Path of the Hero by Dave Wolverton

"All the Pwi, they are already enslaved by love and fear, and since they were born slaves, we do no wrong when we put chains on them."

At the end of Dave Wolverton's 1991 Serpent Catch we learned that not only were the Slave Lords about to conquer the last of the free people of the moon Anee, but that the ecology of the world was so out of whack that the bio-mechanical Creators were going to exterminate everybody and start over!  Tull, the half-Neanderthal, half-human hero, and his friends, foremost among them the thousand-year old blue-skinned superhuman, have their work cut out for them!  The sequel, Path of the Hero, relates their world-shattering struggle to save their world and open up the stars.

It appears that in 2014 Wolverton heavily revised the Serpent Catch-Path of the Hero sequence, turning it into four books, none of which is titled Path of the Hero.  But, as I did twenty years ago, this week I read the original paperback of Path of the Hero, published in 1993, the year of the World Trade Center bombing, "Black Hawk down!," Colin Ferguson, and (finally some good news!) the release of my beloved Doom.

Path of the Hero isn't as lavish a production as Serpent Catch was.  Besides the raised metallic lettering on its cover, Serpent Catch had a cool silhouette decoration by Derek Hegstead on the first page of each chapter, and a nice map.  Somehow, the sequel lacks all these features.  So, in honor of Mr. Hegstead, and to adorn this blog post, I have jumped into the breach and produced some two-tone decorations of my own!

T-Rex hunting hadrosaur (Chapter 1)

Path of the Hero picks up where Serpent Catch left off.  Back home in the fishing town of Smilodon Bay, Tull marries Fava, a Neanderthal (AKA "Pwi") woman, and on their honeymoon they rescue a runaway slave from his pursuers.  The refugee galvanizes Smilodon Bay to begin preparations for a final showdown with the ever-expanding slave empire.

Tull is a bone of contention between Chaa, Tull's father-in-law and the town's greatest Spirit Walker, and the blue man.  Chaa begins training Tull to be a Spirit Walker, while the blue man wants Tull to embrace his human heritage and study science and technology, so one day humanity can return to outer space.  The blue man also fears that Tull, who is very bitter about the Slave Lords, lacks the emotional maturity to become a Spirit Walker--the powers of a Spirit Walker are not to be used as a weapon!  (They always say this kind of thing in Star Wars about the Force and in martial arts movies about karate, even though we only watch those movies to see the hero use his powers to beat the hell out of the villain and massacre his countless minions.)  A few hundred years ago a Pwi with spirit potential like Tull's, a friend of the blue man's, lead a revolution against the slavers but instead of liberating everybody he made himself the dictator of the world, and the blue man doesn't want to go through that again!

Before Smilodon Bay can get ready and Tull can complete his Jedi--I mean Spirit Walker--training, the Slave Lord army attacks and the whole town is burned to the ground.  Most of the population, including Tull, is enslaved.  I was again reminded of Star Wars when the Slave Lords, instead of summarily executing Tull when they realize he's the world's best fighter and has unlimited potential as a Spirit Walker, try to convince him to join their evil army.  

In tried and true adventure fiction tradition, Tull fights in the arena.  The blue man leads an assault on the capitol of the slave empire which fails and he is captured.  Both Tull and the blue man, like so many other divine figures in our culture (e.g., Jesus, Gandalf, and Spock) die and come back to life with the aid of Pwi spirit power and human super technology.  Chaa and Fava rescue Tull and the blue man, and the novel climaxes with the blue man setting off a volcanic eruption that destroys the Creators and Tull achieving psychic communion with every intelligent being on the moon and in orbit around it.  This brief period of collective consciousness leads to the abolition of slavery and the lifting of the alien blockade of the moon: the people of Anee are liberated!  

Ironclad slave ship sails through the night (Chapter 7)

In Serpent Catch it wasn't hard to think of all the Spirit Walking stuff as just psychic phenomena and barbarians' superstition, so that the novel was still solidly science fiction.  But Path of the Hero dials up the supernatural quotient all the way to 13. There are long scenes in which Tull and others travel through the spirit world either to "connect" with each other via "fronds" or fight each other with "tentacles."  The Spirit Walkers can see everybody's soul, which has a good component (lightning) and an evil component (a "hollow.")  After a bungled spirit walk the inexperienced Tull, back in the material world, is attacked by a poltergeist which throws him against the ceiling, brings a bearskin rug to life, and destroys his father-in-law's hovel.  Good mystics and evil sorcerers routinely hold conversations with the souls of the dead and enlist their aid in battling their enemies.

