The Nets of Space by Emil Petaja

The front of my shopworn copy

In the nigh-forgotten past, back in the period known to historians as "January 2014," I read Emil Petaja's The Stolen Sun.  Examination of the records covering this dimly recalled epoch will lead the careful scholar to admit that there is a possibility that this blog did not merely express dislike for The Stolen Sun, but denounced DAW Books for unleashing it upon an unsuspecting public.

As the politicians tell us, America is the land of second chances.  In that spirit, I read The Nets of Space, Mr. Petaja's 1969 paperback from Berkley Medallion (X1692), which is adorned with an irresistibly awesome cover painting.  The Stolen Sun, the cognoscenti will recall, was inspired by the Kalevala, the national saga of Finland; as I cracked open The Nets of Space I pondered the possibility that this time around Mr. Petaja was inspired by the menu at Red Lobster.

The first chapter of this 20 chapter (128 page) book is a dream sequence.  Our hero, Donald Quick (his father named him after The Knight of the Woeful Countenance), is naked, in a huge bowl along with dozens of other naked people.  Above the bowl are Brobdingnagian crab people who are reaching into the bowl to seize the squirming humans and then devour them like appetizers!  The crabs discuss this new delicacy, one of them assuring another that he should eat a black person--the blacks have the most meat, while the Asians are too small and the whites are too fat!  Somebody should tell these outer space crab people that race is just a social construct!

Don wakes up and we find ourselves in the middle of what threatens to become a mainstream novel.  Vietnam vet Don is a victim of mental illness who loves the booze, and is holed up in a mountain cabin all alone with a nice bottle of vodka.  He quotes Amy Lowell and thinks back to his psychiatrist's advice (this advice was to stay away from the booze.)  He looks around his cabin (it's full of dust).  A pretty nurse shows up at the cabin at four in the morning so the two can reminisce about Don's psychiatry treatment and his abortive astronaut career.  Don and the nurse, whose name is Donna, begin a beautiful romance.

And the back

Don received training to go on man's first trip to interstellar space, but failed a physical and so ended up on the ground crew.  In an accident he breathed some of the time-space ship's "time gas" fuel, which put him in the hospital for months.  Eventually scientists at the space agency realize that Don's vivid dreams about the giant alien crabs are not dreams at all--Don is tuning in telepathically on the Earth astronauts, witnessing their horrible fate at the hands (er, claws) of invincible extraterrestrials!

As the kids might say, I totally dig the gargantuan crab aliens.  Petaja has come up with a whole culture, history and religion for them, and the crab peoples' leaders are more interesting than Don's shrink and the head of the Earth space agency, a Scandinavian scientist who says "ja" all the time. So why does Petaja spend so many pages giving us descriptions of the California mountains and flora, snatches of Don Quixote, conversations about Don and Donna's families, and Psych 101 lectures from Don's headshrinker?  Maybe to pad out the page count?

Petaja's writing style isn't the best, either.  Here are three passages that had me laughing or scratching my head:

"To face the enemy of night alone with this on his mind was something that shriveled his viscera, no matter how hard he tried to laugh it off." (43)   

"Whatever was in the Doc's new drugs seemed to be pinpointing one small section of his mind, thesaurus-like." (60)

A later edition

"Panic was all-inclusive.  Yet Don thought he heard parts of names.  Names.  The crew members sought refuge in withness." (86)

Believe me, I spent a long time trying to figure out that thesaurus simile. 

The Nets of Space has lots of problems, including the science, which doesn't seem to make any sense and is not applied consistently.  But I still enjoyed the book.  The crabs are great, and the scenes in which Don negotiates with a different alien race, tiny insect people, are good.  The Lilliputian race has developed a gas that can save the Earth from the crabs (the hungry crabs are on their way to Earth with their nets, seeking to add all of mankind to their larder), but the insect people have to be persuaded to take sides in the crab vs human war.  Only one race can survive; if they don't conquer Earth, the crabs will starve.  Why should the insect people choose the humans over the crabs?  Showing a commendable respect for the arts, Petaja has Don trade the insect people, who are literary connoisseurs as well as great scientists, a copy of Don Quixote for the war gas the Earth needs.  Petaja seems to be saying that, despite the manifold sins of mankind, the human race deserves to survive because it has numbered amongst its members great artists like Cervantes.  This is a message I can endorse!

