The Malacia Tapestry by Brian Aldiss

Back in the 1980s, as a teenager, I read Brian Aldiss's Malacia Tapestry and I loved it.  I enjoyed it so much that it is one of the few science fiction books I have retained over the decades.  While most of the SF paperbacks I read in my youth have been sold or are now in the custody of my brother back in New Jersey, my 1985 paperback copy of this 1976 novel has stayed in my possession over 25 years and traveled with me cross country, because I knew I would reread it someday.  This weekend this paperback's odyssey reached its conclusion when I reread it.

The novel is a smoothly paced first person narrative by Perian de Chirolo, an actor residing in his native town of Malacia, an Italian city state in an alternate universe. I had thought the time period was based on the Renaissance, maybe because the word "Renaissance" appears on the back cover, but some of the men in the novel seem to wear 18th century fashions (breeches and silk stockings, tricorn hats, powedered wigs or hair in a queue held by ribbons) and the illustrations in the book are reproductions of Tiepolos. Some of the capers in the book remind me of the Casanova I have read.  Of course, Aldiss isn't confining himself to one period; there are triremes and dinosaurs, after all, Byzantium is a going concern, and a man in the novel invents a camera and talks the Marxist jargon of exploitation, class enemies and revolution.

Malacia, though a vibrant and exciting center of commerce and culture, is a conservative place; characters say it has not changed in thousands of years, and Perian tells us that the city government's "immemorial duty is to protect Malacia from change." Progressives are burned at the stake or secretly murdered in a dungeon. Despite the efforts of the secretive city government and the predjudices of most of the populace, one of the main characters of the book, inventor and revolutionary Otto Bengsthon, an immigrant from a northern country (he was thrown out of his native town because of his radical ideas) is determined to bring change to Malacia. He not only is revolutionizing the world of art with his camera, but employs hydrogen balloons against the Turkish army which is laying siege to Malacia. (Some of his revolutionary comrades think that their cause will be helped by allowing the Turks to demolish the city, but Bengshton insists that first the "Turks must be defeated, then revolution comes from within.") Perian is in the middle of all these efforts, even though he himself has little interest in revolutionary politics; working with Bengshton allows him opportunities to impress Armida, the beautiful daughter of the inventor's patron, successful merchant Hoytola.

Perian goes to great lengths to woo Armida and impress Armida's father, and succeeds in winning Armida's love; she agrees to a secret betrothal. Despite his protestations of love for Armida, Perian is an incurable ladies man, and enjoys dalliances with many women behind Armida's back.  His promiscuity gets him in trouble with both the revolutionaries and the wealthy members of the middle classes.

Are we to admire Perian de Chirolo for his zest for life, his commitment to his art?  Or are we to deplore him for the way he treats women, how he betrays his friends, his indiference to the social problems which exercise Bengsthon?  Bengsthon, Armida, and others certainly lecture Perian often enough on his selfish and superficial attitude.  In part, the novel is the story of Perian's gaining knowledge and maturity, though Aldiss does not suggest that greater knowledge and maturity necessarily lead to greater happiness.  At the end of the novel the city council has taken care of their Turkish and Bengsthon problems, but it still seems possible that Bengsthon's followers are going to bathe the city in blood, and that Perian may actually join them.  Perhaps we can hope that Perian, who has had wide experiences in a broad cross section of Malacian society, can moderate the radicals and help lead Malacia through a period of peaceful reforms?     

Aldiss includes lots of entertaining elements in the novel: the characters discuss art; Aldiss describes their religion, which I guess you could call Manichean; and of course there is the theme of class struggle, social justice and change.  Even without the Turks or Bengsthon, it seems that Malacia's way of life is threatened; the dinosaurs are dying out and trade with Byzantium is drying up.  Perian's father's fortunes are in severe decline, and with his erudite monomania with historical trivia (a scholar, he spends countless hours researching what Philip and Alexander of Macedon ate) he seems like an examplar or synecdoche of Malacia as a society with a sterile or counterproductive obsession with the past.

