At The Narrow Passage by Richard C. Meredith

"I have only your word," I said, "and I'm sick and tired of taking other people's word for things.  I'm going to find out for myself."  

I think I bought At The Narrow Passage, Berkley N2730, a 1975 edition of the 1973 novel, over a year ago.  I bought it because I loved the cover painting by Richard Powers.  I like Powers, but often his work seems flat, physically and emotionally. Here was a Powers that had a strong sense of physical depth, and a terrible emotional power: it looked like the landscape that would confront you if you were assigned to explore a planet inhabited by feral vampires or sentenced to Hell by a merciless God. I had no idea who the hell Richard C. Meredith was, and the alternate universe soldier plot described on the back cover didn't particularly interest me, so I just put the book on my shelf and admired the cover occassionaly.

Then, back in June, Joachim Boaz reviewed Meredith's 1969 novel We All Died at Breakaway Station.  He only gave it a middling review, and complained about the book's characterizations and gender politics, but it sounded to me like it had some pretty cool ideas, and, if done well, the kind of bleak tone that would go along with the Powers painting on At The Narrow Passage.  This put At The Narrow Passage onto my radar screen, and I even kept it out of the moving cartons when I packed up my books for storage.  This weekend I finally read the novel.

Revised edition

(Tarbandu wrote about At The Narrow Passage and its sequels in January of 2014, but somehow I didn't make the connection until I had started reading this volume. Maybe because he read a revised edition put out in 1979 with a different cover.)

There are many different "timelines" in the universe, visualized as branches on a two-dimensional tree.  When the universe began there was just the one trunk, but when points of uncertainty are reached, decisive moments when something of consequence may occur (will the Roman Empire embrace Christianity or not?) the line will split into two lines.  By the 20th Century there are a "near infinite" number of lines.  In relation to each other, these lines are described as being to the East or West.  Far to the East of our own line are lines in which the Earth is inhabited by the Krith, an inhuman intelligent species that can't or won't manipulate tools or machines (they don't even wear clothes), but which can travel between the timelines (this is called "skudding") thanks to a special nervous organ.  The Krith become friendly with humans while exploring West, and warn them that in the 40th century or so hostile aliens are going to come to Earth, threatening the extermination of the Krith and human races.  So the Krith, Hari Seldon style, go to many human-inhabited timelines and scientifically predict what courses of history are most likely to produce a unified human civilization with the technological level to defeat the aliens. Then they try to push and prod the human race, more or less secretly, in order to get history to move in that world-peace/high-tech direction.

Our narrator is a human, known in his current timeline as Eric Mathers.  Mathers is a mercenary soldier, paid by the Krith to fight in the wars of various timelines on the side the Krith think more likely to lay the foundations of a civilization that will be able to resist those aliens in 2000 years.  ("Timeliner" mercenaries like Mathers can tip the balance of battles and wars because they bring with them special equipment, like rayguns and biological augmentations that provide them better eyesight and faster reflexes.)  In this timeline he is playing the role of a British Army officer; here the British Empire is in a war of attrition in Europe against the German Empire, a war roughly similar to World War One in our timeline.  Very few natives of this timeline know about the Krith and the timeliners, just people like the King of England and Britain's highest commanders.

Hardcover first edition

In the first 100 pages of the book Mathers is a member of a commando team trying to capture a German aristocrat who is in charge of an effort to develop atomic weapons.  Things go wrong and Mathers gets captured by mysterious allies of the Germans who turn out to be timeliners (they call themselves "Paratimers") from the West side of the Temporal Spectrum, lines the Krith have not yet visited.  These people claim the future alien invasion is a Krith fabrication, and that the Krith are manipulating people like Mathers and the British of this timeline for their own unknown purposes.

Mathers spends the middle third of the book as a prisoner in a secret underground city in Florida, where American revolutionaries are plotting to overthrow the British Empire (which in this timeline still rules all English-speaking parts of North America.)  The Paratimers try to get Mathers to switch sides.  This section of the book reminded me of bits and pieces from Robert Heinlein's work (Mathers has sex with lots of women, reminding me of parts of Glory Road, and witnesses pro-independence political meetings, like those portrayed in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Between Planets and Red Planet) and from George Orwell's 1984 (Mathers reads books purporting to be the true history of mankind's relationship with the Krith, like how Winston Smith reads The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.)  Unlike Heinlein and Orwell, however, Meredith doesn't discuss any kind of political philosophy or seem to have any particular political axe to grind. (Tarbandu suggests that he gets philosophical later, in the sequels.)

Meredith's treatment of minorities and women also reminded me of Heinlein's; there are non-whites and women in leadership positions, Mathers specifically condemns racial prejudice, and there are inter-racial sexual relationships--Mathers, who is white, thinks a black woman is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.  It is also made clear that there are timelines in which sub-Saharan Africans developed modern industrial civilizations and colonized Europe instead of the other way around.

(While I'm talking about possible connections to other works, I should note that Meredith's dedication to this book, and tarbandu's discussion of the series, make clear that Meredith owes a lot of this timeline business to H. Beam Piper, but that I personally haven't read any of Piper's own work in this vein.)

Mathers escapes from the secret base and in the final seventy or so pages of the 250-page novel tries to figure out the truth behind both the Krith and the Paratimers.  He learns that both of these groups have been lying to and manipulating humanity--the alien invasion scare is a hoax, while the Paratimers' leaders are ruthless inhuman killers in disguise.  After a climactic ray guns and machine guns blazing confrontation in a desolate timeline where the Earth has been sterilized by Paratimer nuclear weapons, Mathers escapes both his Krith masters and the blue-skinned Paratimers. Safe in our own timeline, Mathers resolves to do something to protect humankind from these two sinister groups.  What the inhumans are ultimately up to, and what Mathers can do about it, I guess we learn in the sequels.

At The Narrow Passage seems to be designed to appeal to history buffs, particularly military history buffs.  There is a lot of talk about firearms and lots of long expository passages in which one character or another describes how his or her timeline got to be how it is.  (For example, in the timeline in which most of the book takes place the British were able to quash the American Revolution in the 1770s and make France a British satellite during the 1790s Revolutionary crisis there thanks to widespread adoption by the British Army of the Ferguson rifle.)  On the intellectual history side, the guy who is credited with figuring out the Krith are lying about the aliens and writing one of the Paratimer propaganda books is an analogue of Martin Luther named Martin Latham, while many of the Paratimers come from a timeline in which the Cathars came to dominate Europe.

There are lots of action and battle sequences: firefights, ambushes, artillery and aerial bombardments, burning towns and so forth.  As we almost always see in these adventure stories, plenty of people get captured and plenty of people escape capture--sometimes I feel like every book I read has multiple scenes in which people get tied up and at least one scene in which somebody gets knocked out with a blow to the head, only to wake up just fine a few hours later.  There is also a strong lascivious element to the book: Mathers meets lots of beautiful women and we receive descriptions of all their breast sizes; the topic of rape comes up several times; and it is normal for characters of both sexes to be naked, because they come from nudist societies or because they have been caught in dishabille during a sneak attack or because somebody needs to use their clothes as makeshift bonds to tie somebody up.

