Deathstar Voyage by Ian Wallace

"You are confident of your allure."

"Should I be?"

"In most situations, yes.  In this one, I am afraid you will lose.  My queen is the Eiland of Ligeria, and these are holy hours, and I do not intend to go a-wooing elsewhere.  My eiland is about to die in a famous bradzh...." 

Driven thither by family obligations, I recently found myself in Beaumont, Texas, a conglomeration of highways and strip malls 90 minutes east of Houston; I never actually saw Houston, as our inbound flight landed around midnight and two days later we boarded our outbound flight before sunrise.  The wife and I spent almost all of our brief visit embroiled in wedding-related operations and looking after my mother-in-law, but I managed to steal away for an hour to go to Red B4 books, a small used bookstore in an ugly strip mall.  Putting aside my sighting of an anole lizard climbing a tree, this was the highlight of my trip, as I purchased four old and battered SF paperbacks for a low low price.

Among these four finds was a 1970 printing of Ian Wallace's 1969 Deathstar Voyage.  You will recall we read Wallace's Croyd back in early 2016.  That novel had some elements of espionage fiction, and a subtitle on Deathstar Voyage's title page, "a downtime mystery cruise," suggests it is a detective or suspense story in SF guise.  Also noteworthy: isfdb suggests Deathstar Voyage takes place in the same universe as Croyd and its sequels.  Well, let's check it out.

The Eiland of Ligeria is a starliner, over a kilometer long and full of shops and restaurants and theatres that cater to its two thousand passengers.  The Eiland is currently on its final voyage, a trip of six days from Earth to planet Ligeria in the Altair system, where it will be scrapped.  Among the passengers is Zhavar, the King of Ligeria and the owner of the ship.  Zhavar is a white man--white people have ruled Ligeria for generations, but the majority of Ligeria's population is made up of golden people; the golden people have a matriarchal culture ("eiland" is the Ligerian word for "queen" or "empress") that practices a version of suttee (called "bradzh") in which a queen's husbands and lovers jump into a fire upon her death.  (Wallace admits in a "Forenote" to Deathstar Voyage that he got some ideas for the novel from the history of British India.)

Acting as the King's bodyguard is our lead character, Lieutenant Claudine St. Cyr of the Galactic Police, an artificial woman who has great reflexes and is a perfect shot with her energy pistol and has some psychic powers that warn her of danger.  "I am told that five continents on three planets collaborated in my design."  Based on Earth, she has just been assigned to protect Zhavar, and they spend a lot of time telling each other their biographies and flirting, producing much of the "clever" dialogue between characters and dialogue with sexual overtones that fills this book, none of which is amusing or arousing.

Deathstar Voyage is a mystery story (one of the characters even compares their situation to that depicted in Agatha Christie's novel Ten Little Indians*), and the crimes and suspects pile up at a rapid pace.  Someone is trying to assassinate the King, and somebody has sabotaged the ship's power source, a big glowing sphere of energy called the Differential Mass Component.  Maybe a religious fanatic called Old Fire-Eyes Greco who thinks the ship is "the ultimate symbol of human corruption" is involved?  What about The Great Dore, a golden Ligerian magician who can use his telekinesis to turn items inside out?  And then there is the ship's Captain, Schwarz, who dislikes the king and thinks it a crime to scrap the Eiland of Ligeria and replace it with more efficient and less luxurious ships.  Oh, wait, Captain Schwarz just dropped dead at the dinner table a few seconds after flirting with Claudine.  He is replaced by Swainson, the first officer, who drops dead the next day during a competition at the ship's elaborate shooting gallery.

*Look up the original title of this best-selling detective novel, but don't say it aloud.

We get a science lecture on atoms, the point of which is to explain that the sabotage to the Differential Mass Component is going to turn the ship, and the two thousand souls aboard, into a star in less than 24 hours.  We get scenes in which people look for clues in the personnel files of the suspects and of the victims, scenes of people interrogating suspects, and scenes of people sitting around talking blah blah blah about clues.  This is all quite boring and also confusing; here is a paragraph I puzzled over for a while:

These images are from the scan of the hardcover edition at the internet archive

Somehow, the biography contains no hints of enemies and also suggests many enemies, and somehow Claudine admits it is full of "exploits" but denies that anything is "out of line" or "flashy."  Did anybody at Berkeley edit this?
     
Deathstar Voyage is not well-written; many of the individual sentences are ugly or clumsy or both.  Here's another frustrating extract, the first two paragraphs from Chapter 9:

What does "going away" mean in this context?  I guess "strip and unstrip" is Wallace's idea of clever wordplay, with "unstrip" meaning "dress."  This passage also includes another of Wallace's anemic jokes, the fact that the second officer, at this point in the story acting captain, has a lisp.  Wallace doesn't give Mashti a lisp to indicate he is a homosexual, a traditional sort of joke; rather, Mashti is from a planet where people have their teeth removed because they only eat liquid food.  Even Wallace realizes that this lisping is a drag, and after a few pages of it just stops typing the phonetic representations of Mashti's lisp and instructs the reader to remember that the officer is lisping.

