Tag Archives: winona menezes

[February 18, 1970] Time Trap, This Perfect Day, Whisper from the Stars, and The Incredible Tide

[We've saved the best for last this month—one of these books is sure to be a pick for the Galactic Stars.  Read on about this remarkable quartet of science fiction tales…]


BW photo of Jason Sacks. He's a white man, with short light hair, rectangular glasses, and headphones.
by Jason Sacks

Time Trap, by Keith Laumer

Sometimes a back cover blurb sells a book. “ABE LINCOLN IN AFRICA?” the cover reads in breathless bold sans-serif type. “He was seen – and photographed – in a Tunisian bazaar.” Hooked yet? How about the mention on the cover of “an ancient Spanish galleon, fully crewed with ancient Spaniards, was taken in tow off Tampa by the Coast Guard…”

Yeah, you probably thought, take my 75¢ plus tax, because that’s a book I have to read. Especially if it’s scribed by the always delightful Keith Laumer, he of the wildly satirical Retief series. At the very least, Time Trap has to be readable, right?

Well, yes, Time Trap is readable, very much so in fact. I flew through its 143 pages in near lightspeed. But there’s just no there there. Time Trap is like a Big Mac: enjoyable at the time but utterly devoid of any nutrition.

Laumer’s latest is fun, sure, but maybe it’s too much fun. Because the novel is just too silly, too whimsical, too full of absurd wordplay and pointless tangents and the sense that Laumer was scripting little bits of this story between partying with friends and warming up for his next, more serious novel.

 A BERKLEY SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL 
KEITH LAUMER
author of the 'Rebel
cover by Richard Powers

You know those kind of classic Twilight Zone episodes where a character leaves a place to go on a journey, only to end up at the same place they left? Laumer starts Time Trap with a scene similar to that, and I was initially intrigued. My receptors came up, the same way they do when I flick on channel 11 at 6:30 and spend some time with ol’ Rod. But Serling always gives us a twist in the tail that lays a moral lesson on us, gives us something to think about. Laumer, on the other hand, just never really builds on the idea time loop.

Instead the book turns its focus on a different guy, Roger Tyson. His crappy car breaks down on the side of a dark country road on a wretched, rainy night. When a motorist, impossibly, happens to drive down the remote road, Tyson wildly waves his hands to beckon them to stop. The driver turns out to be a girl riding alone on a powerful motorcycle. But, oh no, the cycle crashes into a heap of destruction on the side of the road. The girl is dead… but with her last words, she passes an earpiece over to Tyson.

And there his adventure begins.

It’s a wild and wooly adventure as Tyson and his pals (including the girl, Q’nell, who’s not actually dead but kind of is actually dead– it’s complicated) journey from the deep past of Earth to the far future, all over the world, dodging dinosaurs and armies and molten lava and all manner of obstacles along the way. There’s a body swap and some crazy weapons and an alien who’s a higher level being and all kinds of over-the-top silliness. And all along the way Tyson plays the fool: frightened, confused, acting like a Doctor Who companion who traveled without the Doctor.

The adventure is fun enough read episodically, one chapter per night or something. Reading it all at once was a dive into a short attention span I found exhausting. It all would have been worth it if the destination was entertaining.

But Laumer doesn’t quite nail the landing in any sort of thrilling way; instead, the book ends like one of those human- Meets-God moments which grew so tiresome on Trek (to mix my TV metaphors). The threats to wipe out all life on Earth seem a bit breathy and unconvincing, too much connected to the cliches and not quite as wackily transcendent as Laumer clearly wants them to be.

So, yeah. Time Trap. It’s goofy, silly fun. But where most of Laumer’s other comedic works are smart while also being silly, this is pure silliness. It’s a good book to read to clear your head after watching images from Vietnam on the 6:00 News, but this book probably won’t keep looping in your mind. It will likely be forgotten by the time the Twilight Zone comes on tomorrow.

3 stars.


photo of a dark-haired woman with vampiric eyebrows
by Victoria Silverwolf

Seems Familiar

Blue book cover of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, adorned with a globe and a small plane in the forefront. White waves radiate throughout.

Back in 1958, Aldous Huxley published a nonfiction book that took a look back at his 1932 novel Brave New World.

A Light yellow and blue stroped book cover entitled BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED, Aldous Huxley

Why do I bother to mention this fact, which is familiar to science fiction fans and literary mavens alike?  Because a new novel by a bestselling author reminds me so much of Huxley's classic satiric dystopia that it, too, might have been called Brave New World Revisited.

This Perfect Day, by Ira Levin

Tan book cover depicting a bisected face. One eye green, the other blue. The face only has half an upper lip on the righthand side. The caption reads IRA LEVIN
THIS PERFECT DAY
A NEW NOVEL BY THE AUTHOR OF 
ROSEMARY'S BABY
Cover art by Paul Bacon.