So, thumbs up for The Nets of Space.  The aliens are great, its heart is in the right place, and many of its numerous problems have their own weird charm.  (Shriveled his viscera?)

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Gossipy side note:  The Nets of Space is dedicated to Harold Taves.  I had never heard of Taves before, and a google search revealed him to be a Seattle bookstore owner and one of Hannes Bok's boyfriends.  Anybody interested in early SF fandom, or gay figures in the SF community, should check out Jessica Amanda Salmonson's reminiscences of Taves; Taves sounds like an odd and interesting character.  [UPDATE NOVEMBER 21, 2018: It looks like that link to Ms. Salmonson's memoir of Taves is kaput, but I believe I have found a version of it via the waybackmachine at https://web.archive.org/web/20130609003309/http://www.violetbooks.com/taves.html .] 

The Stolen Sun by Emil Petaja

On January 17 I announced to an indifferent world that I had never even heard of Emil Petaja.  The Fates must have been listening, because yesterday I stumbled upon a book by Petaja at Half Price Books, for sale for only a dollar.  I could not pass up this opportunity to familiarize myself with Mr. Petaja's work, and today I finished the short novel The Stolen Sun.

My DAW paperback edition, copyrighted 1967 and published in 1979, also includes Tramontane.  Both The Stolen Sun and Tramontane are based on the Kalevala, the national saga of Finland, about which I know absolutely zero, which may have led me to miss some nuances, but also protected me from spoilers.

A thousand years in the future, Earth's ruthless expansionist empire is at war with the Mephiti, gaseous aliens who hide in deep clouds of black goop that they spread wherever they go, including around planets the Earth empire wants to colonize.  (The Earth is overpopulated and must colonize every available planet.)  Wayne Panu is the best pilot in the Terran Space Navy, his psychic powers enabling him to form a mental union with his ship closer than that of any other human pilot.  Wayne and his ship, The Lady, go on many sorties, bombing Mephiti-occupied planets and clearing them for human settlement.  But Wayne is starting to have second thoughts, to feel compassion for the alien enemy.  If only there was some way the human race could communicate with the mysterious Mephiti, make peace with them.  And what is it with all these weird visions Wayne is having of an old man in a copper ship with oars?

After Wayne's wingman is killed during a bombing run Wayne and The Lady go AWOL, meet the old geezer in the copper ship, and travel back in time to an ancient snow-covered Earth, where Wayne joins a tribe of primitives led by a wizard who are in a war with a witch who has blotted out the sun and then falls in love with a girl cursed to be a vampiric werefox.  Wayne, Hercules-style, has to do impossible tasks for this witch.  This gives him the opportunity to converse with the giant who is sucking the energy out of the sun; Wayne convinces the giant to stop draining the sun and thus saves the day.  The space war plot is vaguely resolved in one brief paragraph, resolved in exactly the way you would have expected.  The main thread of the book is not the space war stuff, but the folklorish witch stuff.  Ugh.    

The space navy war plot is OK, but the fantasy plot with the witches and wizards is silly, and totally unintegrated with the future space war plot.  This edition is full of irritating typographical errors, and Petaja's writing style is not very good, clumsy and full of bad metaphors.  On page 27 we get a fight scene with muggers.  "Rage was a sometime thing in Wayne Panu, but in the rare moments when it did overtake him, it possessed him in toto, like cornered lightning."  On pages 29 to 30, we meet Dr. Delph.  "He, of all others, understood the magnitude of such a phenomenon as a Wayne Panu: a farmboy from Proxima with a mind-talent as inexplicable as the mysterious stirring of primordial Terran slimes into life....Delph was dedicated to serving mankind, no matter what the serving might lead to.  It was a soul-searing job, and it didn't pay off in dreamless nights."   There are lots of odd distracting sentences like these.  The characters are not interesting, and even the ones who don't do anything get long boring descriptions of what they look like and how they dress.   

