Eight Against Utopia by Douglas R. Mason

"A group of us are aiming to set up a colony outside--in the open.  We need two or three more people.  Would you come?"

"How is that possible?  The books say that life outside had to be given up.  North is too cold.  South is too hot and has hostile cities.  You will not be allowed to go."

"Never mind about that." 

Publisher's Weekly, your source for
fake news--every word of that blurb is false

In our last episode I told you that I purchased my 1970 paperback copy of Douglas R. Mason's 1966 novel From Carthage Then I Came, retitled Eight Against Utopia in this edition, partly because it appeared to be inspired or influenced by one of the 20th century's foremost poets, T. S. Eliot, one of the most important of all Christian theologians, Augustine of Hippo, and the ancient tales of the sons of Oedipus.  I even described my experience of reading Seven Against Thebes by Greek playwright Aeschylus and The Thebaid by Roman poet Statius.  Now let's read the lovely blue paperback which set me on that mission of reading books from 2,000 years ago.  Joachim Boaz, star SF blogger and tweeter, warned us that Eight Against Utopia is dull, but let's cross our fingers and dive in anyway!

Seven thousand years ago mankind retreated into domed cities in order to survive a new ice age!  (This must be the ice age J.G. Bennett warned us about on Robert Fripp's experimental rock music album Exposure!)  Over the millennia, ostensibly to conserve scarce resources and maintain order in the shelter's tight confines, the northernmost domed city, Carthage, sited on the African coast of the Mediterranean, has developed into a repressive authoritarian state; each citizen's bodily functions and brainwaves are monitored, so the government can even tell (more or less) what you are thinking!  This system doesn't have the capacity to read everybody's mind at once, reminding the reader of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, and with effort clever people can evade its probing by filling the surface of their minds with a jumble of tedious calculations and trick it by thinking of forbidden matters via misdirecting symbols. 

Gaul T. Kalmar is an engineer in Carthage, and because his duties include doing maintenance on the outer dome, he knows full well that the ice age is over--he has opened hatches and spent time in an almost forgotten observatory atop the dome, and there he has breathed the outside air and seen that the dome is surrounded by forests instead of glaciers.  He wants to leave Carthage and start a new, more free, society in Europe he will call "New Troy."  He gathers together seven additional like-minded people, including a beautiful psychologist, Tania Clermont, and they plot their escape.  The headshrinker (or "mind-bender," as they call psychologists in this book) is a critical member of the team--in her office is a room shielded from the mind-reading rays, so the pioneers can discuss their plans openly in there.  (People can actually sense the oppressive intrusion into their minds of the government monitors, and so to treat her patients Clermont needs a place where they can temporarily escape this source of anxiety.)

One of the remarkable things about Eight Against Utopia is that it is chockablock with learned cultural references.  There are the aforementioned quotes from Eliot's The Waste Land and Four Quartets, a description of a woman as having a "Marie Antoinette bust," a passage in which the "posture of the wife of Indra" (link NSFW!) is mentioned, another in which a character refers to La Venus du Gaz, and many more.  Of course I enjoy these nods to works of art with which I am familiar, and enjoy looking up online mentioned works with which I am unfamiliar.  (Just a few days ago I was reading Wyndham Lewis's Rude Assignment, and was moved to look up Gerald Leslie Brockhurst because Lewis mentioned him.  Even though Lewis brought Brockhurst's paintings up as an example of lowbrow gunk that appeals to the masses, I kind of liked them!)  Unfortunately, Mason's esoteric references add almost nothing to his book!

Firstly, the fact that the characters are intimately familiar with the work of T. S. Eliot and Pablo Picasso makes them seem more like 1950s grad students in the humanities than the engineers and psychologists of a eugenically bred, constantly surveilled and intensely propagandized population of the year 9000 A. D.  Mason is apparently more interested in showing off his own erudition than in conjuring up the atmosphere of an alien milieu and depicting the mindset of its inhabitants.

