"I know your name is Shannon," she told him, "and I know other things about you as well. I know they call you the Mythmaster and that you are the prize fly that the spider Oxon Kaedler covets."
I have only read one short story by Leo P. Kelley, "Cold, The Fire of the Phoenix," and I didn't like it. According to the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, Kelley focused on Westerns later in his career, and it looks like Mythmaster was his tenth and last SF novel. Well, let's hope Kelley left the SF world with a bang and that Mythmaster, 224 pages (of reassuringly large type, 32 lines on a page, much larger than the type in J. T. McIntosh's The Rule of the Pagbeasts, where we get 44 lines on a page) is a good read.
I'm afraid I must report that Mythmaster is not a good read. At all. I didn't like the style--the text is overwritten and wordy, with unnecessarily long descriptions and pointless metaphors, and pretentious, with references to luminaries like Shakespeare and Sophocles and symbolism Kelley explicitly explains to you, and none of this succeeds in having any emotional impact on the reader. The concrete science and adventure components of the Mythmaster's plot are silly and difficult to credit, and the "real" character-based plot isn't great, either. Our protagonist is a space pirate who has lost all connection to humanity and morality because he was raised by robots and while an officer in the space navy was party to a tragedy and was court martialed for disobeying orders. Now he flies around the universe, stealing biological material from hundreds of people to sell on the black market. He runs afoul of an evil businessman, and chases and battles with this guy provide much of the lame action-adventure plot, a plot which lacks much by way of resolution. The soap opera plot about how the pirate needs to learn to love is propelled by the pirate's relationships with a male prostitute (a gay man who is also a navigator and a forger and a paragon of humanist values, the exemplary character of this novel who sacrifices himself for others and gives wise advice based on his knowledge of psychology) and the male prostitute's former wife, also a prostitute. The pirate has at times creepy and fetishistic sex with these characters and they rekindle his connection to humanity and morality. We get plenty of weird sex material in Mythmaster, as well as uninspiring philosophical discussions and psychological discourses.
Gotta give this one a thumbs down. Mythmaster appeared in 1974 in Britain with a serviceable but generic cover by Colin Hay.
That will be enough for some of you, but those of you who want a spoilertastic plot summary and some evidence to back up my condemnation of Mythmaster, read on!
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In the second of Mythmaster's sixteen chapters, Shannon's vessel docks with Seventh Heaven, a space station that is a brothel ("pleasure palace"); the docking process is described in boring detail, and in case we missed it Kelley comes right out and tells us the docking symbolizes the sex act. We also get some background on Shannon and his career, including descriptions of his current ship and his previous ship, which was wrecked by a meteor, perhaps because the navigator on that trip was a man Shannon kidnapped and pressed into service and then beat up. I'll quote from that passage in order to provide an example of the overwriting and the burdensome metaphors I mentioned before; these lines also serve as an example of the less than credible behavior of people in this novel:
For days afterward, the man had raved and stormed about the ship, threatening to foul the navigation system with sugar crystals. Shannon fought him finally, fist to fist, and afterward the man performed his duties in a silence that was a cool pool of hatred.
Kelley also talks quite a bit about Shannon's looks and attire, and his relationship with one of his officers, Starson--these guys seem to have a relationship with homoerotic undertones, with Starson, for example, giving Shannon very detailed and specific fashion advice. The gay material in Mythmaster sort of creeps up on you, starting as mere hints and growing to eventually become a main theme of the narrative, reaching its peak in Chapter Ten when it turns out being date raped by a gay man is the key to learning how to love.
Chapter Three is a series of erotic vignettes in the space brothel. One of the few clever bits of the novel has Shannon perusing a sort of menu of the pleasures on offer on a series of screens and finding a video of himself having sex with a beautiful woman--this is what the media might call "a deep fake;" Shannon was photographed and by way of advertisement a computer has generated this film of him sporting with the pleasure palace's top whore, Reba Charlo. Reba, it turns out, knows all about Shannon and Starson, and makes explicit to Shannon that Starson, who is currently visiting the homosexual level of the brother, is in love with him.
The space navy raids the space brothel after our hero has banged Reba (a nasty sort of sex scene in which each participant tries to humiliate the other), so Shannon, Starson and the rest of the pirates have to fight their way back to the ship in Chapter Four. The servicemen have laser pistols, but Shannon, Starson (who we now learn has an emerald decoratively imbedded in one of his front teeth) outfight them with their fists and pellets of the hallucinogen. We readers have to put up with long descriptions of the navy mens' and prostitutes' allegedly amusing delusional behavior. (I say "allegedly amusing" but fear that Kelley meant these manifestations of the inner minds of government flunkies and whores not merely as jokes but as valuable meditations on the human condition.) Starson reveals that he and Reba were once married and we readers realize we have a love triangle on our hands.