A "cutichron" is a tiny watch or clock on your fingernail.  Wallace talks a lot about time pieces in this novel, and, in fact, the book is dedicated to his (and his wife's) wristwatches.  Which brings up another of Wallace's lame conceits: gratuitous references to the 20th century.  Early in the novel Zhavar buys Claudine a 20th-century wrist watch.  At the fancy dinner at which Captain Schwarz suddenly dies, the men all wear 20th-century evening dress.  The rifles used at the shooting gallery at which Swainson dies are 20th-century rifles.  I've already mentioned the reference to Agatha Christie. 

Wallace piles on mountains of boring details that I guess we are supposed to think are clever or amusing, but which are simply a waste of time.  There are many passages about people's clothes and people's food and people's tobacco that seem totally pointless, unless the point was to bulk up the page count, which, in my paperback, is a criminally excessive 191 pages.  Here's an exchange that comes after the episode at the shooting gallery, when the king asks Claudine to have lunch with him and she asks what she should wear:

Autopsies reveal that Captain Schwarz and First Officer Swainson were murdered by a psychic who turned their hearts inside out--the same sort of psychic powers were also probably used to sabotage the Differential Mass Component.  Investigation also reveals that Dore, the psychic who can turn stuff inside out, is the bastard son of Greco the religious fanatic and that Greco can hypnotize people, and that Dore is particularly susceptible to Greco's hypnosis.  There is a long scene of multiple chapters in which Claudine has a date with Dore (yes, they are on a date even though the star ship is due to explode in like 10 hours) and they flirt and Dore gives a science lecture on how to use psychic powers to turn stuff inside out.  During the course of this date the two fall deeply in love and decide to marry.  But when they go to the shooting range to have their first kiss on the grass, Dore is shot in the head by a sniper!  Wallace tries to pull our heartstrings by assuring us that Dore is dead ("Claudine was a cop, and almost instantly she knew he was dead....she lay down in the grass beside him, her face by his ruined head....") but after a few pages of grief Claudine realizes the bullet just creased the magician's head, not actually penetrating the skull.

Karel Thole makes this tedious dud
look fascinating and sexy--
DON"T YOU BELIEVE IT!

Claudine believes Greco hypnotized Dore into wrecking the Differential Mass Component and murdering Schwarz and Swainson.  When Dore is shot she changes her theory--she now figures Zhavar the King of Ligeria is the culprit, that he has psychic powers he has kept a secret and has been driven by knowledge that the gold people are about to overthrow his government and execute him to spectacularly commit suicide by blowing up the ship.  Zhavar convinces her he is innocent and has no psychic powers, and also reveals that Captain Schwarz was his nephew, whom he raised as a foster father.  Schwarz turned against him and embraced the gold cause and was a master hypnotist and psyker, better than Greco and Dore--Claudine realizes it was Schwarz is the villain.  After he sabotaged the Eiland of Ligeria's Differential Mass Component he faked his own death, and then Swainson's (working in concert with the ship's doctor, who committed suicide out of guilt), and then shot Dore.  Claudine confronts Schwarz, who is disguised as a watch-salesman, and tries to convince him to fix the Differential Mass Component, employing her sexual wiles ("Before you condemn me, I suggest that you taste me") and promising to get the king to change his mind about scrapping the Eiland of Ligeria.  She fails--Schwarz refuses to repair the ship.  Luckily, King Zhavar was lying--he really does have psychic powers, and he fixes the Differential Mass Component, saving the ship and all the passengers.
     
This book is terrible. I don't like mysteries generally, and I certainly don't like mystery stories that feel like a scam, that tell you on page 40 that a guy has died and then on page 166 reveal, ha ha, that the guy actually faked his death, or tell you early on that there is only one person on the ship who can keep it from exploding and then reveal in the last ten pages that there was another guy aboard who could fix it all along so there was really nothing to worry about.  So, the mystery elements of Deathstar Voyage stink.  I like stories about difficult sexual relationships and I like science fiction stories, but the love elements and SF elements of this book also stink, being silly, tedious, unconvincing, and sterile, totally unable to inspire excitement or reflection in the reader.  I can be won over by any type of story, including a mystery story, if it is well-written, but Wallace's style is quite bad, as I think I have chronicled, and the characters and images and events and jokes are all boring or offensively poor.  (There are also annoying plot holes that I won't waste your time by going into...OK, look at the footnotes if your time is not important to you.*)

Publisher's Weekly and Library Journal,
your sources for fake news

Sometimes it is with regret that I feel the duty to give a piece of fiction which had some good elements a thumbs down because the bad outweighed the good.  But Deathstar Voyage has nothing at all to recommend it, and gets an embittered and definitive negative vote.  Zero out of ten 20th-century wrist watches.

*1) The ship's engineer admits that there is a way to fix the Differential Mass Component but he didn't pay attention to that lecture in engineering school and so has forgotten it.  Why doesn't he just look in the manual?--there must be a manual!  Even if there isn't a manual on board, why don't they just radio for instructions?  Multiple times over the course of the novel they radio Ligeria or Earth and receive responses!  2)  One of the clues that reveals that Schwarz is the saboteur and that he is the watch salesman is that when the king bought Claudine a watch it was inverted or flipped or whatever--the second hand runs backwards.  We are led to believe that Schwarz flipped the watch by accident--but when we learn all about the psychic powers Dore, Zhavar and Schwarz have, it is made clear that quite a bit of concentration is involved.