Secondly, all these erudite allusions and quotations are not integral building blocks of a deeply philosophical work, but merely window dressing tossed practically at random into a routine adventure story.  Despite the cover text that invokes George Orwell's 1984 and the cradle-to-grave welfare state, Eight Against Utopia doesn't have much to say about how a state socialist system operates or what it does to human psychology and sociology, and it isn't a defense of individualism or a celebration of man's unquenchable desire for freedom.  Rather, it is a series of tedious engineering scenes and mediocre action scenes starring a superfluity of bland and forgettable characters.

The bulk of the first half or so of the novel consists of detailed descriptions of Kalmar and company secretly digging through the dome foundation (they have a sort of hand held disintegrator device called a "matter pulverizer") in search of a point of egress and sabotaging the city's power source, which they hope will hamper the security forces' efforts to track them down after their breakout.  What Mason describes are not emotions or psychological states, but architecture and the laborious cutting of walls and opening of seized doors, and thus these scenes generate no suspense or fear and do not move or even interest the reader.  I have to admit that I found these engineering scenes difficult to visualize, maybe because I have only the dimmest sense of what "tie bars," "flanges" and "culverts" really look like and in what context one encounters them, but also, I think, because of another problem, Mason's writing style, which is not good.

Instead of explaining things clearly, Mason employs a style full of euphemisms, cliches, and not-at-all-funny ironic deadpan humor, which not only makes it hard to tell what is going on in the many scenes that include architectural and geographical description, but undercuts any excitement or tension the action scenes might generate.

Another distracting tic of Mason's is his reusing again and again the same words and phrases, even though plenty of perfectly suitable synonyms are available.  We see "tack" (for direction or approach) three times in the book's first chapter alone, and Mason uses the phrase "when the balloon goes up" (meaning when some dangerous operation has irrevocably begun) on pages 43, 46 and 57.  This brings us back to my earlier complaint: why are people who have lived in a dome for 7,000 years using sailing and ballooning metaphors, anyway?  These people have never seen the ocean or the sky!  If Mason is going to make no effort to depict the mindset of people living in an environment radically different than our own, why does he set his story in such an environment?

A passage that I think demonstrates many of the essential characteristics of Eight Against Utopia comes on the day our heroes make their break for freedom (the day the balloon goes up!)  While everybody is hustling to the airlock and the hovercraft the men of the group have excavated, Tania Clermont is revealed to be a traitor working for the government!  When Clermont pulls her government-issued gun, one of the men, Shultz, knocks her cold with a karate chop, and then he carries her out of the dome on his shoulder because he still thinks he can make her his girlfriend!

She was very light.  He slung her over his shoulder and through the thin leotard could feel the pneumatic tension of her jagana against the side of his face.  Her scent was a matter of some subtlety and care, with a faint overtone of sandalwood.  Without overt intention, she was doing a fair job of mind-bending.  

I'm guessing "pneumatic," which Mason uses four times over the course of the book to describe women's bodies, is another Eliot reference, especially since at one point it is used in the same sentence with "Phoenician sailor," a famous phrase from The Waste Land, but I've never seen "jagana" before.  (I mean I've never seen the word--I can assure you I have seen a woman's jagana...whatever it is.)

Besides Mason's useless literary references, lame jokes, and vague descriptions, this passage also serves as an example of the novel's attitude towards sex and gender--were Eight Against Utopia to take flight in today's grrrlpower/MeToo era I suspect it would run into some heavy flak!  Not only are there many "male gaze" scenes and groping scenes, but during all the action sequences the women are essentially burdens--men need to tell them what to do, carry them over obstacles, rescue them, etc.  We are told that women are less adept than men at concealing their thoughts from the government monitor rays, so Kalmar keeps the women in the dark during the planning stages of their breakout.

