their clients don't destroy mankind through some paradox, could be a hat tip to Poul Anderson's own Time Patrol, or even the late H. Beam Piper's Paratime Police. And why not? Any time travel story written in the past five years or so would have to draw comparisons with, among other things, Robert Heinlein's masterful "'—All You Zombies—'," which similarly concerns sex and how it might act as a catalyst for time paradoxes. However, while the sex in Heinlein's little jewel of a story is kept offscreen, there are quite a few scenes in Silverberg's novel that could be considered pornographic. Something Jud quickly learns about the Time Service is that the Couriers are almost too busy chasing tail to look after their clients, and the women they chase after are (somehow) always willing. The biggest hedonist of them all has to be Themistoklis Metaxas, a senior Courier who, quite opposite from Capistrano, goes out of his way to bed the female members of his own ancestry. Incest ends up playing such a prominent role in the novel that it's basically responsible for the plot even starting in earnest, as Metaxas's roguish behavior inspires Jud to think about the incest taboo with regards to his own ancestry.
The problem with Up the Line is that it's quite a bad novel, to my mind, and yet it's easy to see how other readers might think it's another victory for Silverberg. Who doesn't love a good time paradox? Not to mention the rampant sex, which will draw in younger readers and those who are predisposed to think about sex regularly (and I admittedly fall into both of those groups), while at the same time reminding us that the New Wave is here to stay. The locations are exotic, especially the fulcrum of the action, that being Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul across the centuries, the city which Metaxas frequents so often as to have residency there. There are constipated passages in which the action ceases so that Jud (read: Silverberg) can educate us on, for example, what rural life was like in 12th century Byzantium. The amateur historian's passion for his subject can be infectious, which I think was what Silverberg was counting on, so that he might distract us from how uneventful this book really is. If I were to keep only the necessary background information and Jud's quest to trace his family lineage backwards, I would have cut the novel in half, to have it squeezed nicely into one half of an Ace Double. Remove most of the sex scenes and historical tangents, and you would have maybe a long novella. It doesn't help that by lingering so long on the mechanics of his time travel business, Silverberg invites us to poke holes in it. Indeed, why are the Time Service and Time Patrol separate organizations? Why is it so easy to abuse such a fragile system? How have we not been devolved to the state of primordial ooze thanks to some tourist stepping on a butterfly?
So there isn't enough action to sustain this 250-page novel. So what? The ideas are ambitious, and deliberately headache-inducing. What about the characters? Indeed, what about them. As I was reading Up the Line, I was intrigued but also at times disgusted—intrigued by the precarious relationship between the Couriers and the fabric of time they play with, and disgusted by the Couriers themselves. Jud starts out as sex-starved and only becomes more preoccupied with the notion of bedding a distant ancestor of his, namely the 17-year-old Pulcheria Dulca, in Byzantium. "It was lust at first sight," as Jud tells us; and of course Pulcheria, despite being married, is perfectly eager to go to bed with him. Truth be told, I've become concerned that Silverberg does not see women as fully autonomous beings, with their own interior lives and ambitions. The women in this book are granted even less personality than Sam, who himself is a caricature, with even Pulcheria barely qualifying as a character. There are also some comments Jud makes about a few female characters younger than Pulcheria (including a disturbing episode in which he encounters his own mother as a five-year-old) that I found revolting. I do mean this with the intention of giving some offense when I say Up the Line reads almost more like a Piers Anthony novel than Silverberg.
Pains me to say this, but I must give it two stars.
Aside from the stray short story I have to admit I had not read any of John Jakes’s novels, of which there have been many as of late—so many, in fact, that we folks at the Journey have not been able to cover every new Jakes book. Just this year alone we’ve gotten three or four Jakes novels, with at least one more already in the can as I’m writing this. So consider this a bit of “catching up,” for the both of us. Jakes started a new science-fantasy series a couple years ago with When the Star Kings Die, and this year he has put out not one, but two more entries in this series. For the sake of not overwhelming the reader, though, let’s just keep it to the first two entries… for now.
Humanity has spread across the stars in what is called II Galaxy, with a planet-spanning league of aristocrats called the 'Lords of the Exchange' (the titular star kings) keeping things in check. The star kings are supposed to live for centuries, being near-immortal, but something has been leading these long-lived aristocrats to early deaths. Maxmillion Dragonard (a name I certainly did not pull out of a hat) is a Regulator, one of the enforcers for the star kings, who starts out imprisoned for a bout of intensely violent behavior but is soon freed on the condition that he investigates why the star kings are dying young. He soon travels to the planet Pentagon, a backwater home to little in the way of technology or civilization, but which seems to house the answer to the mystery; and there he gets involved with a group of rebels who go by the 'Heart Flag'. Dragonard’s sense of loyalty gets split between his allegiance to the star kings, personified by a mischievous spy named Kristin, whom Dragonard quickly falls in love with, and the leaders of the Heart Flag group, Jeremy and his sister Bel.
If you read certain passages out of context you might think you’re reading an adventure fantasy yarn in the Robert E. Howard mode, which Jakes is no stranger to, but overall this is much more evocative of Leigh Brackett’s planetary adventures—low on scientific plausibility but high on swashbuckling action. We have swords and daggers, but also blasters and “electroguns,” not to mention spaceships. Another thing carried over from both Howard and Brackett is this heightened sense of sexuality—or to put it less charitably, the fact that there are only two female characters of note in this novel, and both of them want to jump Dragonard’s bones. Jakes also can’t help himself when it comes to focusing on the women’s breasts, especially Kristin’s. In fairness, Dragonard is a man who has just been broken out of prison, and ultimately this is not a very serious novel. When the Star Kings Die was published in 1967, although the Journey didn’t cover it then; but if not for the publication date you might think it was printed in 1947, possibly as a “complete” novel in the likes of Startling Stories and other bygone pulps. It seems deliberately retrograde, but it’s unobtrusive so far as that goes.
This is a short novel, such that I’m actually surprised Ace didn’t bundle it with another short novel or novella. Even so, with just 160 pages Jakes is able to give us a future world, somewhat believable power dynamics among the parties, a few good villains, and a climactic battle that manages to take up a good chunk of the text. Kristin, despite being Dragonard’s main love interest, is absent for much of the novel, but to compensate his growing admiration for Jeremy and budding affection for Bel are given ample room to develop. The trio’s tenuous but promising relationship at the end of the novel is undermined, however, by the fact that when we did get a follow-up to When the Star Kings Die it was not a sequel, but instead a distant prequel.
This novel does a few things well, but not exceptionally well; and, let’s face it, we’ve been here before. It’s fine, but nothing special.
