The Earth Quarter by Damon Knight

Joachim Boaz's recent review of a Damon Knight collection known as Three Novels or Natural State and Other Short Stories, as well as his twitter conversation about Knight with other members of the SF community, brought the famous science fiction editor to the forefront of my mind.  So I took down from the shelf my 1970 Lancer copy of World Without Children and The Earth Quarter: Two Science Fiction Novels of Tomorrow.  In October of last year I read the 65 page "novel" "World Without Children" and wasn't impressed with it.  (Back in September of 2011 I read Knight's novel, Hell's Pavement, and wasn't crazy about it either.)  But hope springs eternal, so I took a chance on the 120 page The Earth Quarter.

Earth Quarter first appeared in 1955 in a shortened form in If. In 1961 an expanded version was printed under the title The Sun Saboteurs in an Ace Double with G. McDonald Wallis's The Light of Lilith.  I think the text I read was the same as that which appeared as The Sun Saboteurs, but who knows?

The novel starts in the human ghetto in a city on the planet Palu, home of the alien Niori, who have far better technology than ever was developed on Earth.  The galaxy is full of intelligent civilizations, and the people of Earth are on the absolute bottom of the totem pole.  Earth is a total wreck after "the Famines and the Collapse," which the ghetto dwellers see as "the judgement of God" and/or the result of "humanity's folly, cruelty and blindness."  In the most memorable passage in the story, a prominent citizen of the human ghetto describes how Chicago, his home town, is now "a stone jungle," where diseases, bandits, wolves or bears will kill you before your fortieth birthday. And if you make it to 40, you'll wish you were dead!

Rack does in fact wear his jacket as a cape in the story

With the inhabitants of Earth living in barbarism, or, if they are lucky, feudalism, and a hundred small emigre communities living on alien planets, the human race is in trouble. Unless something is done, the human race will die out.

But what to do?  One group of activists, the Minority People's League, wants to ask the aliens for help rebuilding a modern society on the Earth.  Their representatives travel from one planet to another, trying to build support among the inhabitants of the human ghettos.  Opposed to the League are radical terrorists, lead by the charismatic Rack.  They want to secretly build an invincible space navy and exterminate all the alien civilizations.  (It is plausible for less than a million humans based on one hidden planet to overthrow untold billions of aliens on hundreds of planets because all the alien races are exactingly honest and thoroughly pacific--they are absolutely unprepared to deal with human mendacity and aggression.)

Six of the novel's seven chapters are set in the human ghetto on Palu, and chronicle the rise of the radicals and the eclipse of the Minority People's League.  There are many different characters, I guess representing different elements of society and political and philosophical attitudes.  Part of Knight's project seems to be to debunk traditional virtues like loyalty, bravery, and so forth.  Our viewpoint character, Lazlo Cudyk, is an equivocating intellectual who isn't sure what to do, and mostly acts as a spectator while the radicals, the Minority People's League, and some conservative types all conspire and fight against each other (the human ghetto is basically lawless, and neither the human nor Niori authorities investigate or punish the murders and attempted murders Cudyk witnesses), and the bourgeoisie try to make money and avoid risk (as you might expect from a member of the leftist Futurians, Knight's most hostile portrayal is of a selfish cigar-smoking capitalist--as befits an intellectual, Cudyk smokes a pipe!)

We get one chapter on Rack's spaceship, where his cunning and leadership ability, and the sincere bond between him and his men, is demonstrated.

Rack and his small force of ships manage to wipe out dozens of alien systems, murdering billions and billions of aliens, by using a bomb that causes a star to explode (or something.)  Eventually the aliens get their act together and capture the radicals; Rack's men sacrifice themselves so Rack can escape.  Rack sneaks back to the ghetto on Palu, where a mob, of which Cudyk is a member, tears him to pieces.  The Niori then expel the humans, sending them to Earth; from now on the aliens will make sure humans don't get their hands on any space ships, presumably consigning humanity to an eternity of poverty among ruins.

I think this is Rack giving his fallen comrades an honorable "burial at sea"

Knight isn't writing an adventure story here (though the single chapter on Rack's terror bombing ship is actually pretty exciting); he means to tell us something about the human condition, I suppose that our ambition, lust for glory, pursuit of wealth, et al, are nothing more than destructive insanity.  His style is bland, but liberally sprinkled with literary references and philosophic passages.  Cudyk quotes Olaf Stalpedon, T. S. Eliot and Ambrose Bierce, and voices such cryptic bon mots as "the universe always smooths out anomalies" and "the way forward was the way back; the way back was the way forward." There are psychological subplots, like that about a young woman with a strict father; she is afraid to be happy, falls in love with a Niori, and goes insane.  Her insanity manifests itself in the habit of walking through the ghetto stark naked.  (The aliens, we learn, not only never lie or fight--they never suffer mental illness, either.)

The novel is vulnerable to the criticisms that it includes no alien characters to speak of, we learn very little about alien life, and that it is a little silly to think that there are scores of alien races and none of them fight wars or commit crimes or suffer mental illness.  And some may not like the fact that 90% of The Earth Quarter consists of people sitting around jawing, the plot is driven by the villain while the hero does nothing, and the villain is more interesting than the hero. 

There are a lot of science fiction stories that use alien paragons to show how us humans are a bunch of jerks, and I guess The Earth Quarter isn't the worst in the pile.  For one thing, by including in the story sympathetic Christians and a condemnation of the NKVD, Knight broadens the novel's appeal a bit, and inoculates himself from the charge that he is just another commie whining about capitalism and conventional religion.  I'm giving this one a grade of "OK;" The Earth Quarter is acceptable, if not memorable or groundbreaking.  