Six of the party (this count includes unconscious Tania Clermont) fly off in the dusty old hovercraft, but the fuzz are hot on their tails and Kalmar and sexy redhead female engineer Jane Welland are left behind.  In the third quarter of the novel we get long descriptions of the six baling out the hovercraft and rigging a makeshift sail after the machine loses power and lands in the ocean, and long descriptions of Kalmar and Welland fleeing Carthage on foot.  The team's sabotage having cut the city's power, the pair traverse darkened walkways, creep through empty maintenance tunnels and then ascend the shaft of an inert elevator.  Under cover of darkness, a cop Kalmar already has a grudge against tries to rape a woman we never heard about before whom he just picks out of a crowd, Goda Hurst, and our hero Kalmar stumbles on this crime and takes it upon himself to rescue her.  Hurst joins the fugitive party and promptly falls in love with Kalmar, incurring Welland's jealousy.  From the secret little observatory atop the dome the three rappel down to the surface.

Carthaginian security forces pursue the two groups of fugitives, and we get chase scenes and fight scenes.  Kalmar's trio captures an aircraft from their pursuers, and the two groups of refugees are reunited.  They are chased into an old military installation at Gibraltar in the final quarter of the book, and there Mason gives us another punishing dose of descriptions of architecture and climbing and tunnel running and cutting holes in walls.  Tania the treacherous shrink is vaporized by the security troops' energy weapons, but don't feel bad--she had repented of her treachery and faced death with equanimity, and within minutes Shultz develops a crush on Goda Hurst.  (Any port in a storm, I guess.)  They find a MTB or some such military boat, preserved as a museum exhibit.  After 7,000 years its engine and rapid fire deck gun still operate like clockwork, so our heroes crew the thing and, in the shadow of "The Rock," win a naval battle against five Carthaginian hovercraft.  Then they sail to England to restart civilization.
   
What a disappointment!  Eight Against Utopia's references to classical and modernist literature are only skin deep and the political and philosophical issues revolving around the individual's relationship to the state get more of an airing on the back cover than in the actual text, leaving us with a 150-page book about engineering, sex and violence, but all the engineering, sex and violence scenes are inept!  Thumbs down!  (Gotta agree with Joachim this time!)

Seven Against Thebes by Aeschylus and The Thebaid by Statius

...Many a time our race has been
Ill-fortuned, plaything of the fickle Fates...
                                                         -Statius

In May, the wife and I drove around the Carolinas, visiting members of her family who have fled the winters of the upper Middle West, taking in art galleries, and shopping at used bookstores.  At one such store, Mr. K's, I purchased Eight Against Utopia, a 1970 paperback edition of Douglas R. Mason's 1966 science fiction novel, which appeared in hardcover as From Carthage Then I Came.  I bought it largely because of its gorgeous blue cover, but also because it presents itself as steeped in sophisticated literature and Christian thought--the paperback title is no doubt a reference to the war between Polynices and Eteocles, the sons of Oedipus and rival claimants to the throne of Thebes, and I'm guessing the hardcover title is a reference to St. Augustine and/or T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and on the publication page we see acknowledgment that Eliot's The Waste Land and Four Quartets are quoted within the text.

I have been reading Eliot lately and so am familiar with The Waste Land and Four Quartets (if you want a taste of the MPorcius "genteel poverty" lifestyle, listen to Eliot read his poems here and here while you hand wash the dishes and fold your own laundry), but it has been years since I have read about Oedipus's unruly children, so I decided to reacquaint myself with their shenanigans by reading some of the classics in translation on my bookshelves.  (During the early to mid-1990s, while I was working at a bookstore, I was considering a career as an academic focusing on late 18th-century Britain and its culture, and so purchased and read a bunch of Greek and Roman literature in translation, thinking it would help me get into the mindset of people like Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, whose education and entertainment consisted in large part of these ancient texts.)

If you dare, share my journey through a world of people who seem to spend all their time mixed up in incest, murder, and suicide, or fighting bloody battles against gods, monsters and each other, by clicking below.

