At The Narrow Passage by Richard C. Meredith

"I have only your word," I said, "and I'm sick and tired of taking other people's word for things.  I'm going to find out for myself."  

I think I bought At The Narrow Passage, Berkley N2730, a 1975 edition of the 1973 novel, over a year ago.  I bought it because I loved the cover painting by Richard Powers.  I like Powers, but often his work seems flat, physically and emotionally. Here was a Powers that had a strong sense of physical depth, and a terrible emotional power: it looked like the landscape that would confront you if you were assigned to explore a planet inhabited by feral vampires or sentenced to Hell by a merciless God. I had no idea who the hell Richard C. Meredith was, and the alternate universe soldier plot described on the back cover didn't particularly interest me, so I just put the book on my shelf and admired the cover occassionaly.

Then, back in June, Joachim Boaz reviewed Meredith's 1969 novel We All Died at Breakaway Station.  He only gave it a middling review, and complained about the book's characterizations and gender politics, but it sounded to me like it had some pretty cool ideas, and, if done well, the kind of bleak tone that would go along with the Powers painting on At The Narrow Passage.  This put At The Narrow Passage onto my radar screen, and I even kept it out of the moving cartons when I packed up my books for storage.  This weekend I finally read the novel.

Revised edition

(Tarbandu wrote about At The Narrow Passage and its sequels in January of 2014, but somehow I didn't make the connection until I had started reading this volume. Maybe because he read a revised edition put out in 1979 with a different cover.)

There are many different "timelines" in the universe, visualized as branches on a two-dimensional tree.  When the universe began there was just the one trunk, but when points of uncertainty are reached, decisive moments when something of consequence may occur (will the Roman Empire embrace Christianity or not?) the line will split into two lines.  By the 20th Century there are a "near infinite" number of lines.  In relation to each other, these lines are described as being to the East or West.  Far to the East of our own line are lines in which the Earth is inhabited by the Krith, an inhuman intelligent species that can't or won't manipulate tools or machines (they don't even wear clothes), but which can travel between the timelines (this is called "skudding") thanks to a special nervous organ.  The Krith become friendly with humans while exploring West, and warn them that in the 40th century or so hostile aliens are going to come to Earth, threatening the extermination of the Krith and human races.  So the Krith, Hari Seldon style, go to many human-inhabited timelines and scientifically predict what courses of history are most likely to produce a unified human civilization with the technological level to defeat the aliens. Then they try to push and prod the human race, more or less secretly, in order to get history to move in that world-peace/high-tech direction.

Our narrator is a human, known in his current timeline as Eric Mathers.  Mathers is a mercenary soldier, paid by the Krith to fight in the wars of various timelines on the side the Krith think more likely to lay the foundations of a civilization that will be able to resist those aliens in 2000 years.  ("Timeliner" mercenaries like Mathers can tip the balance of battles and wars because they bring with them special equipment, like rayguns and biological augmentations that provide them better eyesight and faster reflexes.)  In this timeline he is playing the role of a British Army officer; here the British Empire is in a war of attrition in Europe against the German Empire, a war roughly similar to World War One in our timeline.  Very few natives of this timeline know about the Krith and the timeliners, just people like the King of England and Britain's highest commanders.

Hardcover first edition

In the first 100 pages of the book Mathers is a member of a commando team trying to capture a German aristocrat who is in charge of an effort to develop atomic weapons.  Things go wrong and Mathers gets captured by mysterious allies of the Germans who turn out to be timeliners (they call themselves "Paratimers") from the West side of the Temporal Spectrum, lines the Krith have not yet visited.  These people claim the future alien invasion is a Krith fabrication, and that the Krith are manipulating people like Mathers and the British of this timeline for their own unknown purposes.

Mathers spends the middle third of the book as a prisoner in a secret underground city in Florida, where American revolutionaries are plotting to overthrow the British Empire (which in this timeline still rules all English-speaking parts of North America.)  The Paratimers try to get Mathers to switch sides.  This section of the book reminded me of bits and pieces from Robert Heinlein's work (Mathers has sex with lots of women, reminding me of parts of Glory Road, and witnesses pro-independence political meetings, like those portrayed in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Between Planets and Red Planet) and from George Orwell's 1984 (Mathers reads books purporting to be the true history of mankind's relationship with the Krith, like how Winston Smith reads The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.)  Unlike Heinlein and Orwell, however, Meredith doesn't discuss any kind of political philosophy or seem to have any particular political axe to grind. (Tarbandu suggests that he gets philosophical later, in the sequels.)

Meredith's treatment of minorities and women also reminded me of Heinlein's; there are non-whites and women in leadership positions, Mathers specifically condemns racial prejudice, and there are inter-racial sexual relationships--Mathers, who is white, thinks a black woman is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.  It is also made clear that there are timelines in which sub-Saharan Africans developed modern industrial civilizations and colonized Europe instead of the other way around.

(While I'm talking about possible connections to other works, I should note that Meredith's dedication to this book, and tarbandu's discussion of the series, make clear that Meredith owes a lot of this timeline business to H. Beam Piper, but that I personally haven't read any of Piper's own work in this vein.)

Mathers escapes from the secret base and in the final seventy or so pages of the 250-page novel tries to figure out the truth behind both the Krith and the Paratimers.  He learns that both of these groups have been lying to and manipulating humanity--the alien invasion scare is a hoax, while the Paratimers' leaders are ruthless inhuman killers in disguise.  After a climactic ray guns and machine guns blazing confrontation in a desolate timeline where the Earth has been sterilized by Paratimer nuclear weapons, Mathers escapes both his Krith masters and the blue-skinned Paratimers. Safe in our own timeline, Mathers resolves to do something to protect humankind from these two sinister groups.  What the inhumans are ultimately up to, and what Mathers can do about it, I guess we learn in the sequels.

At The Narrow Passage seems to be designed to appeal to history buffs, particularly military history buffs.  There is a lot of talk about firearms and lots of long expository passages in which one character or another describes how his or her timeline got to be how it is.  (For example, in the timeline in which most of the book takes place the British were able to quash the American Revolution in the 1770s and make France a British satellite during the 1790s Revolutionary crisis there thanks to widespread adoption by the British Army of the Ferguson rifle.)  On the intellectual history side, the guy who is credited with figuring out the Krith are lying about the aliens and writing one of the Paratimer propaganda books is an analogue of Martin Luther named Martin Latham, while many of the Paratimers come from a timeline in which the Cathars came to dominate Europe.