IN MEMORIAM:  In the course of reading The Earth Quarter, the dry-as-a-bone glue on my copy of Lancer 74-601 gave up the ghost, with the result that the book fell to pieces.  Luckily the front cover, which I adore, is still in good condition, and I didn't lose any of the pages.  I have a collection of those clear plastic bags from half-Price Books, and into one I will inter this relic, where it will rest in peace until unearthed by some future generation SF fan, eager to learn the wisdom and enjoy the artistry of Damon Knight (such as it is.)

   

Non-Stop by Brian Aldiss

Back on February 14 of this year I read Brian Aldiss’s famous short story “Who Can Replace a Man?” and found it lame. As a teenager I loved Aldiss’s novel of an alternate Renaissance Italy full of dinosaurs, Malacia Tapestry, and as an adult I thought the first two Helliconia books and The Primal Urge had good ideas but forgettable characters and plots, so, while mixed, my attitude towards Aldiss was still moderately positive, even after reading “Who Can Replace a Man?” In hopes of reading something really good by Aldiss, last week I took out Non-Stop, which Joachim Boaz praised highly when he read it over three years ago, from the library, and today finished it.  It's good, so Aldiss's stock with me is a little higher today than it was a week ago.

I read a 2000 edition of this 1958 novel. A note at the beginning indicates that Aldiss made revisions to 48 of the book’s pages. Another note tells you in advance that the theme of the novel is that humanity is insignificant and weak, and that human ideas are (unlike nature’s “effects”) “unbalanced,” and we must keep in mind our insignificance and not let our ideas “gobble up our lives.” Is this note supposed to make you eager to read the rest of the book?

Like Robert Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky (1941) and Gene Wolfe’s Book of the Long Sun (1993-1996), Non-Stop is about the inhabitants of a huge generation ship who come to realize the true nature of their lives and the universe. I seem to remember the Heinlein and Wolfe books being basically optimistic; the passengers in those books land on a planet and start new lives. Non-Stop, on the other hand, is pessimistic; it turns out that the generation ship long ago dropped off the colonists, and, mission accomplished, was heading home to Earth when disaster struck.  The ship's systems went haywire and the crew reverted to primitivism; when the characters in the novel find the ship's control room it is a shambles! In fact, the ship has been orbiting the Earth for generations, and the people of Earth have been keeping the ship’s denizens in quarantine and in ignorance, studying them like they would rats in a maze!

Just about everyone in the novel acts in an irrational or immoral way, believing stupid things and acting callously or carelessly. The long space mission was abusive to the space crew, the Earth people treat their descendents no better, and when the primitives get their hands on a powerful laser, they use it recklessly and destroy the ship which has been their home for centuries! In Aldiss’s novel, human science, technology, and ambition, instead of achieving something admirable, cause misery and death. One character even says that the Nazi Holocaust is a “fitting token” of the technological age!

The plot and setting of Non-Stop are good. A tribe of humans is eking out an existence in a small portion of the corridors and rooms of the ship, which is overgrown with untended hydroponics plants and inhabited by feral dogs and pigs, as well as small groups of mutant hermits and other, presumably hostile, tribes. The tribe is nomadic, slowly exploring the ship, opening new doors looking for treasure (like ray pistols and flashlights) left behind by the people who built the ship, and periodically moving their protective barriers further along the corridors. One of the more educated members of the tribe gets his hands on a map of the entire ship, and he leads a small party forward through the wild corridors, hoping to get to the control room and fly the ship to a “natural” world where men belong. These adventurers make their way to less overgrown parts of the ship and encounter various other groups of ship dwellers, including intelligent rats.  In the bow of the ship they set off the crisis which leads to their climactic exposure to reality and destroys the ship. The whole thing is pretty exciting and vivid; Aldiss does a good job of describing this creepy milieu, and the adventure elements (exploring, fighting, getting captured and escaping, etc.) are well done.

One of the themes of Non-Stop is Freudian psychoanalysis. Over the generations since the disaster that caused the modern scientific elite that crewed the ship to revert to primitivism, a religion has grown up around vague scraps of Freudian theory and therapy. Aldiss seems to be making fun of religion and perhaps Freudianism, though at times he also seems to endorse Freudian thinking. (On page 82 of this edition the omniscient narrator gives a little Psych101 lecture on the “death wish” or “death drive,” and on page 184 a character recovers from his “death wish” by following the dictates of his Freudian-derived religion.)

I thought the style of the book had some weaknesses; Aldiss takes the omniscient narrator route, so that, when the characters find a camera or an electric fan, Aldiss just comes right out and tells us what they have found, even though the characters themselves have no idea what those items are. Aldiss also uses metaphors and similes that we 20th century people get but the characters, who have no books or TV, would not get. (Examples: on page 110 of this edition Aldiss compares the path taken through the ship to the rifling inside the barrel of a firearm; this is a good analogy, but the characters don’t have such firearms. On page 179 shadows are like bats, but these people have never seen bats. On page 143 Aldiss uses the word “proslambanomenos;” I had never encountered the word before, and no doubt the people in the story would never encounter it either.) Personally, I think stories of alien worlds are more effective when told from the point of view of one of the characters, or at least from the point of view of someone living in the world depicted.

This edition also contains quite a few typos, particularly regarding quotation marks (or “inverted commas,” as British people might call them.) Perhaps these are scanning errors (on page 161 we get “alarnting” for “alarming.”) Another run through by a proofreader would have really improved the text.