I like sex and violence as much as the next guy, and Meredith handles that material well enough, and all the science fiction stuff, while not believable, is adequately explained for an adventure caper.  And I'm a history buff myself, so all the references to Ferguson rifles and Albigensians were interesting.  On the negative side, the characterizations are pretty thin, and the book feels a little long and slow.

The best thing Meredith does is keep you in the dark as to whether you are supposed to sympathize with the Krith and the British or the Paratimers and the rebellious Americans; both sides put forward arguments that don't hold water, and both count among their members some admirable figures and some creepy suspicious figures. This is more interesting than those stories in which one side is racist or exploiting the environment and so you know right away they are the villains, and have to trudge through half the story to the "surprise" of the main character switching sides to join the multicultural tree-hugging side.  Meredith kept me guessing and wondering through the entire novel.

I enjoyed At The Narrow Passage enough that I plan to read the sequels; I am genuinely curious as to where Meredith is going to go with these ideas.  So call this one a positive review!  It is not for everybody, but it does what it sets out to do creditably.

April 1956 stories by Edmond Hamilton, Milton Lesser, and "Alexander Blade"

At an antiques store in Illinois called Winter Wheat I recently purchased, for like $2.20, a bedraggled copy of the April 1956 issue of Imagination.  According to Wikipedia all the critics think Imagination was a piece of crap, but flipping through the issue in Illinois, with South Carolina ("Look honey, I caught you this toad in the parking lot!") behind me and a stop at Steak & Shake ("Didn't I tell the waitress 'no mayo?'") ahead of me, the magazine looked like a lot of fun.  There's an Edmond Hamilton story and a charming little autobiographical essay by Hamilton, fun illustrations and comics that my college education requires me to warn you are sexist, a column that reviews fanzines, and a letters section in which fans of Imagination call the periodical "Madge," which I thought was just adorable.

This week I read three stories from the magazine; let's see if the critics are right to dismiss old Madge.  These three stories are available for free online at gutenberg.org, so even you cheapos out there don't have to let the critics (or me) do your thinking for you.

True riches come not from gold or diamonds, but from fulfilling relationships.

"The Legion of Lazarus" by Edmond Hamilton

This is one of those noirish stories in which a working class tough guy (in this case an electrician) uses his wits and his fists in a struggle against a ruthless interplanetary tycoon who has framed him for murder.  It also reminded me of a van Vogt story, in that an ordinary man develops psychic powers and super-intelligence and gets involved in a twilight struggle between merciless factions of weirdos.

Hyrst was working as part of a four-man team on Titan, doing maintenance on a robot mining operation.  The team's engineer, MacDonald, keeps bragging that he has found a vein of titanite, but won't tell anybody where he found it.  When MacDonald gets killed, Hyrst stands trial for murder on one of the moons of Mars, and, convicted, gets executed by being tossed out the airlock!

Fifty years later, Hyrst is revived!  He hears voices in his head; he is now a member of the Legion of Lazarus, a group of people with various ESP abilities!  After a scene in which Hyrst's son, who is now physically older than his father, denounces his father for ruining the family name, Hyrst follows the directions of the voices in his head and gets his ass to Mars.  On Mars he joins up with a group of Lazarites who are led by Christina, a beautiful but bitterly angry woman ("she was like a fire, burning with anger, burning with a single-minded, dedicated purpose.  She was beautiful, and frightening.")  Christina's group is at war with Bellaver, a businessman trying to win a monopoly on spacecraft construction; they have half-built the first interstellar ship, and Bellaver wants it.  To finish the ship, Christina's people need to find that titanite of MacDonald's.      

Over the course of the story (billed as a novel, and taking up like 50 pages of the magazine) people get captured and escape, there are space ship chases through the Asteroid Belt and a foot chase and siege on the surface of an asteroid, Hyrst beats people with a fire extinguisher, Bellaver uses an artificial gravity device to torture somebody, and other fun stuff.  The secret of who killed MacDonald (an employee of Bellaver's, of course) and the location of the titanite are extracted from Hyrst's brain. We also get a vague explanation of how all these people got their psychic powers and how they came back to life after being tossed into a vacuum.    

I thought this was a quite good space opera.  In particular, I liked how Hamilton described Hyrst's mental powers and how he grew into them, and the good job he did with all the settings: the snowy landscape of Titan; the surface of an asteroid littered with the eroded monuments of a prehistoric civilization; the cities of Mars, where the hooded natives, now a minority on their own planet, live in monolithic stone houses among the humans' modern buildings; Bellaver's orbital pleasure palace, etc. Hamilton also focuses on Hyrst's psychology, his shame, fear, anger.  The story also gives us hints of those staples of classic SF, the paradigm shift (when the public finds out about the Lazarites) and the "sense of wonder" ending, when the Lazarites in their hyperspace ship flash off to explore the universe.  "The Legion of Lazarus" also appeals to the apparently insatiable appetite of readers for tales of the evils of the bourgeoisie.  I find it hard to believe that the critics had this great adventure story in mind when they were badmouthing poor Madge!  

"The Graveyard of Space" by Milton Lesser

On August 7, via twitter, Joachim Boaz reminded us it was Milton Lesser's birthday. Jumping at a chance for a little self-promotion, I took this opportunity to remind the world that I had reviewed Lesser's novel Secret of the Black Planet at Amazon, pronouncing it bland and forgettable.  According to Wikipedia, Lesser, under the pen name Stephen Marlowe, won awards for his detective and mainstream fiction, so maybe he just put together Secret of the Black Planet on a bad day (or maybe back in January of 2012 I was just being a hardass) and I am going to love "The Graveyard of Space"!  Let's hope so!

Ralph and Diane Meeker (!) are headed home from Asteroid 4712, their efforts to mine it for uranium having come to nothing.  Their failure is straining their marriage. Then their second-hand space ship's radar fails, and they get sucked into the gravitational pull of a sargasso of dead spaceships, thousands of defunct craft orbiting in a swarm together.  (Remember Space Hulk?  Damn, my brother and I spent a pile of money on that stuff.)  The asteroid prospectors put on their space suits and split up to search the lost ships for a working radar set which will fit their model of ship.

This is an attempt at a horror story, and Lesser spends a lot of time describing the dead bodies on the wrecked ships.  Then Diane gets attacked by an insane man who has been stuck in the graveyard of ships for years and survived by cannibalism.  Ralph defeats the maniac in hand to hand combat.  Luckily, this very same ship has the radar set they need.  Ralph and Diane escape the Asteroid Belt; their ordeal has made them realize how much they truly love each other, and saved their marriage.

This story (fewer than 12 pages of text) feels like filler, but it is not bad.  An acceptable entertainment.  

"Zero Hour" by "Alexander Blade"

Who is Alexander Blade, you ask? I asked isfdb and Wikipedia the same thing, and found that it was a pen name used by many authors I have heard of, like Edmond Hamilton, Robert Silverberg, and John Jakes, as well as by authors I was unfamiliar with.  A few minutes googling did not provide any definitive info on exactly whose pen was responsible for "Zero Hour;" if you know better, please don't keep it to yourself!  Hamilton is a prime suspect; in the very next issue of Imagination his story "Battle for the Stars" appeared under the Alexander Blade pseudonym.  (I read the full length book version of Battle for the Stars and reviewed it at Amazon in January of 2012.)

