The Alien by Raymond F. Jones

Of all the inhabitants of Earth, there were but a few hundred thousand scientists who were able to keep themselves on an even keel, and most of these were now fleeing.

My copy

Let's check out another of my Manassas, Virginia finds, the 1966 Belmont paperback printing of Raymond F. Jones' 1951 novel The Alien.  According to the come-on text, The Alien is a "startling" and "controversial" "classic."  I kind of bought it because I liked the cover, with its powerful male nude and quizzical ladies in space helmets, but also because I liked Jones' The Cybernetic Brains.

It is several centuries in the future, and humanity enjoys the benefits of high technology like super-efficient production, anti-grav, force fields, and ray guns.  Life should be comfortable in this post-scarcity society, but the ironic result of a life of plenty is total chaos--too much free time is driving everybody crazy!  Violent crime--including political crimes such as the murder of politicians and terrorism against churches--is rampant, and the political structure is collapsing at the highest levels as one President after another is impeached and removed, to the point that nobody wants to be President!  One of the novel's many scientist characters offers as his diagnosis of humanity's ills the fact that mankind has lost all faith in authority, but not yet evolved into a society in which people are able to act responsibly as individuals.

We readers of pre-New Wave SF can all guess who would be most resistant to the mental illness that results from having it too easy--scientists and engineers!  (The Alien has many of the elitist prejudices of classic SF--scientists and engineers are awesome; religion is a dangerous scam; the common people are dolts and craven politicians cater to them, rendering democracy a disaster.)  Earth's best and brightest are leaving the mess that is Earth in droves to explore the jungles of Venus and the asteroid belt.  One such egghead who has abandoned Earth in its hour of need is physicist Dr. Delmar Underwood, a leading figure on the team of scientists and engineers investigating the remains of the civilization that apparently throve and then expired on the now defunct planet that orbited the sun between Mars and Jupiter 500,000 years ago.  Progress in figuring out what this ancient alien race was all about is slow--Earthmen first stumbled upon evidence of the "Steroid" civilization seventy-five years ago, and they still haven't found any Steroid bones or deciphered any Steroid languages!

Underwood plays a major role in the breakthrough that proves to be the key to our understanding of the Steroids.  A large artifact, like a huge cut gem of some impenetrable black substance, is discovered, and it is Underwood who figures out that the weird script on its outside is a formula describing a type of radiation new to human knowledge and instructions on how to build a generator that can produce this novel ray.  When the engineers have built this new generator they project the ray on the artifact, which opens it up.   

There's a lot of fake news on the
back cover of my copy of The Alien

Reminding us of the similar gag in Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye, the artifact is a repository of scientific information that can only be opened by a people with sufficient scientific knowledge to pass a series of tests.  Underwood and his colleagues pass all the tests, learning the Steroid language in the process.  The final chamber of the repository contains a block of protoplasm and the instructions on how to revive it--this goop is the dormant condensed form of "the Great One," who, when awoken from his half-million year slumber, will provide us the knowledge and power to master the Universe!

The character arc described by The Alien is how the scientists, who had abandoned Earth to engage in unproductive esoteric studies because they were alienated from a humanity that was going down the tubes, turn their talents to (and put their lives at risk) saving the Earth.  When it looks like reviving this alien might put humanity back on the right course Underwood returns to Terra to lead a team of geniuses, including his girlfriend, Illia Morov, one of the world's greatest surgeons, in the months-long project of building the facilities needed to revive the Great One (this equipment fills up an entire museum of the Smithsonian which is requisitioned for the purpose) and accomplishing the complicated revival process.

As the protoplasm slowly assumes the form of a living being, masses of people across the globe begin worshiping the Great One and looking forward to the new world he will lead them to.  At the same time, now that they can read the languages of the Steroids, linguists are studying the formerly indecipherable texts that have been accumulating in Earth museums and research centers over the last 75 years.  Holy crap!  The texts reveal that the Great One was a belligerent dictator named Demarzule and the "Steroids" were ruthless imperialists who subjugated half the universe; these "Sirenians" aren't even native to our Solar System but fled here when their empire started collapsing under pressure from their most tenacious enemies, the Dragbora.  The planet between Mars and Jupiter, the last outpost of the Sirenian Empire, was blasted to asteroids when the vengeful Dragbora finally caught up with the Sirenian refugees and wiped them out for good--but the Sirenians may have the last laugh if Demarzule is revived!