I was surprised by how good the style and pacing were, how effortlessly and pleasantly the book flowed; I remember Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, and Primal Urge being ponderous and at times tedious. I even laughed out loud at some of the jokes in Malacia Tapestry.  There are lots of characters, but Aldiss makes sure each is different and interesting and memorable. 

(On the bad side, this edition has lots of typos.)

It might be worth considering whether Malacia Tapestry is really science fiction or rather should be categorized as fantasy.  The prophecies of the many priests and wizards in the novel seem uncannily accurate, though we learn that these prophets are susceptible to bribes and not above lying.  Most of the characters believe in spells and magic and wear amulets.  Perian has weird visions that reminded me somewhat of the allegorical visions the protagonist in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain has.  (Also as in Magic Mountain, we have a character whom competing theorists try to sway to their way of thinking about how the world should be.)  There is also the strange fact that Armida's hair is jet black when she is first introduced (page 35) but after Perian's most vivid vision and the dinosaur hunt in which he slays a towering therapod and "becomes a man," Armida's hair is described as "golden" (page 329.)  And then there are the satyrs (people who are half man and half goat) and the people who have wings growing out their backs and fly nude around the city.         

However we categorize it, Malacia Tapestry is a great, fun read.  I guess as a teenager I had pretty good taste!  Highly recommended.

Two 1948 SF stories by John D. MacDonald

Just last week I read Wine of the Dreamers, a 1950s science fiction novel by popular mystery novelist John D. MacDonald. I thought it had good points and, on balance, was worth reading, and so today I read two of MacDonald's SF short stories, both from 1948.  I found these stories in the 1985 edition of Isaac Asimov Presents The Golden Years of Science Fiction, 5th Series, edited by Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg.  This book includes stories from 1947 and 1948 that Asimov and Greenberg consider "the best" from those years.

I own a copy of this anthology and appreciate the insane cover art by Romas Kukalis.  Every time I look at this cover I try to visualize what I would see if I looked up in the sky while a monster bigger than the Earth was approaching, within 100,000 miles or whatever, and how different the monster would look based on time of day and the position of the sun and the moon.  

This anthology is also interesting because the voluble Isaac Asimov fills it with his opinions. He tries to psychoanalyze famous SF editor John Campbell Jr., he gloats over the victory of the communists in Vietnam, he brags that he was so bright as a child that he made people uneasy, he expresses his amazement that people would want to live in a small town instead of New York City, he lets you know who his favorite SF writer is (Arthur C. Clarke), he complains that the English language is sexist.  If you want insight into the opinions of one of the movers and shakers of the SF world, Isaac Asimov Presents The Golden Years of Science Fiction, 5th Series, can help you fill that need.

"Ring Around the Redhead"

This is a trifling but pleasant story, full of jokes that are not actually funny but are not offensively bad either.  Gore and violent death are important elements in the story, but MacDonald endeavors to maintain a light-hearted tone.  In part the story is a satire of small town life - except for the inventor, everyone in the town is some kind of gossip, drunk, murderer, adulterer, etc.  

An inventor gets his hands on an artifact from another dimension after a government atomic test temporarily opens a gate to some other world.  The artifact is a large ring, like a hula hoop, I guess, and while you can't see through it, you can reach through it into other worlds. Moving the position of the hoop changes which dimension you can access; the number of worlds that can be accessed is practically infinite.

By chance a beautiful redheaded girl comes through the hoop and is stranded on Earth.  By subterfuge a greedy neighbor steals the hoop; this guy uses the hoop to bring valuable jewels to Earth, but in the process causes trouble for an advanced alien civilization.  The aliens kill him, and the inventor gets blamed, and is put on trial.

Acceptable.  

"A Child is Crying"

This is a very short story that includes the "predict the future via math" element we see in Asimov's Foundation stories (the first of which appeared in 1942), the "I know when you are going to die" element we see in Heinlein's 1939 "Life-Line," and the "psychic kid who is the next stage of human evolution" element I just read in Sturgeon's 1952 Baby is Three.  It is also an anti-nuclear war story.

