Stories by Miller, Bradbury, Oliver & Beaumont from Man Against Tomorrow

You say you're looking to get a "sneak preview of horror and glories in worlds to come?"  Well, William F. Nolan has a book for you, his 1965 anthology Man Against Tomorrow.  We've cracked this one open before, when we read Kris Neville's "Special Delivery," but I think the rest of the stories in this volume are new to me.  So let's read a bunch of stories selected by Nolan to "open the door to the future," skipping (for the nonce, at least) people I've never heard of as well as Ron Goulart, Ray Russell and Robert Sheckley because I have had it up to here with broad satires, farces, and joke stories.

"I, Dreamer" by Walter Miller, Jr.  (1953)

In Nolan's little intro to "I, Dreamer," he tells us that Miller began writing while hospitalized after a terrible car crash.  Holy crap, didn't we just read that Ray Palmer, editor of Amazing, was hospitalized after a terrible car crash?  Stay out of those cars, people!  Move to New York, ride the subway--that is the safe way to live!

We've read a number of Miller stories about men being integrated with machines and the sacrifices men will have to make to conquer the stars, and this story is in the same vein.  An italicized prologue describes the experiences of an infant as it is born, meets its mother, and then is torn from her.  The bulk of the story is a first-person narrative in the voice of a computer being trained to pilot a space warship--this computer has integrated into it the brain of a human being, and so has consciousness, creativity, emotion, etc.  The computer doesn't realize it is part organic, but it is tormented by a desire for love and a fear of pain, just like you and me, and when it sleeps, it dreams of being human.  The plot of the story concerns the computer falling in love with a female technician and witnessing her being sexually harassed by the guy who is training the computer--this guy's behavior is emblematic of the society in which the story takes place, a militaristic space empire run by a dictator where men can have multiple wives and which is plotting to conquer the Earth.  When the woman refuses to join his harem the man tries to take her by force and by guile and threats.  The computer contrives to kill the man, which of course puts the computer at risk of destruction, and the woman as well.

The climax of the story is something you might see in a Barry Malzberg story if sad sack Barry had a slightly sunnier or more romantic disposition.  The woman, who may actually be the mother of the 12-year-old boy whose brain is integrated into the computer, is a member of a resistance movement that is trying to overthrow the government.  With nothing left to lose, she convinces the computer to crash the space warship into the palace of the dictator of the space empire--she leads the computer to believe that death will be a long dream of being human, and we readers are lead to believe this sacrifice will protect Earth from conquest. 

Pretty good.  "I, Dreamer" was first printed in an issue of Amazing (when it was edited by Howard Browne, who took over after Palmer, his boss, left) with a cover seemingly depicting some kind of sex dream.  It has appeared in many Miller collections, and two other anthologies listed at isfdb, one American, one Belgian.

 
"Payment in Full" by Ray Bradbury (1950)

Here's a Mars story by Ray Bradbury that is sort of rare--Nolan stresses its rarity in his little intro.  "Payment in Full" first appeared in Thrilling Wonder alongside stories by Leigh Brackett, Henry Kuttner, John D. MacDonald and Raymond F. Jones--this issue is full of stuff I'd be interested in reading.  There's even a letter from Marion Zimmer Bradley in which she engages in some literary theorizing about the role of the sword in fiction!  "Payment in Full" has only been reprinted in an English language book one other time, in a $300.00 Subterranean Press hardcover from 2009, The Martian Chronicles: The Complete Edition.

You can see why this story hasn't been all that popular; this story is not Ray at his best, and it is a downer, but not a downer in an interesting way.

There are three Earthmen on Mars when the Earth is destroyed by nuclear war--the Earth becomes a "new small sun" that can be seen burning in the Martian sky.  The astronauts are depressed, and drink, and list off the various things they will miss about Earth, their friends' and family members' names and so forth.  One of the three men, making a dark joke about the end of the human race or perhaps just insane, keeps talking about how he will marry one of the other astronauts and have children with him.

A Martian appears, to the surprise of the astronauts, who hadn't thought Mars was populated.  The Martian telepathically invites the three last Earthmen to join the last thousand Martians in their beautiful city.  The Martians learned wisdom long ago, turning away from atomic power before it was too late.  No Martian has used a weapon in ten thousand years!  The Martian gives a long list of all the beautiful things in the city, fountains and minarets and all that.  And now that the Earth and all the violent Earthmen are gone, they don't have to hide anymore, they can turn on all the lights!