These problems didn’t sink the book for me, though. This is classic science fiction adventure with a huge space ship, mutants, ray guns, and a weird future society facing a paradigm shift. I love these traditional SF elements, and I always enjoy it when somebody uses them effectively; Aldiss does a good job with them here, so I enjoyed Non-Stop, and recommend it to other classic SF fans.

How many of these "great" science fiction stories have you read?

This is what the last page of my copy of Edmund Cooper's The Last Continent, Dell 4655, printed in 1969, looks like.  I love these kinds of ads, with just the title and author; your mind is filled with wonder at the possibilities of what each book could be about.  Like young Marcel in Proust, looking at the train schedule and fantasizing what a town is like based only on its name, you can construct characters and a plot in your mind for each book that, who knows?, may be more exciting than what the book truly contains.

I also like to wonder why the titles are presented in the order they are, and why one book is more expensive than another.  Did A. Bertram Chandler piss somebody off?  Were his books poorer sellers than Emil Pataja's?  I've never even heard of Emil Pataja!

<UPDATE JAN 30 2014: I read a book by Emil Petaja, who doesn't necessarily spell his name the way Dell does in its advertising.>

I have read five of the listed books, but I'm not willing to say any of them are great; I'm counting three OK/averages and two lame/Idon'tgetits.  Opinions do differ, though, as we shall see.

Deathworld 3 by Harry Harrison
I've read this twice and enjoyed it both times, but damned if I can remember anything about it.  It's an adventure story in which guys on horses kill astronauts that land on a planet, then an agent goes to the planet to make peace with the horse riders, or something like that.

The Cosmic Rape by Theodore Sturgeon
Earth people are cursed with individualism, but luckily an alien entity, the Medusa, comes to Earth and connects all our minds together.  There are lots of these collective consciousness stories out there, like Clarke's Childhood's End, Holly's The Green Planet, the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, and so on.  The Cosmic Rape was later published under the title To Marry Medusa.  Joachim Boaz liked this a little more than me, and gave it 4 stars out of 5; I think it deserves an "acceptable/average" score of 3.   

The Killer Thing by Kate Wilhelm
Earth people are cursed with a lust to exploit the environment and primitive natives, but luckily some aliens with a powerful space navy come along and force us to behave.  There are lots of these "we are a bunch of jerks and would be better off if there were nice aliens to tell us what to do" stories out there, like Robert Crane's Hero's Walk and the film "The Day the Earth Stood Still."  Back in 2008 I wrote a hostile review of Killer Thing on Amazon.

The Status Civilization by Robert Sheckley
I read this many years ago and remember thinking it was a boring bunch of cliches: the tyrannical Earth government sends a guy to a prison planet where he fights a robot in the arena and then leads the resistance, or something.  Joachim Boaz at sfruminations read it years after I did and thought it a brilliant satire.  What can I say?  Maybe I'm dense.

Spartan Planet by A. Bertram Chandler
This is one of the many books chronicling the career of space navy officer John Grimes.  I've read a bunch of these, totally out of order, and liked most of them.  As I recall, this is the one in which Grimes comes upon a planet where all the women are hidden in a secret lab, and an entire civilization has developed consisting solely of men who, not even knowing women exist, turn to homosexual behavior for love and sexual satisfaction.  Grimes's ship includes female crew members, and the whole society undergoes a revolution when they show up.  This would be a good book to read if you were writing a dissertation about attitudes towards gays in SF.   

*******

Five out of 19 doesn't sound like a lot, but the page says if you ordered five or more of the listed books from Dell then shipping was free, so I am considering five to be a passing grade.  And until I hear differently, I am considering myself king of the science fiction mountain for having read five of the books from this list - feel free to report how many of these books you have read in the comments, especially if you have read six or more and are in a position to dethrone me, or think I'm out of my mind and some of these books really are great. 

Drunkard's Walk and Beyond the Blue Event Horizon by Frederick Pohl

Via twitter Joachim Boaz points to an interesting discussion of academia as portrayed in science fiction by blogger and novelist Andrew Fox.  Fox talks about Drunkard's Walk, by famous science fiction writer and editor Frederick Pohl, examining Pohl's depiction of teaching technology and of the social status of college professors.

I read Drunkard's Walk  in October 2011 but, unlike Fox, when I went to Amazon to review it I didn't do anything ambitious.  Instead I took it as an opportunity to vent my frustration about my own experiences in academia and to mock Pohl's left wing politics, as you can see below, where I paste my review, typos and all:

The cover of the 1960 Ballantine edition of Fred Pohl's Drunkard's Walk proclaims that it is "biting funny" and "sharply satirical." I didn't find anything in the book funny myself, and am actually at a loss to figure out what the novel is a "sharp satire" of. Does "Rich people are inhuman sadists who use their special powers to control us!" count as sharp satire? Maybe it does to an alumnus of the Young Communist League like Pohl.

The novel is set in a university in 2196. My experience in academia suggests that professors (who take credit for their students' work, use grant money to finance their personal hobbies, espouse wealth redistribution in the media while plotting tax evasion in the privacy of their luxury apartments and summer homes, et al) are a ripe target for satire, but Pohl doesn't take that tack. Maybe the professors he knew in the 1950s were not like the professors I knew in the 2000s.

Anyway, the novel follows the structure of a mystery or detective story, and Pohl has math professors as his heroes. The math profs discover that the incredibly ugly and incredibly rich university president and other wealthy people are immortal telepaths who have murdered numerous people in order to hide their conspiracy to rule the world. This conspiracy includes setting loose smallpox to kill most of the population, but does not include amassing weapons or any kind of defense; once the math profs finger the telepaths it only takes a dozen police officers to subdue them.