There are lots of action and battle sequences: firefights, ambushes, artillery and aerial bombardments, burning towns and so forth.  As we almost always see in these adventure stories, plenty of people get captured and plenty of people escape capture--sometimes I feel like every book I read has multiple scenes in which people get tied up and at least one scene in which somebody gets knocked out with a blow to the head, only to wake up just fine a few hours later.  There is also a strong lascivious element to the book: Mathers meets lots of beautiful women and we receive descriptions of all their breast sizes; the topic of rape comes up several times; and it is normal for characters of both sexes to be naked, because they come from nudist societies or because they have been caught in dishabille during a sneak attack or because somebody needs to use their clothes as makeshift bonds to tie somebody up.

I like sex and violence as much as the next guy, and Meredith handles that material well enough, and all the science fiction stuff, while not believable, is adequately explained for an adventure caper.  And I'm a history buff myself, so all the references to Ferguson rifles and Albigensians were interesting.  On the negative side, the characterizations are pretty thin, and the book feels a little long and slow.

The best thing Meredith does is keep you in the dark as to whether you are supposed to sympathize with the Krith and the British or the Paratimers and the rebellious Americans; both sides put forward arguments that don't hold water, and both count among their members some admirable figures and some creepy suspicious figures. This is more interesting than those stories in which one side is racist or exploiting the environment and so you know right away they are the villains, and have to trudge through half the story to the "surprise" of the main character switching sides to join the multicultural tree-hugging side.  Meredith kept me guessing and wondering through the entire novel.

I enjoyed At The Narrow Passage enough that I plan to read the sequels; I am genuinely curious as to where Meredith is going to go with these ideas.  So call this one a positive review!  It is not for everybody, but it does what it sets out to do creditably.

"The Earth Killers," "The Cataaaa" & "Automaton" by A. E. Van Vogt

A British hardcover edition.  Groovy!

Let's explore more far-out stories from my paperback edition of The Far-Out Worlds of A. E. Van Vogt.  As in our last episode, we are not only judging these stories on their literary merit and entertainment value, but assessing the veracity of the publishers' advertising: are these stories truly "far-out?"

"The Earth Killers" (1949)

Like "The First Martian," this is an anti-racist story.  Unfortunately it is inferior in every way to that tale.

Morlake is the most physically fit of the American military's test pilots, and he is up in the air, testing the new S29A superplane, on that terrible day in 1979 when atomic bombs blow up the largest U.S. cities, killing forty million people!  Morlake actually sees the bomb that hits Chicago, and notices that it is falling straight down.  A bomb sent from Russia or China or one of America's other rivals would follow a parabolic path, so the bomb must have come from the Moon!

Morlake is the only man with this information, and when he lands he runs into serious resistance to his theory that the devastating attack came from space.  The US government, which now consists of the military and just a handful of senators who were away from D.C. on that day that will live in infamy, scrambles to figure out who launched the attack, but there is no evidence to point to who may have done it.

Morlake gets imprisoned, escapes, steals the S29A (he is the only guy who can pilot it), and travels across America, trying to alert people to the fact that the bombs came from space.  At the end of the 28-page story Morlake (whom we were told hates racism on the second page of the story) reveals that it was racist Southerners, led by one of the few surviving senators, who have (somehow) secretly built a base on the Moon and launched the atomic attack so they could re-institute Jim Crow.  Morlake shoots the unarmed racist senator down in the middle of a government meeting, and the army prepares rocket ships for an assault on the moon base.

Woof!

The plot is just OK (and somewhat reminiscent of 1947's Rocket Ship Galileo by Robert Heinlein), and the story is choppy, switching back and forth between scenes with Morlake, "big historical picture" exposition, and scenes of the military personnel who are leading the pursuit of Morlake.  The racism theme feels superficial; there are no non-white characters and race issues are not discussed. You'd only have to change a few words of the story to make the villains aliens or bankers or Communists or some other group.

It is also a little hard to believe that American dissidents without foreign help could secretly build a moon base and stock its arsenal with atomic bombs.  On the second page of the story we learn that the government rocket program is extremely expensive and was discontinued before any government astronauts got to the moon; this means that the KKK has a better space program than NASA!  Did the racist Southerners build their own rockets and atomic bombs?  If they had a clandestine network of supporters in the military who stole the space ships and bombs Van Vogt does not tell us; in fact, after Morlake kills the bigoted senator, the military leadership is all on Morlake's side.

"The Earth Killers" first appeared in Super Science Stories and was illustrated by Hannes Bok; check out the illos here at icshi.net, the invaluable website for Van Vogt aficionados.

"The Earth Killers" is barely acceptable as a story, and there is nothing crazy or wild or new in it.  Sure, I love warplanes, atom bombs, and space ships, but those are de riguer, not far-out.

"The Earth Killers":         Is it Good?: Not really.          Is it Far-Out?: No.     

"The Cataaaaa" (1937)

That's more "A"s than on a [insert ethnic group here]'s report card!

"The Cataaaaa" first appeared in Fantasy Book, and was reprinted later in Marvel Science Stories and even a men's magazine, according to icshi.net.  It also appears in the British version of Best of A. E. Van Vogt, and so is perhaps one of the works Van Vogt is most proud of.

Cat people are a fixture of SF (though recently it has come to my attention that there is a faction of SF fans and writers who are into raccoon people.)  "The Cataaaaa" is about a five foot tall cat person who comes to Earth and ends up as an exhibit at the carnival freakshow, where he keeps his civilized nature a secret.

The cat person reveals himself to our human first-person narrator, a college professor.  The cat person is a graduate student taking a Grand Tour throughout the galaxy; his kind live for thousands of years and have the ability to travel through space using mental energy alone.

I think this may be one of Van Vogt's favorites of his own stories because of its philosophical nature.  The feline grad student takes from each planet he visits a single item that represents all significant facets of the planet's civilization.  I thought maybe a gladius or a revolver would represent humanity's constant struggle and people's all-too-common will to dominate others and need to resist domination.  Of course I would prefer space aliens to think a Greek vase or a Chinese bowl or maybe a model of the Empire State Building best represents humanity.

