Space Skimmer by David Gerrold

("That's what he wanted from you, Mass--just a little affection in return.")
("I--don't know.  I'm not very good at--affection.")
("Well, try it again.")
("Hello, puppy.  Nice puppy.")
(--Bright giggling, bubbly laughing, pink streaked, happy bursting, yellow flashing, swirling--warm wet LOVE--!!--)

The copy Joachim and I read

You will recall that, in the year of our Lord Two Thousand and Eighteen, Joachim Boaz, mastermind behind the Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations blog and one of this blog's biggest supporters, made a generous donation of SF books to the MPorcius Library, and that I have been gradually working my way through them.  Today we look at a fourteenth title, Space Skimmer by David Gerrold, a 1972 paperback from Ballantine.  I like Gerrold; before this blog emerged from my addled pate to haunt the interwebs, I read three of his Chtorr books as well as Yesterday's Children; Gerrold's Deathbeast was one of the first books I blogged about.  I thought all five of those books worth reading, so, with some level of confidence, let's see what Space Skimmer is all about.

(Joachim blogged about the novel back in 2012; click the link to read his review, which is much less spoily than mine!)

The first 58 of Space Skimmer's 218 pages get us acquainted with a guy by the name of "Mass."  Mass is the product of genetic engineering and selective breeding, a human being short (four feet tall!) and wide and strong.  A thousand years ago his home planet of Streinveldt was colonized and brought into the expanding human space empire; his people were designed to thrive on that high gravity (2.5 G) world full of monsters and valuable minerals.  Some 400 years ago Streinveldt lost contact with the Empire, and Mass has left his home world in his one-man space ship, apparently on a quest to find out what happened to the Empire, which at one point must have spanned over one thousand light years and consisted of over 11,000 inhabited planets.

Mass flies to a planet of ruins where he finds an Imperial computer that provides some clues, and continues to other planets--some inhabited by humans with various body types suited to their local environments, others abandoned--collecting further clues.  Eventually he discovers one of the super spacecraft of the late period of the Empire, a space skimmer.  The space skimmer looks like a snow flake and has no exterior walls or engines or guns per se--its exterior, propulsion system and defensive mechanisms are all invisible (or nearly invisible) force fields.  It can cross a light-year in two hours (a conventional ship can only travel a third of a light year in a day) and need never stop for fuel or supplies--it gathers energy from stellar radiation and can synthesize anything required.

There is a lot of exposition and description in this book; Gerrold talks about the nature of a space empire--the relationship of the metropole to the peripheral states, the relative importance of information, culture, military might, and trade, etc.--and describes in detail Mass's efforts to learn how to fly the space skimmer, which he controls by typing in commands on a keyboard.

In the second quarter or so of the book we meet Ike of planet Manolka, the planet of immortal and unchanging synthetic men, each of them perfect, each of them identical, each of them connected to every other via a collective consciousness "mass mind" managed by huge subterranean artificial brains.  Gerrold spends quite a number of pages describing how perfect Ike (like all his confreres) is, and then unleashes some experimental prose consisting of sentence fragments with lots of parentheses and em dashes to represent the reaction to Mass of this collective mind.  The Manolkan mass mind finds Mass to be terribly inefficient, and when one of its members (Ike) reads the computer memory device (a thing that performs like a floppy disk or USB flash drive performs IRL) Mass has brought with him, it learns about individualism, something the mass mind erased from its own memory centuries ago.  To protect the collective consciousness form such dangerous ideas, Ike is severed from the collective mind, and begins a career as an individual, joining Mass on his quest to learn about--and perhaps find what remains of--the Empire.

Gerrold spends a lot of time on Mass and Ike getting to know each other; as an unchanging construct that only has recently been liberated from a mass mind, Ike has no idea what art or sleep are, and finds bizarre such concepts as eating and drinking and inebriation, even repellent in their inefficiency.  Gerrold fills this novel with his own poetry, and the most lengthy example is in this section, a four-and-a-half-page drinking song reminiscent of Beowulf that Mass performs while trying to teach Ike to sing.

On the otherwise blank page after the title page of Space Skimmer, Gerrold thanks Larry Niven for allowing him to "borrow" an idea.  About halfway through the novel we get an indication of what that idea might be.  In his Ringworld books, Niven dramatizes the possibility that luck is actually "real," and that it is a heritable trait one might breed creatures (including people) for, just like height or intelligence or eye color or whatever.  Mass and Ike, searching another planet for info on the Empire, encounter an eighteen-year-old hereditary prince who was born some four hundred years ago, but accidentally put in suspended animation.  Mass wakes him up and Prince Tapper explains that he is a member of a long line of people bred for luck, but something went awry and he is unlucky, being left in suspended animation for four centuries is one example of his ill luck, another is that he is a hemophiliac.

