Deyv said, “This is all very well, but how does it concern me? I won’t live nearly as long as a tharakorm, and these gateways terrify me. They are not guaranteed entrances to places where the Earth won’t die—for an unimaginably long time yet. Anyway, what is life to me without my own soul egg and my tribe, the people I know and love?....No, I’m not going one step further on this crazy quest of yours."
Maybe we should consider Dark is the Sun one of those world-building exercises, one that takes place billions of years in the future, so Farmer can include any kind of idea in his world, no matter how wacky, explaining it as a result of high technology or alien influence. We learn all about the ecologies of a multitude of monsters and aliens in the book, and their relationships to humanity, and the bizarre customs of the humans and semi-human people who inhabit the Earth in this far future, as well as the astronomy and geography of this far future universe in which the Earth no longer has any radioactive material and the very solar system has been changed beyond recognition by high technology and the compression of matter as the universe collapses in on itself. For example, the inhabitants of this Earth are unfamiliar with sunrises or sunsets because the sun is dead, the sky is lit by artificial means.
I suppose Dark is the Sun is in the tradition of Clark Ashton Smith's, Jack Vance's and Gene Wolfe's "dying Earth" works, though unfortunately Farmer doesn't demonstrate the brilliant wordsmithery of those three heroes, and he doesn't include the mystery and sorcery prevalent in Smith's and Vance's work, the humor in Vance's, or the challenging narrative strategies or Christian world view of Wolfe's. We might also see Dark is the Sun as influenced by Edgar Rice Burroughs, specifically the Tarzan and Pellucidar books--every two or three pages the main characters of Dark is the Sun have to fight or escape from some monster or primitive tribesmen or climb something or sneak into some place. Unfortunately, Farmer's action scenes are not as exciting as ERB's, and at times I found them a little confusing, leaving me unsure who was standing or clinging where during a fight or while climbing a rope or whatever. This isn't because Farmer's style is terse or sketch-like--on the contrary, Farmer overexplains, tells us more than is necessary, making individual scenes and the book as a whole seem too long. Farmer won't tell you the characters went down the hill to the building when he can tell you that they had to go left to avoid a steep decline and then right because of a boulder and then this guy almost tripped and then that person almost dropped this item, etc. And while I'm piling on poor Farmer, I'll say that his human characters here are not memorable or iconic like Cugel the Clever, Severian, or Tarzan of the Apes, but instead pretty forgettable and overshadowed by the superpowered nonhuman beings who guide and protect them.
Even though Burroughs' books are full of violence and danger, they often serve as utopian, wish-fulfillment fantasies that contrast 20th-century industrial life with a simpler life closer to nature in which there is less concern with money and obeying the clock and wearing clothes and so forth. While Farmer's book here grows steadily more dystopian and apocalyptic as it progresses, Dark is the Sun does feature some of that utopian jazz. The main character of the novel, Deyv, is a member of a tribe of savages who don't have to work, because food is all around the seasonless equatorial jungle in which they live. None of the tribesmen is sexually frustrated, because their society makes provision for unattached males, assigning the role of unpaid prostitute to certain women. The problem of health care costs, a topic that every person I have to deal with in real life relishes discussing ad infinitum, has been solved because everybody in this book has the mental ability to focus attention on individual damaged cells and repair them tout suite. The problem of razor prices has been solved, as humans have evolved to no longer have facial hair. Farmer doesn't examine the social or long term implications of these conditions and abilities, they just sort of get mentioned and help smooth out the plot--you can march all day for weeks and fight all the time if you can heal fast, for example.
Nine tribes inhabit Deyv's region, and they are more or less at war most of the time, hunting each other's heads and so forth, but on a regular schedule they meet peacefully to trade. Among the things they trade are ancient high tech artifacts, items left behind by the many advanced civilizations of their ancestors which rose and fell over the past dozen billion years, items like swords that never rust or dull. (Their own technology is at the poison blow dart and stone tomahawk level--they don't even have archery or the wheel!) Everywhere around these primitives is evidence of their high tech ancestors. The jungle is crisscrossed by highways so durable as to have endured billions of years. The sky high above is regularly crossed by flying machines bearing incomprehensible symbols, a message from the past nobody can read.