I'm glad I have solved the mystery of Emil Petaja, and of course I don't regret trying a new (to me) author, but The Stolen Sun is not a good novel and DAW, which has done such a service to the SF community by putting out so many good books by such superior authors as Jack Vance and Tanith Lee, should be embarrassed for printing something with so many typos in it.          

Thumbs down!

How many of these "great" science fiction stories have you read?

This is what the last page of my copy of Edmund Cooper's The Last Continent, Dell 4655, printed in 1969, looks like.  I love these kinds of ads, with just the title and author; your mind is filled with wonder at the possibilities of what each book could be about.  Like young Marcel in Proust, looking at the train schedule and fantasizing what a town is like based only on its name, you can construct characters and a plot in your mind for each book that, who knows?, may be more exciting than what the book truly contains.

I also like to wonder why the titles are presented in the order they are, and why one book is more expensive than another.  Did A. Bertram Chandler piss somebody off?  Were his books poorer sellers than Emil Pataja's?  I've never even heard of Emil Pataja!

<UPDATE JAN 30 2014: I read a book by Emil Petaja, who doesn't necessarily spell his name the way Dell does in its advertising.>

I have read five of the listed books, but I'm not willing to say any of them are great; I'm counting three OK/averages and two lame/Idon'tgetits.  Opinions do differ, though, as we shall see.

Deathworld 3 by Harry Harrison
I've read this twice and enjoyed it both times, but damned if I can remember anything about it.  It's an adventure story in which guys on horses kill astronauts that land on a planet, then an agent goes to the planet to make peace with the horse riders, or something like that.

The Cosmic Rape by Theodore Sturgeon
Earth people are cursed with individualism, but luckily an alien entity, the Medusa, comes to Earth and connects all our minds together.  There are lots of these collective consciousness stories out there, like Clarke's Childhood's End, Holly's The Green Planet, the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, and so on.  The Cosmic Rape was later published under the title To Marry Medusa.  Joachim Boaz liked this a little more than me, and gave it 4 stars out of 5; I think it deserves an "acceptable/average" score of 3.   

The Killer Thing by Kate Wilhelm
Earth people are cursed with a lust to exploit the environment and primitive natives, but luckily some aliens with a powerful space navy come along and force us to behave.  There are lots of these "we are a bunch of jerks and would be better off if there were nice aliens to tell us what to do" stories out there, like Robert Crane's Hero's Walk and the film "The Day the Earth Stood Still."  Back in 2008 I wrote a hostile review of Killer Thing on Amazon.

The Status Civilization by Robert Sheckley
I read this many years ago and remember thinking it was a boring bunch of cliches: the tyrannical Earth government sends a guy to a prison planet where he fights a robot in the arena and then leads the resistance, or something.  Joachim Boaz at sfruminations read it years after I did and thought it a brilliant satire.  What can I say?  Maybe I'm dense.

Spartan Planet by A. Bertram Chandler
This is one of the many books chronicling the career of space navy officer John Grimes.  I've read a bunch of these, totally out of order, and liked most of them.  As I recall, this is the one in which Grimes comes upon a planet where all the women are hidden in a secret lab, and an entire civilization has developed consisting solely of men who, not even knowing women exist, turn to homosexual behavior for love and sexual satisfaction.  Grimes's ship includes female crew members, and the whole society undergoes a revolution when they show up.  This would be a good book to read if you were writing a dissertation about attitudes towards gays in SF.   

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Five out of 19 doesn't sound like a lot, but the page says if you ordered five or more of the listed books from Dell then shipping was free, so I am considering five to be a passing grade.  And until I hear differently, I am considering myself king of the science fiction mountain for having read five of the books from this list - feel free to report how many of these books you have read in the comments, especially if you have read six or more and are in a position to dethrone me, or think I'm out of my mind and some of these books really are great.