A child of astonishing intelligence is born.  By age seven he knows more about physics than the top physicists.  He is so smart that he can hypnotize people.  He is so smart he can predict the future by simply examining the present state of things.  But he is totally unemotional, totally lacking in empathy, a mere calculating machine.  He doesn't care when his parents sell him to the Pentagon.  He admits that he has forseen an enemy attack on the United States, but he feels no desire to warn the people or government of the time or place of the attack.

Pentagon staff figure out a way to drug the kid so he is compelled to tell them when the enemy attack will come.  The kid informs them that the attack will occur within two months and a cataclysmic war will result.  All the Pentagon staff people will be killed, but the kid himself, and other super geniuses like him, will survive to build a unified global society.

I'm not sure why Asimov and Greenberg included this story in their book; there is nothing very special about it, the characters, plot and style are just adequate, and its ideas are not deeply explored.  Maybe they liked the idea of a bunch of cold-hearted geniuses inheriting the Earth, the way the story could be interpreted as pessimistic (our diverse and passionate civilization is going to be annihilated and replaced by a soulless one-world government of inhuman calculators with no religion, no art, no love) or optimistic (our stupid corrupt civilization of competing money grubbers and militarists is going to give way to a rational society without fear, superstition, or war.)

Acceptable.

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John D. MacDonald is a competent writer and these two stories are alright, but not anything special.  Maybe they serve as good examples of the sort of topics and tone you would find in the SF magazines in 1948.        

Two Novellas from the Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Kuttner & Moore and Sturgeon

Title page of ed. I read

The last two posts on this here blog have been about Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore.  When Jesse of the vast and impressive Speculiction blog pointed out the high marks Moore and Kuttner's novella Vintage Season received from science fiction readers, I decided to give it a read.  After a short walk I had my hands on a library copy of the 1973 hardcover edition of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume 2 A.  Once I had it I decided to read the Theodore Sturgeon story also found therein, Baby is Three.

Vintage Season by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

Originally this story appeared in 1946, as by "Lawrence O'Donnell."  Based on my extensive research (10 seconds on wikipedia) it seems likely the story is mostly or entirely by Moore.  <UPDATE JUNE 2, 2019: In his 1980 essay "The Cutting Edge," Barry Malzberg says that "this story is now known to be one of the very few of their eighteen-year marriage and collaboration to have been written by Catherine Moore alone.">

Oliver Wilson owns a large old house in a large city, and rents the rooms.  Abruptly his rooms are in great demand from different groups of very elegant people, people dressed and coiffed exquisitely.  They claim to be foreigners, but will not say from what country.  Wilson slowly unravels the mystery of where these odd people are from, and what they are doing in his town, and why they are so eager to rent his rooms.

This is a very good story, and probably deserves to be in the "Hall of Fame."  This is a story about people, and Moore does a good job drawing the characters, making them all believable and interesting, and in exciting in the reader an emotional response to the characters.  The characters are actually sophisticated and nuanced, like real people, and as you get to know them better your feelings about them shift, and Moore does this in a way that seems natural, not manipulative.  I found the relationships between Wilson and some of the characters very affecting.

Moore also does a good job of building suspense; the reader gradually comes to realize something terrible is going to happen, and wonders exactly how horrible the tragedy is going to be, and exactly what the nature of the catastrophe will be.  Moore also succeeds in making the end pay off; I found the plot and climax quite satisfying.

An ed. with the sequel by Silverberg

As the reader quickly guesses, the people who want to rent the rooms are from a future society of great wealth, as evidenced by all the cool gadgets the future people have, and sophistication, suggested by how they, like connoisseurs, appreciate fine foods, fine music, and natural beauty.  But there is something a little unsettling about these people, hints that they are connoisseurs not only of beauty, but also of what Edmund Burke might have called "the sublime."  For example, they sometimes eat "candies" that are nauseating.  In the climax of the story we learn that the future tourists have come to Oliver's town to watch as the town is destroyed by a meteor and thousands of people are killed - Oliver's house provides a perfect view of the cataclysm.  Perhaps even more shocking, one of the future tourists is a genius artist who seeks inspiration from witnessing first hand human terror and death on a vast scale.