Tomorrow Part Deux: John Keith Mason, Brian Aldiss, Sonya Dorman & Terry Carr

In our last episode we read three stories from Roger Elwood's 1975 anthology of original stories, Tomorrow. Those three tales took up like 100 pages; today we've got four stories which are quite short.

"Arctic Rescue" by John Keith Mason

One of the complaints about Roger Elwood's anthologies is that they were (this is a quote from Elwood critic Theresa Nielsen Hayden that appears at Wikipedia) "peculiarly long on authors who had slight or nonexistent publishing credentials."  This is obviously not the case with Tomorrow--in this blog post alone we have towering icon Brian Aldiss, the well-known editor Terry Carr, and Sonya Dorman, whose fiction I am not familiar with both whose name I have seen on the cover of F&SF and Galaxy.  (Even if Elwood really did publish lots of stories by relative unknowns, if you spin that as "provides opportunities for new voices to be heard" it doesn't sound like some crime, but a service to the SF community!)  But John Keith Mason perhaps does qualify as a "slight" author--according to isfdb, he published only eight stories; five in the 1940s under the name John Hollis Mason, and then three in the '70s.  "Arctic Rescue" would be his last published story.

A space boat crashes in the Arctic, and an Inuit rescues the alien who is thrown clear and nearly dies of frostbite. The Earthling takes the extraterrestrial back to his igloo where his wife nurses him back to health.  Recovered, the alien, whose species is part of an interstellar union which has abolished war, contacts the space ship which is orbiting Earth studying our civilization, and then talks to the Inuit couple via telepathy.  The alien's family comes down to collect him, and everybody expresses gratitude and brotherliness and all that.

Acceptable, but totally pedestrian.  Maybe it would be interesting to students of portrayals of non-whites and race relations in SF (the Inuit talks about white people and how they differ from Inuits a bit)?

"Always Somebody There" by Brian Aldiss

My feelings about Brian Aldiss's individual productions run the gamut.  I loved Malacia Tapestry, liked Starship (AKA Non-Stop), thought the Helliconia books full of good ideas but nonetheless kind of boring, and was dismissive of his pretentious experimental triptychs.  So I never know how a piece of Aldiss's fiction which is new to me is going to impress me.  But, in general, I find Aldiss an interesting person with interesting views (he is an important SF critic and historian) whose fiction is always worth checking out.

(A few years ago tarbandu had a good blog post about the Helliconia books in which he sets them in the context of their time of publication.)

I think we are going to have to call "Always Somebody There" a New Wave story.  A spaceship left Earth long ago to search for "the Creator," its crew consisting of a man and a computer.  The man has been in deep freeze for what has seemed to the computer almost 60 million years, but due to relativistic effects, the time passed in the outside universe has been much longer.  So long that the universe has collapsed and a new universe sprung up.

(This is one of those stories in which the human is not really like the humans we know, the computer not like the computers we know, and they weren't really searching for God, but an "objective" that could "be expressed only in mathematical symbols," but words like "Creator" have to be used because they are the only crude intellectual tools at our disposal.)

The human is defrosted and the explorers open the viewports to look at the new universe.  All the laws of physics out there are different.  They land on an "octahedral" planet the size of a soccer field inhabited by creatures like blue-feathered kangaroos with heads on their feet.  The human leaves the ship, but the ship shrinks because "in this universe, time was as much a regular dimension as height or length...." so he cannot get back in it.  He realizes that he will have to stand still on this little planet forever--oddly enough, just this misfortune befell him in the dream he had while in deep freeze for 60 million years.

This story is only five pages long, so it is not a big waste of your time, but I can't say it is rewarding.  Barely acceptable?

"Death or Consequences" by Sonya Dorman

As I noted above, I recognize Dorman's name but am little acquainted with her work, which appears to consist of two dozen stories and a fix-up novel, some poems (I actually read one way back when which appeared in the experimental Quark series) and the book reviews in the June 1977 "Special Women's Issue" of Analog.  I mention the book reviews because one of the books reviewed is Barry Malzberg's Down Here in the Dream Quarter.  What might she have said about the collection of mid-1970s Malzberg stories?  I am succumbing to an ineluctable desire to order this magazine from ebay! While I'm at it I guess I should order a copy of Down Here in the Dream Quarter as well, which I do not own (though I have read stories from it, like the amusing "Ballad of Slick Sid" and two pieces that appeared in Elwood's Future Corruption, "On the Campaign Trail" and "Streaking."