Jakes’s ode to the sword-and-spaceship adventures of yore continues with The Planet Wizard, published just this year, although given that it’s about the same length as When the Star Kings Die I’m still a bit surprised it was not released as one half of an Ace Double. The Planet Wizard has a more focused narrative, and more than its predecessor it heavily uses the fantasy elements of the pulp material it’s clearly taking cues from; but even so it feels less like a full novel (certainly now that we have behemoths like Dune and Stand on Zanzibar in the field) and more like a somewhat constipated novella. I very much enjoy novellas myself, but not so much when they look bloated and could use a laxative.
Say goodbye to all the characters from that first novel, since here we’re jumping back over a thousand years in time; conversely all the characters featured in The Planet Wizard will have been long and safely dead by the time we get to When the Star Kings Die. Some cataclysmic event has pushed civilization across planets almost back to medieval times, with the planet Pastora having only a semblance of civilized humanity, with its sister planet Lightmark faring even worse. Superstition has taken over the minds of the masses. Swords and daggers have replaced firearms. Instead of spaceships we have “skysleds.” Magus Blackclaw (another name I did not just pull out of a hat) is a middle-aged “wizard” who lives with his beautiful daughter Maya. The problem is that Magus isn’t really a wizard, for magic doesn’t really exist in this world. Whilst on the run the two cross paths with a tenacious swordsman named Robin Dragonard, who as you may guess is an ancestor of the Maxmillion Dragonard of the first novel. Magus gets captured and put on trial, as a fraud; but the High Governors, the pseudo-Christian religious leaders of Pastora, have a proposition for Magus: go to Lightmark and rediscover the fallen commercial house of Easkod, and maybe these charges will be dropped.
Not only does Magus have to deal with the “Brothers” of Easkod, a league of mutated and vicious humans who watch over Easkod City, but the job to exorcize Easkod of its “demons” quickly turns into a race. Philosopher Arko Lantzman wants his hands on Easkod as an alleged treasury of technology that got lost after the cataclysm, while William Catto, a descendant of one of Easkod’s higher-ups (so he claims), wishes to return the house to its former glory. Given that this is a prequel to When the Star Kings Die, and thus knowing the basic history of the star kings themselves, you can guess the broad trajectory of The Planet Wizard. Given also that Robin (who sadly lacks the charisma of his descendant) will contribute to a bloodline that persists over a thousand years later, it’s safe to guess as to his fate. What keeps the tension alive is that unlike some prequels, wherein we already know the fates of the cast (a kind of dramatic irony granted to the reader), we’re unsure if Magus and Maya will come out of this ordeal unscathed. While Robin is a flatter character than Maxmillion, Magus is a rather fun protagonist, being a middle-aged confidence man who nonetheless does care deeply for his daughter, and goes above and beyond to rescue her when she inevitably gets kidnapped.
In a sense The Planet Wizard complements its predecessor, and I’m not sure if Jakes intended one to be the other’s both opposite and equal. Not better, nor worse, but at least different enough to not feel like a repeat. I do recommend both—if you can find copies below the retail price.
Three stars.
by Victoria Silverwolf
Initial Response
Two rip-roaring novels of space adventure fell into my hands recently, both by authors who use two initials instead of first and middle names. (Yes, I notice trivia like that.) Let's take a look.
Prolific British writer Edwin Charles Tubb (E. C. to you!) has been reviewed several times by Galactic Journeyers, including your not-so-humble servant. He usually earns three stars, once in a while a bit more. Will his latest novel earn him another C or C+ on his report card?
Wordiest cover I've ever seen. Pardon the lousy image.
I must have held the cameras at a bad angle.
A project to launch the first starship is under way, funded by the American government. What the boys and girls in Washington D. C. don't realize is that the folks behind the project believe that humanity is doomed to be wiped out by radioactivity. (There are hints that there have been a few limited nuclear wars, as well as a lot of atomic tests.) They plan to escape and find a world to colonize.
Meanwhile, a would-be dictator and his followers plan to stop the starship, by force if necessary. Don't worry about this subplot, because the vessel manages to leave Earth very early in the book, not without a lot of bloodshed.
(This brings up an odd thing about the book. The protagonists are just about as bloodthirsty as the antagonists. They're ready to destroy an entire community in order to launch the starship. Besides that, a lot of the folks aboard were literally kidnapped, forced to be colonists against their will.)
Pretty soon the escapees find a livable planet, which they name (with heavy irony) Eden. In addition to huge, deadly animals, the place has something in the atmosphere that ensures that any woman giving birth and her child will die.
The book has still barely started. A lot more goes on. There's an attempt at mutiny. There's the mysterious disappearance of the first probe to land on the planet, and its equally mysterious reappearance.
The author throws a lot at the reader, often at random. Some subplots don't lead anywhere. For example, we've got an attempt to activate the brain of a dead scientist in order to extract his knowledge. This is just dropped, and doesn't change anything. The whole thing reads as if it were written as quickly as possible, with a completely improvised plot.
American writer C. C. MacApp also has a fast hand at the typewriter, often showing up in If. He's been reviewed a lot here, generally getting three stars. Sometimes less, sometimes more. (Sounds a lot like Tubb, doesn't he?) Will his latest novel be below average, above average, or just plain average?
Cover art by John Berkey.
Wait a minute! I hear you cry. I thought we were talking about MacApp, not this Capps person!
Yep. C. C. MacApp is actually Carroll Mather Capps in real life. If you'll open the book, you'll see it's been copyrighted in the name of C. C. MacApp. Don't ask me why his real name is on the cover.
Anyway, our hero is an Earthman who caught an alien disease somewhere in space. Before killing him, it's going to make him blind. The good news is that some friendly, semi-humanoid aliens are willing to take him to a place where he can be cured, if he undertakes a mission for them. (The aliens recently arrived in the solar system and have the knowledge of faster-than-light travel, but haven't let humans in on the secret.)
His mission is to track down a renegade alien who kidnapped an alien scientist and stole a powerful piece of ancient technology from a species of extraterrestrials who vanished long ago. In order to do this, the aliens take him to a planet without a sun (hence the title) which is able to support life due to its internal heat.
His contact is a multi-tentacled space pirate with two snake-like heads. This roguish character takes him to a hospital, where a spider-like surgeon operates on his eyes.
Wouldn't you know it? There's a catch. The pirate blackmailed the surgeon into doing something to our hero's eyes so that he needs routine treatment with a certain chemical in order to keep his vision. As a side effect, the operation gave him the ability to see clearly in almost total darkness, even able to perceive radiation. This makes him a very useful tool of the pirate on this planet without natural illumination except starlight.
The guy goes along with the pirate, while also spying on him. Meanwhile, the local inhabitants of the planet spy on both him and the pirate. (There's a lot of spying in this book.) The renegade alien and the kidnapped victim show up, as well as other aliens intent on conquest.