There are lots of interesting things going on in the story.  I liked how Moore's clues about the future had nothing to do with weapons, or power sources, or vehicles; instead she describes consumer goods like clothes, food, snacks and stimulants, and even hair products, the stuff of the everyday lives of everyday people, and forms of art and entertainment.

I also think the story is about how people from different societies, or different segments of the same society, can be so callous towards each other.  The future people have zero sympathy for the people of Oliver's town; even as the holocaust is going on around them they treat it as entertainment, or ignore it to focus on their own lives and relationships.  This is reminiscent of how we all respond to hearing about a plane crash or gas explosion or murder in the news; if we don't know any of the people involved, we just go about our lives, or we integrate the disaster into our lives as entertainment and avidly follow the latest developments.  Similarly, millions of us find reading books or watching movies or playing games about World War II, or the Napoleonic Wars, or the U. S. Civil War, to be a diverting hobby.  I suspect that the reason that Moore points out that there are servants living in the old house with Wilson and the future people, and then almost never mentions them, is to subtly remind us how easy it is for people to simply forget about people who are physically, temporally, or even socially distant.

A great piece of work, I strongly recommend Vintage Season. 

Baby is Three by Theodore Sturgeon

I've really enjoyed some of Sturgeon's work, like "Microcosmic God" and "The Other Celia," but found some of his other things just average, or actively irritating.  It is probably fair to say that I like Sturgeon less than most people who pay attention to "classic" SF.  In my mind, the typical Sturgeon story is a sort of hortatory polemic in which Sturgeon takes the role of apostle for greater brotherly love and human compassion and/or condemner of our individualistic society; I don't find that sort of thing very compelling.

(SFFaudio has the illustrations from the original 1952 magazine publication of Baby is Three on this webpage.  To me they seem pretty weak.)

Baby is Three is the first person narrative of Gerry, a boy who goes to see a psychoanalyst. The story is 50 pages long, and much time is taken up with the conversations between the therapist and Gerry. Sturgeon (apparently) takes psychoanalysis seriously, and there’s lots of stuff, like repressed memories, false memories, and hypnosis, that we’ve seen before, though maybe this material was fresh in 1952.

Gerry relates his strange life story. After living on the streets he became part of a family of kids with psychic powers. There’s the twin black girls who can teleport. There’s Janie, the little girl who has the kind of telekinesis that lets you make stuff disappear; she can clean the house by making the dust vanish, and can take the turds right out of your intestines so you don’t have to waste time going to the toilet. Then there is the baby, who benevolently rules the family from its basinet by communicating with Janie via a sort of baby sign language. The baby is an advocate for “bleshing,” which means everybody working together, the family being like a human body, with different people each being an essential part of the unified whole. The family survives by using their psychic powers to steal what they want from stores.

These kids live in a shack in the woods for three years and then move into the house of a wealthy spinster. The kids teach the spinster the folly of racism, and, when the spinster tries to send the baby to an institution because it appears to be unwell (it never grows) the kids physically assault her with their psychic powers until she reunites the baby with the other kids.

The climax of the story is when Gerry has a “breakthrough” during analysis and realizes that he and the kids represent the next stage of human evolution, that they are a single corporate entity. Gerry is the “head” (the baby is just a “computer” and was in charge temporarily while Gerry matured) the twins are the “hands,” and so forth. Gerry has the power to manipulate people’s minds, and makes the psychoanalyst forget all about him. Even though the kids are generally presented in a positive light, there is the hint that the kids and their (presumed) comrades around the world are going to take over and the rest of us may suffer.

Sturgeon is a skilled writer (the style and story structure are good) so this story is not painful, but corporate entities, psychoanalysis, and precocious kids aren’t really my thing. I’d grade this one “acceptable” or "marginally good," but it appears that the 1950s and 1960s SF community loved Baby is Three. It was expanded into the novel More Than Human, which Joachim Boaz (and the rest of the galaxy, if Wikipedia is any guide) considers a masterpiece, but which I feel no need to read.  