Ebay, here I come!

Alright, back to "Death or Consequences." Like "Arctic Rescue," this story consists of pretty ordinary SF stuff, but I think Dorman's technique elevates it a bit.  Seventeen-year old Sandra, our first-person narrator, wakes up in a space station in 2108--back in the 1970s she was put in deep freeze by her wealthy parents because she had cancer. She has been thawed and cured because of her musical talent--because Earth is overcrowded, lots of frozen people have never been revived, and priority is given to people with special abilities.

Dorman focuses largely on Sandra's emotional reactions, but perhaps more interesting is how she (Dorman) develops a pervasive theme of disappointment in the future--not only does Sandra learn that the Earth is overcrowded and efforts to colonize other planets have come to nothing, but Dorman gives us the idea that everything in the future is fake, phony, fraudulent.  One of the many elements contributing to this theme is when Sandra, who is some kind of prodigy with the flute, classical guitar and piano, hears 22nd-century music for the first time--a recording of an "impertinent, repetitive" "electronic tune" that she immediately recognizes as a mere "popular song."  I always find it interesting when older SF writers like Poul Anderson (Dorman was born in 1924, making her two years older than Anderson), writing in a time when rock and roll and other types of pop music had triumphed, champion classical music.  This is in contrast with such writers as Michael Moorcock (born 1939) who lauds the Beatles in the Jerry Cornelius stories and gently pokes fun at their popularity in the Hawkmoon stories, and Harlan Ellison (born 1934) who publicly welcomed the death of an (unnamed) woman who had the temerity to criticize Jimi Hendrix.

Not bad.

"Castle in the Stars" by Terry Carr

Carr is more famous for his work as an editor, but isfdb lists three novels by him (Joachim Boaz read his third and apparently most ambitious novel, Cirque, last year) and three dozen stories by him.  I don't think I have ever read any of his fiction--Tomorrow is providing me several opportunities to sample authors for the first time.

This is another traditional piece, one about space explorers with a clearly foreshadowed twist ending.  For decades mankind has searched the galaxy, fruitlessly, for signs of intelligent life.  This story is narrated by a member of a three-man team who finally discovers an alien building on a planet where everything is large, because of the low gravity, I guess.  Sand dunes are five hundred feet high, for example.  The three spacemen explore the building, but it seems to lack any real entrance or contents. Suddenly, they realize that it must be a toy or work of art--not a functional building at all, but the alien equivalent of a sand castle, indicating that the aliens must have been hundreds of feet tall.

"Castle in the Stars" is not bad, but it is no more than a trifle.

**********

Four OK stories, though the Aldiss is on the verge of being bad and the Dorman on the edge of "good" territory.  I'm kind of thinking of these as "filler" stories.

We finish up with Tomorrow in our next episode.

Kavin's World by David Mason

"Be careful," said the high priestess.  "Even when you think you defy the Goddess you do her will."

We all learned in college that we live in a patriarchy, but somehow you'll still sometimes, in the dark corners, encounter men who will complain that women are always manipulating them, be it with their strategically deployed tears, subtle tricks, outrageous lies, ability to "lay a guilt trip on you, man" or sexual wiles.  On a less misogynist note, we have the cliche that "behind every great man is a great woman." Kavin's World, by David Mason, a novel published in 1969 (I have the 1972 printing) displays just this sort of attitude, that it is women who really run the show, if subtly.  More broadly, the theme of the novel is that we men don't really run our lives, not even the greatest among us, but are instead at the mercy of powers beyond our control, even beyond our comprehension.  The protagonist and narrator of Kavin's World, Kavin of House Hostan of the doomed state of Dorada, tries to defy women and defy the fates. Let's see how that works out for him.

