Whisper from the Stars by Jeff Sutton

I could understand his worry for Mark Randall, all right.  If Mark stood to open the door into another world--or was it another time?--the government would move heaven and hell to stop him.

Recently, the wife and I were exploring South Central Virginia.  Besides driving the twisting mountain roads and investigating hydroelectric dams, I stopped in Roanoke at Too Many Books, where I found four off-the-beaten-path SF paperbacks in that establishment's basement, four volumes I had never seen before in my travels to used bookstores across the nation.  The woman at the cash register who took my twelve bucks actually seemed a little surprised to see such strange books in her store--"Where did you find these?"  At MPorcius Fiction Log we admire the award-winning masterpieces by the big names and celebrate the people who laid the foundations for 20th-century genre literature in the pages of Weird Tales and Astounding, but we also like to explore the minor works and the minor authors, the forgotten stories and abortive careers, even the disreputable works and the shunned authors!  To this SF wanderlust we can attribute our purchase of these four strange books.

Judging by the article about him at Wikipedia, Jeff Sutton, whose work I do not believe I have ever read before, seems like a stand up guy, a productive citizen.  He served in the Marines in the 1930s and during World War II, later earned a psychology degree, and then worked as an engineer focusing on human adaptations to machines.  This sounds like the perfect training for a writer of exciting and thought-provoking science fiction!  Let's check out Whisper from the Stars, a 1970 novel by Sutton and one of my four Roanoke purchases.  My copy was previously in the library of a C. A. Gallion; the book is in quite good condition, for which I thank Mr. or Ms. Gallion.  Whisper from the Stars has apparently never been reprinted in English, but was printed in Italian in both 1970 and 1982.  Both Italian publications were graced with the same great Karel Thole cover illo that adorns my copy of DAW's The Book of Van Vogt.

It is the early 23rd century.  Luna, Mars, Ganymede, Callisto and Titan all host human mining and scientific installations.  Disease, war, and poverty have been conquered.  But journalism persists!  Our narrator, Joel Blake, is a print and video journalist whose work appears in hundreds of newspapers and on the 3D TV.  At a party he meets Ann Willett, a beautiful astrophysicist.  Willett is not merely a scientist, but a romantic who plays the violin superbly and says things like "I believe that our senses, and therefore the cortex that feeds on them, are restricted--that we live in a closed loop from which there is no escape."  She also complains that the government, which controls the economy and suppresses dissent, denies scientists any flexibility and stifles innovative research.

Some months after meeting Willett, Blake is assigned to interview Mark Randall, the world's greatest scientist--we are told he is the 23rd century's Einstein.  Randall hasn't just uncovered important facts about the nature of subatomic particles and extrasolar bodies called "quasi-stellars;" he is also a philosopher who wrote a book "on the brain as the house of the mind" and says things to Blake like, "The human mind is the key to the universe, yet we know only the bare surface of it, the here and now....We are locked in by our own concepts....There are vistas beyond this one...."

The first 50 pages of Whispers from the Stars consists of vague and boring pseudo-profound conversations in restaurants and at academic conferences between these three jokers and a fourth guy, another journalist, one who is particularly worried that the government is going to crush Randall like a bug.  Blake initially tries to get into Willett's pants, but is totally outclassed by supergenius Randall:

Both saw man as a creature of self-exile in a box of his own creation.  Their complete rapport made me feel more of an outsider than ever.

Blake's sexual frustration and jealousy, and his anxiety about being the least intelligent of four intellectuals who think they can travel to some other dimension or whatevs with their minds alone, could have been the stuff of human drama, but Sutton fails to exploit this material--instead of being envious, Blake has a man-crush on Randall and wants to be his best friend and helper!  Boring!  The relationships of these four people on the verge of an amazing scientific adventure and on the brink of being murdered by the Stasi of the 23rd century are as bland and sterile as their philosophical bull sessions.

Fellow science-fiction fan
C. A. Gallion, we salute you!

As we enter the second third of this 150-page novel, Randall disappears, and Blake's journalistic antennae suggest to him Randall is on the run from Department L, the secret government department charged with eliminating dissenters.  Blake travels back and forth between Lalaland, the Windy City and the Big Apple, trying to figure out where Randall is--the whole time the government is keeping an eye on him and murdering minor characters whose orbits cross those of Blake and Randall.  This isn't as exciting as it sounds because Whisper from the Stars starts with a framing device that lets us know on page 6 that Randall and Willett get away into some other dimension and Blake doesn't--Blake's pursuit of the geniuses and flight from the Gestapo of the 23rd century doesn't generate a lot of suspense because we know how it is going to turn out.

Three years go by!  Finally, Blake stumbles on a clue that suggests Randall and Willett are living incognito at an isolated lunar mine among the roughnecks and lost souls who court death wresting from the lunar rock the valuable metal deposited there in the ancient past by meteorites!  Whisper from the Stars flickers to life as the novel's final third begins and Sutton describes the trip from the Earth to Earth orbit, Earth orbit to Lunar orbit, and Lunar orbit to the Moon's surface.  I'm still a sucker for such descriptions of space travel, and for descriptions of life on that barren and inhospitable partner of Mother Earth we call the Moon.

On the moon Blake meets R and W, but the agents of the KGB of the 23rd century are hot on their heels.  There is a chase on the lunar surface, and R and W escape by shifting to another dimension (apparently--Sutton makes the dubious artistic choice of having the climax of his novel occur off screen.)  The spooks murder Blake, but then Blake wakes up to discover that not only is he alive, all the people murdered by the NKVD of the 23rd century over the course of this boring book are also alive!  In fact, the Cheka of the 23rd century is no longer all that Cheka-like.  Blake surmises that Randall and Willett, after escaping to another dimension, came back to this dimension to tinker with history to make it not quite so uncomfortable for Blake and other of their friends.  Almost nobody notices the changes, just Blake and that other journo, who are sensitives.

Except for 10 or 15 pages of space flight and lunar action, this book is lame.  It is way too long, the main character is a spectator rather than the person who drives the plot by making decisions and performing actions, and most of the exciting stuff like murders and psychic power usage happens off screen and Blake has to figure it out after stumbling on the evidence.

The basic ideas behind Whisper from the Stars and the basic plot outline are not bad, and a brilliant wordsmith like a Jack Vance or a Gene Wolfe, or a skilled writer of adventure tales like a Leigh Brackett or an Edmond Hamilton, or a guy with an unusual style and the ability to surprise the reader like an A. E. van Vogt or a Barry Malzberg, could have made a successful novel out of this material by filling its pages with any combination of fear and anxiety, tragedy and triumph, thrilling chases and cathartic violence, or cynical jokes and wise discourses on the human yearning for freedom or the human impulse to abuse and oppress.  Sutton provides none of these things, and so Whisper from the Stars, like a slug, sits there inert for 100 pages and then sort of squirms tentatively for 50 pages.

Not good.