Pohl produced in Gateway a brilliant masterpiece, and I continue to read him in hopes of finding that he has gifted the world with a similarly impressive work. Drunkard's Walk is, emphatically, not that work. Still, Pohl's style is not bad, and Drunkard's Walk is short and its plot holds together pretty well (I am being hard on the book because I don't appreciate its anti-capitalist politics and I find stories about epidemic diseases and conspiracies boring. I feel that I can safely recommend Drunkard's Walk to anyone who likes left-wing conspiracy novels or whose current address happens to be "Zuccotti Park."

In September 2010, a year before I read Drunkard's Walk, I had taken a whack at Pohl on Amazon because I was disappointed in the mundane Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, the sequel to Pohl's masterpiece, Gateway.   To the video tape:

Fred Pohl's "Gateway" is one of the great SF novels, an adult novel about one man's harrowing adventure in outer space and his own psychological problems, a novel with perfect pacing and a tone of unrelenting tension. The sequel to "Gateway", "Beyond the Blue Event Horizon," is unforgivably pedestrian and boring. "Blue Event Horizon" replaces "Gateway"'s first person narrator with three or four viewpoint characters plus omniscient narration so the tone is terribly uneven and there are no characters we get to know well enough to care about. The oppressive fear and danger that were on every page of "Gateway" are replaced with the tedium of science lectures and page after page of a business guy talking to lawyers, politicians, and doctors about his business dealings and his wife's health. One of the themes of "Gateway" was that life is terribly difficult, and the main character faced various tragedies and suffered terrific levels of fear and guilt, but "Blue Event Horizon" almost seems like a man's wish-fulfillment fantasy; a rich guy gets richer, has a great sex life, his wife gets killed and is brought back to life, and she doesn't mind that he is also in love with another woman! And then after a few hundred pages of boring businessman stuff he hijacks a space ship and wins a gunfight with the aliens.

"Beyond the Blue Event Horizon" is not a bad novel (the basic plot of the scenes in space with the aliens is good, for example) but it is totally average, and painfully fails to live up to the masterpiece that its predecessor was.

(In those days, after furiously typing a bitter denunciation of a book, I would often feel better, even a little regretful for my bile.  Then I would finish the review by claiming the book was good despite what I had just said; after all, I didn't want to hurt anybody's feelings!)

Because he was well represented in the libraries I frequented in my New Jersey youth I read a lot of Pohl as a kid.  I loved Gateway when I first read it, and I still loved it when I read it in 2010.  (I didn't review it on Amazon, though.  Back in those days I rarely wrote positive reviews of popular books; instead I thought it worthwhile to slag books everybody else loved and to promote books I thought were obscure.  My Amazon reviews must make me look like some kind of weirdo.)  I have vague but positive memories of Jem and Man-Plus; maybe I will reread them someday.   

Imperial Earth by Arthur C. Clarke

Earlier in the week science fiction maven Joachim Boaz reminded us via Twitter that it was Arthur C. Clarke’s birthday. Boaz suggested that his favorite Clarke novel was Imperial Earth. I knew I had read Imperial Earth in my youth, but I could recall very little about it. Of Rendezvous with Rama and Childhood’s End I had much clearer memories.

A library a few blocks from my home had a copy of Imperial Earth, so I decided to reread it. The library copy was a hardcover from 1976, with a pentomino design inscribed on the cover. (Pentominoes play a role in the story.)  It appears that I am the first person to open the book in 37 years, and when I did so the dried glue of the spine cracked in many places.  Honor this book which has died in the line of duty!

It is the year 2276. Titan has been colonized, and is ruled by three men, Malcolm Makenzie, the talented engineer and administrator who made colonizing Titan feasible and profitable two generations ago, and his two clones. The younger clone, Duncan, is 31 years old, and is about to go on a trip to Earth, to establish the relationships that will help keep the Makenzies in power on Titan and also to clone himself.  (Malcolm Makenzie is sterile, so the only way to maintain his dynasty is through cloning.) The novel, of 300 pages, follows Duncan’s trip to Earth, where he is to participate in the celebration of the 500th anniversary of U. S. independence as well as clone himself, and also includes flashbacks about Duncan’s youthful relationships with family members and sex partners.

Imperial Earth is “hard” science fiction – Clarke not only tries to make all the technology, astronomy and geography a believable extrapolation of real life science, but spends time explaining Titan’s weather, the speed of moons’ orbits and rotations, the acceleration and speed of the space ship that takes Duncan to Earth, and so on. This is a science fiction book in which the hard sciences really matter; or at least Clarke uses the book to try to teach you some hard science. How much of this stuff really serves the plot is questionable; in fact I doubt if half of Imperial Earth’s pages really deal with the book’s plot. The novel is largely a kind of travelogue through the 23rd century, a utopian vision which serves as a criticism of the 20th century, with additional assorted science and history lectures.

The first hundred pages of the novel introduce us to Duncan and his life, Titan, and interplanetary travel. I enjoyed this part, as space travel and the Titan colony are interesting, and the stuff about Duncan’s sexual and filial relationships is engaging.

Then we’ve got 200 pages on Earth. Duncan travels around, meeting people and taking in the amazing sights, like blue skies, trees, flowers, animals, and the pools of water, things alien to his experience on Titan, where people live in corridors under the deadly surface. Clarke describes this future world and indulges in efforts to infect the reader with some of his own enthusiasms. Clarke was an avid sea diver and supporter of space programs, and so we get a surfeit of pages of romantic gushing over the Titanic and the first moon landing, as well as an interesting scene in which Duncan helps to tend a coral reef.