A high tech artifact ubiquitous among the savages and central to their lives is the soul egg--each savage wears one around his or her neck on a cord. The soul eggs are a kind of mood ring--if you are scared it turns one color, angry another, etc. We eventually learn they can be used as lie detectors. We immediately learn that people choose their spouses using the soul eggs--members of the opposite sex can perform a procedure that makes the soul eggs flicker and pulse, and if the two people's eggs flash in harmony they are compatible. Usually young people find a compatible mate within the tribe, but, if not, they seek a spouse at the regularly scheduled trade meeting. The different tribes are essentially different ethnicities whose members each have a distinctive look about them, and the occasional breeding across tribal lines introduces new blood to the tribes.
As our story begins, Deyv has been unable to find a mate either among his own tribe, the Turtles, or among the other eight local tribes at a trade meeting. So he sets out on a quest beyond the local region to find a girl in some far flung tribe and bring her back to introduce new blood to the region. He is accompanied by his dog and his cat, which have the intelligence of primates and are quite large and thus a big help in the novel's innumerable hand-to-hand battles.
When I was young, I watched a ton of TV. Every so often something thrilling or brilliant would be on the screen, like a woman I had a crush on like Isabella Rossellini or Dana Delany or a monster like King Kong or Godzilla. But mostly the TV was bland and inoffensive, merely a good way to kill time, one hour after another. Dark is the Sun is kind of like that; it goes on and on, not boring or annoying, but for the most part lacking emotional or intellectual effect on the reader. This monster's way of killing you, how the party builds a raft, the thief's expression of his love of stealing or the witch's expression of contempt for her children, et al, are all faintly entertaining or amusing, but not powerful, and you don't care who gets killed or who makes it to the other universe, and many episodes feel like they are superfluous or dead ends. The tone of the novel is flat; every scene feels the same, Farmer apparently uninterested in building up to a climax or springing any surprises on you or doing that thing where he builds tension and then releases it in a catharsis. But every scene is at least OK; Farmer is a professional.
We're calling Dark is the Sun acceptable. It took me a while to read because reading it wasn't any more attractive than engaging in my other hobbies--the art museums, Telengard, the model trains, the antique stores--so I'd read only a few chapters a day, but it wasn't painful. It may be a while before I read another long novel; in my opinion, the short story is a superior vehicle for presenting the SF ideas and horror scenarios that I find compelling.
If you want more insight into what is actually going on in this plot-heavy and incident-rich novel, feel free to read on for a blow by blow description of the saga of Deyv, the man dragged by fate and a talking vegetable to enlightenment and to another universe. I'm warning you, though, that you may not find it asengaging as a trip to the art museum or the antique store.
**********
The sixth chapter introduces the twist that gets the actual plot rolling--while asleep, somebody steals Deyv's soul egg! Without a soul egg, Deyv's people believe, a man has no soul and so will be shunned, thought of as a ghost--when he dies, he will be unable to enter heaven and live forever with his ancestors. Farmer in this novel is not only charting Deyv's physical journey from Earth to another, better, universe, but Deyv's intellectual journey, in which he leaves behind his dumb superstitions, and, if only tentatively, embraces science. In Chapter 6 Devy is at square one, rock bottom, the slave to superstition. The loss of his soul egg throws our guy into a deep depression, and he refuses to eat or drink, starts to die. But then he is struck by lightning and this convinces him that the sky god wants him to live, wants him to find the thief and retrieve his soul egg. So he sets out to after the thief, about whom he knows nothing, and whose trail has been erased by the rain--Deyv trusts in the sky god to guide him.