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Now that I've got The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume 2 A in my custody I will probably read some more of the stories in it.  I should probably be familiar with all these SFWA-approved pieces if I'm going to be shooting my mouth off about classic SF. 

Well of the Worlds by Henry Kuttner

On Sunday I read two really good Henry Kuttner stories, which inspired me to do a little hunting for Kuttner things I had not read yet.  I was able to get an electronic version of the Prologue Books edition of Well of the Worlds through a university library with which I am associated.  The novel originally appeared in 1952 in Startling Stories; I can't find any info about the Prologue edition on their website, so I'll just have to trust that this is a good text.  There are several errors that I guess are scanning errors, like "black" for "back," "top" for "too," and quotation marks where they don't belong.

On the eighth level of a uranium mine in the northern wastes of Canada a passage to another world has opened, filling the mine with things the workers think are ghosts!  A beautiful girl from the other world, Klai, has come through the gateway, but she is afflicted with amnesia and remembers nothing about the other side.  A ruthless fat old man, Alper, has managed to contact an even more ruthless woman through the gate - this alien woman, Nethe, gives him energy which will prolong his life and health, but in return she wants him to murder Klai!  All these shenanigans have lowered uranium production, so the government sends manly man Sawyer to investigate. 

The plot is pretty convoluted.  Nethe is one of the aristocrats (the Isier) from the alien world, and Klai is one of the slaves (the Khom.)  The Isier are virtually indestructible because they can tap the energy from other dimensions, but Nethe has tampered with the Well through which they get such energy in an effort to overthrow the current monarch and take her place.  The Isier are now losing their invulnerability, so the Khom are going to try to rise up; at the same time an army of reptile people who live on neighboring flying islands are launching an invasion of the fortified city where the Isier and Khom live.  Sawyer and Alper, who hate each other and keep trying to outwit or kill each other, end up in the alien city in the middle of all these various conflicts, taking sides and trying to survive.  A lot of the story involves high tech devices which the characters steal from each other and use to dominate each other; we get page after page of "You'll never get the thing if you kill me!" and "Give me the thing or I'll kill you!" negotiations.  

It is noteworthy that Kuttner includes many references to "high" culture; Etruscan sculpture, "Laocoon," El Greco, a character from War and Peace.  Does this show that early 1950s SF fans were very literate, or that Kuttner hoped to inspire them to be so?  There's also lots of mumbo jumbo about atoms, electrons, isotopes, electricity, etc.  I guess a lot of pre-1960 SF fans were really into the nuts and bolts of science and engineering.  This novel gave me the opportunity to feel like a smarty pants ("Of course I am familiar with classical sculpture") and like an ignoramus ("A 'cathode' is a part of a TV, right?") 

In "Graveyard Rats" and "Home is the Hunter" the pace was quick, the writing economical, the images clear and vivid.  In Well of the Worlds everything seems to happen slowly, laboriously, and the images are vague and not very compelling.  The action scenes don't move, and the exotic images (of flying islands and travel between dimensions and the like) are hard to visualize.  There is also lots of dialogue, which drags things down.  The characters aren't very interesting, either; their motivations are thin, and there isn't much reason to care who succeeds or fails, lives or dies.  The obsessive status-seeker in "Home is the Hunter" and even the greedy and terrified caretaker in "Graveyard Rats" are more "real" psychologically than the characters in this story, which is like ten times as long.

I'm afraid I cannot recommend Well of the Worlds; the plot is average and the execution is poor.  It might, however, be a valuable read for those interested in attitudes about gender, class, and science and technology in 1950s SF, with its multitude of gadgets and science lectures, its female ruler battling a would-be female usurper, and its society of invincible aristocrats and throngs of slaves.       

