Bloodworld (AKA You Sane Men) by Laurence M. Janifer

On our world we had our rights, though I fought the world and though it was necessary for me to fight it: you must understand that we had our rights, that we were human, in spite of what we did and in spite of what you think: for I know very well what you think, your faces can't hide it and the tones of your voices can't hide it.  I'm a person: in spite of you, I insist on that.   

Here we have the second book we will read from among my Roanoke, VA purchases, like its predecessor a volume formerly resident in the library of C. A. Gallion.  When in 1965 Lancer published Laurence Janifer's You Sane Men, they matched its hyperbolic come-on text ("the most shocking novel you will ever read") with a restrained, even arty, cover illustration attributed by isfdb to Howard Winters.  But when they republished it in 1968 they changed the title to Bloodworld and slapped on it an amateurish and embarrassing cover illo also attributed by isfdb to Howard Winters.  The colors are bad, the composition is bad, and the artist apparently has no confidence in his ability to paint faces... ugh.

While the cover of Bloodworld seems designed to signal that the book is an exploitation piece, the first few pages of the volume indicate Janifer took this work quite seriously.  There is a heartfelt dedication to editors C. V. J. Anderson and Larry T. Shaw, and a Rosemary I can't quickly identify (wife, maybe?), and two epigraphs from Dostoevsky suggesting that mental illnesses are the product of the society in which their sufferer's live, and that hell is being unable to love.

You Sane Men/Bloodworld comes to us as a memoir typed by a man from a unique planetary society who is in the custody of scientists (whom he addresses as "Doctors," "you balanced men" and "you sane men") of a different society, the multi-system space empire or federation known as The Comity.  From the first pages our narrator, named Jo, assures us that his world is very different from those of the Comity, but also that he is "no savage, nor a villain, nor a monster," though the Doctors may think him such.

The thing that makes Jo's planet (to which, we readers are soon informed, he can never return) so unique is that it was colonized by people with some kind of mental disorder or perversion who left the Comity several generations ago because it was difficult or impossible for them to legally satisfy their outre desires within the Comity.  The striking feature of Jo's planet, the center of their culture, is the many brothels known as "remand houses" where people go to torture slaves.  In an early scene we observe twenty-year-old Jo, bitter after being scolded humiliatingly by his mother, go to his favorite remand house, request a young woman who looks like his mother, and in a private metal room burn this slave girl with a hot poker before raping her.  (The burning is pretty explicitly described, the rape sort of just gestured at.)

From the start of the novel we are aware that Jo's world, a relatively low-tech society whose economy is based on slavery, is in a revolutionary situation, with local uprisings overthrowing local authorities and the governing class of Jo's own town haltingly trying to figure out how to deal with the crisis should it come to their city.  Jo learns that a bunch of young people in his own municipality have decided to overthrow the Council, which is made up mostly of old people, and take power for themselves.  Forced to pick a side, Jo joins those his own age, turning on his own parents (both are Councilmembers) in part because he thinks under the new order, or in the chaos of civil war, he will be able to liberate from the remand house a slave woman he has fallen in love with, Elaine.  (Elaine is not the woman who looks like Jo's mother.)  Jo never tortures Elaine, but instead talks to and treats her like a lover (or at least what he thinks a lover acts like in this twisted society.) 

The effort to overthrow the Council is only in its nascent stages when the murder of a free woman shakes the city.  Murders are so rare on this orderly planet, which until recently was characterized by obedience and a respect for privacy, that the city has no police force.  Jo's father is chosen by the Council to solve the case, and Jo is enlisted by his father to help in the investigation; he is charged with questioning people he knows among the rebellious youth movement and at the remand houses.  Jo learns that the murder victim liked to burn slave women with acid, and Elaine was one of the women she used. 

Jo's father summons to their home a man reputed to be a friend of the murder victim, Tonn, a sort of outcast who lives on the edge of town.  Tonn is considered a disgusting disgrace because, like the murder victim, he prefers to torture people of his own sex; he visits the remand houses maintained for women, where male slaves are tormented.  Tonn describes his relationship with the murder victim: Tonn is a true artist of torture who considers the kind of torture other free people inflict to be mere childishness; the murder victim was a fellow virtuoso in the art of inflicting pain and inspiring fear and the two enjoyed comparing notes on the finer points!