When the alien asks the college professor what single object he thinks should represent mankind, the prof argues that humans are essentially religious, that they need faith to survive; even those who eschew traditional religion have faith in some scientific or economic theory.  He suggests a little statue of a man with his arms raised to the skies, its base inscribed with the phrase "I Believe."            

Meow!

I thought that was pretty clever, but the cat person instead says that Earthlings are characterized by their narcissism, exhibitionism, and self-love.  (Ouch!)  When he teleports away he takes with him as his souvenir the man who ran the freak show--by exhibiting freaks, we are led to understand, he was really exhibiting himself!

The college professor loses his job because when he tries to tell people about the cat alien they think he is nuts.  He starts travelling around the country, going into several bars in every town he comes to tell the patrons about the cat alien.  Ostensibly he is trying to spread the word about the dangers of self-love and exhibitionism, but Van Vogt lets us know that by telling his story at every opportunity he is simply showing himself off, proving the feline visitor right.

"Cataaaaa" is OK, I'd give it a passing grade, but I am not enthusiastic about it.  Is it far-out?  A little, I suppose.

"Cataaaaa":          Is it Good?: It's OK.            Is it Far-Out?: Maybe a little?

"Automaton" (1950)

I'm happy to say we are back in far-out territory!

"Automaton" is about a future world in which the artificial people we built go behind our backs and secretly duplicate themselves in vast numbers.  They infiltrate the government, take over the world, and enact a policy outlawing sex!  Are we going to stand for that?  Hell no!  World-wide civil war erupts between human and tobor (the artificial people call themselves "tobors" because that is the reverse of the term "robot," which they find offensive.)  Those sex-hating tobor bastards have a lot of tricks up their sleeves; for example, they have a process whereby they can take a human and turn him into an automaton, a slave ready to fight to the death for the tobors!

John Gregson is one of these poor souls who has been captured by the tobors and "dementalized," turned into an automaton. Before capture he was a brilliant chemist with a beautiful fiance, Juanita Harding; now he is just Number 92, pilot of a reconnaissance plane in the tobor air fleet!

Number 92 gets shot down over a ruined city. He survives, but is surrounded by human forces.  The human intelligence service realizes who 92 once was, and wants to capture him alive, and repair his psyche, thus returning to him his humanity.  Their strategy for doing so is to broadcast propaganda at 92 which will remind him that he is a human being, and set up a movie screen near where 92 is taking cover.  The human forces project upon the screen a film of bathing beauties!  The sight of all that feminine pulchritude undoes the tobor programming, and John Gregson is back!  He is reunited with Juanita Harding and his knowledge of chemistry ends the war--he comes up with a chemical which will make the tobors as horny as the rest of us, ending the tobor prudery which caused the war in the first place.

We've seen Van Vogt tackle the topic of android takeovers before in stories like "Living with Jane." and then there are the computers who seize power over humanity in "The Human Operators" and Computerworld.  And I seem to recall the use of movie screens and broadcast propaganda on the pilot of a downed enemy craft in the classic short story from 1948, "The Rull."

"Automaton" first appeared in Other Worlds with an illustration by Malcolm Smith.  It is a short and fun story; I found it amusing, though I'm not quite sure in what proportion I am laughing with Van and laughing at him.

"Automaton":         Is it Good?: Yes.            Is it Far-Out?: Yes.

**********

My edition of The Far-Out Worlds of A. E. Van Vogt, Ace paperback H-92, includes a silly jokey bio of Van Vogt from Forrest J Ackerman which may be worth reproducing here.  Ackerman was van Vogt's agent and friend.

The final page of the book is an ad for Ace "Classics of Great Science-Fiction."  Of the fifteen listed books I've only read three, Brackett's The Big Jump, Vance's Big Planet, and Simak's City.  I liked all three, and strongly urge you to print out the page, mark the titles, and put it and two singles in an envelope and mail them off to beautiful Manhattan immediately.

My man tarbandu reviewed Laumer's Worlds of the Imperium earlier this year, and couchtomoon tackled Leiber's The Big Time.  Maybe you should put three singles in that envelope.

**********

Not as good as the first three stories (did the publisher purposefully put the strongest material up front?) and not as far-out, but these three are worth reading.  Soon we'll take a look at what else The Far-Out Worlds of A. E. Van Vogt has to offer.

Stories from 1973 by C. S. Claremont, Geo. Alec Effinger and David Drake

In the past I have mentioned that I often am not sure what to read, and will allow myself to be guided by the Fates.  Recently, in an Iowa antique mall, I came upon a copy of the April 1973 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  I was charmed when I saw that a previous owner of the periodical had read and graded each piece of fiction therein.  I willingly parted with two bucks and brought the issue home with me.  This artifact provided me not only the chance to pass judgement on the work of science fiction writers, but the opportunity to pass judgement on the judgement of an unnamed stranger!

This week I read this individual's favorite story from the issue, "Psimed" by C. S. Claremont, his or her least favorite tale, Geo. Alec Effinger's "The City on the Sand," and a story which received the modal grade (look, I'm using math words), David Drake's "Arclight."   Of the eight novelets and short stories in the issue, five, including the Drake piece, received "g"s.  Let's see if MPorcius Fiction Log is on the same page with the SF fan we can know only as "Previous Owner."

"Psimed" by C. S. Claremont

If you look at Previous Owner's handwritten note, I believe we can gain an insight into his or her thought process.  It looks like Previous Owner was going to give "Psimed" a score of "VG," but then realized he/she was shortchanging Claremont, and upgraded "Psimed" to "Excellent."  (I am disregarding the possibility that Previous Owner's grade is the neologism "vexcellent," meaning "having the ability to cause a high degree of vexation.")            

I've never read anything by Claremont before--in fact, I had to do some research to find out if Claremont was a man or a woman.  As people reading this probably already know, Claremont usually goes by "Chris Claremont," and is staggeringly famous for writing about Marvel's X-Men and collaborating with George Lucas on some fantasy novels.  I'm learning every day!

My man tarbandu has written a little about Claremont's comic book work and I think it is fair to say that tarbandu would not use words like "excellent" to describe it.  Torn between the disparate opinions of tarbandu and Previous Owner, I tried to go into "Psimed" with an open mind.