Chapter Six is on inhospitable ice planet Ra, where Shannon and company deliver the 1000 fertilized human eggs to the illegal human settlement there. (A thousand? Shannon's band of pirates, which we later learn numbers less than 25, did surgery in makeshift conditions on a thousand women during that New England raid? Or was that raid just the final of many?) There is also more foreshadowing about Oxon Kaedler, whom Reba mentioned. Chapter Seven gives us more backstory on Starson, who has training as an astrogator but was working as a male prostitute on Seventh Heaven when Shannon met him. In Seven we also return to Seventh Heaven, where Shannon has a sexual experience with tiny alien monsters. You see, these little polyps have suckers, and you join them in a pool after covering yourself with an oil which, to the polyps, is an aphrodisiac, and they suck at you like crazy. Kelley makes sure to tell us with great specificity that Shannon has a lot of this oil on his crotch and his ass. A male attendant is at the pool and observes Shannon's space monster-induced erection and ejaculation and suggests the pirate captain visit the level of the brothel where he can have sex with a telekinetic alien feline.
In the same way that the atrocious criminal raid in the first chapter has elements of an adventure or horror story but Kelley's cold flat style and uninteresting characters defuse any possible thrills, this bestiality business could be titillating or disgusting, but just comes off as silly.
Chapter Eight furthers the love triangle plot as Shannon (forgoing the chance to play with the psychic cat monster) pays for another session with Reba and she says she still loves Starson. We get some pretentious psychology-of-relationship talk ("Seventh Heaven is a state of mind," for example, and "You come...to lose yourself, not to find someone....I was about to reach out to you and you made yourself unreachable") and a rough sex scene in which Reba tells Shannon she hates him while he is having intercourse with her. Then they talk about Shannon's abortive career in the space navy--he was dishonorably discharged after disobeying orders in an unsuccessful attempt to preserve the lives of some criminals by steering his ship around the convicts' orbiting cells and into a meteor storm (the criminals and his ship ended up suffering.) Shannon works into the conversation his belief that wars are started by bankers and arms manufacturers in their pursuit of profit. (What with its avant-garde sex and leftist politics, maybe we'll see Mythmaster on New York City public school curricula soon.)
In Chapter Nine, Oxon Kaedler floats on stage, and we find, as we so often find in genre fiction, that in Mythmaster the villain is more interesting than the protagonists. (Unfortunately, Oxon has very little screen time in this book and there is no climactic showdown between Oxon and Shannon--did Kelley write this book as he went along?) Oxon is a corrupt businessman who was burned almost to death in a fire at his mansion on Venus; it is likely the blaze was no accident but a murder attempt, a sort of parallel to the meteor events in Shannon's life. (If Kelley had put some more effort into this novel, the way Oxon and Shannon represent similar phenomena could have been interesting.) Oxon is a blackened husk of a man, almost unable to move due to his burns, and absolutely unable to talk. Oxon's nude skeletal form hovers on a column of air projected upwards by a motorized machine, and he is accompanied by a squad of telepathic dwarves--one of these dwarves reads Oxon's mind and acts as the businessman's mouthpiece, speaking Oxon's dialogue.
Through the alien psyker, Oxon explains that he is immune from prosecution because he is legally dead. You see, he had a clone and the clone died in the fire, and because the clone had the same genetic identity as Oxon, Oxon was declared dead. So now nobody can sue him and the government can't prosecute him. This book is pretty ridiculous; maybe Kelley is joking, but it does not feel the least but funny.
Oxon tells Shannon that he wants to be Shannon's partner in the business of stealing and selling fertilized eggs, and offers a stack of cash to join the Mythmaster operation. Also, he wants to buy a cell from Shannon's body in order to grow a clone of Shannon's body into which to implant his brain. Shannon is not particularly healthy or good-looking, so I thought this came out of left field, except as a way of saying Shannon and Oxon are one and the same, both monsters of capitalism or essentially dead because they cannot love or whatever. As for Reba, Oxon explains that, while he can't have sex with his current body, it being too painful to touch anybody or anything, he would like to watch her have sex with her clients, and cherishes hopes that in time she could learn to manipulate the air jets that are holding him up to provide him sexual pleasure. (Have I mentioned this book is pretty ridiculous? This guy's vocal cords are burned so badly he can't talk, but his genitals would still be stimulated by having air blown on them?)
Shannon and Reba emphatically reject these business proposals, and Oxon orders his alien dwarves to attack with them their talons. Shannon and Reba escape through a secret passage, while over the PA system (he has bought Seventh Heaven and is now in charge of the space whorehouse) Oxon pledges to pursue them across the universe.
Chapter Ten covers the trip back to Earth and we get material about Shannon's feelings about Reba and witness Starson and Reba flirting. The three go to Underdenver, the subterranean half of Denver to which criminals are limited. (The government can't prevent Shannon from performing nonconsensual operations on a thousand women but they can confine all other criminals to an underground city.) Our three space adventurers reject the solicitations of prostitutes of all ages and disperse beggars with an electric stun weapon and proceed to a store where an effeminate salesman outfits Reba with some clothes. In Chapter Eleven we get a description of her new attire, glowing alien worms or something. Our three principals go out to dinner (python is on the menu) and dancing and engage in verbal jousting regarding their love triangle--Reba urges Shannon to have sex with Starson, telling him it won't hurt. (Don't believe her, Shannon!) Reba and Starson conspire to drug Shannon with his own hallucinogen and there follows a psychedelic homosexual sex scene ("...there was only the stormy harbor of his thighs in which the ship that was Starson had chosen to anchor.") Starson suggests in a soliloquy that he has opened up a door to a new world for Shannon.