I've only given you a synopsis of maybe half the novel. There are plenty of complications in store. The hero winds up on yet another planet, and finds out about the ancient vanished aliens.
The main difference between Tubb's book and this one is that McApp's is much more tightly plotted. There aren't any pointless subplots. As a bonus, the octopus-like pirate is an enjoyable character, usually several steps ahead of the hero. Not the most profound story ever told, but competent entertainment.
The Palace of Eternity is the first of Bob Shaw’s works that I’ve read. Shaw is a man of many talents, having worn a myriad of hats from taxi-driver to structural engineer and aircraft designer. He has added writing fiction to his repertoire with works such as The Two Timers, Night Walk, and his breakout short story, "Light of Other Days."
The Palace of Eternity is set in a distant and turbulent future where humanity has discovered FTL space travel, taken to the stars, and struggles to weather the onslaught of violent attacks from an alien species known as the Pythsyccans.
The protagonist, Mack Tavernor, is a battle-hardened former soldier who had been orphaned when the Pythsyccans devastated his childhood home. Naturally, Tavernor doesn’t view the Pythsyccans in a positive light but he also seems disillusioned enough with humanity to keep his own kind at arm’s length.
The Pythsyccans attack Mnemosyne, an idyllic, almost utopian world dubbed a haven for writers, artists, and other creators of varied talents. Tavernor, naturally, takes up arms against the invading enemy and dies in battle. This is where the story takes an interesting turn.
After shucking this mortal coil, Tavernor encounters the egons, a non-corporeal race of cosmic beings whose very existence is threatened by the proliferation of humanity’s FTL-ramjet technology, the Butterfly Ships. Tavernor, the newest egon, gets another lease on life, inhabiting the body of a newborn human child named Hal. The goal of his mission, to somehow interfere in the war between the humans and Pythsyccans in order to save the endangered egons.
The Palace of Eternity is a fantastic and eloquently written and fast-paced story that fires on all pistons where the things about science fiction that excite me are concerned. And yet…somehow, though, this book failed to move me. For all its eloquence and imaginativeness, I found myself unable to feel strongly about the characters and events of this story. It failed to fill me with a sense of wonder, even amidst the wondrous imagery. At first, I couldn’t put my finger on why.
It wasn’t just that much of the story felt glossed over—and probably should have been explored in greater detail. My main source of dissatisfaction was with the story’s main character’s development.
Mack Tavernor is admirable. He's truly a man's man in all the ways a man ought to be a man. Yet, I could not bring myself to either like or dislike him. At no point did I become emotionally invested in the things that happened to and around him. In short, as a protagonist, Mack falls flat. Lacking the kind of depth and complexity that makes fictional characters feel real in my mind, he is like soda pop that has lost its fizz.
Had Mr. Shaw given The Palace of Eternity the extent of thought and care it deserved, the book could have turned out to be a true phenomenon. It is, indeed, still an excellent and worthy read. Even so, I feel it's almost a tragic waste of the author's very clear intellect and truly wondrous imagination.
This is my first encounter with the fiction of the British cosmologist Fred Hoyle. A prominent astronomer with a long tenure at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, Hoyle is perhaps best known for a slew of rather controversial opinions. For instance, Dr. Hoyle has rejected the idea of the Big Bang, and for many years has promoted the idea that life on Earth began in the stars.
Yes, he is an eccentric, but Dr. Hoyle is quite a genius, really; a thoroughly unique figure and someone I would really enjoy meeting.
Dr. Hoyle is also a prominent science fiction writer. In collaboration with his son Geoffrey, he recently authored Rockets in Ursa Major, a thoroughly entertaining, if too brief, science fiction yarn reminiscent of the sort of thing which John W. Campbell might have published. If your kind of space fiction involves brilliant and fearless scientists battling bueaucracy and evil aliens, Rockets in Ursa Major is your kind of book.
I kind of giggled a bit when I realized the main characterof Ursa Major is a deeply accomplished and slightly eccentric scientist and that the book is told in first person – do you look in the mirror a bit too much, Dr. Hoyle? As the story begins, the genius Dr. Richard Warboys is at a very boring professional conference when surprising news pops up on the telly: a spaceship which has been lost for thirty years has suddenly reappeared, streaming towards Earth’s atmosphere.
Only a brilliant scientist can help the ship land! And only a brilliant scientist can help discover the ship's great secret of invading alien species! And only a brilliant scientist can fly a seeming suicide mission to battle those invaders! And only a brilliant scientist can figure out a complicated way to use solar flares to defeat those invaders! And, you guessed it, only a brilliant scientist can then fly towards the sun, release those solar flares and save our planet.
Are you shocked if I tell you that scientist's name is Dr. Dick Warboys?
So, yes, the plot of Rockets in Ursa Major is pure wish fulfillment: the 54-year-old Dr. Hoyle cast a genius scientist aged in his mid-30s as the man who basically singlehandedly saves Earth. And it’s all rather silly.
Dr. Hoyle
But Rockets is all tremendously fun, too, in that marvelously light-hearted way one might imagine Campbell publishing next to a Heinlein juvie or van Vogt brain-twister. I’m not sure if it’s the influence of the younger Mr. Hoyle the author, but this book moves at a kinetic speed, with almost too many twists and turns in its breathless style (I’m not sure why we needed a sequence in which Dr. Warboys breaks into the research college by stealing a boat and running through tunnels, for instance).
At the end of this book, the Hoyles hint at the possibility of a sequel. I would enjoy another thoroughly light-hearted and thoroughly indulgent visit with Dr. Warboys.
John Brunner is one of the most prolific science fiction authors of the latter half of this decade, to the extent that it sometimes feels hard to keep up with his work. I’ve always enjoyed Brunner’s work, which often manages to tread a fine line between smart concepts and exciting action. And I was a huge fan of his grand step into literary science fiction, the remarkable Stand on Zanzibar.
This month sees the release of a new Brunner, called Timescoop, but the zines are already reporting the autumn '69 release of another Brunner novel, called The Jagged Orbit [Actually, it's already been released—the Autumn release is a re-release (ed.)]. Based on the blurbs, Orbit sounds like another book of strong literary ambitions.
Timescoop, however, is not a novel of strong literary ambitions. It’s a goof, a novel in which Brunner played with some clever ideas and delivered a quick little satirical piece. Timescoop clears the palette between works of deep seriousness.
Our protagonist here is one Harold Freitas III, a self-obsessed inheritor of his family’s fortunes who is looking to live up to the legacy his father, recently deceased, has left to him.
Fortunately for Freitas, an amazing invention called the Timescoop has been invented, and he has control of it. The Timescoop can bring anything forward in time and allow it to live in the book’s present. Thus the Venus de Milo and Hermes of Praxiteles can exist – with their original arms – and so can people.
