Judgment Night by C. L. Moore

"Every race has come to this end, since the first men conquered the Galaxy.  Each of them sows the seed of its own destruction.  Always a few see the way toward salvation, and always the many shout them down."

Back in June I explored Riverby Books, a used bookstore near the Supreme Court that Washingtonian magazine called "cozy" and the somewhat overweight members of the MPorcius Fiction Log staff called "cramped," and emerged from its basement with a copy of the 1979 Dell edition of C. L. Moore's Judgment Night.  In my last blogpost I was citing C. L. Moore as an example of somebody from the Golden Age of Science Fiction who could write about "the human heart" and so it seems an appropriate time to check out this novel.

Judgment Night first appeared in 1943 as a serial spread out across two issues of John W. Campbell's Astounding, and then was published in book form in 1952, in a hardcover along with four short stories by Moore.  isfdb makes a distinction between the 1943 version of Judgment Night and the 1952 version, so maybe Moore revised it for book publication or something.  My Dell paperback, which, like the members of the MPorcius Fiction Log staff is quite thick (384 pages), reproduces the contents of that 1952 volume, including the novel (like 168 pages) and the four stories.

Since conquering the mysterious planet Ericon long ago, one hundred successive Lyonese Emperors, most of them fierce warriors and cunning statesmen, have ruled the galaxy.  Though Ericon is their capital, and has been for one hundred generations, much of the planet is unexplored and beyond the control of the Lyonese.  The vast forests that cover most of the planet have been declared off limits by the mysterious Ancients, living gods who are aloof but merciless if crossed--even aircraft which dare fly over their forests vanish in a flash of light!  And then there are the catacombs and labyrinths under the Lyonese palace, the ruins of the many civilizations that ruled Ericon before the Lyonese took over.

After centuries of growth and stability, the Galactic Empire of the Lyonese is in trouble!  The reigns of the 97th, 98th and 99th Emperors saw rebellions on many imperial planets, and since then many systems have been taken over by space barbarians, the H'vani; as our story begins, during the reign of the 100th Emperor, things are looking bleak!  The current Emperor has no son, so his daughter Juille has been trained in the arts of war and stalks around the palace wearing a helmet and a "fire sword."  Juille is aggressive and talks of "wiping out" the H'vani, and advises her father to be ruthless, but the old man is something of a softie!  He thinks the apocalyptic war Juille relishes could destroy not only his Empire but all of human civilization, reducing the galaxy's population to a bunch of cave dwellers, so he wants to make peace with the H'vani.

Here on the cover of Astounding we see our
cast of characters in the ruins beneath the palace.
The blonde with the helmet is Princess Juille,
the blond man is Egide, the redhead Egide's
super strong right-hand man, the man in red
is an Andarean conspirator, and behind Juille is
her treacherous mentor.   

A big council meeting where there will be a big vote is coming up, and Juille decides to take a little vacay before it convenes.  Orbiting Ericon is a satellite known as Cyrille where rich people have access to any pleasure, no matter how decadent or perverse!  SF is full of pleasure planets and space resorts and holiday satellites; I hear there's even a casino planet in one of the Walt Disney Star Wars movies.  This is one of my least favorite SF cliches; casinos and resorts do not really interest me.  I suppose the prevalence of this trope is a reflection of fears that modern wealth will lead to decadence, and the influence of the theory that the Roman Empire collapsed due to an abandonment of the stern republican virtues that built it.  Presumably in her story here in Judgment Night about an empire in decline, barbarians at its gates, Moore is channeling that idea that Rome was in crisis during the period of Alec Guinness and Sophia Loren because people were too focused on pleasure and not enough on duty.  (Who could focus on duty with Sophia Loren hanging round?)  Anyway, Juille goes to this pleasure satellite, incognito, largely to experiment with wearing dresses and acting feminine--all her life she has rejected femininity and "embraced the amazon cult wholeheartedly."  Awaiting her on the satellite are not only expert dressmakers and special effects that allow her to make her room perfectly resemble any planet in the galaxy, but an assassin!

In a fancy restaurant with floating tables, and then the virtual reality reproduction of a long ruined city of canals, the assassin, Egide, flirts with Juille; no one has ever treated the arrogant and militaristic princess so informally before, and Juille is both excited and frightened by the experience.  I guess this is Moore writing about a girl's sexual awakening, though in Juille's case it is a late awakening.  Anyway, Egide refrains from murdering Juille, and after three days of dates the princess just returns to the planet surface.