Dorada is a small principality in a medievalish fantasy world of wizards and dragons. The Doradan ruling prince is selected from among the Hostan family by the all-female priestly class, who lead the people in worship of the unnamed Great Goddess.  Dorada is a seafaring nation, and our hero, young Kavin, is at sea when Dorada is invaded by a barbarian horde.  Kavin has bought a hulk of mysterious origin and refurbished it so that it is the fastest ship on the waves.  In a secret compartment of the ship he discovered a beautiful white statuette of a woman, the Goddess of Luck, known as Tana.  Kevin is a willful freethinking sort (one character addresses him as "You who fight against the will of the gods") and he decides to worship Tana instead of his native deity.

(This turns out to have been a good choice--several times during his perilous adventures Kavin and friends get out of scrapes due entirely to luck.)

When Kavin gets back home to Dorada he finds that the countryside has been ravaged by barbarians and the capital is under siege.  The prince has been killed and the priestesses have selected Kavin to take his place.  According to tradition the prince is to marry one of the maiden priestesses, in this case gorgeous blonde Samala, upon ascending the throne, but relations between Kavin and the priestesses are strained; in addition to his religious apostasy, Kavin bought a beautiful red-headed slave girl, Isa, while on his sea voyage and she has been sharing his bunk.  This offends the priestess's sensibilities (they deplore both slavery and horndoggery) and sets off a love triangle drama.  Church-state relations are so bad that Kavin even declares that worship of the Great Goddess is to be suspended and that the new official religion of Dorada is Tana-worship!

To defeat the barbarians Kavin consults the priestess's creepy oracle (a voice that issues from a pool) and with the help of court wizard Thuramon employs horrible magic spells; both operations require dreadful sacrifices.  After the barbarians are routed Thuramon tells Kavin all his sacrifices have been in vain, that Dorada is doomed because an invincible army of insect men from another dimension is about to overrun the country.  The seven hundred Doradans who survived the barbarian war are forced to disperse throughout the world.

Kavin's World is one of those books which feature a "multiverse," so coexisting with the magic and monsters in this fantasy world are Christian missionaries, chess, and other people and cultural influences that have blundered through magical gates from our own Earth.  Even less benign than the Earthling Jesus-freaks and chess fanatics are imperialistic beings from other planes of existence, among them those insect men and the three evil dictators who have sicced the insect men (and the barbarians before them) on poor Dorada. Thuramon tells Kavin that it is his destiny to destroy these three invaders, who seek to conquer and enslave Kavin's world.

1969 printing

The second part of the 221-page book chronicles this quest; Kavin abandons his earlier efforts to resist domination by women and fate and just goes with the flow, embracing his mission.  "If my will was ever my own," Kavin tells us, "I would be vastly surprised; and I was called a ruler!  Ha!"  Kavin and Thuramon, accompanied by sexy slave girl Isa and virgin priestess Samala, sail along a mysterious coast with a small force of fighting men, headed for the sinister domain of the three tyrants.  Kavin and company fight invisible jungle monsters, ally with a colony of wizards and dragons, and tangle with Christian monks who came to this world a thousand years ago and became perverted; they are now devil-worshipping werewolves who lord it over a country of pygmies.  In keeping with the "behind every great man" theme, an invisible woman named Macha Emrinn, who sneaked aboard Kavin's ship, saves the Doradans from disaster.  When Kavin is captured by the lycanthrope monks she rescues him--by holding his hand she can make him invisible.  With one hand on the hilt of his silver-plated sword and his other hand gripping the invisible girl's, he is able to massacre the werewolves and liberate himself and the pygmies.

