Deathstar Voyage by Ian Wallace

"You are confident of your allure."

"Should I be?"

"In most situations, yes.  In this one, I am afraid you will lose.  My queen is the Eiland of Ligeria, and these are holy hours, and I do not intend to go a-wooing elsewhere.  My eiland is about to die in a famous bradzh...." 

Driven thither by family obligations, I recently found myself in Beaumont, Texas, a conglomeration of highways and strip malls 90 minutes east of Houston; I never actually saw Houston, as our inbound flight landed around midnight and two days later we boarded our outbound flight before sunrise.  The wife and I spent almost all of our brief visit embroiled in wedding-related operations and looking after my mother-in-law, but I managed to steal away for an hour to go to Red B4 books, a small used bookstore in an ugly strip mall.  Putting aside my sighting of an anole lizard climbing a tree, this was the highlight of my trip, as I purchased four old and battered SF paperbacks for a low low price.

Among these four finds was a 1970 printing of Ian Wallace's 1969 Deathstar Voyage.  You will recall we read Wallace's Croyd back in early 2016.  That novel had some elements of espionage fiction, and a subtitle on Deathstar Voyage's title page, "a downtime mystery cruise," suggests it is a detective or suspense story in SF guise.  Also noteworthy: isfdb suggests Deathstar Voyage takes place in the same universe as Croyd and its sequels.  Well, let's check it out.

The Eiland of Ligeria is a starliner, over a kilometer long and full of shops and restaurants and theatres that cater to its two thousand passengers.  The Eiland is currently on its final voyage, a trip of six days from Earth to planet Ligeria in the Altair system, where it will be scrapped.  Among the passengers is Zhavar, the King of Ligeria and the owner of the ship.  Zhavar is a white man--white people have ruled Ligeria for generations, but the majority of Ligeria's population is made up of golden people; the golden people have a matriarchal culture ("eiland" is the Ligerian word for "queen" or "empress") that practices a version of suttee (called "bradzh") in which a queen's husbands and lovers jump into a fire upon her death.  (Wallace admits in a "Forenote" to Deathstar Voyage that he got some ideas for the novel from the history of British India.)

Acting as the King's bodyguard is our lead character, Lieutenant Claudine St. Cyr of the Galactic Police, an artificial woman who has great reflexes and is a perfect shot with her energy pistol and has some psychic powers that warn her of danger.  "I am told that five continents on three planets collaborated in my design."  Based on Earth, she has just been assigned to protect Zhavar, and they spend a lot of time telling each other their biographies and flirting, producing much of the "clever" dialogue between characters and dialogue with sexual overtones that fills this book, none of which is amusing or arousing.

Deathstar Voyage is a mystery story (one of the characters even compares their situation to that depicted in Agatha Christie's novel Ten Little Indians*), and the crimes and suspects pile up at a rapid pace.  Someone is trying to assassinate the King, and somebody has sabotaged the ship's power source, a big glowing sphere of energy called the Differential Mass Component.  Maybe a religious fanatic called Old Fire-Eyes Greco who thinks the ship is "the ultimate symbol of human corruption" is involved?  What about The Great Dore, a golden Ligerian magician who can use his telekinesis to turn items inside out?  And then there is the ship's Captain, Schwarz, who dislikes the king and thinks it a crime to scrap the Eiland of Ligeria and replace it with more efficient and less luxurious ships.  Oh, wait, Captain Schwarz just dropped dead at the dinner table a few seconds after flirting with Claudine.  He is replaced by Swainson, the first officer, who drops dead the next day during a competition at the ship's elaborate shooting gallery.

*Look up the original title of this best-selling detective novel, but don't say it aloud.

We get a science lecture on atoms, the point of which is to explain that the sabotage to the Differential Mass Component is going to turn the ship, and the two thousand souls aboard, into a star in less than 24 hours.  We get scenes in which people look for clues in the personnel files of the suspects and of the victims, scenes of people interrogating suspects, and scenes of people sitting around talking blah blah blah about clues.  This is all quite boring and also confusing; here is a paragraph I puzzled over for a while:

These images are from the scan of the hardcover edition at the internet archive

Somehow, the biography contains no hints of enemies and also suggests many enemies, and somehow Claudine admits it is full of "exploits" but denies that anything is "out of line" or "flashy."  Did anybody at Berkeley edit this?
     
