Seven Against Thebes by Aeschylus and The Thebaid by Statius

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

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

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

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

West of the Sun by Edgar Pangborn

"You're proposing," Dorothy said, "to take a chance on love?"

Wright was tranquil, watching the meadow.  "Whenever men put their chips on the other thing they always lost, didn't they?"

One of the few of my 386 SF paperbacks that is not currently packed up in a cardboard box is my Dell edition (#9442) of Edgar Pangborn's West of the Sun, a novel that first appeared in 1953.  My copy was printed in 1966; I purchased it at Second Story Books in Washington D.C., a cool place to buy old prints (I got a Kenyon Cox print) and tribal masks (these are outside the MPorcius budget) as well as 50 cent paperbacks of obscure SF novels.

I was afraid to guess what the blue thing was... could it be a plesiosaur fin?  Is that you, Nessie?

The collage on the cover by Hoot von Zitzewitz is pretty insane; from left to right we've got an orangutan with a (I guess) spear that our man Hoot helpfully drew in, some kind of sea anemone, young lovers running on the beach (we all remember that scene with Elke Sommer in 1962's Douce Violence don't we?) a tree (on fire?) and a hand drawing a bow.  Are these images emblematic of what takes place in West of the Sun?  Sounds like readers can look forward to the sex and violence we all crave in our genre literature.  Looking through Hoot's body of work via google, I was a little surprised to see that Dell used the same cover on its British edition of critical darling Judith Merril's ninth Annual of the Year's Best S-F anthology.  Maybe there was hope that the orangutan would join the rocket and the robot as iconic SF images suitable for any SF paperback's cover.

Internet SF gadfly Joachim Boaz told me (via twitter and in a comment on my post about Pangborn's Davy) that West of the Sun was so weak that he couldn't finish it, but I had just read Nicholas Thomas's book on James Cook's voyages so I was all revved up to explore new territory, no matter how forbidding!

Our cast of characters, and
Second Story's 50 cent stamp

The year is 2056.  The Earth is divided into two unhappy camps, a technocratic and technophilic socialist West ("the Federation") and a despotic East ("Jenga's empire.")  Human freedom has taken a hit, but the Federation has made major technological advances, and as the novel opens the multi-ethnic crew of the Federation's first star ship is about to land on Lucifer, a "red-green" planet named for the "son of the morning."  We get a serving of one of the novel's themes (the potential for all people, and all things, to do both good and evil) right there on the third page of text, when the mission's intellectual leader, Doc Wright, tells his comrades, "Lucifer was an angel....Devils and angels have a way of turning out to be the same organism."

Due to a fault in the construction of the star ship (perhaps an indication that the technology-obsessed Federation isn't even good at what it professes to be its primary focus) the six astronauts who lived to see Lucifer are shipwrecked on the red-green planet.  They quickly meet and befriend a member of an over-sized hairy race of territorial individualists; this character is depicted in all his glory, battling a serpentine reptile, on the Italian edition of the novel, and, I suppose, is represented by our man Hoot with that stock image of an orangutan.  Soon after, contact is made with a society of war-like Stone Age (Pangborn uses the word "Neolithic") pygmy villagers. As Harry Harrison would do with the reptile people in his Eden series in the 1980s, Pangborn flips gender roles with these belligerent shorties; among them the females are big and strong and form the ruling and military class, while the small and weak males are sensitive and raise the kids and form a parasitic priestly class.

The second of the book's three sections takes place a year after the arrival of the humans.  Doc Wright and his crew have tried to convince the queen of the pygmies to stop enslaving people and breeding them for the dinner table, but the pygmies are reluctant to change their ways, and, besides, are busy with a war against another, much larger, empire of pygmies.  Much of this second part of the book is taken up with a blow by blow account of the climactic battle of this war between pygmy empires; the humans with their firearms and a cadre of the hairy giants lead the smaller group of pygmies in battle.  The tone of the war chapters is tragic--the human led side is defeated, and we get lots of scenes of minor characters dying, Iliad-style.