Mason just drops the jealousy/love-triangle element of the plot and on this journey Isa and Salama agree to share Kavin, so he has two sexy wives to sleep with!  It's good to be the prince after all!  One of the problems with Kavin's World is that it is overloaded with characters and elements which Mason introduces at length and then abandons before they have contributed much to the plot.  Neither Isa nor Salama is a particularly engaging character, and either of them could have been left out of the book altogether--there are more than enough reasons for Kavin to be in conflict with the priesthood, and if Mason wanted to do a love-triangle subplot, Macha Emrinn supplies the necessary "other woman."  Similarly, the inhabitants of the dragon-wizard settlement don't threaten or aid Kavin in any significant way, we never find out why Macha Emrinn stowed away on Kavin's ship, and we never find out where the superior ship came from.  Again and again Mason lays the groundwork for some kind of payoff, but never delivers on the payoff part.  Did he write this thing as he went along and not take time to go back and revise it?

Kavin, like Aeneas, founds a new country for his people among his new friends, the pygmies.  Then he and a handful of his toughest fighters (and Macha Emrinn, who is indispensible when it comes to sneaking around) ride overland to the evil country of the three alien tyrants.  This place is a dark valley where dark Satanic mills belch smoke into the sky, slaves work factories and mines, and black clad guards drive locomotives and motorized trucks. The first edition of Kavin's World had a blurb comparing Mason's novel to The Lord of the Rings, and I guess this evil land is reminiscent of Mordor and the famous "Scouring of the Shire" chapter of Tolkein's trilogy, in which the industrialism that has produced all the things that have made our modern lives so comfortable is denounced.

Thanks to Thuramon's necromancy and Macha Emrinn's invisibility, the adventurers sneak into the black fortress in the center of the valley and confront the three aliens: two human sorcerers and a black cloud with an eye who hides in a dark room and is called Ess.  Kavin is revealed to be the reincarnation of a great leader who is destined for some unspecified great achievement, and the evil sorcerers offer him a chance to get into one of his old bodies and get back the memories of his previous lives and join their diabolical ruling class.  Kavin refuses and in the anticlimactic final confrontation destroys Ess by whipping out a lamp--Ess, a creature from a far future when the stars have burnt out, cannot abide any light.

1999 printing

The cataclysmic death of Ess leads to Kavin losing consciousness.  When he wakes up he finds the evil land in decayed ruins; he may be unaged, but many decades have passed!  He makes his way back to the city he founded; it is now a wealthy port where everybody worships Tana, goddess of luck.  Samala and Isa are long dead, but Macha Emrinn, who is some kind of elf or something, I guess, is still young and lives in a cottage in a woods on the edge of town.  She turns off her invisibility and allows Kavin to see her for the first time, and of course she is beautiful. Kavin has a happy old age ahead of him with this third wife!

The covers of all three editions of Kavin's World compare Kavin to Conan, but my image of Conan is as the ultimate rugged individualist who bends the universe to his will and relies solely on his own abilities.  Conan fights dozens of enemies by himself, figures his own way out of every problem, and breaks all the rules of society by being a pirate and a bandit and a usurper.  Early on Kavin does a little of that defiance stuff, but he is obviously buffeted by the winds of fate rather than charting his own course, and his successes result primarily from help he receives from others.  Again and again Tana, Thuramon, and Macha Emrinn pull his fat out of the fire and tell him what to do.  Kavin's World has more in common thematically with something by Michael Moorcock, with all that multiverse, Eternal Champion, manipulative deity stuff he does, than with Robert E. Howard's work.

Kavin's World has a few unusual bits here and there, and is not boring or irritatingly bad, but is basically a routine sword and sorcery story which lacks the virtues of the better S&S tales.  The style and pacing are a little flat and bland, and none of the characters is really interesting.  I think Mason tries to imbue the story with a sense of tragedy, what with Kavin losing his country and then his friends and having his destiny laid out for him by others, but this is undercut by how Kavin gets to happy endings through the efforts of others and through dumb luck.  In fact, Mason failed to inspire any feeling in me, be it of excitement, fun or sadness.  I'm pronouncing Kavin's World to be "merely adequate."