I can see why nobody jumped up to take credit for this story; it's a trifle that reads like it was aimed at children, a strange contrast after Lesser's macabre story about failure, death, cannibalism and marriage.  Little Bobby's family lives on a high security government research base.  Bobby learns that his father is working on a rocket headed for the moon, and even learns the secret launching date.  On launch day Bobby sneaks aboard the rocket, assuming his dad is flying to the moon, but then gets cold feet, and sneaks back home to Mom before lift off.  It is lucky he did, because this was an experimental rocket which was sent, unmanned, to the moon to explode and mark the lunar surface with dye.

A competent but bland, innocuous sort of story.

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If most of Imagination's contents were like "Graveyard of Space" and "Zero Hour" I suppose the critics have a point, but I thought Hamilton's "The Legion of Lazarus" was an above average space opera, and I certainly have no regrets spending a little time with Madge.  Maybe I'll take my copy of this April '56 issue out of its plastic bag and take a look at the other three included stories in the future.

Four stories from Orbit by Gene Wolfe

When Joachim Boaz took to twitter and his blog to praise Gene Wolfe’s “Sonya, Crane Wessleman, and Kittee" I was inspired to seek out Wolfe stories I had never read before, including “Sonya….” These four first appeared in Damon Knight’s famous Orbit anthologies of original stories, though I read them in later Wolfe collections I own: “Sonya, Crane Wessleman, and Kittee" in Storeys from the Old Hotel and "The Changeling," "Melting," and "Many Mansions" in Castle of Days.

"The Changeling" (1968)

Right off the bat I got a story that had me furrowing my brow, trying to figure it out; I read it twice over two days.  As is often true with Wolfe, it makes sense to read carefully, as each sentence is valuable and could contain a clue.  This is no chore, because Wolfe's writing is quite fine, a pleasure to read.

The text of "The Changeling" is a manuscript hidden in a cave.  Wolfe often employs narrators who are unreliable and intellectually and/or morally suspect, and early on we get a sense that there is something villainous about the writer of this manuscript.  As a U.S. Army soldier the narrator was captured in the Korean War and defected to China, even though he had an opportunity to return to the United States.  When he got tired of living under communism and returned to America he was put on trial because of something he was accused of by his fellow U.S. servicemen.  On the fourth page of the eleven-page story the narrator describes how, as a child, he tortured a frog, and when a girl, Maria Palmieri, tried to stop him from pursuing this dreadful behavior, he "hit her in the eye with a stone."

After getting out of prison the narrator returns to one of the towns where he grew up (he left before starting fifth grade), Cassonville.  There he confronts numerous strange phenomena.  He seems to be living in a slightly different world than other people in Cassonville; in particular, the depth and breadth of a river seem different to him than to a childhood friend, Paul Palmieri.  When Paul throws a stone, he claims to have thrown it clear across the creek, while our narrator sees it plop into the water.

Equally strangely, a boy the narrator played with twenty years ago during his frog-torturing days, Peter Palmieri, has not aged--he's still a child.  Only one other person in the town seems to notice that Peter has been nine-years-old for decades, the boy's putative father, an old Italian immigrant.  Papa Palmieri tells the narrator the story of how the child appeared in the town and every body else simply accepted him as a member of the Palmieri family.  As the years went by and Peter's "siblings" grew, and he did not, people simply stopped talking about him as Maria's older brother and started calling him Maria's twin, and then Maria's little brother.

While apparently an alien presence, Peter is acknowledged by Papa, and Peter's actions in the story bear this out, to be a very honest and conscientious person ("he's a good boy--better than Paul or Maria.")  

When the narrator starts investigating old school records and old newspapers he finds no records of himself, even though he should be moderately famous after his defection to Mao's China, court-martial and imprisonment in the US.  He doesn't even appear in an old class photo he knows he was included in--in his place is the mysterious Peter.  On the penultimate page of the story we learn the narrator's name: Pete Palmer.

It seems to me that our narrator and the ageless Peter are one and the same person, somehow split into their evil and good components.  (It is significant that the narrator remembers that not only Maria but Peter Palmieri tried to defend the frog from him, and that Wolfe slyly uses pronouns to leave the reader unsure whether at the climax of the fight the narrator stabbed the frog or Peter with his knife.)  As Christian thinking would suggest, the good part of Pete(r) does not age, while the evil part suffers in places like Red China and an American military prison.

The narrator decides to live as a hermit on an island in the aforementioned river, surviving on fish and handouts.  Here he writes and secretes his manuscript in a cave. Some of the people who bring him fish hooks and sacks of potatoes tell him they wish they were him.  Were China and the prison Purgatory, and the island Heaven?  Maybe the island is just more Purgatory?

As the title suggests, this is a story about how people and their circumstances change over the course of their lives.  The narrator talks repeatedly about how he has been changed by such events as the early deaths of his parents, how as a kid he often moved, how he changed his mind about living a life of poverty and factory work in Communist China.  The title also, of course, refers to folklore about elves, trolls, the devil or whoever swapping a human baby for an inhuman one, creating the phenomenon of a person being raised in a society or world not his own, a phenomenon the narrator presumably felt in China and admits to feeling back in Cassonville.    

“Sonya, Crane Wessleman, and Kittee" (1970)

This is a story about the lonely lives of people in a decadent future utopia/dystopia which is paradoxically collectivized (everybody gets government handouts and there are police cameras everywhere) and radically individualistic (people need not leave their houses and those with money have relationships with organic sex robots instead of other people.)  If I had to guess at what Wolfe is getting at, I'd say it is that developments which many would regard as improvements, like a universal guaranteed income and high technology, could make human relationships superfluous, thus ruining the lives of many because it is human relationships that make life worth living.  I think we can call this one a satire of progress.

Wolfe writes “Sonya, Crane Wessleman, and Kittee" in a sort of folksy genial tone, reminding us repeatedly that it is a story about the future written in the present.  (This is somewhat similar to what he does in the introductory matter of The Book of the New Sun, the text of which he says is a translation of a manuscript from the future.)  Wolfe also includes lots of references to cultural figures like Julie Newmar, Debbie Reynolds, Harlan Ellison, the Kennedys, and even my beloved James Boswell.  The light-hearted tone masks a tale of sadness and horror.

The plot:  Sonya is an old poor woman with no family and no close friends who lives on the dole.  She is accidentally introduced to wealthy widower Crane Wessleman. Crane Wessleman finds her amusing, and for a period of a year he invites her to dinner (microwaved) every week.  Sonya hopes to marry Crane Wessleman, but when she visits he mostly talks about Kittee, his organic robotic "friend."  Wolfe makes it clear that Kittee is not a maid (the house is very dirty and Sonya puts her own dinner in the microwave) and that Kittee is disgusting, a smelly zombie sort of thing that doesn't talk or smile and was made from the "germ plasm" of a cat, monkey or canine, nobody is quite sure what.