The Earthmen respond to the invitation not gratefully, but angrily, as if the Martian is bragging and pointing out Earth's inferiority.  They shoot down the Martian, then take off in their rocket to find the once-hidden, now illuminated city, where they land.  We get a list of all the wonderful things about the city, people reading books and children laughing and people dancing and so on.  "Everybody was happy."  Then the Earthmen emerge from their rocket and destroy the entire city with their machine guns, murdering everybody.

With its lists and its repetition...

The Martian named the places.  They must visit the deep fount pools where colored inks mixed into patterns every second, they must see the flame pictures in the walls, burning and changing.  They must climb the crystal minarets where flowers ten centuries old bloomed forever and forever as delicate as white children, as warm, as tender.  They must hear the music....   

"Now," said Comfort, with his machine gun.
"Now," said Jones.
"Now," cried Williams.
They pressed the triggers of their three guns.

..."Payment in Full" has the poetic elements we associate with Bradbury, but the whole thing is over-the-top and obvious, a monotonous misanthropic cri de coeur rather than anything sophisticated or clever.  I have to give this one a thumbs down, but stories that use aliens as props to show how crummy humans are almost always rub me the wrong way, and maybe others might find this sort of thing moving or validating.

"Transformer" by Chad Oliver (1954)

Chad Oliver is a guy who, in my experience, writes stories about how our modern life of eating ice cream and watching Laurel and Hardy on youtube (that's my modern life, at least) sucks and it would be awesome to live a stone age existence, hunting wildebeest with a javelin or something.  (Check out MPorcius coverage of Chad Oliver stories here, here, here, here, and here.  These links are what I am calling "blind boxes;" one of them is to a post on a Chad Oliver story that is actually good--that one is "the chaser.")

"Transformer" first appeared in F&SF, and a year later was included in the collection of Oliver stories entitled Another Kind.  Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg saw fit to include it in their DAW anthology The Great SF Stories #16: 1954.

"Transformer" is a gimmicky joke story that has as its basis that tired conceit that has made Pixar, the guy from Bosom Buddies and the guy from Tool Time a bazillion dollars--your toys are really alive and move around when you aren't looking and resent it when you break them during your experiments and get sad when you stop playing with them.  Most of the story has a first-person narrator, a tiny toy woman who is part of the scenery of a kid's electric train set.  (The magazine version has a joke about first-person narration that was excised for the book version.)  She describes all the parts of the train set at great length.  She has lots of boring complaints (e. g., the kid doesn't dust the set) and there are lots of obvious jokes (e. g., the little toy people in the toy town are tired of eating bacon and eggs, bacon and eggs being the only food items modeled in the toy diner.)  These are the kind of jokes an actual kid makes while playing with his toys.

The kid who owns the set is now thirteen and no longer plays with the set very often, and when he does he causes the trains to crash into each other, damaging some of the toy people.  So the little toy people try to assassinate the boy by tinkering with the transformer, but the malfunctioning transformer merely gives him a little shock.  Then he sells the set, separating the narrator from her friends, and she ends up in an even worse situation, with a kid who has an even lamer electric train set up.  (Oliver tries to make the story sad as well as funny.)

I know people eat up this kind of goop, but it is not for me.  I think I have to give it a thumbs down because I didn't like it, but recognize its essential competence (the author succeeds in his goals) and market appeal, so maybe the "real" score is "acceptable."

(By the way, this story has nothing to do with the future or man battling tomorrow or anything like that, Nolan's ostensible theme for this anthology, even though he tells us in the introduction to the book that "A worthwhile anthology...should project a comprehensive viewpoint.  The stories in this volume display Man's essential strength in facing complex futuristic problems."  I personally don't think an anthology needs a theme beyond "these are a stories worth reading," so I don't care, but it is odd to see Nolan set out a program and then just blithely divert from it.)