This German edition's cover actually portrays
the sort of stuff that actually happens in the novel

Underwood and his friends fear that if they resurrect Demarzule he'll become tyrant of Earth (the gullible masses are already worshiping him and he isn't even reanimated yet!) and initiate devastating wars with galaxies we haven't even heard of!  The presence of a superman from a superior race will also no doubt retard the evolution of humanity that the scientists are hoping for, the development into a society of people capable of shrugging off the need for leaders and acting as responsible individuals.  So, Underwood and Morov try to halt the revival process, but the politicians, responding to the large bloc of voters who are now Great One worshipers, overrule them.  In Chapter 8 of The Alien (The Alien has 18 chapters) Demarzule rises to his feet and Underwood and a band of anti-Demarzule scientists try to strangle this monster in its crib, but the Disciples of Demarzule defeat them in a ray gun firefight right there in the Smithsonian. Underwood and his comrades barely escape the District of Columbia with their lives, shooting their way past the cops and blasting out of the atmosphere in their research space ship.

The second half of The Alien is a lot of space opera/hard SF stuff, with Underwood and friends evading an Earth space fleet, developing force fields, meeting friendly aliens, searching for the home world of the Dragbora and, when they find it, searching its ruins for the superweapon that defeated the Sirenians 500,000 years ago and can maybe defeat Demarzule today.  There are descendants of the Dragbora living on a moon of the now desolate Dragboran home world; these people are expert surgeons who install in their babies organs culled from a vat of living tissue.  These additional organs provide psychic powers--it is just such mental abilities that are the superweapon that defeated the Sirenians!  In a gun battle with the Disciples of Demarzule one of the leaders of the post-Dragborans is mortally wounded, and before he dies this generous E. T. uses his psychic powers to upload into genius surgeon Illia Morov's brain the advanced surgical techniques of his people and urges her to transplant his psychic organs into her boyfriend Del Underwood--Underwood is thuswise transformed into a master psyker!

Leisure Books, 1977

In the novel's final three chapters Underwood learns how to use his amazing new psychic powers and with them defeats the Earth space fleet and then Demarzule.  With his new powers Underwood can explore the Universe; on a more homey note he and Illia will get married, and on a more grand note humanity is perhaps back on track to evolve into a race of individuals capable of responsible independent action.

The Alien is OK.  I like the basic plot and its themes.  I think the science stuff is handled well enough--the idea of having organs implanted to provide you psychic powers is pretty good.  I think my plot summary has provided a sense of the great volume of material on radiation and military and medical technology that fills the book, but there is another recurring element of the novel's speculative science I haven't mentioned yet.  Reminding the reader of A. E. van Vogt, there is a lot of talk of "semantics," with several secondary characters said to be "semanticists." Their expertise enables them to understand alien languages with great facility and to interpret nuances of meaning from speech as well as clues about a speaker's psychology and his society's sociology.

On the down side, Jones' writing style is mediocre, and the book is so full of science that there is little room for anything else.  The characters are flat, and there is very little emotional content--I didn't care who got blown up in the battles, and none of the characters' relationships or psychologies is at all compelling, though Underwood (a guy who abandons humanity and then risks everything, including his personality by implanting alien organs into his brain, to save humanity) and Demarzule (a guy who loses an empire and sees his entire race exterminated and then wakes up to find he has a chance to build it all up again) are potentially very interesting characters.  Even though the covers of the Belmont and Leisure Books paperbacks imply that Demarzule is the main character, he has almost no lines and his personality is not explored directly.  Finally, we can't really blame this on Jones, but this Belmont edition seems to have lots of printing errors and typos. 

Acceptable.  In our next episode, another novel by Raymond F. Jones: 1969's Syn, which I am told is an expansion of the 1950 novella, "...Divided We Fall."