The year of invites ends when Crane Wessleman dies.  Sonya investigates, finds that Kittee has started eating her "friend."  Sonya puts out food for Kittee and hopes Crane Wessleman left her something in his will.

Somewhat easier (for me, at least) to "get" than "The Changeling," and more emotionally affecting.

"Melting" (1974)

Well, I'm not in love with every Gene Wolfe story.  "Melting" is a discursive New-Wavish piece, just five pages, full of silly puns and tricks.  I think it is about a guy who has an elaborate dream of a party after using drugs and/or alcohol.  The party in his dream is attended by time travelers: apparently figures from books he has been reading like Joseph Bonaparte and a British Army officer who served in World War One, as well as one character who is based on his washing machine.  At the end of the story Wolfe reminds us that we are reading a story, and that the character in the story is unreal, a figment of Wolfe's imagination just like the people in the dreamer's dream were figments of his imagination.  Wolfe hints that we readers may similarly be figments of someone's imagination.

This story is OK, I guess, but not for me.  (For one thing, I hate "and it was all a dream" stories.)  It reminds me of "How I Lost the Second World War and Helped Turn Back the German Invasion," another Anglophilic pun-laden Wolfe story set in some kind of alternate universe.  "How I Lost the Second World War..." is perhaps the Wolfe story I like least, but I guess it is widely admired; Ben Bova, Gardner Dozois and Peter Haining all included it in anthologies.  "Melting" also reminded me a little of Joanna Russ's 1971 "Zanzibar Cat" and the background to Coleridge's "Kubla Khan."

"Many Mansions" (1977)

"Many Mansions" is about gender roles and colonialism and has at its heart a very cool SF idea.  On a planet colonized by humans some generations ago the wealthier colonists lived in houses that were essentially alive--though built of wood and such inanimate materials, the brains of human women were integrated into the houses. These living brains, kept alive far beyond a normal human lifespan, maintained the house, keeping it attractive and in shape in a way the narrator compares to how a woman keeps herself attractive.

When a war broke out between the colony and the metropole (called "the Motherworld" in the story, presumably the Earth) the armies of the Earthers, who won the war, destroyed most of the living houses.  (The war seems to have resulted from, or coincided with, a gender-based revolution on Earth; the Earth army consisted entirely of female soldiers, and it seems there are no men on Earth any longer, that Earth is inhabited solely by female clones grown in "bottles" who live some kind of militaristic lifestyle.)  The living houses were mobile, however, and it is said that some escaped destruction and still haunt deep forests and sometimes capture people for some unknown purpose.

"Many Mansions" takes place decades after the war, when the houses are apparently a mysterious legend and have been entirely forgotten by Earthers; we readers learn all this history in bits and pieces from a colonial man and woman in conversation with a cloned Earth woman who has never heard of the houses.  This Earth woman is investigating the disappearance of a colleague.  The story has the structure of a horror tale; we slowly learn the danger the clone is in, and the possible fate of her lost comrade.  After talking about the houses for eight pages it is not that surprising to find on the ninth and penultimate page that the old woman narrator and her husband reside in one of surviving sentient houses.  The clone flees in fear, and it is suggested that someday she will be, and the lost clone already has been, somehow integrated into a house, where, by helping maintain a house, she will be doing true women's work.

This is a well-crafted story; the plot and characters all work and the idea of brains integrated into walking houses feels both very original but also very natural for SF. The story's form is somewhat experimental, as it is entirely told in dialogue, that of the husband and wife.  Wolfe leaves the reader to wonder which character (if any) to sympathize with.  On the one hand the husband and wife and their house (animated by the wife's great-aunt's brain and personality) play the role of the monster in the story, and it is hinted that the colonists are bigots who look down on the natives (whom they call "autochthons," a word Jack Vance often employs) as well as the poor and clones. On the other hand 20th-century readers have much more in common with the colonial society depicted than with a cold unisex society of Amazonian clones, and it is suggested that the clones have treated the colonists pretty poorly, that they act as an occupying force and will one day run off the colonists.  Reading the story, I wondered if we were supposed to see parallels to the relationship between Great Britain and the Thirteen American colonies, or Britain and the Boers.

I expected "Many Mansions" to somehow refer to 16th-century Spanish nun St. Theresa of Avila's guide to spiritual growth, The Interior Castle, which envisions seven stages of growth as seven mansions within a crystal castle.  There is a reference to the number seven in an anecdote about a drunk guy climbing an ancient road in a snowstorm; above the road is one of the walking houses, and it seems to beckon him, to offer a place of rest.

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These stories are all quite thought-provoking--at least they had me gritting my teeth trying to figure them out and casting about my memory and google, seeking literary and historical references.  And, with the possible exception of "Melting," they are very entertaining speculative fiction, with speculations about future societies, alternate worlds, and/or horror story elements.  Strongly recommended.

Three Worlds to Conquer by Poul Anderson

"As always, he found engineer thoughts soothing.  Forces and matrices were so much easier to deal with than people." 

My (and Bill Meeker's) copy of the novel

Jesse at Speculiction recently reviewed The High Crusade, one of Poul Anderson's more famous novels. I read High Crusade soon after the start of my exile (it was in the local library here on the prairie), like four years ago, and I have to agree with Jesse that the novel is just too incredible. The idea that medieval English fighting men might have admirable qualities that are lacking in modern technological societies, like physical courage or a willingness to take risks or whatever, is an interesting insight and is typical of Anderson's work, but it is too difficult to accept them conquering societies with the wealth and organization required to achieve interstellar travel.

(On the other hand, I recall High Crusade being more readable and memorable than some of Anderson's later work, like For Love and Glory, which I read and have completely forgotten, and Harvest of Stars, which I read and remember being tedious.)

I may not be Poul Anderson's biggest fan, but I enjoyed Brain Wave and The Enemy Stars, and on this blog I have praised several Anderson stories and collections. I am quite sympathetic to Anderson's point of view, so, despite periodic bumps in the road, I keep going back to him.  This week I read a novel published four years after 1960's High Crusade, Three Worlds to Conquer, which was first serialized in If in the first months of 1964. I have the Pyramid paperback, X-1875, printed in 1968.  This copy, for which I paid $1.50 in Minnesota, was originally owned by a Bill Meeker.  

Fellow SF fan Bill Meeker,
we salute you!

Three Worlds to Conquer is a traditional science fiction story about science and wars.  Our hero is Mark Fraser, an engineer on the Ganymede colony of 5,000 people.  He's a skilled pilot of space craft and also the human most adept in the lingua franca that has developed between humans and the natives of Jupiter known as the Nyarr.  Because Jupiter is so inhospitable to human life, humans and Jovians have never met in the flesh, but for over a decade the two civilizations have corresponded via a neutrino-based transmitter system.  As the novel begins Fraser's counterpart on Jupiter, Theor, is asking for Fraser's help because another Jovian society, the Ulunt-Khazul, have launched an aggressive war on the Nyarr.  But Fraser has his own problems--the civil war taking place on Earth has just spread to Ganymede, and the crew of a space battleship (a huge sphere bristling with gun turrets--awesome!) is arresting all the technical personnel on the colony!