Deathstar Voyage is not well-written; many of the individual sentences are ugly or clumsy or both.  Here's another frustrating extract, the first two paragraphs from Chapter 9:

What does "going away" mean in this context?  I guess "strip and unstrip" is Wallace's idea of clever wordplay, with "unstrip" meaning "dress."  This passage also includes another of Wallace's anemic jokes, the fact that the second officer, at this point in the story acting captain, has a lisp.  Wallace doesn't give Mashti a lisp to indicate he is a homosexual, a traditional sort of joke; rather, Mashti is from a planet where people have their teeth removed because they only eat liquid food.  Even Wallace realizes that this lisping is a drag, and after a few pages of it just stops typing the phonetic representations of Mashti's lisp and instructs the reader to remember that the officer is lisping.

A "cutichron" is a tiny watch or clock on your fingernail.  Wallace talks a lot about time pieces in this novel, and, in fact, the book is dedicated to his (and his wife's) wristwatches.  Which brings up another of Wallace's lame conceits: gratuitous references to the 20th century.  Early in the novel Zhavar buys Claudine a 20th-century wrist watch.  At the fancy dinner at which Captain Schwarz suddenly dies, the men all wear 20th-century evening dress.  The rifles used at the shooting gallery at which Swainson dies are 20th-century rifles.  I've already mentioned the reference to Agatha Christie. 

Wallace piles on mountains of boring details that I guess we are supposed to think are clever or amusing, but which are simply a waste of time.  There are many passages about people's clothes and people's food and people's tobacco that seem totally pointless, unless the point was to bulk up the page count, which, in my paperback, is a criminally excessive 191 pages.  Here's an exchange that comes after the episode at the shooting gallery, when the king asks Claudine to have lunch with him and she asks what she should wear:

Autopsies reveal that Captain Schwarz and First Officer Swainson were murdered by a psychic who turned their hearts inside out--the same sort of psychic powers were also probably used to sabotage the Differential Mass Component.  Investigation also reveals that Dore, the psychic who can turn stuff inside out, is the bastard son of Greco the religious fanatic and that Greco can hypnotize people, and that Dore is particularly susceptible to Greco's hypnosis.  There is a long scene of multiple chapters in which Claudine has a date with Dore (yes, they are on a date even though the star ship is due to explode in like 10 hours) and they flirt and Dore gives a science lecture on how to use psychic powers to turn stuff inside out.  During the course of this date the two fall deeply in love and decide to marry.  But when they go to the shooting range to have their first kiss on the grass, Dore is shot in the head by a sniper!  Wallace tries to pull our heartstrings by assuring us that Dore is dead ("Claudine was a cop, and almost instantly she knew he was dead....she lay down in the grass beside him, her face by his ruined head....") but after a few pages of grief Claudine realizes the bullet just creased the magician's head, not actually penetrating the skull.

Karel Thole makes this tedious dud
look fascinating and sexy--
DON"T YOU BELIEVE IT!

Claudine believes Greco hypnotized Dore into wrecking the Differential Mass Component and murdering Schwarz and Swainson.  When Dore is shot she changes her theory--she now figures Zhavar the King of Ligeria is the culprit, that he has psychic powers he has kept a secret and has been driven by knowledge that the gold people are about to overthrow his government and execute him to spectacularly commit suicide by blowing up the ship.  Zhavar convinces her he is innocent and has no psychic powers, and also reveals that Captain Schwarz was his nephew, whom he raised as a foster father.  Schwarz turned against him and embraced the gold cause and was a master hypnotist and psyker, better than Greco and Dore--Claudine realizes it was Schwarz is the villain.  After he sabotaged the Eiland of Ligeria's Differential Mass Component he faked his own death, and then Swainson's (working in concert with the ship's doctor, who committed suicide out of guilt), and then shot Dore.  Claudine confronts Schwarz, who is disguised as a watch-salesman, and tries to convince him to fix the Differential Mass Component, employing her sexual wiles ("Before you condemn me, I suggest that you taste me") and promising to get the king to change his mind about scrapping the Eiland of Ligeria.  She fails--Schwarz refuses to repair the ship.  Luckily, King Zhavar was lying--he really does have psychic powers, and he fixes the Differential Mass Component, saving the ship and all the passengers.
     