In Chapter Twelve the landlord of the establishment where Shannon was date raped complains about the stains S and S left on the sheets. Kelley defuses any of the tension that the gay sex scene might have generated by telling us, after the fact, that Shannon, who can't remember what happened in bed with Starson, doesn't find gay sex problematic and that homosexual relationships are normal--even encouraged--in the space navy of which he is a veteran. What Shannon is angry about is that he can't remember what happened--Starson has robbed him of his memories. Or so he says to himself. Reba accuses Shannon of fearing he is falling in love with Starson. The pirate captain forces himself on Reba, and this time while he is banging her she expresses not hatred by pity--I'm not gay or into having sex with monsters or children, so I found this sex scene the most conventionally effective in the book.
The malign influence of evil businessman Oxon is felt when Reba, at a government office, finds she has lost her legal status and must stay in the undercity (or aboard Shannon's ship) unless she agrees to Oxon's demands. So she is aboard when Shannon, Starson and crew raid an Upperdenver hotel that caters to obese sybarites. The pirates steal cells from the fat voluptuaries; Shannon has signed a contract with a colony of cannibal humans who will use the cell samples to grow clones to eat. When Reba finds out, she objects that this is murder, and in Chapter Thirteen Shannon's crew, "nearly a week out from Earth and almost a day into Garth's Galaxy," discovers she has destroyed the cells. Shannon confronts Reba and Starson joins the verbal jousting, and we readers must endure a lot of relationship dialogue, soap opera pop psychology stuff, Reba and Starson saying they love Shannon and are trying to revive his lost humanity and get him out of the prison in which he has locked himself to keep out the world and Shannon saying he will leave Reba with the cannibals and Starson saying he'll join Reba at the cannibal colony, etc. Shannon talks about how a captain's word is law aboard ship, maybe a reference to Heinlein?
Oxon's ship catches up and locks Shannon's inside a "fieldfix" and Oxon repeats his demands over the radio. Oxon's vessel has three times as many weapons ("nuclearods") as Shannon's so Shannon will lose a straight fight, so he comes up with a ruse and manages to escape, his ship crippled, to an unexplored world. The naval battle scene is poorly handled by Kelley (the science and technology stuff in Mythmaster doesn't make any sense, which would be forgivable if, like the science and technology in the first two Star Wars movies, the laser swords and psychic powers and emotional robots and dogfighting in space and all that, it made no sense but was fun) and Oxon's arrival renders all the talk of giving Reba's cells or Reba entire to the cannibals moot. Kelley's book is full of passages which don't advance the plot or themes and which are not entertaining or interesting either.
Only five people survive the crash landing, the members of the love triangle and two others. In Chapter Fourteen Kelley indulges in the traditional SF exercise of describing an alien planet's topography and ecology, and he kind of botches it, telling us when the cast walks away from the ship that because the gravity is low they are flying off in all directions at high speed and then a few pages later when they are returning to the ship that they have trouble walking because the ground is wet and sucking at their feet. Shannon and Reba admit their love to each other and have nice sex instead of hate sex or pity sex or roofied sex ("They lay down together on the lower deck, unable to see each other, able only to touch and taste the rich messages that their subsequent union proclaimed.") Then monsters attack and eat the crewman whose name we just learned in this chapter, and Starson gets to demonstrate yet again that he is more admirable than every other character in the book.
In Chapter 15 the four survivors march around, looking for a place that is safe from the monsters. Finding himself alone with Shannon, Starson gives Shannon advice on how to be a good boyfriend to Reba, offering his psychoanalysis of her ("She ran from life by running into the arms of men, and getting paid for the running, and believing all the while that no one could ever touch her again") and then of Shannon and himself. Oxon's ship appears above and drops pellets of the hallucinogen, which Oxon has figured out how to produce. We get a tedious surreal sequence in which Shannon confronts what on a TV documentary would be called "his demons." Being delusional leaves our four survivors vulnerable to the monsters, but luckily Starson, who we just learned this chapter has a habit of absentmindedly stuffing miscellaneous things into his pockets, has two doses of antidote in his pocket. Of course he gives them to Reba and Shannon, sacrificing himself.
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Mythmaster is shoddy and poor in every possible way, though its sexual content does embody one of the defining characteristics of SF, the presentation of transgressive ideas. The novel may be of interest to students of depictions of homosexuality in speculative fiction, particularly of glowingly positive portrayals of gay men, and of SF that depicts alternative sexual practices in general, what with the (condemnatory) mentions of sex with children and the (sympathetic) depictions of prostitution and bestiality.
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