Imagine the Hermes – with arms – in a private house near you!
Looking to make a mark with publicity, Freitas brings forward nine of his ancestors in time and brings them to a family reunion broadcast throughout the galaxy. After all, men of the past were men of great virtue and character and the future world can learn from their insights. But… as one character states prophetically… “How much do we really know about these people? One always looks at the past through rose-colored –"
So Freitas brings forward nine of his ancestors – a steadfast medieval king and a medieval Crusader and a 17th century British merchant and a fire-and-brimstone preacher and a female cowboy, among others – and readies them to face the world and make Freitas famous.
But be careful what you wish for, and especially be careful what you create. Because these ancestors are not the good people Freitas wishes they could be. They are pederasts and nymphomaniacs, gluttons who are covered with filth and who have ancient racist attitudes. One even indulged in the slave trade.
Mr Brunner
Most of this is played for laughs, and it’s easy to imagine someone like Peter Sellers or Alec Guiness playing all the roles in a film adaptation, taking on silly voices while someone like Peter Cook keeps rolling his eyes at the chaos.
But there is also a small element of satire, a small joy at bringing down the rich and pompous and allowing their obsessions to blow up in their faces.
Timescoop is another quick little novel, and at a mere 156 pages it doesn’t wear out its welcome. But this is clearly Brunner relaxing and doing a small warmup for his next literary work.
In my first conversations with the Traveller, I was warned that some of the works I would cover here would be unpleasant. This is my first, and it does not even have the decency to be memorably terrible (Ole Doc Methuselah by L. Ron Hubbard), or bland yet competent (One Against Herculeum by Jerry Sohl). Light A Last Candle is knockoff Heinlein, wrapped in knockoff Doc Smith and shot through with attempts at imitating Bester.
Our main character is one of the few remaining humans on a planet. There’s “Mods” — modified humans — which our main character doesn’t like. Like a low-energy Gully Foyle, he doesn’t like anyone or anything very much. He doesn’t have a name, our main character, nor does “the girl”. She’s lucky, as all other female figures are called Breeders. The character our main character can stand the most is an old, fatherly figure simply referred to as Rutherford. They are the only two original humans, Free Men, left on the planet, which is mostly under the mind control of the Aliens, and their Mod slaves…or are they?
Social commentary is attempted, as are twists, and like in The Devil’s Own by Nora Lofts, the revelations provided to the reader are ultimately shallow. The more they appear, the more insignificant they are revealed to be. The Devil’s Own is in fact a rather poor comparison; since that is a fine book. In truth, the story Light A Last Candle most reminds me of is Cat-Women of the Moon (1953), with its clunky twists, bland characterization, pervasive male chauvinism, and failing to convey travel in a story that is ostensibly all about traveling. Distance is compressed like an accordion, details are skipped over, days pass offhandedly when we could be learning more about anything we are reading. This ultimately becomes a paucity of both showing and telling, which certainly is new to me. Like Star Man’s Son by Andre Norton, the book centers around bringing the reader to encounter different cultures in this alien future. Like The Weirdstone of Brisigamen by Alan Garner, that travel also takes place in tight, dangerous caves. In both of those books, however, distance and time were characters in themselves. You felt the pressure of travel, the hard work the characters put in, their sense of purpose.
The only talent that really appears throughout the work is a pervasive sense of disgust, of fleshy horror that I know William Hope Hodgeson in The Derelict and Arthur Machen in The Three Imposters did better sixty years ago. I think it's this author's first book, but his grouchiness is beyond his years.
I am writing this review as quickly as possible, because after finishing this book less than a half an hour ago, it is rapidly leaving my mind. I have filled this page with references to other works, so that the reader may enjoy books much better than this one.
[We've got another wonderful haul of books for you this month, many of which are well worth you're time. Be sure to read on 'til the end—you'll definitely catch the reading bug!]
By Mx Kris Vyas-Myall
The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith by Josephine Saxton
Josephine Saxton is British author so, of course, her first book is about apocalypses and sexual awakening. However, it's a particularly skilled one.
The story: an unnamed teenage boy is wandering across the desolated British landscape alone, after an unexplained event has killed off all the other people. He comes across a baby girl and decides to bring her up. Together they try to understand the world that was left behind and what it means to be an adult.
You might assume this is either the usual “New Adam and Eve” story, or some kind of shock piece. However, Saxton manages to negotiate between these two paths skillfully. She describes the sexual emergences of both of them in matter-of-fact terms, which grounds the story within the dream-like atmosphere they inhabit.
As we go through, their comprehension of the world changes from child-like to a clear understanding of the facts of life. Even though their eventual relations could come across as disturbing given the age difference between the two, and the fact The Boy brought her up like a little sister, Saxton manages to largely negate this. She is able to show the passage of time well and, more importantly, give us the thought processes of both our leads to show they have free-will and are fully in control of their choices. For example:
She studied this for some time, and came to the conclusion that this was a drawing of a penis, and at what she had read and seen, she became hot all over, and in an excitable state.
There is also a clear sense throughout the text about the importance of symbolism. The Boy is constantly dismissing the importance of words and symbols but The Girl slowly shows him that deeper meaning is important.
For me, the key message that is brought out here is that they need to wipe away the sins of the past. The things that brought this world into being. When The Girl is bathing she sings about washing away her troubles in the River Jordan. And, when she gives birth, she insists on doing it in a place of death “to eradicate the source of evil here”. There is a central concept that simply them growing up and continuing the human race is not enough. Things have to change.
I picked up this novel as I knew it was related to The Consciousness Machine, one of my favourite novellas of last year. The connection raises significant questions. However, to discuss this requires mentions of later revelations of both works. As such, if you want to avoid knowing these facts, please feel free to skip to the next review.
As the name suggests, the novella is about a machine, WAWWAR, that can take the images of the unconscious mind and display them on a screen. The technician Zona is trying to decipher the meaning of The Boy and The Girl’s journey. There is also another piece of material relating to the hunt for a wild animal. These secondary and tertiary narratives are completely absent from the novel, which only contains The Boy and Girl’s tale in its totality.
As such, the conclusion of the book version is not about Zona learning the nature of the Animus, but The Boy, The Girl and The Baby deciding it is time to go home. So, they get on a bus, pay the conductor and go back to a fully furnished suburban house. The Girl then decides to get an early night as there is nothing on television on Tuesdays and puts the baby to sleep.
Now, a simple explanation for this could be we are literally seeing the film that was recorded by the WAWWAR. However, no hint of that is given and I think that is too large a leap to expect the average reader to make.