Levin is, of course, best known for his popular novel Rosemary's Baby and the smash hit film adapted from it.  Can he handle science fiction as successfully as he did horror fiction?

Some centuries from now, the world is inhabited by people who all look very much alike, with a few minor exceptions.  The central authority tells folks where to live, what kind of work to do, who they should marry, and whether or not they should have children. 

The populace is kept under control through the mandatory administration of drugs that keep them calm and unaggressive.  Words like hate and fight are profanities.  Starting at adolescence, people have sex once a week. 

Television viewing, apparently for the purpose of propaganda, is a daily ritual.  Everything is planned by a huge computer.
Everybody wears a bracelet that is difficult, if not impossible, to remove, and which much be scanned everywhere they go.

Our protagonist is Li RM35M4419, known as Chip.  That's because his grandfather, who isn't quite as much a conformist as younger folks, thinks he resembles his great-great-grandfather, and calls him a chip off the old block.

I might note here that there are only four first names for women and an equal number for men.  That symbolizes the rigidness of the society, I suppose, but it also seems like a pointless restriction.

Chip is an oddball because he has one green eye and one brown eye.  Grandpa takes him to see the real computer, hidden underneath a false facade that is meant to satisfy tourists.  This becomes a plot point much later in the book.

We see a lot of Chip's childhood and teen years.  Suffice to say that he eventually joins up with a small group of rebels.  It turns out to be really easy to avoid the constant bracelet scanning, which makes me wonder why there aren't a lot more rebels.  Quite a bit later, Chip discovers a way to avoid the tranquilizing drugs.  This is almost as simple as skipping the scanners.  Not the most efficient totalitarian dystopia ever imagined!

There's a lot of back and forth running around, but let's sum up.  Chip falls in love with one of the rebels, who has gone back to her old tranquilized ways.  He kidnaps her and takes off for an island of rebels.  Again, this is remarkably easy to do, but at least this time there's a reason, revealed in a plot twist.

I have to mention that Chip rapes the woman he supposedly loves.  When she comes out of her drugged state, she accepts this as natural, and their romance continues.  Sorry, I'm not buying it.

Long and somewhat tedious climax short, Chip leads an attack on the computer, leading up to a surprising revelation as to what's really been going on.  This part of the novel is very melodramatic, in sharp contrast to the rest, which is often as bland as the world in which it's set.

Neither original nor plausible, this simply isn't a very good book.  It could benefit from some serious editing.  Keith Laumer would have told the same story in one-third the length.  Robert Sheckley would have made it more satiric.  Stick to the scary stuff, Ira.

Two stars.


A photo portrait of Winona Menezes. She is a woman with light-brown skin, long black curly hair and dark eyes. She is smiling at the camera.
by Winona Menezes

Whisper from the Stars, by Jeff Sutton

Book cover of a dark haired man on a red planet covered in sprawling tower architecture a large string of beads comes from the foreground and passes behind his right shoulder. The caption reads
He wrenched open the door to strange, multiple worlds 
WHISPER 
FROM THE STARS 
BY JEFF SUTTON.
cover by Paul Lehr

The year is 2231, and jet-setting science journalist Joel Blake is at the top of his field. His glamorous job has him rubbing shoulders with the brightest minds of his age, and affords him a level of comfort that rarely has him challenging the technological utopia that Earth has become thanks to the control of a world government determined to maintain peace and progress… at any cost. His easy complacency is rattled for the first time when he meets the brilliant astrophysicist Ann Willett at a party she doesn’t want to be at; her aloofness betrays a discontent with the world that he finds fascinating. All his probing yields from her is a frustration at the government’s unwillingness to fund research into any field without an immediate profit motive, leaving her feeling like a great discovery lies just beyond her reach. He’s never met a mind like hers, and he doesn't meet another until work assigns him an interview with the visionary polymath Mark Randall.

Randall’s scientific work spans multiple fields, with seemingly nothing beyond the grasp of his prodigious mind. Feeling as though he has conquered the known world of science, he has turned his attention to the unknown: dimensions beyond human perception, elongation and reversal of the passage of time. Randall and Willett immediately find kindred spirits in each other, leaving Blake to feel insignificant under the shadows of their intellects. But when the tyrannical rulers of their gilded world discover their attempts to liberate mankind from the order they’ve imposed, both scientists are forced to flee into the cosmos, and Blake is left behind to piece together their radical vision for the future of humanity.