The narrative alternates between Theor and his war on the Jovian surface and Fraser's struggle on Ganymede; Theor and Fraser conduct their relationship entirely through electronic communication.  Three Worlds to Conquer thus reminded me of those hard SF classics A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge (1999) and Mission of Gravity, by Hal Clement (1954), which also centered on long distance human-alien relationships.

After suffering military defeats at the hands of their enemies, Fraser and Theor use their engineering ability, rhetorical skill, and willingness to incinerate people with rocket exhaust, to win the day.  

There is a lot of science in Three Worlds to Conquer; we hear all about neutrinos, the solar wind, the atmosphere and geology of Jupiter, and what kind of orbits space ships have to take to efficiently travel about the solar system.  I think Anderson spends two entire pages of Chapter 2 describing the neutrino communications device to us readers.  For the most part this stuff is convincing and interesting.  More fun, perhaps, is the strange ecosystem Anderson comes up with for Jupiter, particularly the plants, animals and people that fly/swim in the thick Jovian atmosphere.  He also makes a creditable effort to figure out what kind of technology the Nyarr and other people living on Jupiter's surface, under tremendous pressure and in terrible cold, would have.

Anderson has a tragic sense of life, and, besides all the people who get massacred in these wars, this is expressed in Fraser's relationships.  A skinny 40-year-old who complains about getting old, he has a wife and children, but his marriage has obviously grown stale.  When Fraser returns from a week-long mission to Io, he goes to the neutrino transmitter to talk to Theor before he goes to see his family.  ("Bros before hos," I guess, even if your bro is an alien you've never seen.)   Fraser and Lorraine Vlasek (mmm, pickles), a woman whose loyalties seem to vacillate between the two different sides in the Earth civil war, have a sad unconsummated love affair.  Fraser also deals with the stress of his work on Ganymede by smoking a pipe and taking "happypills," and frets when tobacco and "psych medicine" are in short supply.  Anderson doesn't imply any moral judgments about Fraser's attitude towards his family or his reliance on stimulants to get through a Ganymedean day.

Characters and style aren't the strong point of this short (143 page) novel; it's a story about plot and ideas.  There aren't any libertarian speeches like the one at the end of the Van Rijn collection Trader to the Stars, but Anderson's politics are in evidence; Fraser carps about government censors and bureaucrats, and Theor gets out of a predicament by trading with primitive natives he encounters.  Anderson portrays war as preferable to living under tyranny or surrendering what is yours, but many minor characters are willing to give up and/or collaborate and have to be convinced by people like Fraser and Theor to do the right thing and stand up for what is right.  And while wars will happen, at the center of the novel is the idea that different cultures will most profit through trade and friendship.

Not spectacular, but solidly entertaining; Three Worlds to Conquer has all the classic hard SF elements, and doesn't outlast its welcome, as new things keep popping up to maintain the reader's interest.

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Some four years ago Joachim Boaz reviewed Three Worlds to Conquer; you'll have to take my word for it that I read his review after drafting mine. 

If we have any substantial disagreements about the novel, it is about Fraser's wife, Eve.  Joachim seems to think her lack of "screen time" is a careless flaw, perhaps a sign of sexism.  I, as I have suggested above, think this is a conscious artistic choice by Anderson, an effort to depict a stale marriage.  The very last line of the book is actually about Eve, and Fraser's strained relationship with her, suggesting Anderson thought the Fraser marriage an important element of his novel.

Joachim also suggests the aliens in the novel are silly-looking, but I thought them better than the cat people, teddy bear people, and girls with blue or green skin we so often get in SF.

***********

The last page of my edition of Three Worlds to Conquer is an ad for the "Latest Science Fiction!" published by Pyramid.  Of the seven books advertised, I've only read the two included Jack Williamson Legion of Space novels, first written in the 1930s ("latest" indeed.)  I remember enjoying The Cometeers (yay, space war!), but being disappointed in One Against the Legion (instead of interstellar naval warfare we get a detective story in a space casino.)  Joachim read the Sturgeon collection A Way Home last year, and gave it a mixed review.

Feel free to let the world know via the comments why we should seek out The Butterfly Kid, Venus Equilateral, Against the Fall of Night, and The Synthetic Man, or why we should avoid them like we'd avoid the ammonia seas of Jupiter.

Stories from 1973 by C. S. Claremont, Geo. Alec Effinger and David Drake

In the past I have mentioned that I often am not sure what to read, and will allow myself to be guided by the Fates.  Recently, in an Iowa antique mall, I came upon a copy of the April 1973 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  I was charmed when I saw that a previous owner of the periodical had read and graded each piece of fiction therein.  I willingly parted with two bucks and brought the issue home with me.  This artifact provided me not only the chance to pass judgement on the work of science fiction writers, but the opportunity to pass judgement on the judgement of an unnamed stranger!

This week I read this individual's favorite story from the issue, "Psimed" by C. S. Claremont, his or her least favorite tale, Geo. Alec Effinger's "The City on the Sand," and a story which received the modal grade (look, I'm using math words), David Drake's "Arclight."   Of the eight novelets and short stories in the issue, five, including the Drake piece, received "g"s.  Let's see if MPorcius Fiction Log is on the same page with the SF fan we can know only as "Previous Owner."

"Psimed" by C. S. Claremont

If you look at Previous Owner's handwritten note, I believe we can gain an insight into his or her thought process.  It looks like Previous Owner was going to give "Psimed" a score of "VG," but then realized he/she was shortchanging Claremont, and upgraded "Psimed" to "Excellent."  (I am disregarding the possibility that Previous Owner's grade is the neologism "vexcellent," meaning "having the ability to cause a high degree of vexation.")            

I've never read anything by Claremont before--in fact, I had to do some research to find out if Claremont was a man or a woman.  As people reading this probably already know, Claremont usually goes by "Chris Claremont," and is staggeringly famous for writing about Marvel's X-Men and collaborating with George Lucas on some fantasy novels.  I'm learning every day!

My man tarbandu has written a little about Claremont's comic book work and I think it is fair to say that tarbandu would not use words like "excellent" to describe it.  Torn between the disparate opinions of tarbandu and Previous Owner, I tried to go into "Psimed" with an open mind.

"Psimed" is the story of Petra Hamlyn, a female doctor in a future high tech New York.  I get the impression that Claremont often writes female protagonists.  Hamlyn is a showy individualist, wearing jewelry and short skirts in a society in which fashions are androgynous and conservative.  Male characters stare at her legs, female characters think she looks like a prostitute.  When a new colleague calls her "Doctor," she corrects him: "My name's Petra.  I'm afraid I despise formality...."

The child of a wealthy man collapses of a rare disease, and Hamlyn's team of doctors try to save the kid.  Hamlyn and the kid are both psychics, and, in this universe of Claremont's, psychics tend to lose their powers and get all angsty and then commit suicide.  There is some melodrama as the kid goes berserk upon learning he has lost his psi powers and when Hamlyn has a painful flashback to when she lost her powers while terrorists tortured and murdered her husband.  Hamlyn also has sex with the new colleague.  The story ends when the kid dies, and another one of Hamlyn's colleagues, a psychic who has melded his mind with the kid in an effort to save him, also dies.