This book is terrible. I don't like mysteries generally, and I certainly don't like mystery stories that feel like a scam, that tell you on page 40 that a guy has died and then on page 166 reveal, ha ha, that the guy actually faked his death, or tell you early on that there is only one person on the ship who can keep it from exploding and then reveal in the last ten pages that there was another guy aboard who could fix it all along so there was really nothing to worry about.  So, the mystery elements of Deathstar Voyage stink.  I like stories about difficult sexual relationships and I like science fiction stories, but the love elements and SF elements of this book also stink, being silly, tedious, unconvincing, and sterile, totally unable to inspire excitement or reflection in the reader.  I can be won over by any type of story, including a mystery story, if it is well-written, but Wallace's style is quite bad, as I think I have chronicled, and the characters and images and events and jokes are all boring or offensively poor.  (There are also annoying plot holes that I won't waste your time by going into...OK, look at the footnotes if your time is not important to you.*)

Publisher's Weekly and Library Journal,
your sources for fake news

Sometimes it is with regret that I feel the duty to give a piece of fiction which had some good elements a thumbs down because the bad outweighed the good.  But Deathstar Voyage has nothing at all to recommend it, and gets an embittered and definitive negative vote.  Zero out of ten 20th-century wrist watches.

*1) The ship's engineer admits that there is a way to fix the Differential Mass Component but he didn't pay attention to that lecture in engineering school and so has forgotten it.  Why doesn't he just look in the manual?--there must be a manual!  Even if there isn't a manual on board, why don't they just radio for instructions?  Multiple times over the course of the novel they radio Ligeria or Earth and receive responses!  2)  One of the clues that reveals that Schwarz is the saboteur and that he is the watch salesman is that when the king bought Claudine a watch it was inverted or flipped or whatever--the second hand runs backwards.  We are led to believe that Schwarz flipped the watch by accident--but when we learn all about the psychic powers Dore, Zhavar and Schwarz have, it is made clear that quite a bit of concentration is involved.    

Spectrum 5: 1950s stories by Wallace, Thomas, Ashwell, and Ashby

1969 and 1972 paperback editions of Spectrum 5; I probably should have used the '69 image
on my last blog post because the cover looks like it may have been inspired by
James H. Schmitz's "Grandpa."

In our last episode we read half the stories in Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest's 1966 anthology of 1950s SF stories Spectrum 5, the half by authors I felt were more or less famous.  Today we experience the other half of the book's content, four stories by authors whom I, at least, am less familiar with.  Let's check out these "guys"--maybe we'll meet a new favorite!

"Student Body" by F. L. Wallace (1953)

Wallace has a single novel and like two dozen stories listed at isfdb. Barry Malzberg, whom we at MPorcius Fiction Log both take very seriously and consider a figure of fun, asserts that Wallace is a writer who deserves a higher reputation than that which he enjoys.  A story by Wallace is included in the 1979 anthology Neglected Visions, a book edited by Malzberg, Martin H. Greenberg, and John D. Olander dedicated to reprinting work by nine such SF writers who, according to Malzberg, have been unfairly neglected.

Marin is the biology officer with the first wave of colonists on a virgin planet.  Before the colonists got there the planet was surveyed by a whole team of biologists, but Marin finds that their survey is not accurate, that there are troublesome creatures on the planet they weren't warned about, namely voracious rodents that start taking a chunk out of the colony's limited food supplies.  Marin deals with this problem by designing a robot cat, and when even bigger rodents show up that the steel feline can't handle, by manipulating his supply of frozen animal material and breeding a pack of terriers the size of great danes.  The huge terriers soon have to contend with heretofore undetected native predators who are bigger still, beasts much like tigers.