Now, I don’t feel that this book did anything I haven’t seen before: the oppressive government, the predictable utopia, the geniuses turned space-fugitives. Randall is very much a stock genius character, as though Sutton wished to rely heavily on our shared cultural knowledge of the Sci-Fi Genius to fill in the gaps left by his sparse characterization. It's all familiar, but familiar in the way my favorite blanket is familiar. If I didn’t like this genre with all its conventions, I wouldn’t be here. No, the reason I connected with this book lay in its smaller details.

The character of Ann Willett was so interesting to me, and though she could (and should!) have been explored in greater depth, I did also get the sense that the tantalizingly sparse but dense scenes centering her character contributed to the air of mystery, the self-imposed isolation that so intrigued Blake and drew him to her. Sutton’s intimate descriptions of spaceflight were scattered with those delightfully technical imaginative flourishes that always betray a writer’s engineering background. Blake’s charmed life as a high-society journalist is simply everything I’ve ever wanted, and I brimmed with envy the entire novel.

My absolute favorite detail was Willett’s violin motif. I’ve always found it hard to put into words the way that the sound of a violin can sound so haunting to me, so profoundly lonely. It fills a room with sorrow and longing in a way to which no other sound compares, and this is the motif through which Sutton conveys Ann Willett’s loneliness. She expresses her solitude in the melodies she plays on her violin, and the invocation of violin music had such a visceral sensory effect on me that she instantly became one of the more unforgettable characters I’ve read. I was so enchanted to read Sutton put into words the lonely beauty of violin song and to know the feeling is more universal than I thought.

It was the details in Whisper From the Stars that appealed to me, minutiae small enough to pass by a reader unnoticed but which felt tailor-made to suit my sensibilities. On its face it's a good, solid, unremarkable book, but it’s so rare and wonderful to recognize so much of your own eccentricities in a book that I’m going to have to give this one four stars.


Society's Fears Made Uncannily Manifest


by Amber Dubin

The Incredible Tide, by Alexander Key

A red book cover depicting a red ten Winged bird in front of a face. The caption reads
THE INCREDIBLE TIDE by ALEXANDER KEY
by Davis Meltzer

I cannot think of a more fitting name for Alexander Key's stunning piece of fiction than The Incredible Tide. This fast moving ride of a story immerses the reader immediately with a forcefully aggressive pace and doesn't release one's attention until it has crashed upon the shores of its abrupt conclusion. It takes what appears to be a fantastical hero in a uniquely broken world and anchors to a coming of age anti-fascistic message so masterfully that the reader truly feels the author’s societal warning.

In order to dispel all doubt that the story within is meant as a warning, Alexander Key begins The Incredible Tide with the ominous dedication “To a people unknown, of a land long lost – for surely what is written here has happened before. It depends upon us alone whether it is a reflection or a prophecy.” It is thusly that the reader embarks on the plot like a scavenger unearthing a sandy message in a bottle. Like a freshly unburied treasure, the remarkable 17 year old castaway, Conan of Orme, shakes himself loose of his seemingly unsurvivable circumstances, marooned alone on a tiny cluster of rocks with only birds as companions. It is revealed that he has endured in this solitary state for five years after a catastrophe coined “the incredible tide” drowned a previously Earth-like environment in endless water.

He is “rescued” involuntarily by elderly, frail representatives of one of the fascist factions responsible for plunging the world into this regrettable state. Once taken prisoner, it is revealed to Conan that the New World Order, an Axis-powers-like force, is still greedily fighting over the scraps of this decimated planet, clinging to the totalitarian, short-sighted ways that caused its own destruction. Thankfully, all hope is not lost because Conan and his ilk possess certain super human abilities of perception and telepathy, and they use these powers along with the sometimes equally powerful and very human capacity to love, empathize, and connect with each other and a very strong spiritual source. Conan and all his allies will need to use every opportunity they can to be able to survive and ultimately overthrow the oppressive, greedy and powerful government whose obsession with clinging to its own past threatens to doom the entire future of humanity.

In my experience of dystopian world creation, The Incredible Tide's is vague and as enshrouded in mists as their planet is presently, but I don't think this takes away from the story. I felt like the story could have been longer and the character development and relationships could have had more room to take wing, but there was also something beautiful in the story's conciseness. The way Alexander Key was able to somehow balance a Lord of the Flies-esqe uprising on one shore with a colliding tsunami of Animal Farm oppressive governmental takeover was particularly masterfully done in a short amount of pages. I was also impressed by the way he was able to communicate the absurdity of maintaining an Orwellian Big Brother police state (a la 1984) on the remains of an actively rotting planet. Intriguing too, is a moment very much reminiscent of the unheard warnings that Superman's parents conveyed to the stubborn oligarchs on the planet Krypton before their willful self-destruction; though I felt the way it was communicated here was much more gritty and frustratingly human than the comic book version.