For me, the scenes in the spirit world were too long and too detailed; this stuff is more believable (and less tedious) if it is kept mysterious and vague.  Also, all the earlier spirit world scenes weaken the novelty of the final climactic one.

Struggle in the spirit world (Chapter 8)

As in Serpent Catch, in this novel we witness stabbings, beatings, shootings, tortures, and executions galore, plus a healthy(?) dose of S&M-flavored sex:

Chulata smiled at him.  "You will undress me and give me my bath," she said, her voice cold, commanding.  "You will do it gently, as if I were your lover."

In Serpent Catch the female characters were mostly sex objects and villains, so people who like to see assertive female characters in their novels will be pleased to find that in Path of the Hero Tull's wife and a human girl who writes love poetry enjoy opportunities equal to the men's to put on disguises and murder slavers in their sleep or stab them in the back, and that Fava and the versifier play pivotal roles in saving the world.

Another difference from its predecessor, and I think a real improvement, is how in Path of the Hero we get a view of what life is like for soldiers of the slave empire. Several Neanderthals high in the ranks of the Slave Lords' armies are characters, and we listen in on their internal monologues and get to hear their point of view. Wolverton's Neanderthals are very emotional and sentimental--we are told that Neanderthals think with their hearts, while humans think with their heads.  (This is because, Wolverton tells us, a Neanderthal's hypothalamus is three times the size of a human's.)  To survive in the merciless slave empire's bureaucracy, the Neanderthal army officers and sorcerers who serve the Slave Lords have to painfully stifle their natural inclinations to express love and experience fear.  I actually thought these tormented characters were more interesting than the goody-two-shoes women from Smilodon Bay.

The Tomb of Theron Major (Chapter 10)

All in all, this is a good adventure story with well-developed characters that touches on topics that readers are likely to find interesting or appealing.  Sure, there's all kinds of violence and sex, but Wolverton also presents such elements as a stone-age matriarchal vegetarian tribe.  In the Pwi he seems to be trying to evoke the history and culture of Native Americans and African-Americans.  Wolverton also uses this long story of cataclysmic war as a way to talk about philosophical questions like "What kind of ambitions should an individual, and a society, pursue?  What sort of life is worth living?"

I'm happy to recommend Path of the Hero.

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Reading Path of the Hero, I couldn't help but wonder what changes Wolverton made to it for the 2014 "repackaging" which appears under his "David Farland" pseudonym.  There are some oddities, like giving an old man in Path of the Hero the same name as a young woman who appears in Serpent Catch, that it would make sense to eliminate, but I'm mostly curious if the new version is more or less gory, salacious, and/or mystical.

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On the last page of my Bantam Spectra edition of Path of the Hero is an ad for the oeuvre of Sherri Tepper, about whom I know nothing. 


      

Serpent Catch by Dave Wolverton

"Tull, I know you believe that we will sell ourselves to the humans, and this bothers you.  But my father is a Spirit Walker.  Someday, he says, we shall be their teachers.  We shall overthrow the Slave Lords."

After graduating from Rutgers University, and before moving to New York, I spent nearly three years working at a bookstore in Northern New Jersey for minimum wage. During this period of my life I read mostly books I thought would prepare me for the study of 18th century British history, but I did read some science fiction novels I borrowed from local libraries.  The SF book that most impressed me during this time was Dave Wolverton's On My Way to Paradise.  I then read Wolverton's Serpent Catch and its sequel Path of the Hero.  Since moving to the Mid West I have purchased all three at used bookstores.  I can still recall quite a bit about On My Way to Paradise, so a few days ago I decided to reread Serpent Catch, curious because I could remember very little about it.

Googling around a little indicates that last year Wolverton released revised or reworked versions of Serpent Catch and Path of the Hero, but I am reading the Bantam Spectra paperbacks from the early 1990s.  Serpent Catch was published in 1991, and has a fun map and illustrations by Derek Hegstead, including silhouettes on the first page of each chapter.

Serpent Catch is set in the distant future on Anee, a moon 2,000 light years from Earth.  Over a thousand years before the novel starts, Earth scientists employed genetic engineering to recreate dinosaurs, mastodons, Neanderthals, and other prehistoric creatures, and populated Anee with them.  When hostile aliens destroyed all the Earth's space craft, humans had to hide on the surface of Anee and interact with their creations. Some humans allied with the Neanderthals, but others enslaved them and built a world-spanning slave empire.