In Chapter 7 Deyv encounters a woman who has also had her soul egg stolen, an exotic beauty with blue eyes, blonde hair, a straight nose, thin lips, and small high breasts--Deyv's own people are dark and have thick lips and the women have big breasts. Deyv and this woman, Vana, join forces to find the soul egg thief. Soon they make friends, in Chapter 8, with another victim of the thief, a sort of centaur-plant-man of great intelligence and learning whose name to humans sounds like Sloosh. The plant-man, broad-minded but a little arrogant in his superiority, throughout the novel is a sort of spokesman for what science fiction fans (Farmer presumes) believe (or should believe): the pursuit of knowledge is glorious, you should think of the future and consider the entire ecosystem in your decision-making, human beings are violent, selfish, short-sighted and greedy, etc. Sloosh also drives the plot and overcomes most plot obstacles, being so much bigger and smarter and more moral than the humans. He can see people's psychic residue, the traces they leave behind everywhere they go, making catching the thief a viable proposition. By getting in touch with the memories of his fellow plants around the world, Sloosh can also sort of see into the past and into the future, and in Chapter 9 delivers a science lecture and a history lecture about the big bang, human history (mankind has risen and fallen many times, during the rises even having enough power to move Earth away from the dying sun and replace the sun with an artificial energy source) and the inevitable collapse of the universe. This collapse will be soon on a cosmic timeline, but at this point Sloosh still thinks it many thousands of years away, so while it is a big deal to the plant man, Deyv and Vana just shrug it off.
The main cast catches up to the thief, a furry person. The thief has been captured by a village's warriors, and in Chapter 10 Deyv and Vana watch from their perch in a tree, which affords a view over the village stockade, as the thief gets tortured. (Siting up in a tree watching the activities in a primitive village is the kind of thing Tarzan does all the time that Deyv also does all the time. In real life, don't the people who build fortifications chop down all the nearby trees, if only to serve as material for the fortification?) In Chapter 11 the villagers are all drunk and D and V invade the village and outfight the few guards who aren't drunk as well as the village canines, but narrowly miss retrieving the eggs because the red-furred thief manages himself to escape in the confusion, snatching the eggs again in the process. This whole sequence is an example of an action scene that is sort of confusing and overwritten, and a scene that feels like a dead end or like a superfluity--eventually, to advance the plot, Deyv and Vana have to catch the thief and get their soul eggs, and in this scene they almost, but not quite, succeed, so we have to wait until a later scene accomplishes 100% of what this scene only achieves 90% of.
The plot moves forward in Chapter 17 when our heroes, a quarter or third of the way through the novel, catch up to the furry thief. But he doesn't have the eggs--he was hired to steal them by a witch, and now she has custody of them, having seized them from the foolish thief, along with his own soul egg, without even paying him. This woman is not a magician or a devil-worshiper like the witches we are used to, just a woman who has all kinds of ancient high-tech equipment and uses her arsenal to enslave people and generally exploit the locals. (As in a Burroughs novel, slavery in Dark is the Sun isn't treated as some disgusting crime against humanity but just a fact of life.) She is the latest in a long line of witches who have long dominated the area from behind their monster-guarded fortification. Also present on the periphery of her lair are fruit trees that drug those who eat them into having a positive attitude about the witch, to thinking she is the victim of discrimination and not in fact a cruel tyrant and slaver. Woah, maybe there was a tree like this in New York City that made the students at the grad school I worked at say all those odd things about Mao Zedong, Hugo Chavez, and Vladimir Lenin.
Our main cast, now augmented by the thief, sneaks into the witch's lair, which consists of three of the living gas bag airships lashed together and floating at the end of a tether like 600 feet above. The fight up on the three air beasts with the witch and her minions takes up Chapters 18 through 21. The battle is very detailed, with lots of dialogue as the heroes plot their next moves and lots of sneak attacks and maneuvering among and between the various gas bag airships, and it all is a little hard to follow and not terribly exciting.
Immediately after the fight, in Chapter 22, we get a lecture from Sloosh on the rotation of the Earth--over the last few billion years, the Earth's rotation has varied due to manipulations made by super-high tech human civilizations. D and V require this lecture because their people don't have clocks or even the concept of hours and minutes, and so have trouble understanding that the air ship they have captured is going 100 miles an hour thanks to a storm so they will be over a thousand miles from home by the time they can land safely. During this flight our heroes torture those of the witch's family members and slaves whom they captured during the fight. But these underlings don't know where the soul eggs are, so the plant man negotiates with the witch, who reveals where she hid the eggs--back where the air ships were moored, of course. The witch explains why she hired the furry thief to steal the eggs, and tells her life story in Chapter 23. As so often happens in these adventure stories, the villain is more interesting than the protagonists (consider Dracula, Fu Manchu, Darth Vader, etc.)