Overall I found The Incredible Tide to be an awe-inspiring, page-turning, and unique adventure that deserves a singular place alongside many other powerful works of dystopian fiction, and I'm rather pleased to see another heavy-hitting ominous warning make it into the 70s, as it has been decades since we've seen such cautionary tales as were more commonplace in the 40s and 50s.

5 stars

[New to the Journey?  Read this for a brief introduction!]


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[November 28, 1969] Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s The Sirens of Titan

[We are proud to introduce our newest associate, late of Texas and now a confirmed Golden Stater. Don't let her self-effacing first paragraph mislead you—Winona is not only a brilliant young engineer, but she has a talent for prose, as you will soon see…]

A photo portrait of Winona Mendezes. She is a woman with light-brown skin, long black curly hair and dark eyes. She is smiling at the camera.
by Winona Menezes

Several weeks ago, I was plucked from obscurity off the streets of San Diego by the Traveller himself. He was quite taken to hear that I was a long-time fan of the same books and magazines, and I had quite a lot of thoughts on them, if only anyone cared to listen. Wasn’t it fortunate, then, that he did know lots of people who might care? You can call it a chance encounter, serendipity, dumb luck–but me personally? I think somebody up there likes me.

He invited me to cut my teeth on something easy, something that was near and dear to my heart. And so, I’d like to start with one of my favorites, a satirist’s take on religion, morality, and free will. This one is not a recent publication but I do find myself going back to it, clinging to it when it feels the world is spinning a little too fast.

The book cover. In the foreground, there is a technological orb with cables and a trail of flying rocks in front of a woman with long hair, her hands behind her head and her ayes closed. There are two other less visible characters behind the first one, and the silhouette of a tall and narrow structure. The cover, along the title and the author's name, sports the tagline "A remarkable and terrifying novel of how life might be for the space travallers of the future".

The Sirens of Titan is the second of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, first published in 1959. It is a convoluted interplanetary melodrama centered on the life of Malachi Constant, the richest man in America through no merit of his own. Having inherited and further amassed a staggering fortune through sheer luck, he finds himself enjoying a hedonistic lifestyle while quietly, passively longing for a lightning-bolt of fate to give his life a higher purpose. This lightning-bolt does come – from the apparition of New England billionaire Winston Rumfoord, whose pleasure-seeking space expeditions have turned him and his faithful dog into incorporeal, semi-omniscient wavelengths and sent them undulating throughout the solar system.

The plot unfurls erratically, as though Vonnegut himself is along for the ride as much as his characters. Constant is invited by Rumfoord on a planet-hopping journey through space, promising him adventure and treasure and women of incomparable beauty. But when Constant declines, already not being in want of anything on Earth, he is told that he will have no say in the matter. His fate has been decided for him, and his life will culminate in a meeting with Rumfoord on Titan regardless of any actions he takes to the contrary–all that remains to be seen is the in-between.

Malachi, along with the cast of characters whose stories entwine with his, are plucked from their lives and scattered like chess pieces across the solar system. Our spoiled, iniquitous protagonist with the world at his feet is suddenly a hapless pawn in a cosmic journey so sprawling and incomprehensible that each move from one place to the next feels chosen at random. As a result, the culmination of each loose end being gathered up one-by-one and woven seamlessly back together in the ending is masterfully executed. Any disorientation felt by the reader as unwitting characters are flung through spacetime by the narrative is replaced by a deeper, longer-lasting discomfort as the machinations of fate are slowly unveiled to be much more deliberate, though no less insipid.

Still, the novel is dotted with moments of lucidity on the parts of the characters, whose determination to understand and derive meaning from their lives only grows as it becomes increasingly clear how little control they have over their own destiny. These moments are as stars in a sky of absurd nihilism, and it is left to Constant and company—and the reader—to string them together into constellations of meaning.

Vonnegut’s satirical voice, whetted on his first novel (Player Piano, 1952), is wielded now with the skill and precision of a scalpel. Darkly ironic humor disarms the reader just enough for them to be thrown full off-kilter by a constant subversion of expectations. The ridiculously circuitous route the novel takes to find its conclusion seems fitting; the answers to the questions the book raises are even more elusive and slippery in real life. It’s a small comfort, but a comfort nonetheless to read our own struggle for meaning through the lens of a protagonist whose comical shortcomings as a self-absorbed chauvinist make him a difficult character to like, at least in the beginning. If the illusion of free will must give way to an existential nightmare against which we must find our own meaning, it may as well be funny.

Sirens of Titan is over a decade old by now, but there’s never a wrong time to come to terms with the futility of your own existence. Maybe, like me, it can help you find your footing in an ever-changing world. Five stars.



[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]


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