Clarke depicts a future society that I suppose you could call “progressive,” and reflects 1970s concerns. Everyone is conditioned to embrace a policy of zero population growth – Terrans are “horrified” to find some Titan families have three or more children. Religion is forgotten (it sounds like Christmas has been replaced with "Star Day"), and Clarke subtly endorses the mob that burned down the Vatican. Sex is casual: marriages are “open,” homosexual sex is as common and unremarkable as heterosexual sex – most people are neither primarily straight nor gay, but are indiscriminately promiscuous. People are almost unconscious of racial differences; Clarke says Duncan has never given more thought to his skin color than to his hair color. The human race, through widespread race mixing, is gradually becoming a uniform shade of “off white.” At the same time Clarke hints that, in the America of 2276, African blood and dark skin are more prized than European blood and white skin. A woman is president; presidents are chosen at random by computer.

Like presidential elections, agriculture is a thing of the past, and the American Midwest is covered in dense forests. Most Terrans make their domiciles and places of business underground and almost all food is synthesized in factories. This doesn’t sound so great to me, but the Terran characters, and Clarke, seem to endorse it as a way of protecting the environment. In many SF stories characters moan that the synthetic food is bad, but in Imperial Earth Duncan proclaims that the synth developers have done a fine job.

People in 2276 have been conditioned to find firearms disgusting, but somewhat paradoxically celebrate George Washington, Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong.

In the last hundred pages or so the plot finally revs up.  On Earth, Duncan encounters Calindy, a Terran girl he was in love with as a teen, and fellow Titanian Karl, a boyfriend of his teen years, a rival for the Calindy’s affections, and a scion of the Helmer family, a dynasty skeptical of Makenzie dominance of Titan. Karl is involved in some kind of gem smuggling and other clandestine activity, and Duncan has a dramatic meeting with him at a remote spot.  Before the psychologically unstable Karl can spill the beans he acts erratically and gets killed by a government sniper who is detailed to protect Duncan. Duncan figures out what Karl was up to by examining his notebook and minicomputer – Karl was smuggling because he needed money to finance the building of a super radio telescope with which to detect possibly inimical aliens he suspected were perched on the edge of the solar system!

Instead of ending in an explosive climax or a solid resolution, Imperial Earth, like a lot of classic SF, ends with an idea (the aliens perhaps living on the edge of the system, among the comets) that is supposed to leave the reader with a "sense of wonder," a feeling of vast and undefined future possibilities.

Imperial Earth is better than I expected, better than the more flashy Childhood's End.  There is more of a human story here, less mysticism, and even though a few of the Earth tourist segments were too long and felt extraneous, Imperial Earth has a better structure, with things you learned about the characters in the beginning of the novel having a payoff at the end.  Titan, the space ship, and ZPG Earth are interesting settings, and Clarke doesn't just use them to criticize the 20th century, but also to address deeper themes, like decadence and the pioneer spirit, as well as the value of both being cautious and embracing the past and taking risks and embracing change.  I'm glad I reread this one.       

The Starmen of Llyrdis and The Big Jump by Leigh Brackett

Via Twitter, Joachim Boaz of SFruminations reminds us that it is Leigh Brackett's birthday.  I have enjoyed a number of Brackett's books and stories, most recently (in January of this year, I believe) The Starmen of Llyrdis and The Big Jump.  I wrote reviews of these novels, then in a computer mishap erased them, but have drafts of these reviews that I will paste below; the Big Jump draft looks almost finished.

There is a blog dedicated to Brackett that does not appear to be updated regularly, but includes quite a few interesting posts: http://leighbrackett.blogspot.com/.

The Starmen of Llyrdis

This was a competent SF adventure story, not very innovative, but not bad.  A mid 20th century guy who has never felt like he has ever belonged, despite being the US Air Force's best test pilot, traces his roots in Europe and learns he is the offspring of the union of an alien and an Earth person.  It turns out that the universe is full of intelligent life, but only one race of space aliens (one that can breed with Earth people) has the mutation necessary to survive interstellar travel.  This race, thus, has a monopoly on interstellar trade.  They have been secretly buying Earth goods, like Scotch whiskey, French perfume, and American movies.  The main character joins this race of space merchants and travels the galaxy with them, becoming involved in rivalries between various factions of the merchant race and getting involved with a dangerous femme fatale.  There is a very effective scene on a planet covered in a fungus forest. 

The Big Jump

Originally appearing in 1953, then published in 1955 by Ace, The Big Jump is a noirish/hard-boiled tale of man's first extrasolar exploration.

The moon, mars, and other parts of the solar system have been colonized for genberations, buyt only noew has a ship tavelled to another star and returned.  However, only one member of the crew, Ballantyne, has come back with the ship, and he is an emaciated near-comatose wreck who dies soon after his return.  What happened to the others?  The only clue are Ballantyne's last words, whispered to his friend, musclebound construction worker Arch Comyn.  Comyn is determined to find out what happened to the expedition because he owes a favor to one of the men left out in space, and tpo do so he has to contend with various members of the wealthy Cochrane family, a ruthless bunch of robber barons wjho financed Ballantyne's expedition.

A pleasant pulpy sort of thing about tough guys, a sexy dame and hit men, as well as space travel and alien planets; people who like a little Mickey Spillane mixed with their rocket ships should check it out.
 