Henry Kuttner's "Graveyard Rats" and "Home is the Hunter"

I’ve had mixed experiences with Henry Kuttner and his close collaborator and wife, C. L. Moore. I didn't think the novels The Dark World or Earth’s Last Citadel were very good at all. Over the years I have read many of Kuttner’s short stories, and stories he wrote in collaboration with Moore, and they have run the gamut from very good, like the famous “Mimsy Were the Borogroves,” to some quite weak ones, with lots of mediocre ones in between.

On twitter I learned about SFFaudio’s page of PDFs of public domain SF stories. Today I decided to read the two Kuttner stories there, “The Graveyard Rats,” which I have read before, and “Home is the Hunter,” which was new to me.

“The Graveyard Rats”

The PDF at the SFFaudio web page is a scan of the original magazine appearance of “The Graveyard Rats” in Weird Tales in 1936.  I love the title page illustrations, and it is fun to see the silly intro to the story provided by the magazine’s editors.

“The Graveyard Rats” is a straightforward, traditional horror story, but its rapid pace, feverish tone, and striking, vivid images render it a masterpiece of weird terror.  The corrupt caretaker of a Massachusetts cemetery is up to his customary grave robbing when he finds that oversized rats have stolen the corpse he hoped to loot.  He pursues the rats underground, and finds himself in a battle for his life against the rodents and the eldritch intelligence that is directing them! 

A horror classic I enjoyed reading this second time.

"Home is the Hunter"

In its 1953 Galaxy appearance, “Home is the Hunter” is attributed to Moore and Kuttner. (I am told that in Ahead of Time it is credited solely to Kuttner.) I can’t say I am crazy about the Galaxy illustration or the editor’s intro.

The story, however, is really good. Kuttner (and Moore?) economically and cunningly describe an insane future New York in which machines provide all food and shelter needs, and so the population has embraced a perverse decadence. The city is dominated socially by aristocrats called Hunters who eschew all pleasure (they don’t even have sex with the women in their harems!) in order to stay in tip top shape. The Hunters need to be at the peak of physical and mental condition because they all are obsessed with status, and status is earned by meeting each other in life or death combat in the hunting ground of Central Park!

Presumably this is a commentary on the psychologically counterproductive middle-class striving that is so prevalent in a center of business, academia and the arts like New York. (We all know someone who works so hard he has no time to enjoy the fruits of his labors or relationships with his family, don’t we?) It is implied that the low status "Populi" enjoy life more than the Hunters, who lead lives of fear and danger and don't enjoy love or sex, or even tasty food.  But "Home is the Hunter" it is also a visceral adventure and psychological horror story, and very entertaining.

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These two very good stories make me think I should seek out Kuttner stories I have yet to read, and maybe reread some of the ones I have read and don’t remember very well.

Classic SF fans should definitely check out the long list of stories available in PDF form at SFFaudio.  I'm particularly enjoying seeing the illustrations stories I've already read were graced (or saddled) with when they first appeared.

The Yellow Fraction by Rex Gordon

Here we have the last science fiction novel written by British author Stanley Bennett Hough, under his manly pseudonym Rex Gordon.  I am sure there are ordinary people all over world with the name "Rex Gordon," but to my susceptible mind "Rex Gordon" sounds like the name of a guy who punches first and asks questions later, a guy who writes those mens' adventure books like The Destructinator: Peril in Patagonia or The Exculpationer: Massacre in Madrid.  On the other hand, the cover painting by Kelly Freas seems to be illustrating the story of a man who lives on the dole and sits in the park all day and at 5:00 sadly watches the business people file out of their office building.

After making a lot of crazy guesses about The Yellow Fraction based on the author's pen name and the cover illustration, I decided that the best way to find out what it was all about was to actually read the 160 page 1969 novel.  A decision I perhaps took too lightly.

Five hundred years ago an Earth colonization ship arrived at the planet Arcon, where plants grow blue instead of green.  Sick of space, most of the colonists wanted to put down roots on Arcon.  Some, dubbed the Greens, hoped to terraform the planet so that it resembled Earth.  Another faction, the Blues, thought humanity should learn to adapt to Arcon's environment.  A tiny minority, eventually labelled the Yellows, feared Arcon was too unhealthy to colonize.  The Yellows were not only outvoted, but became pariahs and scapegoats on whom all problems, for centuries, were blamed.