By observing a captive native creature, and by using a sonar device to study in situ fossils without digging up the terrain, Marin figures out what is going on.  All these vermin and carnivores are the same species--when environmental conditions change, as with the introduction of the Earth dogs, the current generation of native fauna gives birth to a generation fully equipped to deal with the new conditions--for example, to deal with the dogs the rat-like natives gave birth to a generation of tiger-like offspring.  The sense of wonder ending is that when the human colonists kill the tigers with rifles, the next generation of natives looks quite like human beings--maybe the Earth-derived humans can negotiate with these creatures?  They had better learn to, because mouse-sized natives have stowed aboard the star ships which brought the colonists and have since headed home, and soon every planet in mankind's space empire will be infested with these quick-growing and quick-adapting alien creatures.  

This story is about average, not bad, but no big deal.  A little better than acceptable, I guess.  

"Student Body" is the only story in Spectrum 5 that is not from Astounding; its first appearance was in Galaxy.  It has been included in numerous anthologies, including ones edited by Groff Conklin and by Galaxy editor H. L. Gold.

"The Far Look" by Theodore L. Thomas (1956)

Uh oh, I read Thomas's 1970 story "The Weather on the Sun" in May and denounced it as a piece of garbage that romanticized politicians and bored me to death.  I implied that this irritating misfire was included in Orbit 8 because Thomas was friends with editor Damon Knight's wife Kate Wilhelm, but I am not aware that any such excuse is available for Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr. or British men of letters Amis and Conquest.  Well, let's do the right thing (for once) and try to look at "The Far Look" with an open mind.

"The Far Look" starts out long-winded and annoying.  As a scientist provides the background exposition to a subordinate egghead (and to us readers) Thomas buries us under a blizzard of mind-numbing minutia about Dr. Scott's pipe--how he fills the pipe,  the size of the match he uses to light the pipe, the gurgling noises the pipe makes, the size of the flame that comes out of the bowl of the pipe, how Scott waves the pipe around for emphasis and how he prods the junior scientist with the end of the pipe to put him in his place (that's right, Scott takes his disgusting cancer promotion device out of his mouth and touches one of his colleagues with the saliva-covered end of it as a means of enforcing dominance--sickening!) and blah blah blah.  Oh wait, I said I was keeping an open mind.  Well, let's take a look through all the tobacco smoke at the actual text of the exposition Scott delivers.

The United States has a base on the moon, staffed by two men.  Every month the two astronauts are relieved by a different pair sent up from Earth.  Many of the astronauts who return have become geniuses, the world's best in some field of art or science or business.  Earthlings can immediately tell which astronauts have become geniuses by looking at their eyes--those who have become geniuses have a "far look" and crinkles around their eyes.  Pipe enthusiast Dr. Scott is tasked with figuring out how spending a month on the moon has turned above-average men into supermen.

Once the seven Earthbound pages with the scientists are past and we are up on the moon with two of the astronauts, "The Far Look" is actually pretty good.  I like stories in which people in space suits go about the business of surviving in low-gravity, zero-atmosphere, environments, where death awaits only a few centimeters and a few seconds away, and Thomas actually does a good job of describing all the technical technological aspects and even the psychological aspects of two men's stay on the moon.  (And by "a good job" I mean the story is entertaining and builds an anxious, claustrophobic atmosphere--I am not competent to assess how realistic any of the science is.)

Over 27 pages we follow the astronauts' compelling adventures on Luna, their fears and their near death experiences, and then they are replaced and return to Earth with "the far look."  It's a little vague, but apparently the experience of being so horribly alone, and then returning back to the bosom of Earth and its teeming millions, is what turns the astronauts into geniuses.

I'm skeptical of the story's central gimmick (it's not clear what causes the astronauts to become superhuman and there is very little about how these newly superior persons behave on Earth) and the first part with the scientists, who we don't see again at the end of the story is poor and practically superfluous, but all the stuff on the moon is good and won me over despite my bitterness about Dr. Scott and his filthy habits and "The Weather on the Sun."  I am happily surprised to be able to give "The Far Look" a solid thumbs up.

"The Far Look," after its debut in Astounding, was chosen by Judith Merril for her second Year's Best volume, which means I own two printings of the story, I having purchased that Merril anthology in December of 2015 in New Jersey, and by Harry Harrison and Willis E. McNeilly for a 1975 anthology of Science Fiction Novellas.