I'm no expert on the X-Men, but it seems like the themes of this long, boring, and histrionic story about a small elite of angst-ridden people with special powers who are expected to use those powers to help society, have something in common with the themes of those X-Men comics.

So, what did Previous Owner like about this story?  I guess lots of people are into medical dramas, and into stories about people with special powers who suffer angst and alienation.  I don't find medical stuff interesting, and while I sometimes like the whole alienated mutant thing (I just gave Kuttner and Moore's "The Piper's Son" a positive review), I didn't think this was a good example.

Previous Owner Grade: Excellent

MPorcius Fiction Log Grade: Not good

"The City on the Sand" by Geo. Alec Effinger

I've already encountered Effinger and his short stories during the course of this blog's life.  My feelings have been mixed.  Let's see if "The City on the Sand" tips the scales one way or the other.  SF blogger extraordinaire Joachim Boaz thinks highly of Effinger, so again we see a blogger I admire at odds with the mysterious Previous Owner, who was at a loss for words to describe his or her unhappiness with "The City on the Sand."  Who will I side with?

"The City on the Sand" is a consciously literary and subtly amusing story about decadence and a life wasted.  It takes place in an alternate early 20th century world (they have electric lights and radios) in which Western Europe is so decadent that its people have not bothered to conquer or even explore the New World or Sub-Saharan Africa.  The main character, Ernst Weinraub, is a would be poet and novelist who has traveled Europe, but found no place truly congenial.  So he has settled in the one city of North Africa, where he sits at an outdoor cafe all day, drinking and watching people walk by.  He has an outline for a trilogy of novels but has made no progress on the novels in years.  When it rains he doesn't even have the energy to move inside or lower the awning.

Weinraub has done nothing with his life, he has no friends, no wife or children.  He doesn't make an effort to get his poetry published; he just hopes some tastemaker will spot him sitting in the cafe and "discover" him.  When people try to develop a relationship with Weinraub or enlist him in their projects (a Polish political activist is trying to raise a volunteer army to free slaves or something like that) he just waves them away.

I have to disagree with Previous Owner again.  Effinger's style here is good, and the setting and tone of the story are good.  I can see why someone wouldn't care for "The City on the Sand," though--there's not much plot and certainly no action or sex.  This is a literary mood piece, but it is a good one and I quite like it.  My opinion of Effinger has just gone up.

Previous Owner Grade: ugh

MPorcius Fiction Log Grade: Good

"Arclight" by David Drake

In my youth I read and enjoyed Killer, which is about a space alien murdering people in ancient Rome, and was written by David Drake and Karl Edward Wagner.  I read a couple of Drake's Hammer's Slammers stories, and they just made me shrug.  I quite liked Drake's short story "The Barrow Troll," and in late 2010 I read his novel The Voyage and wrote a three star review of it on Amazon in which I focused on the fact that the protagonists are a bunch of amoral jerks.

So, that is a brief history of my relationship with David Drake, who seems like a competent writer but whose isn't always ideally suited to my temperament.  I was curious to see how I would respond to "Arclight."

Well, for once I am on the same page as Previous Owner; this is a good story.

Drake served with the U.S. Army in Vietnam and Cambodia, and this story draws on his experiences.  A cavalry unit (the main characters operate ACAVs, M113 armored personnel carriers equipped with additional machine guns and armor) accidentally uncovers an ancient Cambodian temple.  There is a hideous idol in the temple which the troops damage in the course of investigating the ruin.  Over the succeeding nights the soldiers dream of this monstrous statue, and some of them are mysteriously killed, their bodies horribly mangled.  Was it communist guerrillas who killed them?  A ravenous tiger?  We readers know it was an invisible demon!  The demon's campaign of vengeance ends when the U. S. Air Force bombs the temple into oblivion, demolishing the idol.

This is a solid entertaining horror story.  We've all probably read lots of stories about monsters from ruins terrorizing people, but Drake's story really benefits from its setting among American soldiers in South East Asia.  For example, I found the military stuff interesting (I was not familiar with the terms "ACAV" and "arclight" before.)  So, thumbs up for this one.

Previous Owner Grade: g

MPorcius Fiction Log Grade: Good.

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Even if Previous Owner and I have different tastes, I enjoyed my exploration of his or her old magazine, which gave me an opportunity to learn more about three authors I have only had a limited exposure to.

The April 1973 F&SF also has a bunch of interesting ads.  On the first page of my copy (which I suspect is in fact the third page--I think the first sheet of my copy was lost) we have an ad for an anthology of SF stories about sex.  Hubba hubba!  Also, an ad for a novel about what would happen if some guy figured out astrology was real.  I'd be curious to read some of the sex stories (despite the embarrassingly dumb font they use in the ad for the title), but the astrology book sounds horrible.

In the back of the mag (we cool people call magazines "mags," you know, to save time) we have the "Market Place," which is full of fun classifieds.  I had no idea there was a town in California called "Brubank."  Not only is there such a town, but the people there love dinosaurs!  There's an ad for Dianetics; these were the days before the Elronners had that John Travolta and Kirstie Alley money and could afford those TV ads we all remember.  A guy in Hawaii is willing to teach you telepathy.  You can mail three questions to a psychic in Illinois and for only ten bucks he will use his powers to answer them.  And if you don't have ten dollars and live in South West Canada, a guy will teach you how to pan for gold right in your own neighborhood!  Awesome!  

Click to read about all the bargains I missed in 1973 when I was two years old

Master of Life and Death by Robert Silverberg

On August 8 of this year I received from SF blogger extraordinaire Joachim Boaz three books from his "SF Wall of Shame," nine science fiction novels he feels are "some of the worst SF ever written."  Joachim and I have different tastes, and I'd give at least four of these books (Farmer's To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Heinlein's Beyond this Horizon, Knight's Beyond the Barrier, and Platt's Planet of the Voles) passing, though not high, marks.  Today I finished another of Joachim's Wall of Shame books, Robert Silverberg's 1957 Master of Life and Death.

Joachim traded to me (more details of the trade here and here) a severely worn copy of the 1986 Tor paperback edition of the novel. The cover proclaims Master of Life and Death a classic, and upon the first page is inscribed the mysterious code "MAB."  Is there a science fiction collector out there calling herself "Queen Mab?"  I hope so!

Master of Life and Death has been printed again and again since it first appeared as half of an Ace Double, so somebody must like it.  Joachim is not one of those people.  Am I one of those people? 

Queen Mab, your legend lives on!

It looks like I am not one of those people. Master of Life and Death has lots of crippling problems, perhaps more than I can enumerate here. 

Master of Life and Death is one of those books with an unsympathetic protagonist. Roy Walton is the head of the Bureau of Population Equalization, a new agency founded just a few months ago to deal with the population problem that is plaguing the 23rd century.  To deal with the population problem (the Earth's population in the novel's 2232 is at seven billion...just like in real life's 2014) the Bureau puts to death babies with defects (examples provided include blindness, a propensity to suffer tuberculosis, and being "spastic") and old people who are unproductive.  Even if you are healthy you might not be safe from the Bureau.  If you own a large piece of property the Bureau can seize it to settle people on, and if you live in an overcrowded place, like Belgium, the Bureau can compel you, and your entire town, to move to a place that isn't overcrowded yet, like Patagonia.