"Psimed" is the story of Petra Hamlyn, a female doctor in a future high tech New York.  I get the impression that Claremont often writes female protagonists.  Hamlyn is a showy individualist, wearing jewelry and short skirts in a society in which fashions are androgynous and conservative.  Male characters stare at her legs, female characters think she looks like a prostitute.  When a new colleague calls her "Doctor," she corrects him: "My name's Petra.  I'm afraid I despise formality...."

The child of a wealthy man collapses of a rare disease, and Hamlyn's team of doctors try to save the kid.  Hamlyn and the kid are both psychics, and, in this universe of Claremont's, psychics tend to lose their powers and get all angsty and then commit suicide.  There is some melodrama as the kid goes berserk upon learning he has lost his psi powers and when Hamlyn has a painful flashback to when she lost her powers while terrorists tortured and murdered her husband.  Hamlyn also has sex with the new colleague.  The story ends when the kid dies, and another one of Hamlyn's colleagues, a psychic who has melded his mind with the kid in an effort to save him, also dies.

I'm no expert on the X-Men, but it seems like the themes of this long, boring, and histrionic story about a small elite of angst-ridden people with special powers who are expected to use those powers to help society, have something in common with the themes of those X-Men comics.

So, what did Previous Owner like about this story?  I guess lots of people are into medical dramas, and into stories about people with special powers who suffer angst and alienation.  I don't find medical stuff interesting, and while I sometimes like the whole alienated mutant thing (I just gave Kuttner and Moore's "The Piper's Son" a positive review), I didn't think this was a good example.

Previous Owner Grade: Excellent

MPorcius Fiction Log Grade: Not good

"The City on the Sand" by Geo. Alec Effinger

I've already encountered Effinger and his short stories during the course of this blog's life.  My feelings have been mixed.  Let's see if "The City on the Sand" tips the scales one way or the other.  SF blogger extraordinaire Joachim Boaz thinks highly of Effinger, so again we see a blogger I admire at odds with the mysterious Previous Owner, who was at a loss for words to describe his or her unhappiness with "The City on the Sand."  Who will I side with?

"The City on the Sand" is a consciously literary and subtly amusing story about decadence and a life wasted.  It takes place in an alternate early 20th century world (they have electric lights and radios) in which Western Europe is so decadent that its people have not bothered to conquer or even explore the New World or Sub-Saharan Africa.  The main character, Ernst Weinraub, is a would be poet and novelist who has traveled Europe, but found no place truly congenial.  So he has settled in the one city of North Africa, where he sits at an outdoor cafe all day, drinking and watching people walk by.  He has an outline for a trilogy of novels but has made no progress on the novels in years.  When it rains he doesn't even have the energy to move inside or lower the awning.

Weinraub has done nothing with his life, he has no friends, no wife or children.  He doesn't make an effort to get his poetry published; he just hopes some tastemaker will spot him sitting in the cafe and "discover" him.  When people try to develop a relationship with Weinraub or enlist him in their projects (a Polish political activist is trying to raise a volunteer army to free slaves or something like that) he just waves them away.

I have to disagree with Previous Owner again.  Effinger's style here is good, and the setting and tone of the story are good.  I can see why someone wouldn't care for "The City on the Sand," though-- there's not much plot and certainly no action or sex.  This is a literary mood piece, but it is a good one and I quite like it.  My opinion of Effinger has just gone up.

Previous Owner Grade: ugh

MPorcius Fiction Log Grade: Good

"Arclight" by David Drake

In my youth I read and enjoyed Killer, which is about a space alien murdering people in ancient Rome, and was written by David Drake and Karl Edward Wagner.  I read a couple of Drake's Hammer's Slammers stories, and they just made me shrug.  I quite liked Drake's short story "The Barrow Troll," and in late 2010 I read his novel The Voyage and wrote a three star review of it on Amazon in which I focused on the fact that the protagonists are a bunch of amoral jerks.

So, that is a brief history of my relationship with David Drake, who seems like a competent writer but whose isn't always ideally suited to my temperament.  I was curious to see how I would respond to "Arclight."

Well, for once I am on the same page as Previous Owner; this is a good story.

Drake served with the U.S. Army in Vietnam and Cambodia, and this story draws on his experiences.  A cavalry unit (the main characters operate ACAVs, M113 armored personnel carriers equipped with additional machine guns and armor) accidentally uncovers an ancient Cambodian temple.  There is a hideous idol in the temple which the troops damage in the course of investigating the ruin.  Over the succeeding nights the soldiers dream of this monstrous statue, and some of them are mysteriously killed, their bodies horribly mangled.  Was it communist guerrillas who killed them?  A ravenous tiger?  We readers know it was an invisible demon!  The demon's campaign of vengeance ends when the U. S. Air Force bombs the temple into oblivion, demolishing the idol.

This is a solid entertaining horror story.  We've all probably read lots of stories about monsters from ruins terrorizing people, but Drake's story really benefits from its setting among American soldiers in South East Asia.  For example, I found the military stuff interesting (I was not familiar with the terms "ACAV" and "arclight" before.)  So, thumbs up for this one.

Previous Owner Grade: g

MPorcius Fiction Log Grade: Good.

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Even if Previous Owner and I have different tastes, I enjoyed my exploration of his or her old magazine, which gave me an opportunity to learn more about three authors I have only had a limited exposure to.

The April 1973 F&SF also has a bunch of interesting ads.  On the first page of my copy (which I suspect is in fact the third page--I think the first sheet of my copy was lost) we have an ad for an anthology of SF stories about sex.  Hubba hubba!  Also, an ad for a novel about what would happen if some guy figured out astrology was real.  I'd be curious to read some of the sex stories (despite the embarrassingly dumb font they use in the ad for the title), but the astrology book sounds horrible.

In the back of the mag (we cool people call magazines "mags," you know, to save time) we have the "Market Place," which is full of fun classifieds.  I had no idea there was a town in California called "Brubank."  Not only is there such a town, but the people there love dinosaurs!  There's an ad for Dianetics; these were the days before the Elronners had that John Travolta and Kirstie Alley money and could afford those TV ads we all remember.  A guy in Hawaii is willing to teach you telepathy.  You can mail three questions to a psychic in Illinois and for only ten bucks he will use his powers to answer them.  And if you don't have ten dollars and live in South West Canada, a guy will teach you how to pan for gold right in your own neighborhood!  Awesome!  