But to read it purely as a science fiction tale causes just as many problems. This sharp turn is nowhere hinted at in the text and in fact contradicts several core points created. Even if you could somehow accept the idea that The Boy went to live in a town that has been uninhabited, how does he have a house? How has he never seen a fully grown adult woman before? How does The Girl know about contemporary television schedules? How is the home not only still available to them after decades away, but with the utilities on?
So, what are we to make of this strange choice? There is no reason I could imagine that would force Saxton to expunge this frame from the longer book form. And the novel is indeed a good bit more explicit than the novella. So, a choice we must assume it is.
I like to believe it is opening us up to the freedom to understand the text in our own way. Zona’s meta-commentary on the events is merely one way of understanding a dream. You could also just as easily contend that the explosion in the chemist, shortly before they leave the town of Thingy, actually killed them all, suburbia representing the afterlife and Zona being like the angels in 40s cinema, discussing their existence.
Or, perhaps, the Town of Thingy really does exist and is a time displaced retreat. Something akin to Hawksbill Station. Where couples facing marital difficulties can be de-aged, grow-up together, and learn how to become one unit again, before being brought back at the same moment they left. And then The Consciousness Machine is actually just a dream The Girl has after she goes to bed.
I don’t know what Saxton intended, but I also do not think it matters. The journey and feel of the novel is excellent and how you choose to view it is just as valid as those watching the WAWWAR.
Humanity has made its first steps into interstellar space, settling the worlds of the Pleiades. In so doing, they have brushed across the domain of the mysterious Moldaug—a frustratingly humanoid but not quite human alien race with a fleet strength comparably to Terra's. After decades of peaceful coexistence, the Moldaug suddenly make claim to all the Pleiades. The Old Worlds of Earth, Mars, and Venus, reeling from a kind of space phobia, offer to relinquish their own claims to the Frontier. This only makes things worse for two reasons: 1) the Moldaug inexplicably find the offer offensive, and 2) the Frontier is not Earth's to give, for they had fought and won independence a dozen years prior! (For more on this story, see the novelette Hilifter.)
by Jack Gaughan (and cribbed from the novelization of Three Worlds to Conquer, as I learned from my friend, Joachim Boaz—the art makes much more sense for the original title)
Enter Cully O'Rourke When, the man most responsible for the Frontier's independence. When the veteran spacejacker returns to Earth to treat with the Old World's government, he is thrown into a floating prison with hundreds of other Frontiersmen, rendered impotent to cause more mischief. But in that very prison, he learns from an imprisoned anthropologist the explosive secret that foretells Armageddon between humans and the Moldaug…unless someone can bring the two races into true understanding.
Thus begins a tale that involves Cully's jailbreak, piracy on high space, and political turmoil in three realms.
This is a frustrating book because it has such potential, and there are many things to like in it. The gripping beginning, the well-realized triune nature of the Moldaug (each being-unit comprises three tri-bonded individuals), the subtle difference in morality between the two species (Right/not-Right vs. Respectable/not-Respectable—though one could argue that this is a thinly guised variation of the Japanese concept of "Face"), the rich setting, the final confrontation between Cully and the Moldaug Admiral Ruhn…these are all compelling.
But Dickson falls into the issues he had with his Dorsai series: one mastermind (our hero) knows every move and countermove, and everything breaks his way. As a result, the only drama comes in seeing the master plan unfold, not how said hero responds to adversity. In stories like this, one can see the author laying out the stepping stones, guiding a path so that the protagonist never makes a misstep.
The other issue is the virtual absence of women. I know people have given me grief for harping on this issue since I started this 'zine in 1958, but come on, people—it's 1969. We have women leading Israel and India. On Star Trek, a third of the crew of the Enterprise is female. A few years back, Rydra Wong led a crew of misfits to save the galaxy. So when the only human female character in all of the Frontier and the Old Worlds serves just to be a romantic foil (and to be ignored at the one juncture that she has critical information!), and she is the sole woman amongst a cast of dozens of men, the world Dickson builds starts to feel a little hollow.
Edmund Cooper is a British writer who has been active since the '50s, and up until recently I've not had the pleasure to read any of his work. He put out a novel just a month or two ago, and now here he is again, with a short collection called News from Elsewhere, featuring eight stories, only one of which is original to the collection. It was published in Britain last year but only just now got an American edition, courtesy of Berkley Medallion. Overall it's a mixed bag, since it looks like Cooper likes to repeat himself (there are three or four stories here about space expeditions), but the strongest material does make me curious for more. Let's take a look.
This is the only story to be first published in News from Elsewhere, and it’s… fine. It’s basically a fable, set in an icy and desolate world, about a young woman and her infant son as they travel with “the People of the Spur,” on a religious pilgrimage. The problem is that the woman’s son is a half-breed, a child-by-rape whose father is a “Changeling,” of a fellow humanoid race that whose members have hairy and thorny ridges on their backs. The woman tries to keep her son’s racial status a secret, but in trying to evade her people she literally falls into a chasm—and certain death. Cooper’s style here is almost childlike; there is barely any dialogue, and by the end it becomes clear what message we’re supposed to take from what is admittedly a harrowing adventure narrative. Cooper also saves the answer to the question “Is this science fiction or fantasy?” for the end, although I’m not sure why he treats it like a twist.
We jump from the newest story to one of the oldest, first published as “The End of the Journey” in the February 1956 issue of Fantastic Universe. “M 81: Ursa Major” is a space opera that asks a rather troubling question: “How do we know when we’re dead?” Or, to phrase it less threateningly: “How can we tell the difference, subjectively speaking, between being dead and being unconscious?” An experimental ship uses scientific mumbo jumbo to skirt the fact that it’s impossible to travel at the speed of light. The results are tragic, but also very strange—not least for the deeply jaded captain, who has a hunch that things will go wrong indeed. This is a story with a loose plot and only one genuine character to speak of, but it’s anchored by a strong idea. It’s the kind of story that was commonplace a decade and a half ago, but which now strikes me as a bit refreshing. I almost feel nostalgic about this sort of thing.
Four stars, but I understand if someone reads it and is not as impressed.
The Enlightened Ones
This one originally appeared in Cooper’s first collection, Tomorrow’s Gift. It’s the longest in the collection, and frankly, I’m not sure the length was justified. Long story short, a team of space explorers makes first contact with a race of hominids, who at first seem like primitive humans but who turn out to have a major advantage over the humans—only the humans are too concerned with what to do with the hominids at first to notice anything amiss. It’s a trite premise, even by the standards of a decade ago, that’s elevated by Cooper’s acute pessimism with regards to the notion of human supremacy. In this distant future it’s said that the Eskimos, Polynesians, and some other indigenous groups on Earth have been driven to extinction. Certainly the Campbellian protagonists do not come off well for the most part, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that “The Enlightened Ones” (such an immediately ironic title) was printed in Fantastic Universe and not Astounding/Analog.