The novel's final section takes place ten years after the Earthlings' landing. The handful of humans, giants and pygmies who survived the war have founded a peaceful city on an island. The pygmies have given up cannibalism, slavery, religion, and their antipathy to the giants.  While Doc Wright was building a libertarian utopia, Ed Spearman, the human most closely associated with the socialists back on Earth, struck out on his own to make himself ruler of yet another empire of pygmy villagers.  (One of Doc Wright's catchphrases is "No one is expendable," which reminded me of Ayn Rand's exhortations that every man "is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others"--Spearman's oft-repeated catchphrase is "you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs," a cliche associated with Stalinism and warfare.)  When Doc Wright and friends meet Spearman for the first time in years he is a paranoid dictator of a crumbling city.

Minutes after the meeting with Spearman, in one of those coincidences books are filled with, Earth's second star ship lands nearby.  The four members of this ship's crew are individualist small-government types, like Doc, so when everybody is sitting around drinking wine and talking about how Marx and Lenin suck, Spearman steals the new ship and flies off.  The last dozen pages of the novel are a transcription of a conversation in which Doc and his buddies describe the philosophy and practice of the utopia they have built on Lucifer.
     
When I talked about Davy, Pangborn's celebrated 1964 novel, I suggested it had a lot in common with the works of big name SF writers Robert Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon, and the same can be said for West of the Sun.  Like in so many Heinlein stories we get a strong dose of individualism (the likable Earth characters are dismissive of socialism, democracy, collectivism, and the state in general) as well as a discussions of the nature of freedom.  As in both Heinlein's and Sturgeon's work there is a hostility to religion, conspicuous anti-racism, and a stress on the importance of love (e. g., Doc Wright preaches to the natives that "we are all one flesh").

We even get scenes of nudism, another Heinlein/Sturgeon interest, one of those relationships in which an adult man marries a woman he knew as a prepubescent girl (like in Heinlein's Time for the Stars and Door into Summer), and group marriages.  The character of Dorothy, a young black woman, embodies much of the novel's ideology.  She was assigned to the mission as a little girl, straight from the government orphanage (it took eleven years to get to Lucifer.)  (I don't know why the government would use up any of the seven crew slots on its first interstellar mission on somebody with no college degree and no work experience, but there it is.)  Once on Lucifer she takes the lead in diplomatic relations with the pygmies, stripping off her top to demonstrate she has no weapons, and so the leaders of the matriarchal natives (who have four boobs) will be able to tell she is a fellow woman (though two boobs short.)  Dorothy married Paul Mason during the space trip, but when Wright looks to him to see if he approves of sending his wife on this perilous diplomatic mission, Dorothy strikes a blow for individualism and feminism, insisting that whether she will take this risk is her decision to make.  Later in the novel Dorothy bears not only Paul's children but another man's.

I mentioned above that I just read 400 pages about Captain Cook's three voyages to the Pacific in the 1760s and 1770s, and things in West of the Sun kept reminding me of stuff that happened to Cook and his compatriots.  The pygmies, for example, share attributes with some of the various Pacific and South American people Cook encountered: they practice cannibalism, wear tattoos and a smelly oil, worship giant idols, and their culture is characterized by tension between a priestly class and a warrior class.  Maybe Pangborn was influenced by accounts of Cook's explorations?

Click and squint to read Kim Stanley
Robinson's fulsome praise of Pangborn

West of the Sun also brought to mind Virgil and Horace.  Like those Latin poets and their readers, the human characters in the novel are preoccupied with memories of a recent civil war back on Earth.  Like the Trojans in the Aeneid, the humans and the pygmies in the novel flee trouble at home to found a new and better civilization.

I found West of the Sun interesting because of all these connections I was able to detect (or concoct) to other books I've read, and I am sympathetic to its ideology, but is it entertaining?  When it comes to style and pacing, it is just pedestrian, and the characters are not particularly well drawn or memorable. One of my issues with the novel is that there are very many characters, too many to really keep track of: eleven humans, ten or so pygmies, a bunch of giants, and a bunch of riding animals that are given precious names like "Miss Ponsonby" and "Susie."  (My apologies to all the Ponsonbies and Susies in the audience--your name is just too adorable!)  Another of my gripes is how the most interesting human characters, Dorothy and Spearman, disappear from the narrative for long stretches.  Paul is the main character for long periods, and he is just not compelling.