Click to read about all the bargains I missed in 1973 when I was two years old

Three 1971 stories by Robert Thurston

As I have reported several places online, I quite like Robert Thurston's 1978 novel Alicia II.  I also enjoyed his Q Colony, from 1985 (link goes to my Amazon review.)  So, when I came upon Clarion, a 1971 anthology which includes three stories by Thurston, I bought it.  This week I read the stories, "Wheels," "Anaconda," and "The Last Desperate Hour."

Does that say "a darling
transvestite rite?"

"Wheels"
"Wheels" won the first place award at the 1970 Clarion Writers' Workshop, and was fourth in the 1972 Locus Poll for short fiction.  It was anthologized a second time in 1979, in Car Sinister, a paperback anthology of stories about the future of man and the automobile.  I couldn't find any decent scans of the cover of Car Sinister online, which is too bad, as the cover is pretty amusing.

"Wheels" was also the basis of Thurston's novel Set of Wheels, published in 1983. Check out Tarbandu's negative review of Set of Wheels; Tarbandu not only harshly assesses the book, but the entire Ford Motor Company. 

Personally, I don't care about cars, and, as I tell incredulous MidWesterners, I don't like to drive.  ("I didn't drive for years in New York, I walked or took the train everywhere-- it was a paradise!")  I am really looking forward to the autonomous cars we keep hearing about.

Enough about me, let's talk about "Wheels."  As he tells us in the intro, Thurston's "Wheels" is about the tension between the romantic view of the car as a symbol and a means of freedom and sexual prowess, and the more recent view that the car is dangerous and bad for the environment.

"Wheels" takes place in a dystopic future in which the city is plagued by snipers, police have cordoned off the black ghetto, and cars have not been manufactured since 1979.  Our narrator is a young man with a yearning to drive, but getting a license and a car are almost impossible.  He enviously watches people in cars drive by; the drivers even shout insults at him!  So he sneaks into the ghetto and buys a battered black market '67 Mustang and drives off into the country.  Out there he joins up with a group of outlaw car enthusiasts, including a biracial girl whom he finds fascinating.  "She has white-girl-texture hair which she ties back as if ashamed of it."  She wears cosmetics to darken her skin, but she can't hide her "white girl's small-nostril nose."  In the climax of the story the narrator and the young woman are pursued by the bravest cop in the territory.

I thought this was a pretty good adventure story that also addresses "the issues of the day," like race relations and urban crime.  It has some literary affectations, like being in the present tense and using no quotation marks, but I didn't find these overly distracting.  It is easy to see why it would win the award at Clarion; Thurston has all the bases covered, and his writing style is good.  So, thumbs up for "Wheels."

"Anaconda"
"Anaconda" is three pages long. Some of the paragraphs constitute a sort of stream-of-consciousness thing, the thoughts of an American serviceman running through a Philippine jungle, worried about "Jap" snipers.  Other paragraphs are about a funeral, and the deceased's failed marriage.  It appears that the guy in the jungle and the guy being mourned are the same, and that the marriage failed because the wife was unfaithful.  The husband, after the war, became a drunk and fell down some stairs, and the ex-wife confessed to having pushed him, but was acquitted at trial.

A puzzling story, not very fun and only faintly interesting.  Thumbs down.

"The Last Desperate Hour"
Editor Robin Scott Wilson in the intro to this one tells us it is "very funny."  Thurston suggests that the story is meant to subvert or satirize old melodramatic movies in which evil is punished, because in real life sometimes "the bad guys" succeed.  I can't say I was eager to read a story making fun of old movies because they are square, but I soldiered on.

"The Last Desperate Hour" is a farce.  Eighteen years ago two bank robbers, Noodles and Butch, broke into the Glaze family's suburban home and forced the Glazes at gunpoint to allow them to use their house as a hideout.  Noodles and Butch are still there nearly twenty years later, not having left the property for one moment over that period of time.  The criminals have watched the family evolve; toddler Veronica is now a college student, and Mr. Glaze, once a radical dedicated to the class struggle and sympathetic to the robbers, now complains about his wife's "bleeding-heart liberalism."  There are weak jokes (Noodles's .45 is rusty) and feeble puns (Noodles looks at Veronica's legs and engages in "remembrance of thighs past.")            

"The Last Desperate Hour" is like a bad Saturday Night Live skit.  Thumbs down!

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So far, I've read six stories in Clarion, three by George Alec Effinger and three by Robert Thurston, and have liked two of the six.  There are twenty-one pieces of fiction in Clarion; dare I read any more?

The Pastel City by M. John Harrison

My man Tarbandu praised the Viriconium books by M. John Harrison, so when I saw one at a used bookstore I bought it.  Tarbandu is not Harrison's only big league fan; the back of the copy I purchased, Avon 19711, printed in 1974 (copyright 1971) has praise from Michael Moorcock, and on the first page are quotes from Ursula K. LeGuin (comparing Harrison to Fritz Leiber) and Philip Jose Farmer (comparing Harrison to Jack Vance and William Hopes Hodgson.)

This copy also has a fun ad on its last page for an anthology of stories from New Worlds. Interestingly, the words "science fiction" do not appear on this ad, a black and white reproduction of the book's cover.

The Pastel City is one of those stories, like Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories (1950-1984), or Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun (1980-1983), or Hugh Cook’s Chronicles of an Age of Darkness (1986-1992), about a far future society with a quasi-medieval technology and social structure, but which is able to take advantage of old technology left over from earlier more advanced civilizations, technology that is only dimly understood. (This way, as on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom, you can have guys sword fighting in one scene, flying aircraft in the next scene, and shooting off guns in the scene after that.)  The Pastel City, like J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth books and Michael Moorcock’s Elric and Corum stories, also is about a formerly high civilization in a period of change and/or decline, and those of its members who sadly recall a superior past.

The city of Viriconium is in trouble. Not only has the city been sliding into decadence, its people more concerned with trade and wealth than fighting in wars (the book is full of leftist Harrison's hostility to the bourgeoisie): now Canna Moidart, a cruel foreign woman with a claim to the throne of Viriconium (she married the previous king’s brother and then murdered him) is leading an army on the city, hoping to overthrow the current queen, the beautiful teenage girl Methvet, AKA Jane. The aristocratic heroes who led the armies of Jane’s dad come out of retirement and gather together to save Jane and Viriconium.