First published in the 1963 collection Tomorrow Came, which may sound unfamiliar because it never got an American printing. “Judgment Day” is the most British-sounding of the lot so far, to the point where it reads like the late John Wyndham at a hefty discount. At first it doesn’t even register as SF. The narrator and his wife are in the park one day when people around them start having violent seizures—too many in one place for this to be a random occurrence. Soon the narrator’s wife falls victim as well, and for much of the story we may be wondering about not just the cause, but the context for all this. What does any of this mean? The narrator meets a soldier who promptly feeds him enough information to stun an elephant, the result being that we’re told about something important that basically happens outside the confines of the page and which has already come to an end by the time the narrator hears about it. It’s rather inelegant, never mind that the SFnal element already feels outdated somehow.
Two stars.
The Intruders
Cover art by Virgil Finlay.
This one first appeared as “Intruders on the Moon” in the April 1957 issue of Fantastic Universe. Yes, this surely does read like an SF adventure story from a dozen years ago. A team of explorers land on our moon to investigate the massive crater that is Tycho, for mining as well as the slim possibility of discovering intelligent life. (Something I wish to make clear at this point is that Cooper’s characters are not usually “characters” in the Shakespearian sense; they do not tend to have distinguishable personalities.) Miraculously, however, one of the crew discovers footprints in the sand near Tycho—rather large footprints with very long strides, indeed too much to be a human’s. The explorers go looking for this “Man Friday” of theirs, but they soon learn to regret it. “The Intruders” is pretty straightforward for how long it is, and while its quaint vision of man’s landing on the moon would have been acceptable last decade, I can’t imagine there being much interest in a story of its sort now.
One of Cooper’s earliest stories, and a hand-me-down from Tomorrow’s Gift. A team of space explorers (oh God, not again) lands on “Planet Five,” where there doesn’t seem to be any organic life—save for a species of butterfly. The butterflies have a power over the human explorers they remain unaware of until it’s too late. But it’s not all bad: the explorers also have with them a smartass robot named Whizbang, who emerges as the story’s single genuine character. The autonomous robot comes off more human than the actual humans, although this may be Cooper’s intention, as he uses this disparity at the end of the story to somewhat chilling effect. I’m sensing repetition in the story selection, but I do tepidly recommend this one. If nothing else it comes close to “M 81: Ursa Major” in conveying Cooper’s thesis on the strenuous nature between human rationality and things in our universe which may be beyond human understanding.
A strong three stars.
The Lizard of Woz
Cover art by Virgil Finlay.
This one first appeared in the August 1958 issue of Fantastic Universe, and it’s the crown jewel of the collection. “The Lizard of Woz,” aside from having an incredible title, is different from the others in that it is an outright comedy (albeit of a morbid hue), but it also is told from an alien’s perspective. Ynky is a member of a highly advanced race of alien lizards, who has been sent to Earth so as to determine if it is fit for “fumigation,” i.e., genocide on a planetary scale. The people Ynky comes into contact with (an American, then a Russian, then a third I would prefer to keep a secret) are caricatures, which is all well and good. Cooper pokes fun at both sides of the Iron Curtain, but overall this is a story about the absurdity of the notion of racial supremacy. We’re told constantly that the lizards of Woz are a superior race, yet they also have slave labor and are casually murderous with other sentient races, not to mention Ynky himself is rather slow-witted. Since this is a comedy, and a pretty silly one to boot, some people will be irritated by the antics, but I laughed several times over the span of its mere ten pages.
Finally we have “Welcome Home,” which first appeared in Tomorrow Came and so this marks its first American appearance. Looking back at that time, it seems now like the early ‘60s were simply an extension (or the semi-stale leftovers) of the ‘50s, at least with regards to SF, because this story reads as a few years older than it is. A team of explorers (for the last time, we swear it) land on Mars, which is suspected of possibly hosting life, but if so life on Mars would be far down on the evolutionary ladder. As it turns out, a mysterious pyramid, a sophisticated structure, has drawn the explorers’ attention. This is a first-contact story—of a sort. The twist, which I won’t say here (although you can safely guess it), seemed oddly familiar to me. As with a few other stories in the collection, “Welcome Home” is about the conflict between the West and the Soviets, although it’s not of a ham-fisted sort. It’s fine, but nothing special or surprising.
Three stars.
by Jason Sacks
The Sky is Filled with Ships by Richard C. Meredith
It's the year 979 of the Federation, or the year 3493 in the old calendar. Captain Robert T. Janas of the Solar Trading Company, Terran by birth and starman by occupation, is journeying back to his home planet at a time Terra is in great peril.
The Federation, long bloated and often brutal, is facing a massive rebellion among its vast and angry colonies. A truly titanic armada of thousands of warships from hundreds of solar systems is streaming to Earth via subspace wormholes to gain freedom for the colonies. Janas knows the defense of his home planet will be a futile gesture. There is no possible way even the enormous Terran space fleet can overcome the overwhelming odds and passions of the furious rebels and their massively armed fleet.
Janas knows, too, that a victory by the rebels will spiral mankind down to a new dark ages, just as brutal and destructive as that of Europe after the fall of Rome. Only Janas has the insight and plan to preserve a smidgen of the wisdom — not by saving Terra but by making the Solar Trading Company one of the few institutions to survive and preserve galactic knowledge.
I'm not familiar with the fiction of Richard C. Meredith, but I'm curious to read more by him based on this book. I was pretty intrigued by lead character Janas, who has a nice kind of fish-out-of-water feel to him as he wanders around Earth. That alienation presents a clever, illuminating aspect of the character. I enjoyed having a protagonist who is both a highly self-assured man and who also feels uncomfortable at times due to certain aspects of Earth's culture.
For instance, there's a slightly poignant feel to his annoyance at Earth fashions- like a colonial returned to his home only to find it dramatically different from the place he left. Janas is a stiff military man on a planet where the men dress like harlequins and the women wear fashions which leave them bare-breasted and proud.
But all that discomfort contrasts with the depiction of Janas as a man of action. Like a classic sci-fi hero, Janas brings his own plans and friends to the office of Al Franken, leader of the STC but too blinded by his own hubris to understand he is the problem. Captain Janas literally drags Franken into a plot which will ensure the fall of the ruling Franken family and the survival of Janas's beloved STC.
Meredith adroitly alternates chapters of this palace intrigue with scenes of the armada flying through subspace and showing the massive devastation which the rebel fleet creates on its journey. Those invasion scenes have a breathless, telegraphical quality to them which convey a massive sense of urgency.
As the book winds up, Meredith also does a clever thing: in late chapters he shows brief snippets of events all around the planet Earth as the reality of the Terran apocalypse become clear. In East Asia an angry mob kills their governor and his whole family; in Australia, a cult climb a mountain and await their ends; a rural farmer stands at his barn door, shotgun in hand, waiting to do his small part.