Jo's next move in the investigation is to interview the daughter of the murder victim, Griselda.  Griselda is an aggressive and ambitious woman who enjoys killing and destruction; after meeting Jo, to whom she takes a shine, with lightning speed she makes herself leader of the youth movement, and in no time at all the rhetorical and legal conflict erupts into violence that leaves the city a smoking ruin and most of its freeborn inhabitants dead.  Jo gets Elaine out of the remand house, and they flee to the woods, to one of the spacecraft that brought their ancestors to this planet a few centuries ago.  Griselda confronts them, and Jo must choose between Elaine the slave girl, and Griselda, a woman of his own class whose interests range from killing birds to leading genocidal revolutionary political movements.  Griselda is not the type who takes rejection lying down, and Jo kills her.

Jo and Elaine get the space ship to work, blast off, and eventually are picked up by a Comity ship.  Jo's treatment of Elaine offends the liberal sensibilities of the Comity people he meets, and the lovers are separated, Jo put under close observation by Comity headshrinkers.  In the last sentence of the novel Jo drops his bombshell revelation: Griselda knew who murdered her mother, and she told Jo right before she died--the killer was Jo's mother!

In a somewhat self-indulgent afterword Janifer suggests somewhat vaguely that You Sane Men is meant to be a satire of our society or an allegory of general human psychology or something, saying that we are all Jo, Elaine, Tonn, et al.  He also does that Barry Malzberg thing, bragging/lamenting that he has published 21 books and many articles and stories under more than 30 pseudonyms.

In writing You Sane Men Janifer adopts a sort of modernist literary style, with long, colloquial and somewhat repetitive sentences.  There are digressions on the nature of memory and the inability of words to truly convey feelings and other realities--Jo deliberately refrains from giving the name of his planet, his city, and the murder victim, saying the names would tell us nothing, would convey no information.  The fallibility of efforts to transmit and receive knowledge is a pervasive theme in the novel.

A recurring motif of You Sane Men is the depiction of two different worlds, and the allegation that it is impossible for people from one world to understand those from the other, and unfair for them to judge those in the other world.  The first and most obvious example is the efforts of the Comity scientists to understand and willingness to condemn Jo and his world of slavery and torture, but there are plenty of other examples: Elaine was raised in the remand house and knows very little about the world outside its impenetrable metal walls, Jo's world; Jo thinks of Tonn the homosexual as coming from another world and Tonn tells Jo's father that it is impossible to explain to a conventional mind like his the sophisticated torture techniques he has devised; the Council in Jo's city has no interaction with the Councils in other cities and has only the vaguest ideas of what is going on in them; the rebellious youths make no effort to describe the city they will build once they have destroyed the city in which they were born.  A related theme is the question of who is accorded full and equal status as a human being: Jo insists to the people of the Comity that he and his people are not monsters, even though they have slaves and torture people for fun; when Elaine hears of the efforts made to solve the murder of Griselda's mother she is enraged that the death of a free woman is taken so seriously when nobody cares what happens to slaves like her; Tonn's expulsion from decent society provides another example.

Fellow SF fan C. A. Gallion, we salute you!

Relationships between parents and children are another one of Janifer's prominent themes; we have not only the troubled relationships between Jo and his parents, but Griselda's complaints about her own mother, and her exploitation of her status as an orphan to energize the rebellion (Griselda argues the old order must be destroyed because it was that order which killed her mother.)  The entire rebellion is more akin to the rebellion of children against their parents (one of those Psych 101 concepts we are all familiar with) than an ideological or political struggle--Council membership rotates among adult free people, but you are only counted as an adult if your parent of your sex has died; the young complain that they won't be on the Council themselves until they are so old they won't have the energy to enjoy power.

You Sane Men is ambitious with all its psychological and philosophical angles, and Janifer endeavors to shock readers with the torture scenes and Oedipal overtones, and I'd say it is a moderate success; the talk of it being "astonishingly different" and "the most shocking novel you will ever read" is of course an exaggeration, but I was curious to see what would happen and do not regret reading this SF oddity.