The war drags on badly, with the H'vani taking over planet after planet, in many cases aided by a mysterious fifth column.  Juille watches the battles on TV from the safety of Ericon.  Over Juille's objections, the Emperor sets up a peace conference with the H'vani; Juille refuses to attend and orders assassins to murder the H'vani envoys--she wants the Empire to fight the H'vani to the finish!  Watching TV, she recognizes Egide as one of the envoys--she, along with us readers, realizes that Egide is the leader of the H'vani barbarians!  She expects to see her assassins shoot him down, but the attack fails to materialize, so Juille marches into the conference hall and shoots Egide herself.  Egide is wearing a vest that reflects the energy of Juille's ray pistol and so survives, and in the confusion Juille is captured by Egide and some of the fifth columnists, who include Juille's own lady-in-waiting, her life-long mentor!  We learn that the fifth columnists are Andareans, the descendants of the people who ruled Ericon one hundred generations ago, before Juille's dynasty conquered the planet.

Moore's writing about these different "races," as she calls them--Lyonese, H'vani and Andarean--is a little muddled.  They are all human beings, but it is suggested that they have distinctive physical appearances--one guy is said to have "Andarean features," and Juille snarls that H'vani are "hairy." However, Juille didn't recognize Egide as a H'vani on Cyrille, and it is not clear if Juille knew her lady-in-waiting was an Andarean before she revealed herself to be amongst the leadership of the fifth column.  This is a little sloppy, but a much worse sin is that Judgment Night is one of those stories in which our protagonist is ineffectual and is more of a spectator of the plot than a driver of it--Juille's assassination plans all fall through, and she watches battles on TV instead of participating in them, while other characters and forces--her father, the mysterious Ancients, the mysterious Andareans--make decisions and accomplish things and dominate Juille.

1943 illustration of a llar by A. Williams;
just adorable, right?

Egide and the Andareans carry Juille down into the catacombs below the Lyonese city, where lie super weapons made of such fine materials that they have not suffered a blemish over a thousand years.  The Andareans hand some of these weapons over to their allies, the H'vani, though it is hinted the Andareans may doublecross the H'vani in the future.  Egide goes to the forest to consult the Ancients--he is the first in centuries to do so--and the Andareans foolishly leave Juille alone so her little pet alien, a "llar," can arrive to untie her and deliver to her a super weapon recently developed by the Dunnarians.  The Dunnarians are a race that remained loyal to the Emperor and whose planet was recently conquered by the H'vani (this is one of the planets Juille watched get bombed to rubble on TV.)  Only one person escaped Dunnar when the H'vani took it, and that guy, called "the envoy," brought with him a prototype super weapon.  (This novel is full of strange super weapons with weird, outlandish, effects that Moore describes in detail.)

The llar guides Juille to the Ancients and then disappears.  Juille herself consults the Ancients, who appear differently to each supplicant (like the Wizard in the original book version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) and give cryptic and vague advice.  To Juille they appear like smoke rings in a dark and disorienting space (Juille feels like a fly upside down on a ceiling in a pitch black room) and tell her she may be able to save her race, but only if she does not trust her instincts.  (No pressure!)  Egide captures and ties up Juille again.  (There is a lot of talk about Juille being a devotee of the cult of the amazon, dedicated to the art of war, but whenever she tries to murder people or gets in a fight with the H'vani she blows it.  Is a subtext of this book that fighting isn't women's work?)

Having been knocked out, our princess wakes up back on the pleasure satellite Cyrille, in one of its many holographic reproductions of a paradise planet.  Via a TV screen, she looks into the satellite's many rooms, seeing that the staff have been killed and that in a control room Egide is mounting one of those super weapons for use in bombarding the surface of Ericon below.  Now in the final third of the book Juille finally starts accomplishing things, making her way through the many corridors and illusory reproductions of Imperial planets (more than once she does that thing Princess Leia did on the Death Star, blasting a hole in a wall or floor and just jumping through it, to where she does not know), hunting for the control room and fighting not only perverts who live out their insane fantasies here on Cyrille but Egide's hulking right hand man as well.  (For a few pages it looks like Juille has killed this brute, but then we learn he is a robot and getting shot by Juille just slowed him down a little!) 

The cover of the 1952 edition of the book
features the Dunnar envoy and a llar

Unable to find the control room, Juille uses a hand held super weapon dropped by the robot when she shot it to destroy the satellite from within, jut blasting away at random.  In these scenes of destruction Moore throws a lot of allegories and symbolism at us.  Because Cyrille's innumerable rooms contain simulations of planets from all over the galaxy, Juille's destroying them with energy blasts is like the way the interstellar wars have been destroying the societies of one planet after another.  Juille's ability to destroy Cyrille and, metaphorically, all the galaxy's inhabited worlds, makes her like a god.  Judgment Night is not only an indictment of the human propensity for violence, but a denunciation of gods, or at least mankind's reliance on gods.

Juille wrecks the satellite but not before Egide has finished setting up his weapon and has used it to blast the Imperial palace below.  (I guess the fact that the heart of the Lyonese empire is destroyed from the pervert-infested pleasure satellite is part of Moore's Rome-fell-due-to-decadence theme.)   Juille has been outdone by Egide again; Egide even rescues Juille from the wreckage that is flying around the station due to the fact that the hull has been breached and the artificial gravity system is going haywire.     

