Patterns of Chaos by Colin Kapp

"Press that button, Jaycee, you vindictive bitch.  If you dare.  I'd be interested to know what it does--to both of us."

Prepared as he was, the pulse of pain that hit him was far greater than he had imagined possible.

Back in early April I bought the 1973 Award Books printing of Patterns of Chaos in Zanesville, Ohio.  (The novel was first published across three issues of Worlds of If in 1972.)  The owner of the used bookstore where I purchased it asked me if I was a fan of author Colin Kapp.  When I admitted to not being familiar with his work, he told me that Kapp was "like Robert Heinlein or E. E. Smith."

"Well, good," I replied, "that's what I like."  Whether the gentleman was suggesting that Kapp had something specifically in common with Heinlein and Smith, or those two worthies were just the first SF writers that came to his mind, I couldn't tell, but I still took this as a propitious sign.  Another such sign was the gushing blurb from Galaxy on the cover--I tend to think of Galaxy as a relatively literary and snooty SF periodical, in contrast to, say, the science-heavy Astounding and the escapist pulps like Amazing and Planet Stories.  If the pretentious snobs at Galaxy liked it, how bad could it be?

(If I was the cynical type I would think it significant that in 1972 Galaxy and If were both published by UPD and even had the same editor, Eljer Jakobsson.)

The protagonist of Patterns of Chaos is Bron.  As the story opens, Bron wakes up from a coma and finds himself in the middle of an evacuated city being blasted to rubble by the energy weapons of hostile space warships.  Even worse, Bron has lost his memory and has no idea who he is, where he is, or what he is doing!

Luckily, voices in Bron's head fill him in!  Centuries ago humanity spread across the Milky Way and colonized many systems, but these colonies have formed disparate cultures which don't get along.  Currently a terrible interstellar war is underway; the aggressors in the war are "the Destroyers," a space empire which has already laid waste to three dozen inhabited planets.  Bron, Bron learns, is a Terran commando on a mission to infiltrate a Destroyer ship and find out where the Destroyer home world is so it can be attacked by the Terran space navy.  The voices in Bron's head are his controllers back at HQ on Terra, on the other side of the galaxy.  They explain that Bron is disguised as Ander Haltern, a highly respected cleric of this Christian planet, Onaris, which is being conquered by the Destroyers at this very moment--the REMFs on the safe end of Bron's brainphone are sure that the Destroyers will capture Bron and bring him home, revealing to Bron's superiors the location of their base.

Sure enough, Bron is seized and carried off Onaris in a Destroyer ship.  Hours later Onaris is wiped out by huge missiles which streak by the Destroyer task force.  The Terrans believe that the missiles were launched by the Destroyers, but the Destroyers present evidence to Bron that somebody else, a malignant alien force from the galaxy of Andromeda, blew up Onaris, as well as all those other planets!

Patterns of Chaos is one of those novels that is full of conspiracies and mysteries, in which you are never sure what is really going on.  As the story progresses Kapp forces the characters and us readers to reassess our beliefs about the motives and objectives of each individual character and each of the three polities involved in this intergalactic crisis.  Patterns of Chaos is also a novel which dispenses with any commitment to ideas of good and evil, of justice and injustice.  Kapp populates his book with unsympathetic characters who act amorally at best and often with radical selfishness and perverse malice, and never condemns their behavior explicitly or implicitly.

The two most prominent of Bron's controllers are representative.  A male controller, Ananias, is suspected of being some kind of spy, saboteur, or coup-plotting conspirator, while a female controller, Jaycee, is some kind of sadist (she's not the only sadist in the book.)  The dialogue between Ananias and Jaycee and between Bron and Jaycee bristles with disturbingly abusive sexual tension--Ananias and Bron repeatedly call Jaycee a bitch, and she often threatens, and sometimes commits, physical violence against them.  Bron is always trying to rebel against his controllers and in response Ananias and Jaycee warn him they control mechanisms which can inflict punishing pain on Bron or simply kill him.  At one point Ananias tries to push the "murder button" and Jaycee grabs him and breaks both his thumbs!  (Maybe being a REMF is not as cushy as we thought!)

Significantly, Ananias and Jaycee succeed in their ultimate aims--these creepos live happily ever after!

In the final portions of the book we (and Bron) learn that Bron is some kind of superman, a "chaos catalyst" who can alter the course of history.  Before losing his memory, he worked with Ananias to exaggerate the Destroyer threat so that the Terran government would spend a pile of money expanding its space navy.  Then they manipulated events and worked behind the scenes in concert with the Destroyers to make sure the Terran and Destroyer fleets would meet--not to fight each other, but to unite under Brom's command to fight off the invading armada of those Andromedans. After defeating the alien fleet Bron leads the first human expedition outside the Milky Way; on the Andromedans' homeworld he finds their civilization has decayed but left behind technology which will allow him to unite the human race and launch mankind's conquest of the entire universe!