Mr Meredith in his younger days
Mr. Meredith, just over the age of 30, has created a clever and fun novel. There are points in which The Sky is Filled with Ships reads like a pretty standard potboiler sci-fi actioner, with square-chinned heroes fighting for noble causes. In that way it feels a bit of a throwback to the golden John W. Campbell days.
But I appreciated how the actions of our hero were focused on preserving society, which gave him a nobility which stood out on the page. As well, the scenes of oncoming invasion are exciting and had me quickly turning the pages.
I finished this relatively slim novel in one night. And though Meredith is no John Brunner, Philip K. Dick, or Harlan Ellison, he makes no effort to create literary science fiction with this novel. The Sky is Filled with Ships achieves what Meredith set out to create: an intriguing, exciting novel which will make me seek out some of his shorter fiction while I wait for the next thrilling novel by him.
This is the fifth in a series of novels under the collective title of Children of Violence. The others are Martha Quest (1952), A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), and Landlocked (1965). I haven't read the others.
A little research reveals that they all deal with Martha, the child of British parents working on a farm in colonial Africa. She's born in about 1920. The four novels all take place in southern Africa. As a teenager, Martha leaves home to work in a city. As the years go by, she is married and divorced and married again. She has a daughter whom she leaves in the care of others. She becomes involved in leftwing politics.
None of the earlier books have speculative elements. The newest one is different. At well over six hundred pages, it's also roughly twice as long as any of the previous volumes.
The sheer length and the very large number of characters and incidents make it difficult to offer a brief summary. I'll do what I can. Keep in mind that I'm leaving out the vast majority of the content of this massive novel.
Martha is now in London in about 1950. She gets a job as a secretary/housekeeper for a man who is married to a woman who is in and out of mental hospitals. She winds up living in the same household for many years, becoming involved with many other members of his family and their acquaintances.
Just to pick one example out of dozens, the man's brother is a scientist who defects to the Soviet Union. He leaves behind his wife and young son. The woman is a Jewish refugee from the Holocaust. When her husband leaves, she kills herself.
That's enough of a dramatic plot for a complete novel, but it only takes up a small portion of the book. Rather than attempt to relate any other events of equal importance, let me try to give you some idea of what the novel is like as a whole. Taking my inspiration from its title, I'll consider it as four different kinds of book in one.
Psychological Novel
Much of the text consists of Martha's interior monologues. She often looks at herself as if she were an outsider. At times, she withdraws from the rest of the world and spends time in a meditative, introspective state.
Novel of Character
Although Martha is the most important character, we also spend a great deal of time with lots of other people. In one section, the point of view shifts to Martha's elderly mother, who leaves Africa in order to visit her daughter. All the secondary characters are described in detail. There are so many of them that I sometimes lost track of who was related to whom. A dramatis personae for this book would take up several pages.
Social Novel
A large number of social and political issues come up in the novel. Just off the top of my head, these include Communism and anti-Communism, psychiatry, post-war austerity evolving into 1960's hedonism, the youth movement, the relationship between the sexes, the media, the environment, the military, espionage, homosexuality, colonialism and anti-colonialism, and economics. At times the novel resembles a series of debates.
Science Fiction Novel
You were wondering when I'd get to that! They take a while to show up, but speculative themes eventually make an appearance. The novel suggests that people diagnosed as schizophrenic are actually clairvoyant and telepathic. They are treated as mentally ill because they have visions and hear voices.
More to the point, the book's lengthy appendix consists of documents, mostly letters from Martha and other characters, describing how the United Kingdom and other parts of the world are devastated by what seems to be a combination of pollution, accidental release of nerve gas, plague, and radiation from nuclear weapons. Martha ends up with a small number of survivors on a tiny island. In true science fiction fashion, children born there have highly developed psychic powers.
Giving this book a rating is very difficult. Some people are going to hate it, and find slogging through very long sentences and paragraphs that go on for a page or more not worth the effort. Others will consider it to be a major literary achievement of great ambition.
I have very mixed feelings. At times I found it highly insightful; at other times I found it tedious.
Three stars, for lack of a better way to rate it.
by Cora Buhlert
A Five and Dime James Bond: Zero Cool by John Lange
This weekend, I attended a convention in the city of Neuss in the Rhineland. Luckily, West Germany has an excellent network of highways, the famous Autobahnen, so the three and a half hour trip was quite pleasant.
I left at dawn and took the opportunity to have breakfast at the brand-new service station Dammer Berge. Service stations are not exactly uncommon – you can find them roughly every fifty to sixty kilometers along the Germany's Autobahnen. There's always a parking lot, a gas station, a small shop, a restaurant and sometimes a motel, housed in fairly unremarkable buildings on either side of the highway.
Dammer Berge, however, is different. Billed as the service station of the future, the restaurant is a concrete bridge which spans the highway, held up by two steel pylons. The structure is spectacular, a beacon of modernism, though sadly the food itself was rather lacklustre: a cup of coffee that tasted of the soap used to clean the machine and a slice of stale apple cake.
But I'm not here to talk about architecture or food, but about books. Now the trusty paperback spinner rack at my local import bookstore does not hold solely science fiction and fantasy. There is also a motley mix of gothic romances, murder mysteries and thrillers available. And whenever the science fiction and fantasy selection on offer does not seem promising, I reach for one of those other genres. This is how I discovered John Lange, a thriller author whose novel Easy Go I read last year and enjoyed very much. So when I spotted a new John Lange novel named Zero Cool in that spinner rack, I of course picked it up.
Zero Cool starts with Peter Ross, an American radiologist who's supposed to present a paper at a medical conference in Barcelona. And since he's already in Spain, Ross plans to take the opportunity for a holiday on the nearby Costa Brava in the seaside resort of Tossa de Mar.
One of John Lange's greatest strengths is his atmospheric descriptions. His skills are on full display in Zero Cool in the descriptions of the rugged Costa Brava with its picturesque fishing villages turned holiday destination for package tourists from all over Europe. It's obvious that Lange has visited Spain in general and the Costa Brava in particular.
That doesn't mean that Lange doesn't take poetic licence. And so his protagonist Peter Ross notes that the beaches of the Costa Brava are full of beautiful women in bikinis with nary a man in sight. As someone who has actually visited said beaches, I can assure you that this isn't true. Like anywhere on the Mediterranean coast, the beaches of Tossa de Mar contain a motley mix of old and young, of men, women and children, of attractive and not so attractive bodies. And yes, there are women in bikinis, too. Ross has holiday fling with one of them, a British stewardess named Angela.