I sure hope somebody out there has that crazy mask from
 the Powers cover of Another Kind as his or her twitter avatar

"Mass for Mixed Voices" by Charles Beaumont (1954)

In his intro to "Mass for Mixed Voices," which first appeared in Science Fiction Quarterly, Nolan mentions Beaumont's famous story from Playboy, "Black Country," which I read in 2015 in Volume II of The Library of America's American Fantastic Tales along with stories by Thomas Ligotti and Gene Wolfe.  He also refers to Beaumont's association with The Twilight Zone.  "Mass for Mixed Voices" is the title story of a 2013 collection of Beaumont stories published by Centipede Press that sold for $125.00.

I guess this story is trying to be profound, but I have to admit I don't quite grok it.  It is the future, in a highly regimented and militaristic society.  Disease has been conquered, and people live very long lives--in fact, people die so rarely (it seems decades go by between deaths) that the government schedules everybody's euthanasia, making a big public event out of each person's passing, a "World Festival" with visits from diplomats from other planets, performances by dancing girls, etc.  People live so long that they grow tired of life, and welcome death, so there is no resistance to the government-scheduled euthanasia regime.

Until today.  Johnmartin has lived a long and full life, fighting with distinction in many wars, having had a successful marriage and produced many offspring.  Since retirement he has cultivated a big diverse garden full of alien plants which have emotions and wills and can move about almost like animals.  Johnmartin's day to die has come, but he tells the authorities that he does not want to die, that he is still fascinated by life, in particular his plants.  It appears he developed this love of life and desire to enjoy immortality from reading some ancient books he found (it seems there are no books in this society, though there is reading and writing--we learn that the government sends people letters and it is a felony to ignore them.)  

The government cannot permit anybody to refuse to die on his death day, and Johnmartin reluctantly submits.  But he first eats a bunch of seeds from his garden, and requests that he be buried in his garden and the government make sure somebody waters and weeds the garden forever.  The authorities agree, and as he dies Johnmartin has a vision, of a new flower in his garden, a flower of which he believes "there was something in it of every other blossom," and as he dies he welcomes the darkness.

Obviously this is a sappy and sentimental story that is supposed to pull your heartstrings, but what is its "message?"  That the kind of scientific and regimented society that could conquer death would, ironically and paradoxically, also forget the value of life?  That death is what makes life feel worthwhile?   Are we supposed to agree with the Johnmartin of the start of the story, the Johnmartin who wants to go on living, or with the Johnmartin who welcomes death in the last line of the story because he is going to live on in his plants?  (It is a little odd that the idea of living on in his plants makes him content but he never considers that he is going to live on in any of his "hundreds of descendants--none mutants.")  There are plenty of references to war and religion and intrusive laws in the story, but if the story is a satire of the military-industrial complex or big government or religious institutions it is a very subtle one, because there is no evidence offered that the wars were unjust or that people are groaning under tyranny or the victims of manipulation by priests--people are unhappy because they are "tired, bored, satiated."  If the story is making the commonly-made-in-SF point that utopias are boring because there are no challenge or goals, why include all that talk of wars--this society, and Johnmartin in particular, has faced many challenges and achieved many goals.  

I'm finding this story frustrating--thumbs down. 

**********

The Miller is pretty good, but it was downhill from there.  Well, they can't all be winners, can they?  Nolan seems to have chosen these stories on the basis that they pack some kind of emotional punch, that each tries to break our hearts, which is fine, but only the Miller has a plot that is interesting and well-constructed and makes sense as a SF story.  (The Oliver's plot is alright as a sort of silly fantasy.)  

More 1950s SF short stories in the next exciting (we hope) episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.

The Valley of Creation by Edmond Hamilton

"It is true, outlander.  You now inhabit the body of the wolf, Asha."

The strong wild thought of the stallion interrupted.  "The power of the ancients!  The punishment of those who transgress the brotherhood!"

In our last installment we talked about Leigh Brackett's 1949 novel The Sword of Rhiannon.  At the risk of becoming the Hamilton-Brackett Book Blog (which doesn't sound like a bad fate, actually) today we are talking about The Valley of Creation, a novel by Brackett's husband, Edmond Hamilton. The Valley of Creation first appeared in Startling Stories in 1948, but the edition I read, a 1964 paperback from Lancer, prints a revised text, copyrighted 1954.  The indispensable isfdb warns us that that "1954" is a typo for "1964," and reminds us that in a 1976 interview Hamilton admitted that three chapters of this novel were written by Brackett!