(That's right, our main character Roy Walton thinks the world would be a better place if Stevie Wonder had been killed at birth.  Hey Roy, I just called to say I hate you.)

If this sounds elitist and anti-democratic, don't worry, it gets worse.  Roy Walton isn't just some cold bureaucrat, he has serious opinions about architecture and poetry.  And he is corrupt.  When his favorite living poet's son is born, and is identified as tubercular, the little boy is slated for the gas chamber.  So Roy goes into the computer files and falsifies the records so the poet's kid will not be killed.

The Bureau's powers are vast, and it is not, as we say nowadays, transparent.  The Bureau, in a way I didn't quite understand, is in charge of the top secret effort led by a famous scientist to terraform Venus, and of man's first interstellar space flight, a top secret one-year mission that started like 10 months before the Bureau was founded.  When somebody comes up with a way to prevent aging, Roy tries to hide this breakthrough from the people.

And then there is Roy's attitude towards free speech and the freedom of the press.  When a guy gives an anti-Bureau speech Walton inspires a mob to riot and kill him with their bare hands!  Roy uses Bureau funds to purchase the leading anti-Bureau newspaper and turn it into a pro-government rag.  Best of all, Roy puts subliminal advertising on TV to win everybody over to Bureau policy.

I kept thinking Roy was going to realize what he was doing was wrong, and dismantle the Bureau and/or introduce the sorts of checks and balances that make government bearable. But I was wrong; the book justifies all of the killing and torturing Roy does, and the favoritism he showed to the poet, and when Roy kills somebody who had information Roy needs (oops!), space aliens take the info out of the dead body deus ex machina style on the 217th page of the 219 page book!

A lot of things in the book ring false.  How is the Bureau, which is only six weeks old, in charge of all the outer space stuff, including a space flight which began almost a year ago? Shouldn't a research agency or the military be running something like that?   And how does the Bureau keep such things secret from the public?  There are sixteen people on the starship, and there are the scientists, technicians, and ground crew who must have worked on it. And why did all all the elected officials of all the powerful wealthy countries, and all the tax payers who voted for them and are footing the bill, meekly surrender all their power to the Bureau, whose leader hasn't faced election?

Then there are the Herschelites, a political faction opposed to the Bureau because they think the Bureau should be even more ruthless.  Roy Walton, who kills your baby and your grandma, steals your land and forces you to move three thousand miles at gunpoint, considers himself a moderate and deplores the Herschelites as radicals because they advocate sterilizing defectives.  Silverberg, I guess, just includes the Herschelites to try to make Roy look more moderate; they don't figure very much in the plot and aren't mentioned in the second half of the book at all.  Most of our villains are people who object to the Bureau stealing their stuff.

Another issue is the fact that we are repeatedly told that a world-wide referendum gave the Bureau all its powers, and that the UN supports the Bureau, but that the most popular newspaper is anti-Bureau (until Roy buys it with the taxpayers' money, I mean.)  Roy spies on a community meeting, and everybody hates the Bureau.  It feels like Silverberg is trying to have it both ways, telling us that the Bureau has an irrefutable public mandate but is also the underdog.  (I know real-life politicians do this, but it is annoying when they do it and it is annoying when an author does it.)

Master of Life and Death is dripping with elitist contempt for the ordinary man; we are told numerous times that the "unwashed masses" spend all their time watching kaleidoscope videos on TV, and that the best-selling newspaper is written in an "illiterate style."  The populace is such a flock of sheep that it only takes 24 hours for them to go from 90 percent against the Bureau to 90 in favor of it. Not that Silverberg doesn't also try to go populist on us, attacking wealthy land owners.    

It's time for your mind-picking!

So I don't like the book's politics or general attitude, some elements feel manipulative and others half-assed.  What about the characters?  Bad.  High points of Silverberg's characterizations of villains in the book include making one guy Roy has killed short, and telling us one of the wealthy landowners he has "mind picked" is fat.  And the plot and pacing?  Weak.  Almost the whole book is a guy sitting in an office having meetings or talking on the videophone! There is no tension or drama and nothing interesting happens.  

If this novel is one big joke, a satire of intrusive and unaccountable government, it is not funny and is incredibly subtle.  If it is a piece of advocacy that argues in favor of extreme government measures during an emergency it is a total failure because Silverberg spends no time or energy convincing us intellectually or emotionally that there really is an emergency.  If you want me to cheer on murdering or torturing a guy you are going to have to do better than just telling me that he's short and fat!

Thumbs down!

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After finishing the novel and drafting the above blog post I checked out Joachim's June 2011 review of Master of Life and Death.  Joachim and I may have different taste, but we agree on this one: it's a stinker.

Joachim includes in his review a list of three Silverbergs he has liked.  Silverberg has produced quite a few good novels, and so here's my list of Silverberg novels I am happy to recommend, three different ones than on Joachim's list: Kingdoms of the Wall, Dying Inside, and The Second Trip.  So you've got at least six Silverbergs to read before this one.

Thanks again to Joachim for making such a generous trade; even though this book was pretty weak, it is interesting to be more familiar with Silverberg's long and productive career.

Planet of the Voles by Charles Platt

Here we have another inmate from Joachim Boaz's Wall of Shame.  As you may recall, Joachim and I traded some SF paperbacks recently, he sending me some SF books he thought among "the worst ever written."  (More details of the trade, and discussion of one of the other Wall of Shame titles, which I actually liked, here.)  Since Joachim and I have somewhat different tastes, I was not reluctant to give Charles Platt's Planet of the Voles a spin.

Planet of the Voles first appeared in hard cover, adorned with a cool Paul Lehr cover, in 1971, the year of my birth.  Joachim sent me the 1972 Berkeley paperback; the painting is the same, but the cover text obscures the image a bit.  Some kind of color ad was bound between pages 96 and 97 originally (these old paperbacks often have ads for the Science Fiction Book Club or cigarettes) but a previous owner tore out the ad, leaving mere fragments behind. 

Planet of the Voles is an action adventure in which people shoot ray guns at each other and machete their way through jungles inhabited by giant reptiles and predatory birds, but it also takes a stab at being philosophical.  Unfortunately, Platt doesn't quite make the thing work; the two elements (space opera and philosophy) actually undermine each other, and he also makes irritating mistakes that diminish the entire effort.

It is the future, and man has colonized many planets.  Centuries of peace have led man to forget the arts of war and have bred out of him many of his aggressive instincts.  So, when the mysterious Volvanians start conquering human planets, the Earth has to genetically engineer fighting men and mass produce them in huge vats!

Tomas and Jan are just such men, crewmen of a space battleship on its way to liberate a planet the Volvanians have occupied.  Tomas and Jan are on the support staff, and don't fight on the front line.  Tomas was genetically engineered to be an artist; his job is to decorate the ship with murals and photographs, design insignia and medals, that sort of thing.  Jan was created to clean the narrow tube that runs the length of the ship and is essential to the hyperdrive; he's only five feet tall, and can't reach the controls of a suit of battle armor.