"Big Sword" by Pauline Ashwell (as by "Paul Ash") (1958)

Here's another story I own multiple printings of.  After its debut in Astounding, Pauline Ashwell's "Big Sword" was included by Groff Conklin in his 1966 anthology Another Part of the Galaxy, a copy of which I acquired in Kentucky in 2016, as well as by Amis and Conquest in Spectrum 5.  In all three places the story appears under the masculine pseudonym "Paul Ash."  Ashwell has two novels and a score of stories listed at isfdb but I don't think I have ever read her work before.

Jordan is a spaceman and a scientist, currently the leader of a scientific expedition to planet Lambda.  At the start of his career he foolishly married a social climber who was only interested in his notoriety, Cora.  Cora divorced him while he was away on one of his expeditions, after she had given birth to his son, Ricky.  While back home on Earth, Jordan learns that Cora and Ricky, now fourteen, don't get along, and she is trying to send Ricky to some school for troublemakers so she won't have to deal with him, or even see him, for some years.  Instead of authorizing the shipping off of Ricky to this school, Jordan brings Ricky, who is interested in science, to Lambda.  He thinks that this trip will be a chance for him to get to know his son, whom he has hardly ever seen, but as leader of the expedition Jordan has almost no time to spare for Ricky.

Meanwhile, the 6-inch tall Lambda natives, of whom the human explorers are not even aware, are trying to open negotiations with the Earthers, who have unwittingly damaged their home.  Ashwell's aliens have an interesting biology and society, one so different from that of the humans that it makes any cross-species communication difficult--in fact their first efforts to communicate are perceived by the humans as an attack by invisible enemies or even an irresponsible practical joke played by Ricky.  (Some of the scientists are suspicious of Ricky.)

Luckily, Ricky turns out to be a rare human telepath--in fact the poor relationship he has with his mother and some of the expedition team members is largely a side effect of his psychic powers; Ricky, by picking up stray brain waves, innocently acquires knowledge that has lead Cora and others to think he has been snooping in their private papers.  Using his telepathy, Ricky, unbeknownst to all the adults, who have yet to even see a Lambdan, develops a friendship with the leader of the natives.  Ricky goes off with the alien leader to help him resolve an existential threat to his tribe, and Jordan, thinking his son has run away or is perhaps lost, organizes search parties and flies an aircraft in search of his son.  Ricky solves the Lambdans' dire problem and makes peace between human and native.  Tying up our other plot thread, Jordan even finds a wife among the other scientists.

Ashwell's aliens are very good, but the story feels too long and the whole deal with the precocious kid who is believed to have run away from home and who makes peace between the races feels tired and a little childish, like something from a sappy live action Disney movie from my youth.  I guess it all averages out to marginally good.  Suggesting that I am not necessarily an outlier in my assessment of where "Big Sword"'s strength lies, it was reprinted in 1983 in an anthology titled Aliens from Analog.

"Commencement Night" by Richard Ashby (1953)

In the 1960s the UN sponsored an elaborate experiment, Project Peace, that sought to find out how to prevent all the strife attendant with human life by studying human beings who were unaffected by history and culture.  A bunch of scientists took an island and exterminated all the rats and germs on it, then left a multicultural cohort of forty-five babies on the island.  It is now the early 21st century, and for decades a fifty-strong company of researchers has been observing the island through a multitude of hidden cameras and microphones as the children invented a super efficient language and multiplied to today's population of over 300 individuals.

One of the technicians on the research team is a former Olympic swimmer, and one New Year's Eve he was drunk and decided to leave the secret subterranean facility from which the researchers watch every move the experimental subjects make and take a swim around the island.  This lapse of judgement sets in motion a series of events which lead to the scientists learning that the island's inhabitants have developed psychic powers and been visited by space aliens.  (This is news because the islanders and E.T.s have been exploiting blind spots not covered by the boffins' cameras and mikes.)