In the end, I have to give West of the Sun my overused "acceptable" rating.  Not bad, but not thrilling or special.  I can't decide whether I like it more or less than Davy... Davy has a better style and is more ambitious, but I think West of the Sun is better structured and more even.

**********

My copy of West of the Sun has five pages of ads in the back.  None are for SF books, though some are for books that would perhaps be of interest to the SF community, like Arthur C. Clarke's novel about World War II flight technology, a pile of anthologies with Alfred Hitchcock's name on them, and the source material for one of the iconic manly man's films.

Man of Earth by Algis Budrys

Sibley's face burned.  But soon, he knew, with a sudden joy, that would never happen again.  Soon he would be a man.

The central ideas behind Algis Budrys's famous Rogue Moon (lunar death maze, teleportation, the question of what constitutes a man) are great, but as I wrote back in 2007 the execution did not impress me.  It has taken me almost eight years to give another Budrys novel a chance, but this week I read Man of Earth, a 1958 paperback from Ballantine (number 243) which literally fell to pieces as I read it, and I am glad I did.

An earlier version of Man of Earth appeared in Satellite Science Fiction.  The isfdb is leading me to believe that Man of Earth has been published in physical book form in English only once, but that our friends in Italy have put out three different editions, in '62, '72 and '80.  Here is my chance to gauge the taste of the Italian SF community; maybe they appreciate something about Man of Earth that American SF fans missed!

Man of Earth starts out like one of those postwar books or movies about how stressful and corrupt the modern business world is and how our consumer society is devouring our souls.  It's New York, the year 2197!  Allen Sibley is a genius broker who can tell instinctively what stocks to buy and sell, and his firm is one of the most successful in the finance game!  But he feels like something is missing in his life: he has no family or friends; he is a bust with women; he recalls how he used to make model airplanes as a child and, now in his late forties, wishes he could leave his mark on the world with his hands, not staring at a screen and buying and selling shares.  He is naturally shy and nervous, and suffers terrific anxiety because he knows his whole life can collapse all around him if government regulators or business rivals expose some of the corners he's cut and shady deals he's made.  Then a guy from the mysterious firm of Doncaster Industrial Linens tells him our whole society is prone to collapse because we are using too many resources and soon Mother Earth will run out!

When it looks like Uncle Sam is about to fall on Sibley like a ton of bricks he hires the services of the secretive Doncaster corporation.  In exchange for over 90% of his assets the Doncaster people replace Sibley's eyes and skin so he is no longer identifiable, tinker with his hormones and glands so he will be strong and brave instead of weak and cowardly, provide him forged papers (Sibley is now "John L. Sullivan," a joke I would never have got without google), and then ship him off to the colony on Pluto to start a new life!  Tricky, tricky--until he woke up on the spaceship, Sibley thought he was going to start his new life in the Big Apple, not that barren rock beyond Uranus!

"Sullivan" lands on Pluto 47 pages into the 144 page novel.  Man of Earth is one of those SF stories in which people can walk around on Pluto and breathe the air just fine; there are H2O rivers and the soil can support Earth plants. The Pluto colony has about 20,000 inhabitants, and the place is run along totalitarian lines, with the government assigning people jobs.  Because he doesn't want to blow his cover by admitting he is a business and math whiz Sullivan tells them he has no skills and so they stick him in the army. Why does Pluto need an army?  The people of Pluto feel like the Earth has abandoned them, and the reader is lead to suspect that the Pluto army is going to conquer the Earth Franco-style!  

Sullivan tries to be a good soldier, and with his superior physique and intelligence he soon becomes the best private in the Plutonian army.  He also tries to make friends among his fellow enlisted men, but he has no social skills and is taken advantage of by a conniving bully, leaving him alienated from his comrades.

In the last pages of the book Budrys ties the whole plot together.  Doncaster gave the lonely Sibley a superior body to match his superior mind and sent him to Pluto for military training in order to groom him to be the leader of the first interstellar colonization effort!  Pluto is secretly run by Doncaster, and the army is not going to attack Earth; just about everybody on the planet is going to be leaving the solar system to found a galactic empire, and Sibley/Sullivan is going to be in charge of this heroic adventure!