A Volvanian ship sneaks up on Tomas and Jan's ship during transit through hyperspace and attacks with a sort of poison gas weapon.  The ship itself suffers little damage, but the gas drives the servicemen insane so that they fight among themselves and open the airlocks, jettisoning all air and fuel.  Apparently by chance, T & J are the only survivors of the entire thousand man crew.  Now T & J, the least war-like of the ship's complement, have to get the ship, which comes out of hyperspace in orbit over the planet they came to liberate, working again.

T & J take a troop carrier to the surface, and have various adventures, rescuing the humans on the planet, infiltrating a Volvanian fortification, that sort of thing.  Then they lead the attack on the alien base, defeating the aliens and learning their strange secret!

During the attack in hyperspace that killed all of his comrades, Tomas got a glimpse of the commander of the Volvanian ship, a beautiful woman he later learned is known as Galvina.  He became obsessed with her, irrationally certain he had met her before and that somehow Galvina could reveal secrets about himself.  In the climax of the book Tomas confronts her, and learns about the Volvanians' psychic powers.  Using these powers, over twenty years ago Galvina tinkered with the vat in which Tomas was created, trying to make of him a Volvanian spy.  She made sure he survived the attack in hyperspace, hoping to meet him face to face and recruit him for behind-the-lines missions.

Tomas refuses to betray humankind, and Galvina escapes.  Tomas, feeling he doesn't really fit in with the humans, decides to strike out on his own rather than return to Earth.  In the last three pages of the book Tomas, no doubt to the chagrin of the taxpayers of Earth, steals the 500 meter long space battleship and he and Jon set out to explore the universe and maybe confront Galvina a second time.

isfdb image of hardcover edition

There are some interesting ideas and passable action scenes in Planet of the Voles that reminded me of space operas like E. E. Smith's Spacehounds of IPC or A. E. van Vogt's Rull stories.  The Volvanians enslave the humans on the planet by destroying all their food and then planting a bush which bears fruit that is nutritious, but turns people into almost mindless zombies.  The Volvanians then use the zombies' empty minds as amplifiers for their psychic powers.  In those Smith and Van Vogt stories the key to human victory is often scientific ingenuity, and that is true on the Volvanian-occupied planet; one of the humans on the planet is a biochemist, and is able to synthesize yeast to provide food for the resistance movement that links up with Tomas and Jon.

Another cool space opera gadget Platt includes in the novel is a small device that the Earth servicemen employ to control animals.  A little black box with prongs, you imbed it in the skull of a beast and then you are able to direct the beast.  T & J use these boxes to ride around on giant birds.

Unfortunately, for every fun idea like those, Platt commits a distracting error.  Sometimes he uses metric measurements, sometimes English measurements (the battleship is 500 meters long, the troop carrier is 30 feet long.)  The space battleship and the planet are never given names; the omniscient third-person narrator and the characters all just call them "the mother ship" and "the planet."  This feels sloppy.  The style is also bland, Platt failing to convey the kind of urgency, or fear, or thrill we hope to feel when guys are in firefights, or chases, or hacking their way through a jungle on an alien planet.

Another disappointment is the relationship between Tomas and Jon.  You get the feeling that Platt wanted to portray these two men developing a deep friendship based on the fact that they are outsiders, but in the end he just tells you they have developed a bond rather than demonstrating it.  I also expected more to happen between Tomas and Galvina, that they would fall in love and end the war, or fight to the death, or something.     

Then we have the philosophical aspects of the book.  The idea Platt is peddling is a sort of yin-yang thing, that a person and a society need to embrace both strength and beauty, aggression and reflection, muscle and mind, male and female, etc and etc, to flourish.  Tomas, our hero, is such a success because he is a well-rounded person, part human and part Volvanian, both artist and fighting man.  (Maybe Platt could have used the relationship between Tomas and Jon to demonstrate his yin-yang idea, by having each possess skills which complemented the others', but in fact Jon and Tomas have few scenes alone together and Jon mostly tags along while Tomas does almost everything that matters.)

The humans in the book are all male, and represent power and aggression; the Volvanians (the people of the vulva?) are ruled by females, and represent beauty and (I guess) the intellect, including subtlety, deception, and manipulation.  The Earth people have better force fields and energy guns, and the Volvanians compete by launching sneak attacks, using a surface fortress to act as a decoy when their real base is underground, and by using chemicals and psionics to mess with the Earthlings' minds.  

The way the two races represent the two sexes leads to what is probably the most memorable scene in the book, the embarrassing assault on the secret Volvanian base.  The Earth battleship, a long cylinder, penetrates the oval-shaped hanger doors of the alien base, which lies in a valley, and then from the nose of the battleship spew forth the Earth troops.  Platt leaves no doubt that this is supposed to represent the sex act when he tells us the interior of the Volvanian base has red walls that are moist!

It was a wide, deep shaft, almost as wide as the mother ship that had pushed into it.  The shaft led into the earth, curving slightly.  Its walls were moist with condensation, and a gentle red color.            

Besides causing embarrassing scenes like that, the philosophy of the book weakens the adventure story aspects of the book.  Over the course of the story the Volvanians kill hundreds of humans and enslave hundreds more by turning them into zombies.  We are also explicitly told that the Volvanians are the aggressors in the war and that for centuries humans have not made war on each other.  So it makes sense that the reader feel that the Volvanians are the villains.  But, because the ideology of the book requires some level of moral equivalency between the humans and aliens, we get disconcerting scenes in which we are expected to deplore how bloodthirsty the humans are.  We are also supposed to consider that the human buildings on the planet are more beautiful after the Volvanians' ray guns have melted their dull-colored vertical walls into brightly colored curves.  This undermines the gung ho fun often provided by military action adventures, and prevents the catharsis you find in stories in which, at the end, the villains are brought to justice.  And since Platt does not go as far as a book like The Forever War, in which the humans are the villains and the aliens innocent victims, Planet of the Voles ends up provoking mixed and muted feelings in the reader.

Planet of the Voles has many problems.  While it was disappointing and at times embarrassing, I didn't find reading it a painful experience, and I don't regret reading it.  The beginning is an OK adventure story, the end interesting in a bizarre way.  So, a sort of borderline case.

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After finishing Planet of the Voles and drafting the above blog post, I read Joachim's review, from July 2012.  Joachim proclaims the book terrible, awarding it one out of five stars.

Besides the fact that I am more forgiving to adventure stories and pulp than Joachim, I think the big difference between our views is our assessments of what Platt's "point" is.  I think the book is more or less sincere as an adventure story and as advocacy of a well-rounded individual and society.  Joachim suggests that Platt is claiming conflict between the sexes is inevitable and perhaps criticizing feminism, and/or that the book is a satire of space opera, a weak version of something Norman Spinrad might do.

The case for Planet of the Voles being a spoof space opera is pretty strong, but it is something that did not occur to me; the adventure elements felt totally sincere to me for some 170 of the book's 192 pages, and even the final attack on the base felt, to me, like overblown symbolism rather than a spoof of the space battles one finds in E. E. Smith.  Well, maybe the joke's on me this time.