The swimmer talks to an alien.  The alien explains that there is a Galactic Confederation with many member species, and they would like humanity to join, because humanity has some very useful skills, but we can't be accepted yet because our system of communication is too primitive--it is our inadequate ability to communicate that has lead to the wars and crime and greed, etc., that have plagued humanity throughout history.  When the aliens learned about Project Peace they secretly came down to teach the islanders their space language, in hopes of jump starting Earth's development of better means of communication.  Sure enough, because the islanders only know the alien language and not any Earth language or culture, they are all peaceful and honest hippies overflowing with love for everything.  As part of his work under the island observing the islanders, the swimmer has learned to speak the space language, and so the islanders are able, with their psychic powers, to change the swimmer's brain, erasing the negative effects of Earth culture so he, too, is full of love.  As the story ends we are led to expect that all the researchers will soon have their brains fixed and that humanity is on its way to joining the Galactic Confederation.

This is the worst story in Spectrum 5.  It is silly, it is sappy, and it is boring.  Ashby takes a bunch of SF elements (scientists who experiment on people, a Galactic Confederation, psychic powers) and instead of exploring them in any depth or using them as the building blocks for an entertaining story he just piles them up like a bunch of discarded bricks.  Gotta give this one a negative vote.

"Commencement Night" has been anthologized in only one place besides Spectrum 5, by Groff Conklin in Giants Unleashed, which was republished with the title Minds Unleashed.  Ashby has a single novel and like a dozen short stories listed at isfdb.

**********

It ends on a sour note, but Spectrum 5 is a good anthology of more or less optimistic tales that celebrate science and the ingenuity and drive of the human race.   A worthwhile purchase.

Croyd by Ian Wallace

"Listen, Greta.  This is going to sound crazy, but accept it until you understand.  You have a visitor.  I am a mind named Croyd who has lost his brain, and--well.  I'll just have to use yours until I can get mine back."

The cover painting of the Berkley 1968 edition of Ian Wallace's 1967 Croyd, by Paul Lehr, took my breath away.  The color, the hideous eye-like structures, the lightning bolts, and especially those disturbing faces depicting people in the extremes of emotion... I couldn't stop looking at it!  It is becoming one of my favorite SF covers.

But is the 184 page novel any good?  I don't think I've read anything by Ian Wallace before, and preeminent science-fiction blogger Joachim Boaz didn't exactly endorse my purchase of the novel after I announced the acquisition on twitter.  But the book is covered with praise from various newspapers ("fast-moving," "highly readable," "a must," etc.)  Well, when we think at all here at MPorcius Fiction Log, we think for ourselves!  Let's see what Croyd is all about!

Praise for Croyd from now-defunct newspapers

Croyd is the best secret agent of the future (one of those admiring blurbs compares him to James Bond) when humanity has colonized three dozen systems across the galaxy and is faced by extragalactic enemies. Croyd is so indispensable, so elite, that in the first scene of the novel he receives instructions from the President of the Galaxy himself at an undercover meeting in a New York bar!

In the same bar Croyd meets an attractive woman who is down on her luck and looks a little strung out.  She sets out to seduce Croyd, but she's no ordinary horny chick--her brain is occupied by one of those hostile extragalactic aliens, Princess Lurla of the "gnurl," a caste-bound race from Large Magellanic Cloud!  Lurla succeeds in invading Croyd's brain, taking over his body, and shifting Croyd's mind into the brain of the depressed human woman, whose name is Greta.  In Croyd's superior body Lurla is in a position to wreak all kinds of havoc, while poor Croyd is stuck in an ordinary woman's body!

1967 hardcover edition

This novel is full to the brim with both conventional and unusual SF ideas. Wallace describes, brusquely and as needed (and sometimes when not needed): psychic powers, Croyd's half-alien parentage, the solution to the mind-body problem that allows his crazy plot to function, anti-gravity and artificial gravity devices, teleporters, interstellar space flight, a system of government based on mercenary managers (the President of the Galaxy is elected by the people but most government work is handled by a private firm; I guess this is like how some U. S. cities are run by a professional city manager appointed by elected officials) and more.  As trumpeted on the front cover, an important element of Croyd is time travel, to the past ("uptiming") and the future ("downtiming.")  Croyd is the only character who can accomplish this feat, and besides doing the kind of thing that Alfred Bester did in The Stars My Destination (Croyd sees a fleeting and mysterious image of a future version of himself early in the novel and later learns its identity), Wallace uses time travel to explode materialism and determinism.  (Alas, I remain a materialist and determinist.)