As a young woman, the witch, thrown out of her home by her mother, went on an adventure with the plan of stealing some high-tech artifacts from a space alien known as the Shemibob who is currently living on Earth. This alien captured her and the witch had to serve the alien as a slave for some time; during this time the witch learned that the Shemibob had the secret of immortality and even had theories on how to travel to another universe when the collapse of this one was imminent. Eventually the witch escaped and took up her rightful station, seizing her mother's lair and artifacts. Now an old woman, the witch has been stealing soul eggs in hopes of thereby attracting heroic individuals who would venture to the land of the Shemibob--known as the Jeweled Wasteland--and acquire the secrets of immortality and how to travel between universes and bring them back to her--she would hold their soul eggs as hostages. It seems the witch has stolen hundreds of soul eggs over the years and sent many adventurers into the Jeweled Wasteland, but none has yet returned.
The living airship eventually comes down in a body of water, and our characters narrowly escape from a diverse collection of sea monsters, including living sailing ships. The folding space ship is unfolded, and they float inside it, drifting until they hit shore on an island in Chapter 25. Having just introduced us to the idea of portals to other universes in Chapter 23, Farmer puts one on the mountain peak of this island two chapters later. A man with a beard and pants, maybe a time traveler because man has left behind facial hair and pants many generations ago, or maybe just from a younger universe, appears briefly from the portal and then returns into it; the gateway projects a field that causes nausea, so our people can't enter it, not that Deyv or Vana wants to--at this point, only Sloosh and the witch are really interested in other universes.
On the mainland the party begins the long march to the Jeweled Wasteland, Deyv and Vana having decided to accompany the quest for the door to another universe which animates the witch and Sloosh (the furred thief just wants to steal what the Shemibob has.) They march for thousands of miles in Chapter 28; Farmer also uses the chapter to develop the sexual relationship between D and V, who haven't been having sex because they find each other's lack of a soul egg repellant, as do the witch's slaves, who reject D and V's advances.
In Chapter 29 our heroes are captives of a people who I guess are descended from dolphins or whales or something, people seven feet tall with blowholes on the tops of their skulls. One of Farmer's little jokes is how these people, just as primitive as Deyv and Vana's tribes, paint both six-pointed stars and swastikas on their bodies, and Sloosh talks about how these symbols have had very different meanings over Earth's billions-years-long history. These cetacean people have a stone and metal god that they have been trying to communicate with. Every captive they take they tie up in front of the god and compel to try to communicate with the god via flashing lights--they give the captive an oversized firefly (growing up in New Jersey we called these "lightning bugs.") So far, none of the captives has had much luck passing to the god the message that the village shaman would like the immobile god to come to visit the village shaman's hut. Each captive has died in the attempt and then been eaten by the tribe.
In Chapter 30 our party is dragged to the god--the plant man thinks it is a machine, maybe a vehicle from outer space, that doesn't move because it is low on fuel or something. The god's light pulses are laser beams that invariably slay any captive before they can exchange any information. First to go among Deyv's companions captive is the witch's other despised son. Only one captive is killed per meal time, two or three a day, so Deyv and Vana have time, under the pressure of imminent death, to realize their soul eggs were not the repository of their souls but just some device that became a crutch for fallible weak humanity and they should have been having a love relationship all this time.
After two of the witch's slaves have been lasered down and it is Deyv's turn at bat, Sloosh, in Chapter 31, persuades the tribe's leader to place captives a few feet to one side when they try to talk to the god so the laser will miss them. Soon Deyv's party are learning the alien machine's language. This part of the novel is less credible than the others--why didn't the shaman soon realize that he could preserve those he sent to talk to the god by letting them stand out of the line of fire of the communications laser? Because the captives tasted good? This whale-man section reads like a satire of religion more than something believable meant to generate excitement or suspense--it even ends deus ex machina style.