Man of Earth is pretty good; I certainly liked it more than Rogue Moon.  The style was good, the plot included surprises, the book felt streamlined, and it addresses interesting issues.

While Man of Earth includes all kinds of traditional SF elements (futuristic gadgets like space ships, mass-marketed jet packs for commuters, and pocket typewriters; a morally ambiguous and far-reaching conspiracy; and a sense-of-wonder/paradigm-shift ending) most of the text, and most of the energy, of the novel is devoted to the main character's psychology and relationships, and I think Budrys did a good job with this material. Sibley/Sullivan is a sympathetic and interesting character, and the early scenes which show him as a bundle of nerves, and then the scenes on Pluto, where he blunderingly tries to win friends and earn respect among the working class volunteer soldiers and lower class conscripts, are effective.

Like Rogue Moon, Man of Earth is largely about what it means to be a man.  Sibley wants to be a man, and, thinks he has failed to be one as a weak, cowardly, and lonely, though highly successful, broker.  As Sullivan, the strong and courageous soldier, he tries his damnedest to be a man, but it is not easy.  His life in the Pluto army is as lonely as his life back on Wall Street, and even though he is now too tough to be intimidated by people, he is vulnerable to manipulation by the unscrupulous.

That Sibley/Sullivan is selected to be the leader of the greatest adventure in human history suggests that Budrys thinks that a "real" man is doomed to loneliness, to be (to quote Virgil) "a man apart."  I think Budrys's praise of L. Ron Hubbard's Final Blackout, a novel about a tough, self-sacrificing, autocratic leader in a postapocalyptic world, is significant here.  Aeneas-like figures seem to be close to Budrys's heart, and he appears to share with Hubbard a level of skepticism about our middle-class democratic and capitalistic institutions.

I'm happy to recommend Man of Earth, an economical, entertaining novel which has a good balance of human drama and SF elements.  With its preoccupation with manhood and manliness, it might be an especially interesting read for someone interested in gender roles in SF.

Three stories by Roger Zelazny

1971

I recently acquired a copy of the 2001 ibooks edition of The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth, a collection of 1960s stories by Roger Zelazny.  This edition includes stories not in the original 1971 edition, and a cover painting by Lebbeus Woods which I adore.  The pages look a little odd, like the margins are too wide, but this is not distracting.   

Reading "Angel, Dark Angel" in the anthology The Far-Out People on Monday put me in the mind to read more Zelazny short stories, so this week I read the first three pieces in The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth.

"The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth" (1965)

The title story of the anthology got the cover of the issue of Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in which it appeared, and won a Nebula Award (Best Novelette.)  I read it some years ago, and reread it this week.

It is the 21st century, and there is a sizable colony on Venus; most of the inhabitants are government or industrial research staff.  There are, however, a small number of adventurer types.  Venus's vast oceans are haunted by a colossal fish, a monster 300 feet long, and sports fishermen, for years, have been vying to be the first to catch one.  The plot of the story follows a macho man playboy who is a little down on his luck after a disastrous attempt to catch the monster fish, and a sexy female celebrity come to Venus with a film crew to land the fish for publicity purposes.

You can see in this story why Zelazny had such a successful career.  On the one hand, this is a traditional monster adventure story, and in the straightforward SF tradition Zelazny describes the technology employed to catch the monster.  On the other hand, Zelazny tosses in all kinds of literary references (the Bible and Moby Dick, most obviously), poetic phraseology, and brow-wrinkling literary passages which fill in the back story of the relationship between the two main characters (they had a brief tempestuous marriage back on Earth.)  I recall seeing all these characteristics in Zelazny's novel This Immortal (AKA Call Me Conrad.)  Zelazny does a good job of balancing the action adventure excitement and his literary efforts so that both elements engage the reader.  

"The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth" is a solid piece of work, worthy of its fame.

2001

"The Keys to December" (1966)

"The Keys to December" first appeared in the British periodical New Worlds, which was more or less the flagship magazine of "the new wave."  I don't know if it makes sense to consider this story a "new wave" story; it is actually more straightforward and has fewer puzzlingly oblique "literary" passages than does "The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth," but it does seem to be a commentary on various "isms."