Tapper (and his adorable little puppy!) join Mass and Ike on the skimmer.  Tapper is another person Mass has trouble understanding.  Streinveldt is a rough and dangerous world where everybody has to work hard and it is strength that is prized and respected; to become a prince on Streinveldt one must fight monsters or lead war parties, and Mass finds Tapper, who has a sweet voice and soft hands and was born a prince in a society that exalts poetry and good taste, to be contemptible and even disgusting.  Mass is similarly disturbed when Ike meets another synthetic man and the two go into "rapport," touching to temporarily form a two-unit collective consciousness, which Mass (clever Tapper realizes) interprets as sexual intercourse that is perverse because it is unconnected to reproduction.  Gerrold is gay, and presumably Mass's reaction to Tapper and to Ike's relationship with another android is a way for him to write about (conservative? traditional? religious?) straight men's hostile attitudes towards homosexuality.  (Later in the novel, working in the tradition of SF titans Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Heinlein, Gerrold somewhat obliquely suggests that maybe incest and bestiality aren't such a big deal.)

In hopes of getting Tapper's hemophilia cured, the characters fly to a planet where there are reputed to be fine doctors.  A woman there, Edelith, examines Tapper and decides he doesn't have "real" hemophilia, just a psychosomatic kind brought on by some childhood trauma--all of his bad luck, this distaff Sigmund Freud suggests, is the result of psychological issues.  Edelith accompanies the party to yet another planet, where there are reputed to be psykers who can look into Tapper's mind.  Edelith provides yet another character for Mass from macho Streinveldt to bounce off of--he is made uncomfortable by a smart capable woman.  It is also in conversation with Edelith that the characters figure out that the space skimmers must be the reason the Empire collapsed--the space skimmers are so powerful that they made their captains invulnerable and thus irresponsible.

Our motley crew of heroes acquires an empath in the form of a skinny girl, a clone--the psyker planet produces these clones on an assembly line and sells them into indentured servitude.  The model of clone they pick up--her name is Aura--is fragile and short-lived.  Aura can sense everybody's feelings, and she senses that Edelith and Mass argue so much because they are in love but afraid to let down their defenses.  During the crisis of a skimmer malfunction, Mass lets down some of his defenses and shows that he cares for others; meanwhile Aura and Tapper have been falling in love.

With Edelith's guidance, Aura facilitates all the characters--Mass, Ike, Tapper, Edelith, and Aura, and even the puppy and the skimmer!--forming a collective mind.  We get like a dozen pages of em dashes and parentheses.  (See epigraph to this post.)   Edelith solves everybody's psychological issues--even the skimmer has a psychological issue (that is what caused the dangerous malfunction)--and everybody learns to love each other across all barriers of culture, gender, and species.  The characters resolve to work together to revive the Empire.  But the story ends on a tragic note--when everybody returns to his, her or its own body, they find that Aura was exhausted by the effort of linking everybody's minds, and is dead.

Space Skimmer is OK if you don't mind a story that is mostly conversations and descriptions and has as its point that we should all love and accept and understand each other.  There is very little tension or suspense or surprise--those first 58 pages include adventure stuff with dangerous enemies and weapons and so forth, but that is all dumped for conversations for the remaining three quarters of the novel.  The novel is episodic and lacks a central through-line--the quest to learn about the fate of the Empire is largely forgotten after Tanner comes on the scene and then resolved in a casual way without any drama or impact, and the decision to rebuild the Empire comes out of nowhere.  We learn all about Mass and Ike in the first half of the novel, but after that new concepts and characters will suddenly just pop up and receive little elaboration.  For example, we are supposed to see the death of Aura as tragic, but she only appears on page 179 so we barely get to know her before she makes her sacrifice and dies on page 217.

Another character issue has to do with Mass, whose role in the novel shifts halfway through.  In the first 80 or 90 pages he seems like a good-natured guy, committed to exploring the galaxy, and he drives the narrative and overcomes obstacles, but in the rest of the book he is angry and closed-minded and other characters drive the narrative and resolve problems.  In the second half of his novel Gerrold uses Mass as a foil for the more sophisticated and liberal Tapper and Edelith, who show Mass the error of his ways and repair his stunted psychology.  It feels kind of like Gerrold's intended role for Mass changed as he was writing, and he didn't have time to go back and revise the first part of the manuscript in order to make Mass's personality more consistent.

Acceptable.