The Pastel City reminded me a lot of some of Moorcock’s Eternal Champions books, those ones in which the best swordsman in the world gets a message from a higher power and is sent on a quest in order to thwart some other higher power's world-threatening designs. Our main character, Cromis, is the best swordsman in the world as well as a talented poet and musician. After he kills an evil merchant he gets a message from a higher power and goes on a quest. Canna Moidart has unearthed an army of robots (“robots” is not very poetic, so Harrison calls them “automata”) but after she defeats Jane, the robots cease to obey Canna Moidart and start killing people at random. It seems the robots were programmed to destroy all human life. (This kind of Ludism goes hand in hand with hostility to the merchant class.) So Cromis and the other aristocrats must travel through a desert created by the industrialism of past civilizations to find and destroy the one huge computer (Harrison calls it “the artificial brain”) that controls all the genocidal robots.

The book is, or tries to be, moody.  On almost every page Harrison describes the wind, or how some person place or thing has been eroded by time. We get samples of Cromis’s T.S. Eliot-style poetry (“…we are nothing but eroded men…”). There is tragedy, with lots of Cromis’s old buddies getting killed. Harrison is also into images; we get detailed descriptions of everybody’s clothes, of various landscapes, and of architecture, with an emphasis on colors.

The book works, and I’m comfortable recommending it to people who like these sword fighting science fantasy things, but I didn’t think it stood out from its genre.  All the other authors I have mentioned in this blog post have done better work of this general type. 

The plot and the characters in The Pastel City are just kind of average; I didn’t really care who won the war and who lived or died.  It could be that the book is too short, that there wasn't enough time to develop any feelings for Cromis and Jane and Viriconium and the rest so that when they got betrayed or killed or whatever I was invested in them.  Canna Moidart, who sets the whole adventure in motion, never appears "on screen."  The high points of the book are things like the eight foot tall power armor a dwarf engineer refurbishes and wears into battle, the killer robots (who collect the brains of the dead), and the truth about the huge "artificial brain." 

I’ll probably give Harrison another shot, but, as I brood and the wind ruffles my black garb, I do not hear any insistent voices beckoning me to stalk this bitter land, a land ravaged by time and the industry of forgotten generations, in search of the sequels to The Pastel City.

Three More Mummy Stories: Wollheim, Williams and Grant

Let's return now to the copy of Tales of the Dead I borrowed from the library, to read three more stories from the section of the book which reproduces editor Bill Pronzini's 1980 anthology Mummy!

"Bones" by Donald A. Wollheim (1941)

I've already enjoyed Wollheim's work as an editor; in 1971 Wollheim founded the famous DAW Books, and I own and have read books by Jack Vance, Tanith Lee, A. E. Van Vogt, Lin Carter, Theodore Sturgeon, and others, published by DAW.  But until today I had never read any of Wollheim's fiction.

"Bones" first appeared in Stirring Science Stories, a magazine that lasted four issues, which Wollheim edited.  According to Wikipedia, Wollheim had no budget to pay for fiction, so he and his cronies wrote all the stories, often under pseudonyms.  According to ISFDB, one story Wollheim wrote was credited to "X" and titled "!!!"

"Bones" feels amateurish and overwritten.  "Half conquered by the smell of the antique houses, the subtle vibrations of past generations still pervading his spirit..."  Not too good, and the entire story is like this.  "...his nostrils were assailed by the inescapable odor of all such institutions - age!"  "The silence assailed his ears with a suddenness that all but took his breath away."  "Shortly Dr. Zweig announced himself ready to attempt the final work toward actually bringing the now pliant and vibrant corpse to life."  "The air was supercharged with tension, horror mixed with scientific zeal."  Oy.

The plot of this 7 page story is similar to Edgar Allan Poe's "Some Words with a Mummy": a guy is invited to be part of a group of intellectuals attending the unwrapping of a mummy, the mummy is electrified and comes to life.  But while in Poe's satire the mummy criticized democracy and American architecture, "Bones" is a mood piece with a trick ending, and when the mummy tries to speak, it falls apart.

Not very good.  

"The Vengeance of Nitocris" by Tennessee Williams (1928)

When you are reading from a book called Mummy!, you might think that you will not be exposing yourself to the work of great figures of American literature.  Well, you could not be more wrong!  Tennessee Williams, who penned A Streetcar Named Desire ("Stella!") and The Glass Menagerie ("gentleman caller") and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ("Big Daddy") was published in Weird Tales, the August 1928 issue, with this story long before he was the toast of Broadway.  "The Vengeance of Nitocris" appeared in the same issue as a story by Robert Howard about Solomon Kane and one by Edmond Hamilton about the Interstellar Patrol.

When you are reading from a book called Mummy! you probably expect all the stories to include mummies, but again you would be mistaken.  As Pronzini warns us in his intro, there are no mummies in "The Vengeance of Nitocris."  Instead this is a story set in ancient Egypt, about a pharaoh who neglects his duties to the gods, and is torn apart by an angry mob lead by rabble-rousing priests.  The impious pharaoh's sister, Nitocris, is a striking beauty with "thick black brows," "luminous black eyes," "rich red lips" and "slender fingers."  Hubba hubba, we can understand why the priests put her on the throne after murdering her brother, can't we?  

Nitocris has built a tremendous temple of great beauty, and invites all the priests to a banquet there in its subterranean dining room.  While the priests are living it up with booze and slave girls, Nitocris sneaks off and pulls a lever and the Nile rushes into the banquet hall, drowning all of the priests (and the slave girls!  Cold!)  Nitocris then commits suicide in a room full of fire.

This is more like an anecdote than an actual short story; Williams lets us know ahead of time what is going to happen, and all you classical scholars will know anyway, as Williams lifted the story from Herodotus.  So there isn't much suspense.  I myself hadn't heard the story before, and was disappointed when the priests were drowned; when Nitocris pulled the lever, "a moment of supreme ecstasy," I thought a pack of ravenous lions was going to burst into the banquet hall and tear everybody to pieces.

This story is just OK, though I feel like I learned something about American and Greek literature I should have known already, so I will recommend it.     

"The Other Room" by Charles L. Grant (1980)

I've never read anything by Grant before, though I have a book he edited, Gallery of Horror.  It seems that "The Other Room" only ever appeared in Pronzini's Mummy! and the omnibuses like Tales of the Dead in which Mummy! rose again.