Slavery is a major theme of the novel

Anee, full of prehistoric beasts, primitive tribes, genetically engineered monsters, and almost-forgotten technological cities and artifacts, is a brilliant setting for an adventure story.  And Serpent Catch does follow the format of a traditional adventure story, in which the world is going through major changes (for the worse), and a misfit who has some sort of special skill or attribute turns out to be the chosen one who must go on a quest to counteract these changes and save his society.  The human and Neanderthal town of Smilodon Bay is in trouble, because the sea serpents, who were designed by the scientists centuries ago to keep the rapacious Mesozoic animals from swimming from their continent to the Cenozoic continent where Smilodon Bay resides, are dying out.  If plesiosaurs and dinosaurs can swim to Smilodon Bay they will ruin the local ecosphere and hence the fishing-based economy, and leave the town vulnerable to the slavers who control most of the continent.  Our hero is Tull, who is half human and half Neanderthal and has had a difficult home life, and long been regarded by the people of the town as "a man without a people."  A Neanderthal mystic (a "Spirit Walker") declares that only Tull can travel into the evil land of the slavers to capture baby sea serpents to bring back to Smilodon Bay, so off Tull goes with a motley assortment of human, Neanderthal, and superhuman friends.

Superhuman?  Yes; a small number of humans on the moon still have artificial genetic traits possessed by the spacefaring Earthlings who originally terraformed Anee.  One minor human character, a merchant, can do complex math in his head instantly; this skill allows him to predict the changes in Anee's apparently erratic tides so that his ships can cross the seas more safely and swiftly than his rivals.  A major human character has blue skin, is almost seven feet tall, and has lived for centuries, thanks to his access to advanced technologies.  He has traveled the moon for ages, trying to enforce laws against importing dinosaurs to the Cenozoic continent and against slavery, and to prepare the people of Anee for an eventual return to space.

Blue man says pet stegosaurus is a no-no

In a lot of SF books the author will express his displeasure with humanity by contrasting humans with some nonhuman race, aliens or elves or whoever.  There is also a literary tradition of using "noble savages," American Indians for example, as foils for Europeans/whites/Westerners, in an effort to show how selfish, greedy, and indifferent to the environment "modern" people are.  In Serpent Catch, the Neanderthals (who call themselves "the Pwi") play this role.  While humans are ambitious and aggressive, individualistic and cruel, the Neanderthals are always smiling, always expressing affection for each other, live as one with the environment and for their families and communities. Here's a sample from page 46 of this 411 page novel:

Years ago, he'd realized that humans always seem to tell stories of conquest, of men who bulldog mammoths into the ground and slaughter each other in battle, but the Pwi always seemed to tell stories about reconciliation.  

There is quite a bit of sex in Serpent Catch, and we learn that the Pwi are monogamous and marry for life; Neanderthal widows and widowers generally die of grief soon after the demise of their spouses.  The humans in the book are all adulterers who crave rough sex (the Pwi like tender sex.) The Neanderthal families are all models of amity and devotion, while the human families are dysfunctional, either indifferent or brutal.

I often find this sort of thing hard to take, but Wolverton doesn't push it too far; Serpent Catch isn't a propaganda piece or a broad satire, but an epic quest story with three-dimensional characters.  The Neanderthal and human characters all feel real and the focus is on the adventure elements and on Tull's growth as a person, how he learns about his world and himself, and his place in that world.  By the end of the novel Tull is fully integrated into Pwi society, with a loving Pwi wife (though on his journey he had a variety of erotic encounters with females human and non-human) and Smilodon Bay has a new batch of sea serpents.  However, Tull and the blue man have also learned of even more catastrophic threats to the free people of Anee, setting the stage for the sequel.  

Serpent Catch is stuffed full of weird settings, strange creatures and dramatic incidents of sex, violence, and horror.  (Maybe it could count as "grim dark;" people are getting raped, murdered, and tortured all over the place.)  But there is also a lot about hope and love and wisdom of the folksy pro-community variety (the blue man says, "I have always believed that true morality can only arise when we recognize our mutual dependence on one another...," and a venerable Pwi crone tells everyone "Sometimes a pain is so great it cannot be relieved until it is shared.")  Wolverton's many individuals, tribes and ethnicities all have distinct and believable personalities and motivations.  The plot sustained my interest for the entire course of the novel; I was always curious about what was going to happen next, and I actually cared whether or not characters achieved their goals and lived happily ever after (or, like many people in the book, were frustrated, killed by enemies or eaten by monsters.)  Serpent Catch is a superior adventure story, with much of the flavor of a fantasy quest (people fight with swords and arrows and there is plenty of mumbo jumbo including prophecies), but the elements of a science fiction adventure (there are menacing space aliens, genetically engineered monsters, high tech gadgets and lots of biology and ecology) as well as some musings about crime and justice, freedom and responsibility, and family and community.

Strongly recommended to fans of epic adventure tales.  This week I'll read Path of the Hero; I'm hoping to enjoy it as much as I did Serpent Catch.