Patterns of Chaos is fast-paced and jam-packed with SF elements of the mind-blowing surrealist kind.  The novel's version of hyperspace is very trippy--each human ship bears within itself a "subspace cavity" which includes a 3D "map" of the galaxy. Navigators string floss-thin copper wires between the minute model stars, and then the ship shrinks inside-out into its own cavity and rides those wires.  People caught within the cavity during a subspace jump are apt to see their own tiny ship passing between the stars and to go insane.  Another surreal episode has Bron boarding a spaceship which has been transformed into a mirror image of itself--text on control panels appears backwards to him, meters, dials and keyboards are reversed, etc. Ananias was on the ship during its "lateral inversion," the shock of which killed the rest of the crew and left Ananias with his heart on the right side of his chest instead of the left.

Reminding me of the Nexialism in the novel version of A. E. van Vogt's Voyage of the Space Beagle, the guy Bron is impersonating, Haltern, is a "syncretist." A syncretist, Bron is told, is one who "works across the channels of scientific specialization rather than along them." Strengthening Bron's disguise is the fact that, through a "hypnotic synthesis" process, Haltern's personality has been overlaid on top of Bron's--if Bron can relax, this Haltern personality will take over in response to particular stimuli, like if Bron has to interact with Onarians or is asked questions about syncretism. (Should that fail, and it does, the real Haltern is hanging out with Ananias and Jaycee back on Terra and can coach Bron, Cyrano-style, in a pinch.)

Syncretists are experts in studying "the patterns of chaos;" chaos, Haltern explains, is "the whole spectrum of cause and effect...considered not as connected incidents but from an entropic standpoint...." Here is some more sample mumbo jumbo from Haltern (we get several pages of this sort of material):

Both cause and effect make detectable entropic 'sparks' that become the centers of expanding shock spheres.  If you can analyze enough of the sphere to be able to determine the radius of its curvature and its intensity you can locate the position of a cause or resultant both in space and time by extrapolating along the geocentric axis.   

The Terrans, Destroyers and Andromedan invaders all have means to detect chaos shock spheres, and can thus predict the future.  The extragalactic aliens, it turns out, predicted the existence of superman Bron millions of years ago, and their armada was sent to the Milky Way with the sole intent of killing him.  (These aliens never invented an FTL drive, and so the fleet is robotic and during its million year transit the race that built it fell into decadence and barbarism.)  Bron, as a chaos catalyst, is able to buck the trends predicted by the chaos detectors, and thus escape death as well as outwit the human race and make himself their dictator with Jaycee as his Queen.

This cover faithfully depicts the
final chapter of the book.

I've already hinted that sadism and masochism are themes of the novel.  Bron gets tortured and beaten repeatedly, and in his guise of religious fanatic Haltern he wears a futuristic living hair shirt in penance for an imagined sin, essentially torturing himself.  This brings us to another theme of Kapp's book, religion.  With the exception of Haltern, the main characters all seem to be pagans; at least they associate Christianity with weakness and when surprised exclaim "Jupiter!" or "Zeus!" the way a Christian might gasp "Christ!" or "Oh my God!"  Kapp seems to have contempt for Christianity; in the opening chapters of the book on Onaris we see that the church establishment there is corrupt (the head priest is a sadist) and its doctrines are nonsense which distract people from reality.  As part of his Haltern disguise Bron carries an antique Bible, and in a MacGyver moment (he's trying to get out of a prison cell) he rips pages out of the Good Book and uses them to start a fire! Is Kapp, whose novel pointedly ignores all issues of morality, dismissing the value of the Bible as philosophy and literature?

I think I can give Patterns of Chaos a moderate recommendation.  Its structure, style and themes are more reminiscent to me of van Vogt than Heinlein or Smith.  The style isn't so hot, the characters are not deep and the only strong feeling the book inspires is one of uneasiness (some will find the book's attitude towards women and/or Christianity offensive), but because it moves quickly and is so crazy and full of so many wild SF ideas, it is entertaining.

1968 stories by Burt Filer, E. G. Von Wald, Colin Kapp, Sydney Van Scyoc & Laurence Yep

Let's continue to explore World's Best Science Fiction 1969, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr and adorned with a terrific cover by John Schoenherr and 21 fun illustrations by Jack Gaughan.  Today we're reading stories by authors whose work I have never read before!

"Backtracked" by Burt Filer

This is a solid story that first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  isfdb lists a dozen stories by Filer, but this is the first story by him I have read.