"Killdozer!" by Theodore Sturgeon

A few days ago Joachim Boaz started a conversation on his blog and on Twitter about Theodore Sturgeon, asking what people considered Sturgeon's best short work. (I advocated for “Microcosmic God” and “The Other Celia.”) A few people, including admiralironbombs, who has a wide-ranging blog on vintage genre fiction, mentioned “Killdozer!”, which was one of those stories I have heard about many times but never read.

Last night I decided to give “Killdozer!” a shot. I was able to access an Adobe PDF version of The Mammoth Book of Golden Age SF through a university library; this anthology of ten stories, first published in 1989 (I had a PDF of the 2007 printing) includes the original version of “Killdozer!” from 1944. There is a 1959 revision which is less widely anthologized and which I would have read if it was as close at hand.

“Killdozer!” is what you would expect from the title. On a small island in the Pacific, a team of eight men, with the latest construction equipment, are building an airfield. Knocking over an ancient ruin with a bulldozer, they awaken the last survivor of an antediluvian civilization riven by war, a creature made of pure energy (“an organized electron-field possessing intelligence and mobility and a will to destroy”) which can take over machines. It takes over the bulldozer and starts killing the eight construction workers.

Sturgeon makes an effort to describe all the workers. One of the men is a racist troublemaker from Georgia, a former accountant with a “womanish walk” and a propensity for back-stabbing office politics. (In just one character Sturgeon gives us all the race, class, gender, and sexual orientation issues we could possibly need in a story about a murderous bulldozer.) One is a young Puerto Rican (the troublemaker calls him a “monkey”), another is old and has wisdom born of experience, another is the troublemaker’s simple-minded sidekick, and so on.

The more we know about the men the more we care when the creature from a pre-human age tries to massacre them. But Sturgeon also describes the operation of the bulldozer and other machines in great detail; Sturgeon apparently was very familiar with such machinery. (Sample sentence: “The clutches involved were jaw clutches, not frictions, so that he had to throttle down on an idle before he could make the castellations mesh.”) I’m not convinced all this technical detail adds to the effectiveness of the story, but all the talk of voltage, foot-pounds, compression, et al, may interest those who read science fiction for the science and engineering.

I guess you could analyze “Killdozer!” as a story about the fear man has of being at the mercy of his machines; this is strongly implied in the prologue about the origins of the electron-field creature. (The odd epilog also seems to suggest that technology, especially military technology, is nothing but trouble.)  But mostly this is a fun slasher-style story: a killer takes down the members of a group one at a time, the survivors blame each other until finally the true killer is revealed, and then the story climaxes in a desperate battle. Probably overrated, certainly not representative of what I think Sturgeon is all about, but entertaining.

Commune 2000 A.D. by Mack Reynolds

SF blogger extraordinaire Joachim Boaz tweets that today is Mack Reynolds' birthday.  In late 2011 I read Reynolds' novel Commune 2000 A.D., a Frederick Pohl selection with a very cool red cover.  My copy also has an eight page ad for the novel All Creatures Great and Small bound inside, which is much more fun than the cigarette ads you sometimes find in these old SF paperbacks.

I didn't recall very much about the book, but fortunately I had my Amazon review of December 27, 2011, pasted below, to refresh my memory:

Published in 1974, Mack Reynolds' novel, Commune 2000 A.D. depicts a North America in which 90 percent of the population is unemployed and on government assistance, and yet everyone leads a comfortable lifestyle, with plenty of food, beautiful spacious housing, efficient public transportation, and an array of electronic devices (including what we would now call cell phones and internet access.) Crime and envy are almost entirely eliminated, and there is no paper money or coins, all transactions being done through what we would call debit cards. There is no pollution and the landscape has been restored, with factories and highways underground. Computers and automation make this utopia possible. In fact, every year people take an intelligence/aptitude test, and the government computers select the best individuals for the tiny number of jobs available.

The fact that everyone has a middle class income and lifestyle without working allows them to leave the cities and band together into communes of the like-minded (for example, a commune of homosexuals, a commune of artists, a commune of people who like to get high on drugs every day, etc.) The main character, a graduate student in the social sciences, is tasked by his graduate adviser to write his thesis on the communes, and he travels from commune to commune, interviewing communards and taking notes.

There is not much plot to the book. The main character travels from commune to commune, and, because he is very skilled in bed and this is a very promiscuous society, he has sex with a beautiful woman in every commune. In the last 20 pages or so we suddenly get some plot momentum, with the conspiracy behind the communes, and the conspiracy in the government, both revealed, and the main character having to choose which one to ally with. What are the chances that he will join up with the conspiracy that has been throwing beautiful women at him?

This is a talky book, with lots of dialogue about life in the various communes and lots of anthropological and historical trivia - early in the book we read about the sexual positions favored by different civilizations, and get a lecture on the history of the mobile home in 20th century America. Later we get a recipe for cannabis brownies and a boring description of an LSD trip.

The book is also devoid of passion; most books about a socialistic future will be bashing your head in trying to convince you that our current market economy is horrible, or bashing your head in trying to convince you that the socialist economy we are headed for is horrible. In Commune 2000 A.D. there are some mild criticisms of a society in which 90% of people are on the dole, and some mild criticisms of 20th century exploitation of the environment, but neither the book's characters nor Mack Reynolds seem very exercised over anything (with the possible exception of homosexuals, both gay men and lesbians, who are portrayed in a rather unsympathetic light.)

Lacking in the plot department and the point department, Commune 2000 A.D. is a limp, tepid read. It is not offensively bad, but when you are done you wonder why the hell it was written or published.