It seems that Grant is a fellow New Jerseyean, and in fact was born in a town with which I am familiar, Hackettstown, where they make M&Ms.  

"The Other Room," Pronzini tells us in his intro, takes place in the New England town of Oxrun Station, the setting of several stories by Grant.  Like everybody, I love New England: the trees, hills, ocean, antiquing, old houses, etc.  After we bought our doughty Toyota Corolla my wife and I spent many weekends driving around New England.  One week we stayed in a spider-infested cabin in the Maine woods, next to a clear pond full of adorable turtles.  The power went out and for light to read by I had to hand crank a LED lamp.

Sometimes my life back in New York feels like a dream.

Anyway, in "The Other Room," two academics discover a secret chamber in an old Connecticut house.  The room contains sarcophagi, and an inscription that describes a simple spell.  When one of the academics completes the spell there is fire and smoke and everyone flees the house, and we are left to wonder what manner of doom is about to befall the world, now that a door to some ancient evil has been opened.

Grant spends a lot of time setting the scene and helping us get to know the characters, which include the wife and teenage daughter of the owner of the house.  This is fine, but I felt like there wasn't much pay off; what they actually find in the secret crypt and what happens next is left a mystery.  This story kind of feels like the first chapter of an adventure story about an army of monsters trying to conquer the Earth through a gate, and how a band of plucky ordinary people, or a special branch of the FBI, or an armored division of the US Army, has to stop the monsters before midnight or an eclipse or something.  Or the first half of a short story about a family or a pair of friends who outfight a monster in a house using the rifles from the gun cabinet, the rusty crossed swords that have hung over the fireplace for 20 years, and their knowledge of the Bible or The Necronomicon.  (My spell check wants to read a story in which people defeat a monster with their knowledge of microeconomics.)

Grant seems like an able writer - I want to read something else by him now - but I feel like there could have been more here.  My man Tarbandu, who has read lots of horror stories and doesn't seem to be a fan of Grant's, suggests at his venerable PorPor Books Blog that the lack of a "payoff" is characteristic of Grant's work.  Will Errickson, whose Too Much Horror Fiction blog is always interesting and full of great images, appears to like Grant more than does Tarbandu, and provides a more sympathetic view of the style of horror Grant wrote and promoted.    

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One poor story, and two OK stories; not so hot.  Still, I will rustle up and read more stories by Wollheim and Grant before giving up on them.  And I'm not done with Tales of the Dead; its third section, Ghoul!, lurks in my future.

The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction edited by Brian Ash

Tarbandu at the PorPorBooks blog recently has featured the cover of Brian Ash's Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction on his site, and blogged about the similar Encyclopedia of Science Fiction edited by Robert Holdstock. Drake University has a copy of the Ash volume (sadly, the spine is quite broken and the pages threaten to achieve their liberty at any moment) and I spent some time looking through it.

After like 60 pages of timeline (called "Program"), listing major events in SF in from 1805 to 1976, the book is organized by themes (or as the book calls them, "Thematics") such as "Robots and Androids," "Mutants and Symbiotes," and "Warfare and Weaponry." This is the heart of the book, in which numerous stories and books are described. Then we get essays on topics like "Science Fiction as Literature," and "The Value of Science Fiction" in the "Deep Probes" section, and finally discussion of "Fandom and Media." Many of the sections of the book are written or introduced by recognizable SF authors and editors, including such important figures as Asimov, Anderson, and Pohl. This being a British book, British authors are well represented, including not only big names like Brian Aldiss and J. G. Ballard, but some I feel like I don't hear much about, such as Ken Bulmer and Edmund Cooper.

All 19 of the "Thematics" are introduced by "name" SF writers.  A. E. Van Vogt's contribution is characteristically bizarre; my man Van barely addresses the issue he was asked to talk about, espouses some of his weird theories, and actually calls out the people who produced the book he is writing for, saying "I observe that my current work is not appreciated by British critics of the genre; but it sells well...." Zing! Philip Jose Farmer writes about his religious beliefs, asserting that if we are not immortal, life has no meaning. Ouch! Ken Bulmer's contribution is all over the place; he decries technology as evil, complains that in SF "artefact" is usually spelled "artifact," and takes time out from his pessimism party to praise SF artists for their "honourable labour." The photo of Bulmer reminded me that I need to shave and get a haircut.

(I'll list all the Thematics and their introducers below the fold, as newspaper people say.  All you fashionistas will find Ken Bulmer's photo down there, too.  Get your clippers ready. )

I don't really like the design of The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.  The font is tiny and ugly and the pages feel crowded and cramped (every single page has a horizontal heading at the top of the page and most have a vertical heading on the outside margin.) There are many illustrations, mostly book covers and magazine illustrations, which of course is great, but I thought many of them mediocre.  I also don't understand why some particularly weak illustrations, like a panel from a Barbarella comic, are allowed to take up an entire page.  On the plus side, any illustration you haven't seen before has some kind of information value, and this book is full of illos I have never before encountered. There are many photos of author's faces, and, adding to the cramped feel of the book, many of them are cropped very close, the writer's chin and forehead beyond the borders of the image.

As with the illustrations, the text, even when I don't think the style is good, is full of interesting information about books, stories, and authors I have never heard of.  And the 19 Thematics intros provide some kind of insight into the character of writers with whom we may be familiar primarily through their fiction.  The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is definitely worth a look for classic SF fans, even if I don't grok some of its artistic and design decisions and I think some of the Thematics intros are wacky.     

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.   

Three Novels by Edmund Cooper

Tarbandu at The PorPor Books blog recently purchased Edmund Cooper’s All Fools’ Day, which brought Cooper to the forefront of my mind. I read a Cooper novel in late 2011 and another in early 2013, and had a third on my shelf, unread, so this week I gathered up my notes about Cooper and read that third novel, The Last Continent. 

A Far Sunset

I read this in late 2011, and thought it a solidly average piece of work, as I related in my December 6, 2011, review on Amazon, pasted here:

This 1967 novel is about Paul Marlowe, a British psychiatrist who is on the crew of one of Earth's first interstellar space ships. When his ship lands on an alien planet and is disabled he is captured by the intelligent natives, people who look much like humans and have agriculture and cities but no wheel. Marlowe becomes a member of the alien society, and the novel follows his efforts to alter that society and uncover its secrets.