The premise of the story is a little gimmicky, but it works.  In the near future people can travel back in time and "replace" their earlier selves--you go to sleep in, say, 1968 as a 20-year old, and wake up the next morning in the body of yourself as a 25-year old--in 1973 you must have decided to backtrack to this date.  The big catch is that you lose all the memories you accumulated in those five years.  Why would anybody do this?  To prevent (and/or to forget) some terrible event.

The character in the story is a weak cripple (he was born with polio) with a beautiful wife.  He wakes up one morning in a body ten years older, but very strong, very athletic--he must have spent ten years exercising before backtracking!  Later that day his wife is threatened with death in an accident--our protagonist requires all his  newfound strength and agility to save her life.  He sacrificed ten years of his life to save his wife's, but was it worth it?

An effective and entertaining story, even though the premise probably doesn't make much sense if you think about it.

"HEMEAC" by E. G. Von Wald

Von Wald has eleven stories listed on isfdb.  This one first appeared in Galaxy.

In a post-apocalyptic future order is maintained within the walls of a university by the robots and computers who run the institution.  These machines rigidly control every aspect of the lives of the "students" who have lived within the university for decades and are horrified of the chaos that they are told reigns outside the university grounds. We follow a day in the life of one of these students as he struggles to follow the exact and multifarious dictates of the machines.  But this is no ordinary day--satisfying the machines and avoiding punishment (banishment outside the campus) has become increasingly difficult as the machines deteriorate and malfunction and issue increasingly contradictory and arbitrary commands.  As the story progresses we learn how this bizarre milieu came about, and witness its final collapse.  Will the students welcome the deactivation of their computer masters as a liberation and embrace their freedom, or have they been turned into Big Brother-loving flesh robots fit only to obey?

I'm going to have to give this story a borderline thumbs down.  It is more like the description of a setting than an actual story, and feels longer than it need be to achieve its modest goals.  The ending is more anticlimactic than surprising, and I didn't feel for the characters or laugh at the jokes.  It is possible the story is a satire of academia, a complaint that colleges don't teach kids how to think but instead enforce an intellectual orthodoxy, but if this was Von Wald's intention he or she was too subtle.    

"The Cloudbuilders" by Colin Kapp  

There is a long tradition of science fiction stories which glorify scientists and engineers, and which try to teach you some kind of science stuff.  There are also plenty of science fiction stories which advocate that a small elite of smart people manipulate society so it evolves in the "right" direction.  In "The Cloudbuilders" we get both of these elements.

Europe, many years after some apocalypse, has a sort of Medieval/Renaissance level society, with no electricity or petroleum products or gunpowder.  The hot air balloon powered by methane is cutting edge technology.  (The great monotheistic religions have also been forgotten, and people in the story invoke Zeus, Aphrodite, and other classical deities.)

Jacobi is a member of a Guild with access to artifacts of "the age of miracles," radios for example, which they keep secret from the ordinary populace.  He travels from Guild HQ in a large city to a remote village where lives one of the most intelligent and ambitious of balloon makers, Timor.  Jacobi's mission is to help Timor develop the hydrogen balloon--the Guild's long term objective is to reintroduce high technology to the world, but at a measured pace which they control.  Timor's beautiful daughter becomes Jacobi's lover; she acts as a spy, hoping to get Guild secrets she can pass on to her father.

A major obstacle to Jacobi and Timor's objectives are raiders who have over a hundred balloon vessels and periodically attack Timor's settlement.  Jacobi uses his superior technical knowledge and trickery to sabotage the sky pirates' ships and exterminate them.  This reminded me of one of the early stories of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, in which the Foundation sells faulty space warships to some barbarians.  The Guild in "The Cloudbuilders"is really quite similar to Asimov's Foundation.

I'm afraid this story is getting a marginal negative vote.  It feels long and boring, with a bland style and lots of superfluous description of technical matters and other extraneous topics.  Kapp tries to make a tragic figure out of Jacobi, telling us that he is lonely because he is two centuries of education above everybody else and melodramatically showing us how he is selflessly devoting his life to the good of humanity by making himself the dictator of Europe, but it didn't work on me.  One of my pet peeves is having to listen to mothers and school teachers moan about how they are doing the most important job in the world but not getting the recognition and remuneration they deserve ("I give and I give!")--they chose jobs which essentially consist of dominating vulnerable people, but are always trying to convince you they are the victims, not the people they are ordering around and yelling at all day.  "The Cloudbuilders" gave me that same feeling whenever Kapp took a break from teaching me how to manufacture hydrogen or methane or coke and tried to do a little characterization.