Oh yeah, now I remember why I haven't read the other Reynolds book I own.

The Bridge by Iain Banks

A tweet from SF blogger star Joachin Boaz alerts me to the fact that Iain Banks has been recognized with a special award at the 2013 British Fantasy Awards.  I read an Iain Banks novel, The Bridge, many years ago, and recently found in my archives a somewhat jocular and quite mixed review I wrote of it.  This review I paste below.

I sold my copy of The Bridge long ago, and could only find this one less-than-ideal image online of the paperback edition I read.

The Bridge by Iain Banks

As far as I can tell, The Bridge is about this working-class Scottish guy who, in college in the 1960s, begins an on-again-off-again love affair with a rich woman.  These two are left-wing hippies, having all kinds of promiscuous sex, using drugs, railing against capitalism, saying nasty things about Thatcher and Reagan and laudatory things about the Soviet Union and the Sandinistas.  As he gets older, the main character, despite his politics, becomes a very successful engineer, making piles of money and buying all kinds of expensive cars.  Then, one day, drunk and stoned, kaboom, he gets in a terrific car crash, and is put into a coma, during which he has vivid surreal dreams.

These surreal dreams, and not the banal "real life" story, form the bulk of the book.  The main dream is about the Scottish dude's life in a city of skyscrapers built upon a colossal railroad bridge, a life of amnesia lived at the mercy of mysterious people and powers, but there are also various "sub-dreams," including a sort of Conan/Elric/Aeneas pastiche and several episodes of a military character.  These dreams have a sort of unifying theme: that of powerlessness, all of them portraying people whose fates are determined by others.

What you might call the novel's central "literary conceit" or "device" is how the "real life"and dream portions are interspersed with and influence each other, rather than being presented in strict chronological order.  A long fantastical segment will be followed by a briefer biographical segment, a sort of flashback, in which we learn the source of the elements present in the dream. 

Is this book worth reading?  It's not exactly bad (and many people seem to adore it), and some of the scenes in the bridge city and in the sword and sorcery parody are good and memorable, but as a whole it came up short for me.  The main character (who after all is shown to not be running his own life) is not very compelling, and the "real life" portion of the story is mostly a tedious exercise in nostalgia (again and again we hear about what sort of rock music the Scottish engineer likes.) The dream sequences really have the surreal character of dreams, which shows literary skill, but also imbues them with a sort of airiness, dimness, nebulousness and basic lack of reality that is characteristic of dreams, and makes one wonder what the point of them is.  In fact, the book as a whole leaves me with that feeling: there is no overarching plot, the the portions of the book that have a plot are dreams in which the narrator is virtually powerless, driven by the whims and wills of others, dreams whose significance lies in their containing mental artifacts from the dreamer's less than exciting real life.  So what is the point?  That under capitalism (or maybe life in general) we are at the mercy of forces not under our control?  Perhaps.


Since I read The Bridge a decade or more ago I have not read any more of Banks's work, and it seems unlikely that I will read any in the future.


  

Harry Harrison - rambling reflections

Yesterday Joachim Boaz of SF Ruminations tweeted a link to a review of Harry Harrison’s Deathworld at Speculition which is well worth any SF fan’s time.  I thought this was as good an occasion as any to record my thoughts about Harrison.

As a teen in the '80s I read many of Harrison’s books and short stories, some of which include scenes I remember vividly all these years later.  As an adult I reread four of these books, and took notes and wrote draft reviews, but these documents were destroyed one day when I was cleaning up a hard drive and accidentally shredded the wrong folder.  (Remember to back up your files, kids.)  A look through my boxes of papers has yielded much fascinating material (1993 GRE scores are in the fascinating category, right?  What about my certificate for passing New York State sexual harassment training?) but it looks like I didn’t print my Harry Harrison notes.  So my reflections here will be more or less at random and at the mercy of my faulty memory.  (I will welcome being corrected regarding which arm Bill lost in the Chinger war.)  

The Deathworld Series

I read the first three Deathworld books in my youth in an omnibus edition from the library.  As a kid I loved the idea of a planet where you have to shoot everything that moved.  I guess because my mother was a smoker and because there was a lot of anti-smoking propaganda at school, I’ve never forgotten the argument at the start of Deathworld 2 in which we learn that tobacco in the future will have no carcinogens and Harrison has the hero argue that the villain, who is against smoking, is a puritanical hypocrite.

I read the first three Deathworld books again as an adult, over a period of years, by chance in reverse order.  I enjoyed them all, but I remember nothing about Deathworld 3, and sold my copy at some point.  My review of Deathworld 2 has survived on Amazon, and is pasted below.  I still have my copy of Deathworld 2 because I love the cover. 

Deathworld 2

A pretty good and fast-paced adventure tale, I suppose you could call it a planetary romance; a spacefaring thief is shipwrecked on a planet inhabited by various barbaric/medieval tribes. In his efforts to get back to interplanetary society, Harrison's smartass hero plays the part of a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, introducing various pieces of technology to the primitive world. The novel is enlivened (some might say encumbered) by Harrison's attacks on religion and advocacy of moral relativism. Deathworld 2 is no masterpiece, but is definitely fun if you take it in the right spirit. I read the September 1964 Bantam paperback with the beautifully sinister brown painting on the cover and the ad for Winston Churchill's The Second World War on the last page.