The novel is also brimming over with sexual overtones; on the first page we learn that in the future waitresses in bars do their work in the nude, and it is hinted that they act as prostitutes.  Croyd's being "inside" Greta is obviously metaphorically like sex, and Wallace mines this for lots of his material.  At first, Greta is uncomfortable about having Croyd inside her, but then Croyd marries them ("A galactic agent can officiate at his own marriage.  No witness necessary....") and she not only accepts their weird relationship but thrives under Croyd's influence. Croyd, as a human-alien hybrid with precise control over his body and all kinds of psychic powers, is able to radically improve Greta's physical health, even to (making the sex angle glaringly explicit) restore her virginity!

In the first half of the novel, while Croyd and Greta develop a modus vivendi inside Greta's skull, Lurla, in Croyd's body, pursues a mission for the human government--she wants them to think she is the real Croyd.  Rebels have seized Ceres and, by installing forcefield generators and propulsion units on the dwarf planet, have turned it into a huge bomb and aimed it at Nereid, the moon of Neptune where the firm that manages the human space empire has its HQ!  While Wallace describes the gnurl and Lurla in some detail, these rebels he simply dismisses as "beatniks" and we learn nothing of their motivations or character; I think they represent a limp effort at satirizing the counterculture of the 1950s and '60s.

Right after Lurla disposes of the beatnik threat, Croyd and Greta catch up with her, and Croyd tries to transfer his mind back into his own body and eject Lurla.  But he fails, and instead his mind comes to occupy a computer many light years away--this is because Lurla was thinking about this computer!  The computer in question is being used to coordinate the gnurls' Plan B in case Lurla fails to infiltrate and enslave humanity with her psychic powers.  Plan B is to detonate a planet the gnurls have turned into a bomb (yes, Wallace, uses this gag twice in the same book) at the star-rich core of the Milky Way--the blast will exterminate all life in our galaxy!

Things work out fine in the end, however. Princess Lurla has never inhabited a male brain before, nor ever dominated a brain for such a great length of time, and she begins to lose control of Croyd's, which inhibits her effort to hypnotize the government of the human race. More importantly, close contact with Croyd, humanity's finest specimen, has not only improved Lurla's opinion of humans (whom most gnurls consider little better than animals)--she has fallen in love with him!  She joins forces with Croyd, Greta, and the human space navy and together they defuse the planet-sized bomb at the galaxy's core.  The second half of the novel also features a love triangle plot--Greta has also fallen in love with Croyd, while Croyd has fallen in love with both of them!  In the end our hero chooses Greta (but only after some flirtatious low-gee dirty dancing with Lurla in her genuine gnurl body, all eight furry feet of it!)

Croyd is not great, but it is entertaining.  Things happen very quickly, with new ideas and characters coming out of nowhere frequently, so the book never drags.  I love stories in which people switch brains, or minds, or share a body, or whatever, so I was in the book's corner from the get go.  On the negative side the style is a little weak, with feeble jokes and "snappy" dialogue which make your eyes roll.  Croyd himself is a boring goody goody superhero character; Princess Lurla and Greta, who are changed by their relationships with Croyd, however, are somewhat more interesting. The conservative/old-fashioned attitude of the book (pro-marriage and pro-virginity, anti-beatnik, anti-Stalin, anti-materialism, anti-determinism) may put some people off.

Croyd reminded me of van Vogt stories (the superman with mental powers, the breakneck pace with all the crazy twists and turns) and Heinlein's super secret agent stories like Friday and Methuselah's Children, and of course I Will Fear No Evil, in which two personalities, one male, one female, inhabit a single body.

*********

Joachim Boaz, in the summer of 2013, reviewed Croyd and gave it a score of 2.5 out of 5--"Bad."  Check out his review at the link.  I'd give it a mild recommendation, myself.  While Joachim deplores its kitchen-sink approach (he says that Wallace "revels in arbitrary excess") I found the inclusion of dozens of crazy ideas, however undeveloped, to be fun.  Who knows, I might even purchase one of the sequels!