Juille uses the Dunnarian super weapon to turn the tables on Egide, taking him captive.  They take a space boat down to the surface, slipping past the H'vani fleet and landing at the half-ruined palace, where the Emperor is organizing an evacuation into the hills.  Seeing what a ruin everything is, Juille realizes that 135 pages ago her father was right to pursue peace and she wrong to demand war--civilization really is collapsing!  Because of the Ancients' prohibition on aircraft, the final battle for the Lyonese Galactic Empire is fought by infantrymen and horse-mounted cavalry, the H'vani with the Andarean super weapons and the Lyonese with the Dunnarian super weapons.  Egide says he has changed sides and will fight for the Lyonese, but before he and Juille can join the battle the Dunnarian envoy reveals to them an astonishing secret--he is one of the all-powerful Ancients in disguise!  He tells them that neither H'vani nor Lyonese will win the war, that all of humanity will lose, and that the Ancients are tired of mankind and its violence.  The llar, creatures of wisdom who care neither for the individual nor for gods, but for the collective, will inherit the galaxy.  As the story ends we readers have no idea if Juille and Edige will live out the day.

1965 printing

Judgment Night has many good plot elements and ideas: a woman going through a difficult sexual awakening because her sexual desires are at odds with her emotional feelings and intellectual beliefs (Moore uses phrases like "her treacherous body"); an empire beset from without and within; a thousand year conspiracy centered on super weapons hidden in sinister catacombs full of traps; weird aliens with their own unfathomable motives; a character dedicated to war who changes her attitude when she sees the wreckage wreaked by war, etc.  Unfortunately, Moore's execution is not great; Judgment Night feels long and slow.  A lot of verbiage is invested in telling us about clothes, architecture, landscapes, and weather, and I'm not convinced that this investment pays off--rather than bringing the story to life a lot of that detail is just suffocating superfluity.  We get two pages of description of how Juille's black star-spattered dress is created and molded to her perfect body, we get fifteen pages about Juille's dates with Egide on Cyrille, and on and on.  Even the action scenes, when Juille fights perverts and the H'vani robot on Cyrille, are long and wordy and thus fail to transmit to the reader any urgency, any excitement.

I've already complained that Juille is too passive and too ineffectual for my liking--instead of directing events and mastering challenges, she is carried along by the plot and pushed around by the other characters--and another problem is how Moore, repeatedly, sets you up to expect something interesting or exciting to happen and then just lets the matter fizzle.  Right there in the beginning of the story Juille and her father talk about an upcoming contentious council meeting, and then the meeting happens off screen.  We are lead to expect assassination attempts but the attempts are aborted, the targets of the assassins never even knowing they were in danger.  We are given the idea that Juille is a great fighter but she almost never fights and when she does she doesn't kill anybody (well, save a bizarre pervert.)  I find this kind of thing frustrating.

Judgment Night is ambitious, with plenty of philosophical and psychological and political themes as well as lots of SF concepts, and it has the sex and violence we look for in our pulp literature, and I want to like it, but the structural and stylistic problems ruin it, it is neither compelling nor fun; a disappointment.

Even if I didn't really enjoy it, Judgment Night is still a cudgel I can use in my disagreement with portions of Harlan Ellison's 1974 review of Barry Malzberg's Herovit's World.  In that review (which is very interesting and informative and which I recommend even if I don't agree with every thing Ellison has to say) Ellison moans that SF must mature, must focus more on "the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself" and abandon its focus on "sexless heroes" with no emotional problems who wield lots of hi-tech gadgetry.  Well, over two decades before Ellison wrote that review, we see Moore wrote a novel full of war and gadgets and a person brimming over with psychological conflict, and the first version of it appeared in John W. Campbell's Astounding, the cover story of the most important SF magazine of its time.  Ellison was mischaracterizing the SF of the past, not giving the field credit for its breadth, its diversity.

People commonly say SF before such and such a date was sexist or sexless or imperialistic or one-dimensional or whatever; these people commonly exaggerate.  Of course there were particular stories with the characteristics people like Ellison denounced in the 1970s and people continue to denounce today, but there were also stories, even before the end of World War II, that lacked those characteristics, or had the opposite characteristics, stories criticizing Earth imperialism (like Edmond Hamilton's 1932 "Conquest of Two Worlds"), stories with female heroes (like Nelson S. Bond's 1941 "Magic City," another Astounding cover story), stories written by women like Moore and Leigh Brackett that were published by male editors and admired by male fans.  It makes you wonder if maybe some of SF's critics haven't actually read very many 1930s or 1940s SF magazines and are just repeating what they have been told.  Always consult the primary sources before passing judgement, people!

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I can't tell you Judgment Night is good, but I have enjoyed C. L. Moore's work in the past, and I am interested in her career, so we'll be reading more of her work in our next episode!