The Stainless Steel Rat Series

I read the first four or five Stainless Steel Rat books in my teens, but only remember the first three, which I read in a thick hardcover omnibus from the library, with any fondness.  I recall that, with each new book, the jokes become more and more broad and the social/political commentary more obnoxious.  I have a paperback collection of those first three books now, and have reread the first as an adult.  I enjoyed it as a fast paced adventure story, but probably not enough to read the other two books in the collection.

The Stainless Steel Rat is “Slippery” Jim DiGriz, one of the few criminals in a future in which eugenics and other policies have almost entirely eliminated the criminal element.  Like the protagonist of the Deathworld books, DiGriz is a smartass, which I guess I appreciated as a kid.  DiGriz finds modern society boring, and commits crimes for fun, crimes which never physically hurt anyone and which DiGriz figures make the newspapers more interesting.  When he is arrested by the government they recruit him to help capture the ultrarare dangerous criminals; it takes a thief to catch a thief, as they say.  I believe his first case is the pursuit of a man who is building a space battleship, a dangerous threat in this era of peace in which the government has no space battleships of its own.  As it turns out, this guy was only building the battleship because of the manipulations of a woman criminal.  DiGriz falls in love with this female malefactor, captures her, and the government wipes her brain of criminal tendencies, and Di Griz marries her.  As a teen I thought this was all cool, but as an adult the book made me consider various moral issues around theft and personal identity (shades of A Clockwork Orange.)

      

Bill the Galactic Hero series

I loved the broad absurdist satire of Bill the Galactic Hero when I read it.  I won’t read it now, as I expect I would find it irritating.  The book is a parody of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (while Heinlein found his time in the Navy a positive experience, service in the Army Air Force fostered in Harrison a hatred of the military) and an anti-military and pro-environmentalism satire.  I think I read Bill the Galactic Hero before I read Starship Troopers, oddly enough.  Bill loses an arm while serving in a war against innocent aliens who are victims of human aggression, and the inefficient military bureaucracy has a replacement arm grafted on, but not only is it a different skin color from his own, it is a left arm – it was a right arm that Bill lost, so now Bill has two left arms.  I also recall scenes about how some planet is making too many dinner trays that are not biodegradable, so the planet is being overrun with dinner tray filled landfills.  As a youth I loved crazy stuff like this, but now this sort of thing seems tired and annoying – I feel the same way about Monty Python, which, when I was young, I adored.

I tried to read one of the Bill sequels, written over 20 years after the first, but it was horrible and I was older and I quickly abandoned it.

Eden series

If my memory is to be trusted, these books are more serious and less polemical than the other Harrison books I read.  They depict an alternate Earth in which, while humans developed in one part of the world, lizard people developed in another.  The plot of the books concerns the resistance of Stone Age humans to efforts by the lizard people to colonize the human territory.  It was in these books that I first encountered the idea of organic technology: instead of making a gun or a boat out of wood, metal, plastic, gasoline, gunpowder, etc., the reptile men (somehow) bred a small lizard which could expel darts out of a sphincter for use as a gun, and bred a big aquatic animal to act as a ship.  I also enjoyed the many illustrations in the paperback editions of these books of the cool lizard people and their weird living equipment.  I would definitely try rereading the first of these, West of Eden.  

UPDATE: In the last week of December 2013 I read West of Eden, and quite enjoyed it.

  

******

I haven’t read any of Harrison’s later work, and it doesn’t look very interesting (alternate history Vikings and alternate history British intervention in the U.S. Civil War aren’t doing it for me.)  But I enjoyed and can recommend much of Harrison’s earlier work, and have to commend Harrison on his exciting and fruitful career, which included lots of editorial work, moving to Ireland to escape taxes, the quixotic advocacy of Esperanto, and collaborations with one of the best comics artists, Wallace Wood.   That's a full life, and we SF fans are richer for it.

Stochastic Man by Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg has been one of the pillars of the SF community for many decades, producing many fine stories and novels and doing important work as an editor of a multitude of anthologies. But nobody is perfect, right?

SF blogger extraordinaire Joachim Boaz yesterday pointed out a great review of Silverberg's Stochastic Man by Max Cairnduff at Pechorin's Journal. Mr. Cairnduff hits the nail on the head when he says that Silverberg writes about people, and that is why we like his work. Cairnduff levels several valid criticisms at the book, but in the end admits he still loves it. This is where we disagree; when I read Stochastic Man in 2007, after reading several really good Silverberg books, I was quite disappointed, as my November 8, 2007 review on Amazon.com pasted below, suggests. Interestingly, while both Cairnduff and I find Stochastic Man to be below par for Silverberg, we focus on different deficiencies.

I like Silverberg's writing style, and it doesn't fail him here, but I have to say this book is in the inferior 50%, maybe even 25%, of the Silverberg I have read. For one thing, too much of the narrative concerns U.S. electoral politics; I don't read science fiction looking for a fictional version of the real life stuff I can read everyday on blogs or in the newspaper, and Silverberg just gives us boring horserace stuff, almost nothing about political philosophy or theory.

There is also a problem with the plot. Again and again the man who can see the future tells the main character that the future cannot be changed, that there is only one possible future, and again and again he is proven right. But, for some reason, the main character keeps thinking that his knowledge of the future can help the politician win elections, which, if the future is immutable, obviously makes no sense. Maybe Silverberg is just pointing out that, even though we have every reason to think the universe is deterministic, we all insist on acting as if it isn't. Even if that is the case, it is still a little frustrating for the reader.

(Maybe the novel is just too long, and would benefit if some of the political race stuff and a few of the examples of the predicted future coming true were eliminated.)

I wouldn't advise people to avoid Stochastic Man, but would let them know that Silverberg has numerous superior books.