But in spite of what the cover may imply, Zero Cool is not a romance set in an exotic location, but a thriller. And so Ross finds himself accosted on the beach by a man who begs him not to do the autopsy or he will surely die. Ross is bemused—what autopsy? In any event, he is on vacation and besides, he's a radiologist, not a pathologist, dammit.
Not long after this encounter, Ross is approached by four men in black suits who could not seem more like gangsters if they wore signs saying "The Mob" 'round their necks. The men want Ross to perform – you guessed it – an autopsy on their deceased brother, so his body can be repatriated to the US. Ross protests that he is a radiologist, not a pathologist, but the men are very insistent. They offer Ross a lot of money and also threaten to kill him if he refuses.
In the end, Ross does perform the autopsy – not that he has any choice, because he is abducted at gunpoint. To no one's surprise, the four gangsters from central casting are not all that interested in how their alleged brother died, but want Ross to hide a package inside the body. Once again, Ross complies, since finding himself on the wrong end of a gun is very persuasive.
Up to now, Zero Cool seems to be a fairly routine thriller about an everyman who gets entangled in a criminal enterprise. But the novel takes a turn for the weird, when the body vanishes and people start dying horribly, mutilated beyond recognition. Ross not only finds himself a murder suspect – in a country which still garrottes convicted criminals – but other parties also show an interest in the missing body and the mysterious package inside. These other parties include Tex, a cartoonish Texan in a ten gallon hat, the Professor, a bald man who uses mathematics to predict the future and is basically Hari Seldon, if Hari had applied his skills to crime rather than to trying to save humanity from the dark ages, and – last but not least – the Count, a Spanish nobleman with dwarfism, who collects perfume bottles and lives in a castle with a mute butler, a flock of murderous falcons and a Doberman named Franco.
With its exotic locales (well, for Americans at least, since for West Germans the Costa Brava no longer feels all that exotic, when you can book a flight there via the Neckermann mail order catalogue), beautiful but duplicitous women and colourful villains, Zero Cool feels more like a James Bond adventure than a serious thriller. As for the mystery package, it doesn't contain anything as mundane as drugs (which was my initial suspicion), but a priceless emerald stolen by the Spanish conquistadores in Mexico. It all culminates in a showdown at the Alhambra palace in Granada, where Ross finds himself dodging bullets, poison gas and the razor-sharp talons of the Count's murder falcons.
It's all a lot of fun, though it still pales in comparison to the James Bond novels and films, which Zero Cool is clearly trying to emulate. Because unlike the suave agent on her majesty's secret service, Peter Ross just isn't very interesting. He literally is an everyman, an American doctor – and note that John Lange is the pen name used by a student at Harvard medical school who is financing his studies by writing thrillers – bouncing around Spain and France. In fact, Ross is probably the least interesting character in the whole novel. Furthermore, the fact that Ross is a radiologist, though constantly brought up, contributes nothing to the resolution. He might just as well have been a paediatrician or a gynaecologist or any other type of doctor for all it matters.
But even a lesser effort by John Lange is still better than most other thrillers in the paperback spinner rack. If John Lange becomes as good a doctor as he's a writer, his patients will be very lucky indeed.
An outrageous adventure. Three and a half stars.
(As mentioned above, John Lange is a pen name. However, I have it on good authority that his real name is "Michael Crichton" and that he has just published a science fiction novel under that byline. I haven't yet read it, but my colleague Joe has, so check out his review.)
The story begins in the town of Piedmont, Arizona, in the United States. It’s a pretty unremarkable town, with one small exception: just about everyone in the town is lying dead in the street, all except for two men who traveled to Piedmont to recover some lost government property and an odd figure in the town of corpses who happens to be walking their way. Upon the apparent death of the two men, an investigation gets underway, ultimately led by a clandestine government group called Project Wildfire.
Project Wildfire is the brainchild of Dr. Jeremy Stone, a bacteriologist possessing so many awards and degrees that the story paints him as a modern-day Da Vinci, a man above men. His team includes Dr. Charles Burton, a pathologist; Dr. Mark Hall, a surgeon, and the only unmarried man on the team—the odd man as the story puts it; and lastly, Dr. Peter Leavitt, a microbiologist. The four men quickly fall into their roles as they uncover the cause of whatever killed an entire town full of people in one night and try to prevent it from spreading.
They do this working out of a secure, state-of-the-art research facility with a list of protocols to prevent the escape of diseases, viruses, and other deadly pathogens, longer than a football field. Part of the appeal of the story is the detailed descriptions of all the computers, machines, and medical facilities that the four doctors use in their quest. Crichton’s depiction of even the smallest details of the workings of every inch of the Wildfire facility give a grounded feel not only to the base but to the descriptions he provides of the microorganism at the heart of this story: the Andromeda Strain itself. Crichton beautifully has his characters follow the scientific method we all learned in grade school, as Stone and the others start with observation, then move to hypothesis, then experimentation. Every solution in the book is arrived at through the efforts of brilliant men under tremendous pressure. It is truly exciting to witness them work as each discovery and dead end leads to new discoveries and new dangers.
The pacing of The Andromeda Strain felt fitting to me. I never felt as if I was waiting for something to happen. Each scene in every chapter was packed with purpose and direction, each page wasted no space. Every character had a job to do, and each was one of the best in the world at that job. Regarding the characterizations, although the story is set in modern times, these men often felt as if they were the stoic men of bronze from 1950’s serials. The characters felt dated, but the problems they tackled were quite modern.
By the end of the book, the characters and the circumstances reached a good stopping point. The object of worry, the Andromeda Strain itself, proved a challenge that had taxed the heroes of the story to their very limits. Some issues are addressed, and others are left unresolved. In my own zeal for the story, I’ve taken great pains to avoid revealing too much of the plot. It is best experienced in real time. All I can say is that the journey this book takes you on is worth the time investment. It’s a stellar read.
But not a perfect one. This is a story that begins with the end in mind. With all the truly amazing events that unfold in the book, what stands out most are the constant reminders from the narrator that the story was already over. This was my first time reading a book written by Mr. Crichton. I don’t know if he employs this technique in his other works, but I would have preferred that he kept his internal monologuing to himself. In one instance, a character forgets to replicate an action that he had performed on some lab rats. Narrator: “Later we learned that was a mistake.” In another, a character makes assumptions about a biological process. Narrator: “That action wasted days of our time.” The narrator frequently shares tidbits of the future, a narrative tool I would call “Poor Man's Foreshadowing.” The Andromeda Strain is such an engaging and suspenseful tale that I wished to remain in the present throughout my reading without Crichton yanking me out of it, offering glimpses of a future I wanted to reach without shortcuts.
That minor gripe aside, The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton is a thrilling mystery with high stakes. It is the kind of fact-based science fiction that I enjoy the most.