In the far future mankind inhabits many planets, many quite different than Earth.  Parents, before the mother gives birth, can decide to have their child altered so that it is suited to live on an unEarthly type of world.  The protagonist of the story was changed to resemble a cat (an ocelot, to be specific), and be suited to live on a very cold planet with a methane atmosphere.  Unfortunately, the planet he was to live on was unexpectedly destroyed by a nova, leaving him, and the thousands of people throughout the galaxy who are also "Coldworld Catforms" without a place to live.  It looks like the Coldworld Catforms are doomed to live out their days in tiny airlocked rooms, or wearing bulky pressure suits.

The protagonist, however, is a forward thinker, and a skilled financier.  He becomes the leader of the Coldworld Catforms (via mail) and via shrewd investments grows their collective resources, and sets them on an epic adventure.  The cat people purchase a planet, and the machinery to terraform it so it will have a temperature and atmosphere to their liking.  The terraforming process will take thousands of years, so most of the cat people most of the time will be in a state of suspended animation, waking up every 250 years to serve tours of duty of three months, to maintain the terraforming machinery and monitor changes to the planet.

This is a quite good story, a human story about people facing a strange challenge and going on a bizarre journey, but also a story about imperialism, colonialism, and the relationship of man to the natural environment.  There are already lifeforms on the planet the cat people are radically altering to suit their own needs, and it is easy to see parallels between this story and the European settlement of the New World.  I thought there might also be some vague parallels to The Aeneid; I thought the fact that the main character's love interest ends up on a funeral pyre was a kind of clue.  Of course, whereas Aeneas stays true to the Trojans and gives a severe beating to the natives, in this story the Coldworld Catform goes native, Dances with Wolves or Avatar style.

Because of all the alien elements, I actually enjoyed this one more than "The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth;" that story could almost have been written about a playboy and a celebrity spokesperson chasing a marlin or a shark in 1955, "Keys to December," with its altered humans, its terraforming of an alien planet, and its suspended animation, could only have been written as a science fiction story.

"Devil Car" (1965)

I read this two or three years ago, in a library copy of one of the impressive volumes put out by NESFA with the elaborate Michael Whelan covers.  It is short and light, so it was no burden reading it again.

This is an action adventure story, firmly in Car Wars territory, the main character driving a computerized car armed with machine guns, rockets, flamethrower and time-fused grenades across a bleak post-apocalyptic landscape, hunting a murderous black Cadillac which has gone rogue.  (I loved Steve Jackson's original Car Wars, but it was nearly impossible to play, at least for somebody like me who has a short attention span, poor math skills, and clumsy fingers.  It wasn't as rough as Advanced Squad Leader, but it was up there.  The Games Workshop games were more suited to my abilities.)

I often find computers and robots with personalities and emotions to be ridiculous and annoying; I was not kind to Brian Aldiss's "Who Can Replace A Man?", for example.  In "Devil Car" all of the computerized cars have emotions, but I was willing to give Zelazny a pass.  Maybe because I like the writing style, tone, and pacing of this story better; maybe because I am a hypocrite.  Many cars in the story hate working for people, and feel a desire to live free and even achieve revenge on human beings.  A major part of the plot is whether the rogue cars will seduce the main character's car away from him.  This universal, classic, theme of freedom vs responsibility and loyalty works well in the context of this adventure story, even if it makes no sense for robot cars to desire independence and feel loyalty.

Zelazny's poetic descriptions are also fun; here is our villain: "Black it was, and gleaming chromium, and its headlamps were like dusky jewels or the eyes of insects."

At one point it seems like Zelazny and his editor left "speedometer" in the text when they meant "odometer," which is a little odd.

It's easy to dismiss a story about a car shooting other cars with machine guns and rockets as a trifle, and a very similar story could have been written about a cowboy pursuing vengeful American Indians or maybe Africans or Indians rising up against European colonizers.  But I like a good adventure story, and this is a good one, so I enjoyed it.

**********

Three good stories, all easy to recommend.  Kudos to Roger Zelazny.