The Yellows were, of course, right; Arcon is poison, and after the starship is irretrievably dismantled it becomes clear that human life expectancy on Arcon is a mere 40 years!  Lacking any means to escape the planet, the government conspires to keep people in ignorance of the facts.

I took an almost immediate dislike to this book.  On the second page of text, page 6, Rex gives us this sentence: "He laughed in a voice that gave Len a considerable lack of pleasure."  To my mind this is poor writing.  You don't give somebody a lack.  The phrase should be something like "gave Len considerable displeasure" or "failed to give Len any pleasure."

On page 9 we get a typo, "staying" for "saying."  On page 32 we get this atrocious paragraph:

The man and the voice were known, but not the sense the things the voice said.  The cell was ten feet by six, with toilet and white tiles, which made it look quite clean.  The way it looked so uninviting could be the pain.

How do you know a sense?  Does the sentence mean the things the voice said made no sense?  Does it mean the words were unrecognizable?  Does it mean the tone was different than before?  And the last sentence... should "way" be replaced with "reason?"  There are distracting problems like this all through the novel.

Rex, I don't buy these books so I can relive my experiences copy editing students' papers!

So much for the style.  As for the plot, the first half of The Yellow Fraction is a weak political satire full of anemic jokes.  (The Army's administration building is called "The Hexagon," and the head of the military is J. Adolf Koln.)  The protagonist is Len (I guess short for Lenin) Thomas (perhaps his middle name is "Doubting.")  Len is a college student.  After being inspired by Yellow-sympathizing college professor Berkeley (a nod to Bishop Berkeley?) he gets thrown out of school for his Yellow beliefs, and so decides he wants to launch a revolution.  He is immediately hauled in by the government, and quickly discovers that Berkeley is a high-level member of the secret police!  (Doesn't this happen in 1984?)  The reader soon realizes that the Yellows are not only oppressed by the government--they have infiltrated the government!  (Doesn't this happen in Slan?)

Rex turns out to be an ambitious writer willing to experiment.  Besides the third person narration of Len's adventures, he provides us with J. Adolf Koln's and Berkeley's diaries, the minutes of political party conferences, memos, extracts from the history books of the future, and even a woman's shopping lists.  Rex inadvertently reminds us that not every experiments is a success.  Way way too much of this book consists of uninteresting people sitting around talking.  Are the competition between the Army and the secret police for public funds and Yellow debates about the possibility of constructing a starship without alerting the public supposed to thrill the reader?

The book shows some signs of life in its second half, when Len and 11 other 20-somethings with science or engineering training, an elite carefully chosen by the Yellows, are drafted into crewing a space ship that has been built secretly in the desert.  The Army and the intelligence services have conflicting views on what the ship's mission will be, which creates some suspense, and the dozen crew members, half male and half female, are expected to pair off sexually, generating a little human interest.  Unfortunately, Rex's main focus is on people on the Arcon surface: a philosophical discussion between two Yellows (Rex seems to think that the lies of religious and communist leaders are justified and can lead to improvements in society) and J. Adolf Koln's conspiracy to outwit the intelligence service and take over the government.  Boring.  The whole plot is resolved when Len in space and the Yellows in the intelligence service promulgate the spurious claim that Arcon is under attack from space aliens.  This lie galvanizes the populace and leads to a revolution that somehow solves all of Arcon's problems.

With its mediocre plot, irritatingly bad style, and elitist "vanguard of the revolution" politics, The Yellow Fraction is to be avoided even more assiduously than the poisonous blue planet of Arcon itself.

Break from Fiction: Two books about Samuel Johnson and his world

In February I read two Johnsonian books, Dr. Johnson’s Household by Lyle Larson and Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading by Robert DeMaria, Jr.