I like the plot, and it is not a bad novel, but nothing exceptional or special; there is something bland about the whole thing, frankly. Cooper's style is somehow detached, putting distance between the reader and the characters, so that the emotional impact of big moments is diminished. Cooper also makes it a practice to announce ahead of time when something exciting is about to happen (one chapter begins, "It was on the second night that disaster struck,") limiting the amount of surprise, tension or suspense the story can generate.

This was the first Edmund Cooper book I have read, and I am likely to read more, should I encounter them.

I have the Berkley Medallion edition, with the red Richard Powers cover.

Five to Twelve

In January or February of 2013 I read Cooper’s 1968 novel, Five to Twelve. I have the Berkely Medallion paperback with the sexy Jeff Jones cover, which I like quite a bit. Unfortunately the novel was mediocre, a little below average. I didn’t post a review on Amazon, but in my archives I find these notes:

I did not like this as much as Cooper’s A Far Sunset. As a side effect of widespread use of birth control pills, women begin to outnumber men, and women’s physical strength and IQs increase dramatically. By the time the novel depicts, women have all the good jobs, run the government, and have made men second-class citizens, courtesans and such. The main character is a man who, like in a lot of SF books, is contacted by a ruthless underground group of rebels and spends the book deciding whether to side with the ruthless and violent rebels or the ruthless and corrupt status quo. The book was full of weak jokes that the author considered satire, and so any tension the adventure/suspense portions might have had were undermined.

The Last Continent

This week I read 1969's The Last Continent.   My copy is a tattered Dell, #4655, with the somewhat embarrassing Ron Walotsky cover.  I guess Richard Powers and Jeff Jones were busy that day.  And it is not all Ron's fault; the typeface and its placement are also inferior to those on my Berkeley Medallion Cooper books.

This novel takes place some two thousand years in the future. The Earth is mostly a barren waste, due to the use of nuclear weapons in a war between the white and black races back in the late 20th or early 21st century. In this war the moon was broken apart and pieces of it rained down on the Earth. The southern polar region still bears life, and is the site of a dense jungle with a rich ecosystem of mutant plants, birds and reptiles; there has been an increase in the amount of solar and cosmic radiation that reaches the planet surface, speeding up evolution.

In a small city in the middle of this Antarctic rain forest dwell the last human beings on Earth, people of European ethnicity who have a mixture of primitive (they hunt with spears) and modern (they have electric lights and the telegraph) technology. Only an elite class of eunuchs is permitted to study the modern technology.

On Mars has developed a modern civilization of people descended from Earthlings of African ethnicity. This civilization is going through a period of totalitarian government; their ruling ideology is Vaneyism, a series of myths based loosely on the life of Thomas Mulvaney, a black activist who lived on Earth during the period leading up to the cataclysmic race war. Vaneyism holds that the white man went extinct as punishment for his sins and the Earth is a dead world. As the book begins a Martian exploration ship, hoping to find mineral resources that are scarce on Mars, has just taken up orbit around Earth. Its crew includes a ruthless and paranoid “political officer,” and the crew members are all careful not to say anything that could be interpreted as “anti-Vaneyism.”

The lead black character of the book is Mirlena Stroza, ship’s psychologist (Cooper seems to like to write about psychologists and psychiatrists.) Stroza isn’t quite sold on Vaneyism, and is very excited to explore the Earth. She uses her sexual wiles and a little skullduggery (she drugs the political officer) to make sure she is on the space boat that leaves the ship and goes down to Earth. She is the first of the party to set foot on Earth, and almost immediately meets the lead white character, Kymri son of Kymriso. Kymri has never seen a black person before, and Stroza has never seen a white person before. Reversing the nature of such encounters in earlier history, it is the science-trained black explorer who is backed up by advanced technology (space suit, space ship, firearms) and the savage white native who carries a spear and wears a cape made of feathers. Kymri is captured and finds himself at the mercy of the Martian astronauts.

The encounter of these two civilizations will inevitably lead to radical changes in each, but will those changes be catastrophic or beneficial? The discovery of a living white race explodes Vaneyism and could cause trouble for the ruling Vaney party back on Mars. The political officer wants to exterminate or enslave all the white people. For their part, the rulers of the white city fear the Martians will use their superior weapons and superior numbers to conquer them, and weigh the wisdom of buying time by murdering the small landing party before they can send much information back to Mars. Fortunately for everyone concerned, Mirlena Stroza turns out to be a good diplomat, the white rulers act responsibly, and a revolution breaks out on Mars that overthrows the hardcore members of the Vaney party.  We get a happy ending in which whites and blacks are going to work together to build a just multicultural civilization.

This is a moderately entertaining and interesting book. I am always inclined to like stories about explorers making contact with aliens, and Cooper’s using this scenario to talk about race relations adds a layer of interest. The various characters and the two civilizations, though not extensively drawn (the novel is only 156 pages) are fleshed out enough to maintain the reader’s interest and sympathy. I hoped that Mirlena Stroza’s love affair with Kymri son of Kymriso worked out, and that the Martians didn’t just nuke Antarctica into oblivion. Cooper uses short chapters and the pace is quick, which I appreciated.

There are problems with the book, though. The metaphors in the big sex scene are embarrassing, and the recorded speech the characters find, left by the last black man on Earth twenty centuries ago, is too histrionic and melodramatic. The revolution on Mars, though necessary for the happy ending, feels tacked on; there is only one chapter set on Mars, and the revolution isn’t really closely linked to the Earth expedition.  If I had been Cooper's editor I would have advised him to have the discoveries on Earth more clearly inspire the Martian revolution; that way Mirlena Stroza and Kymri are masters of their own fates.  As written, the change of government on Mars feels like deus ex machina.  

Also, though the book is anti-racist, The Last Continent is vulnerable to charges of racism. Some might find the final fate of the political officer to be offensive on this score. Cooper also suggests that the blacks on Mars, over two thousand years, have failed to produce any significant art or develop any new technologies.   

Despite its shortcomings, The Last Continent is a worthwhile read, especially for those interested in the depiction of race issues in science fiction and connoisseurs of sex scenes in which someone’s tongue is described as an impudent snake.