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What's that?  You are wondering what other books Bantam Spectra offered to the SF-reading public in early 1991?  I'm glad you asked, for that information is right at my fingertips!

I haven't actually read any of the books advertised on the last two pages of Serpent Catch.  I've read one book each by Timothy Zahn (I think Angelmass) and David Brin (Sundiver) and just thought them OK.  As a teen I loved Weis and Hickman's first six Dragonlance books, starring depressed wizard Raistlin, who for a year or two was my personal hero and role model.  I have fond memories of reading the first Rama book in junior high, but have not read any of the sequels.  

Out of this World Science Fiction Classics from Bantam, 1983

In the back of my 1983 copy of Samuel Delany’s Empire Star is this advertisement for Bantam’s “great series of science fiction classics,” full of fancy, terror and adventure.  What is the story with these ads?  Why do some paperbacks have them, and others do not?  Was Delany annoyed that his book contained ads like this?  How were the books chosen for the ad... are these books Bantam is proud of, or are these books they printed too many of and are scrambling to unload?  If Ursula K. LeGuin saw this page back in 1983 would she say, "Awesome, my buddies at Bantam are really working hard promoting my work!"  or would it be more along the lines of, "Cripes, Bantam must really be having trouble selling all those copies of my Earthsea books to the stores."  How many people actually used this "handy coupon" to order books from Bantam?  What percentage of Bantam's gross revenue came from such orders?       

Four of these books are by Ursula K. LeGuin, whom I’ve never read, and three of them are by Warren Norwood, whom I’ve never even heard of, but I am familiar with several of the listed books.

Sundiver by David Brin

I read this in the ‘90s, in fact I think it was the first SF book I read after a few years of avoiding SF and reading mostly history and poetry, the period when I thought I might actually finish grad school and get a degree.  I thought Sundiver was just OK; I liked the sciency stuff of flying into the sun, but wasn't impressed by the murder mystery stuff (the guy with laser eyes did it.)  I never read any more of Brin's fiction, though his critique of Star Wars (that it is elitist and promotes hereditary aristocracy), which I must have read in Slate right after "Phantom Menace" came out, I found very interesting and has stuck with me.  

The Dinosaurs by William Stout, Byron Preiss and William Service

I love this book to death, and have spent many hours admiring the beautiful illustrations.  Stout works in various media and various styles, so even though its dozens and dozens of pictures of dinosaurs by the same guy, each page is fresh and exciting.  I can still remember seeing this in the bookstore in the mall for the first time, and then buying it on a subsequent trip.  The store only had one copy, and it was a little shopworn, but I put a piece of masking tape on the spine and the book is still in one piece, 30 years later.

Harlan Ellison also loved The Dinosaurs, and wrote a gushing blurb-sized review for it in the February 1982 issue of "Heavy Metal," which I learned on tarbandu’s blog, The PorPor Books Blog, back in February of 2012.   There is also an enthusiastic preface by Ray Bradbury. 


The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury 

As I have said earlier, I don’t think I have read every story included in all the different editions of Martian Chronicles, but I have read many of them here and there, and liked them.  I think Thomas Disch's criticisms of Bradbury (that Bradbury can be too sappy and sentimental) have some merit, but in the same way that I still like Star Wars even though David Brin scores some points against George Lucas, I still like lots of Bradbury's work.  "The Silent Towns," one of the stories included in Martian Chronicles, isn't sappy or sentimental at all. 

Mockingbird by Walter Tevis

This book is on Half Price Book's list of 100 SF books, and its Wikipedia entry makes it sound like it might be good. 

The Man Who Fell To Earth by Walter Tevis

I saw the movie of this with David Bowie. I really like Bowie, as a musician and just as an appealing character who livens up the TV screen whenever he appears, and the movie had some memorable images and scenes, but also felt too long and a little too silly.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller, Jr.

I read this in the mid '90s, when I worked at a bookstore in New Jersey, after graduating college but before moving to New York and starting grad school.  This may have been the last SF book I read for a long time, before the SFless period ended by Sundiver. (Though I read Dave Wolverton's On My Way To Paradise and two Serpent Catch books around the same time.  I enjoyed those books, and remember them pretty well.) I remember very little of A Canticle for Leibowitz, except a vivid discussion of how you shouldn’t try to euthanize a sick cat.  I should probably read A Canticle for Leibowitz again.   

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If you want to join Harlan, Ray and me in gushing about Stout’s The Dinosaurs, or if you want to tell me who Warren Norwood is and why I should know him, or say anything at all about these Bantam books or David Bowie, feel free to do so in the comments.