Samuel Johnson of course had a famous circle of friends who were successful members of the middle and upper classes: James Boswell, pioneering biographer and diarist; Joshua Reynolds, genius painter; Henry Thrale, rich businessman, and his wife, Hester, writer and patron of the arts, and on and on. But Johnson had another circle of intimates, poor people and people down on their luck whom he put up in his own household, partly out of charity and partly because Johnson had a (perhaps pathological) fear of being alone. In his book, Dr. Johnson’s Household, Lyle Larsen provides interesting descriptions of these characters. Most interesting are the accounts of Zachariah Williams, who had a crazy theory on how to figure longitude, and of Francis Barber’s sad life after Johnson’s death.

Since his teens Barber, a freedman, had been in Johnson’s employ, and for him Johnson was something of a surrogate father. Johnson, while genuinely affectionate and well-meaning, does not seem to have been a particularly good father figure. For one thing, Johnson stifled Barber's ambitions of being a sailor.  Johnson didn’t really need a servant, and in fact sent Barber off to school; during another period, Barber was working in an apothecary's shop.  But, when Barber ran off to join the Royal Navy, Johnson used his connections to get Barber out of the service, against Barber's will; Barber was enjoying life at sea.

Johnson left Barber quite a bit of money in his will, easily enough to live on, but Barber was a spendthrift and handled this money very poorly, living beyond his means and even asking Boswell, another spendthrift who was always in debt, for money. Maybe Barber was incorrigible, but I can't help but think that perhaps  Johnson could have expended a little more effort in teaching Barber how to handle finances. Of course, Johnson himself was not very good at handling money, and perhaps was ill-equipped to serve as anybody's financial role model.

Robert DeMaria is interested in the history of books and of reading. In his 1997 book Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading he distinguishes between four types of reading, and uses Samuel Johnson, one of the most widely read men in history, as a vehicle to discuss these four types of reading. "Curious reading" is when we get lost in a book, like a novel or romance, and suspend criticism of the book. "Perusal" is when we read a book hoping to extract something from it; we are attentive, but the book is relatively easy to read. "Mere reading" is idle, superficial reading of something that may deserve skepticism, like when we read a newspaper or magazine. "Study" is when we focus on a work which deserves respect, perhaps committing passages to memory; Johnson studied the Bible and Virgil.

DeMaria’s book provides some interesting information on 17th and 18th century “self-help” and religious books that there is almost no chance I will ever actually read, but which were very important to 18th century readers like Johnson. DeMaria judges that Johnson and others “perused” these books, hoping to find advice on how to live and also comfort when faced by religious doubts. The section on mere reading includes interesting descriptions of 18th century newspapers.

I most enjoyed the section on “curious reading.” Johnson was addicted to fiction, taking great enjoyment in reading “heroic romances” (adventure stories about knights), as well as contemporary sentimental novels like Henry Fielding’s Amelia. But at the same time he was very skeptical, even hostile, to fiction, judging it often to be a waste of time and sometimes a negative influence. Johnson blamed some of his own career problems on the “unsettled turn of mind” that reading “extravagant fictions” in his youth had cultivated in him. Recognizing the power of fiction, in public Johnson always praised fiction that promoted virtue, like the novels of Samuel Richardson, even as he devoured frivolous or sensual works in private.

Something I had never heard before, or forgotten, was that one of Johnson’s favorite books was the Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, which describe her experiences in Turkey traveling with her husband, the British ambassador to Turkey from 1716 to 1718. Johnson was always interested in the Orient, and Montagu’s book, as evidenced by excerpts provided by DeMaria, includes titillating descriptions of life in a seraglio.

Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading is quite scholarly; DeMaria refers to Habermas and Foucault and other esoteric thinkers, and revisits the topic of his 1993 biography of Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson: A Critical Biography, which took the interesting tack of arguing that Johnson’s dream was to be a member of the small international elite of neo-Latin poets. However, the book is also full of anecdotes about Johnson’s life, references to Johnson’s writing, and information about popular literature of his period, and so entertains as it expands our knowledge of Johnson’s opinions and of 18th century intellectual life.