In Chapter 34 our cast explores the castle, and in 35 they meet the Shemibob. This alien is a sort of snake-centipede-centaur, a creature with a female human torso and head that are twice the size of a human head and trunk and are equipped with fangs and a long tongue and quills on the head instead of hair and a different number of fingers and so forth, while below the hairless genitals is a 40-foot-long hideous worm body with 40 humanoid legs. The Shemibob reveals that she has been trapped in her castle by what acts like a one-way forcefield that has allowed the party in but won't let them out. In a way I did not understand, the forcefield keeps water and air from coming to the castle, even though it let Deyv and Vana's party in, so the Shemibob's high tech machinery has been manufacturing new air. This forcefield is an effect of a gateway, presumably to another universe, deep within the castle. The gateway causes fear and nausea, like that at the island of Chapter 25, but they will have to go through it eventually because the time will come when the raw materials needed by the machines to make new air are exhausted. Oh, wait, the forcefield starts contracting just after the Shemibob tells her life story so this alien monster and our adventurers have to jump into the gateway now. In Chapter 36 they find themselves in what they think is a cavern in another universe. Using their various pieces of equipment and their skills, they escape the rubble of the castle that is flying through the gateway behind them and bust through a cavern wall to the emerge below the ocean surface and then rise to an island beach where they come to realize this is not some other universe after all but just some other place on their Earth. I always find these bait and switch things, when the author leads you to expect something wild is going to happen and then what happens is not really that wild, to be an annoyance.
In Chapter 37 the Shemibob reveals she has made soul eggs for D and V by scanning their brain waves. The two check to see if they are compatible mates, and they are, but they wonder if maybe the Shemibob's eggs aren't legit, if the ophidian alien maybe fashioned the eggs specifically to show they were compatible, whether they were or not. We readers learn more about the eggs.
Here I will note that, despite all the descriptions of breasts, Dark is the Sun may be seen as a feminist story. Vana is right in there with Deyv killing with her blow gun and stone tomahawk and arguing about what to do next. The wisest and most ambitious human character is the witch, and her most admirable offspring is her daughter. The most powerful character in the novel is the Shemibob, and she is portrayed as a good leader, pushing everybody around and deceiving them for their own good.
Chapter 39 largely concerns the personalities of the thief and the witch. The party has arrived at another wasteland to be crossed, and the thief proposes killing the witch, whom he hates, saying feeding her in a land where no food is available would just be a waste. The superior beings--the noble and wise Sloosh and the alien vermiform Shemibob--defend the witch, as do Deyv and Vana--this chapter is a SF staple, the human race put on trial by superior beings. By defending the witch, Deyv and Vana pass the test. Vana also gives birth in this chapter.
At the center of this wasteland the characters discover the 200-foot-high tower from which those indecipherable flying symbols regularly emerge and fly around the Earth. You remember them, right? It takes many pages but eventually our heroes get to the top of the tower and look down through an unbreakable skylight into this millions' years old unbreakable tower. Inside sits a figure in suspended animation which Farmer's description makes us readers think looks like Santa Claus. A joke, I guess. Sloosh and the serpent alien come to believe the flying figures and this tower are a clock that foretells the end of this universe, and the end is soon. This chapter, the fortieth, just tells us something we've been told already, and takes its time doing it. I guess the value proposition of this chapter is that there is the Santa Claus joke and that we are supposed to enjoy the sense of wonder of the characters who are looking at a building and a machine millions or billions of years old, even though we've already been exposed to tons of stuff that is super duper old.
The long march continues and in Chapter 41 the child is starting to talk and Vana is preggers again. The furry thief murders the witch and runs off with lots of Shemibob's high tech devices, but is killed in an avalanche. The snake woman's devices are lost under the fallen rocks. The machine alien has to shut down because it is out of radioactive fuel and there is no more to be found on this worn out old Earth. In Chapter 42 it is months later and the surviving adventurers find another of the gateways. D and V are finally convinced--by a dream--to try to get their tribes to join the mission to leave the Earth and reestablish the human race in another, younger universe. In Chapter 43, the characters learn that Deyv and Vana's tribes have moved and cannot be found. Can't Sloosh follow their psychic emanations like he followed the thief's? Maybe Farmer explains this, maybe not, I forget. Anyway, Deyv and Vana will have to go to another universe without their tribes, which causes much grief.
Finally, the heroes go through a portal to a young Earth-like planet that still has a conventional sun and thus sunrises and sunsets. In Chapter 47 the people of those tribes they manipulated follow them through the portal, leaving their gods and ritual items behind. The human race will endure after the collapse of our universe.
No comments:
Post a Comment