Kapp has quite a few books and stories to his credit.  Maybe I'll buy the DAW editions of his Cageworld series if I ever see them; apparently they co-star a sexy girl with grey skin.  "The Cloudbuilders" first appeared in the anthology New Writings in SF 12 and is the title story of an anthology produced by the fun people at Ramble House in 2013.  

"A Visit to Cleveland General" by Sydney Van Scyoc

This story is about maternalistic tyranny--now here is something I can sink my teeth into!

Albin Johns is a young journalist. His mother is constantly nagging and guilt-tripping him via the video phone which covers one wall of his home--in this dystopian future you can't refuse or ignore calls!  Of course Mom thinks she is helping him by constantly telling him what to do, and of course she thinks she is the injured party.  ("'I'm doing everything a mother can,' his mother moaned.")

Every morning John takes pills; he thinks the pills are to aid his memory because he suffered injuries in a vehicular accident which killed his brother, but in reality the pills inhibit his memories of the traumatic accident--sometimes he not only forgets he was hurt in the accident, or that there was an accident, but even that he had a brother!

Johns's first big journalistic assignment is today; he has been put on the hospital beat. (His paper has a regular column about the local hospitals.)  At the hospital he is given a tour by the assertive veteran "senior social worker," Miss Kling, who "remembers vividly the day when doctors maintained private practices...."  Johns finds that this woman unilaterally runs the lives of the patients who come into her care.  In the maternity ward, for example, Kling decides which pregnant women will give birth, which will get abortions, which will put their offspring up for adoption and which will be sterilized.  She takes babies from women she judges unworthy and gives them to other more respectable women.  The patients have no say in the matter, and Kling uses drugs which blot out memory and her own skills of persuasion to give patients illusions that comfort them and conceal Kling's shenanigans.  Mothers whose children have been seized believe their babies have died, while those who suffered miscarriages are fooled into thinking the babies they leave with are their own biological offspring.

One of Johns's colleagues at the paper tells him today's medical system is an improvement over the old days, when people suffered fear and uncertainty.  At the end of the story we realize that the hospital staff (Kling herself, perhaps) writes the newspaper's regular column, which always lionizes the hospital, and uses memory drugs to make journalists think they wrote it.  A lucky mistake made by Kling briefly clears Johns's memory and we learn the truth of his and his brother's air car accident and their recovery in this very hospital.

A fairly good story about how people with power have contempt for you and love telling you how to live your life, and have little trouble convincing themselves they are controlling you for your own good.  "A Visit to Cleveland General" also has a pretty good horror story structure and horror elements.  "A Visit to Cleveland General" first appeared in Galaxy. Van Scyoc has a pretty extensive oeuvre; maybe I should check out more of her work.

"The Selchey Kids" by Laurence Yep

I think this is Yep's first published story; it appeared in Worlds of If. Yep seems to have achieved considerable success as a writer of fantasy trilogies for teens later in his career.

Our narrator Deucalion ("Duke"), ostensibly the son of marine scientists, is one of the few survivors of the cataclysm that saw California sink beneath the waves. After growing into maturity and getting an English degree in flyover country, where he misses the ocean ("I hated every moment of it....I grew up among the corn and wheat fields like a strong weed") he returned to the West Coast to work with a team of marine biologists who knew his parents.  Their leader is a Noe Selchey, and one prominent member is Pryn, an attractive young woman who can read minds.  These scientists have been training two dolphins, Ossie and Ollie, to speak English--they already have vocabularies of ten words!

Duke, Pryn, Ossie and Ollie go on a salvage mission, diving into the submerged city where Duke's parents had their lab.  Examining records from a water tight compartment, Duke realizes his parents were not his parents at all--he is the result of a genetic experiment in which a human sperm (Noe Selchey's!) fertilized a dolphin ovum (Ossie and Ollie's mother's!)  Things get crazier still when Duke has to fight a monster to the death to save Pryn, and it turns out the monster is another one of his half-brothers, the product of Selchey's sperm fertilizing the egg of a giant octopus!

I like the plot and structure of this story, but I think Yep overdoes the angst a little bit (Duke is always trying to commit suicide, for example) and the metaphors and similes; on the first page we get  "Sand grips my back like a myriad of stars moving down my spine.  The sun comes up on tiptoe beneath the sun-burnt clouds and wine-stained sky."  Yep's excuse is that Duke is an English major and failed writer, but I don't think the depression stuff or the purple prose adds to the story.  Still, I give "The Selchey Kids" a lukewarm recommendation.

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None of these stories is abysmal; even the ones I gave a thumbs down to are worth reading and have some good elements.  World's Best Science Fiction 1969 seems like a strong collection so far, and I still haven't read the stories by big league writers Poul Anderson, Robert Silverberg, Brian Aldiss and Fritz Leiber.