(Check out the issue of Startling at the internet archive--L. Ron Hubbard, Jack Vance and Henry Kuttner also contribute stories, and don't miss the Virgil Finlay illustrations or Marion Zimmer's long letter in which she assesses Finlay, Kuttner, and a host of other SF figures, and presents "Ode to Startling," her poem honoring the magazine!)

The cover illustrates the reprint of the
1937 Kuttner story

The protagonist of The Valley of Creation, Ohio-born Eric Nelson, served in the U. S. Army in the Korean War and became addicted to the dangerous life of a fighting man!  (And you thought being addicted to KitKats was unhealthy!)  So for ten years he has been a mercenary, fighting for petty warlords against the communists in the mountainous regions where China, Tibet and Burma meet, his comrades including a patriotic anti-communist Chinese man but mostly American adventurers like himself and European criminals unable or unwilling to get conventional jobs.  In the first third of The Valley of Creation Nelson and his four mates are hired by Shan Kar, a weird guy of unusual ethnicity from an obscure, hard-to-reach valley.  Before they reach the valley a beautiful woman of the same mysterious race as Shan Kar, named Nsharra, tries to seduce Nelson, and, while he is distracted by her feminine charms, she sics her wolf on him!

Nelson survives this assassination attempt and he and the four other mercs, guided by Shan Kar, make it to the valley of L'Lan, where they learn the whole crazy situation they have gotten themselves involved in.  In L'Lan, wolves, eagles, horses and tigers are as intelligent as humans!  Shan Kar is the leader of a human faction that thinks humans should have exclusive governmental responsibility over the valley, while Princess Nsharra and her father are leaders of the establishment, called the Brotherhood, which includes most humans and all the animals--they think there should be legal equality between human and animal, as there has been for time immemorial. Very much in the minority, Shan Kar's Humanites will need outside help to win the civil war they are starting against Nsharra's Brotherhood.  In the ancient past the people of L'Lan were masters of super science, but while they still live in the elaborate cities of bubble-domes and high towers built by their ancestors, the current inhabitants of the valley have lost the ability to produce mechanical devices and so fight with swords and bows--in such a setting the mercenaries' grenades and automatic weapons may be decisive.

At the novel's halfway point Nelson gets captured while on a botched commando raid against the Brotherhood's main city.  As anybody who read the back of the book was expecting, the Brotherhood punishes Nelson by blowing the dust off an ancient wonder of super science--a mind switching machine!--and transferring Nelson's mind into the body of a wolf! (The wolf is installed in Nelson's own form, but for some reason, instead of exploring the joys life offers those with thumbs, he just sleeps.  Another loose end is the question of why being put in a wolf's body is considered a punishment if everybody in the Brotherhood is considered equal.  I'm afraid Hamilton didn't think all of this stuff through.)

The scenes in which Nelson is in the body of the wolf are by far the best part of the novel, as the author compellingly describes the emotions of a man so transformed, rendered inhuman but also imbued with new abilities and new perceptions.  In that 1976 interview, which has been mentioned before on this blog, first by commenter marzaat, and which I strongly recommend to classic SF fans, Hamilton says that some consider the chapters of The Valley of Creation Brackett wrote the high point of the book, strongly suggesting that she wrote these very wolf's-eye-view passages.

People in these Hamilton/Brackett stories often switch sides, and as we've been expecting, Nelson turns against the Humanites and his fellow mercenaries (as does the Chinese merc, who gets killed seconds later by one of the Eurotrash mercs.)  Back in his human body Nelson helps lead the fight against the Humanites, but his former comrades-in-arms outmaneuver him and take the Brotherhood's city.  Nelson and Nsharra go into a cavern in which is embedded a crashed alien space ship and via an ancient recording learn the amazing truth about the valley of L'Lan and about the human race!

Long ago, aliens who had destroyed their own world with their technology were searching for a new home when they crashed on Earth.  Unable to breathe our atmosphere, they genetically altered the five most advanced species they found in the valley--the ape, the horse, the tiger, the wolf and the eagle--so they could transfer their alien minds into them. This was how the ape developed the intelligence that marks humankind! Some intelligent apes left the valley to colonize the world and become its master, but for some reason the other four intelligent species never left the valley.

(Hamilton's body of work includes numerous stories with bizarre explanations for how humankind arose--check out "The Accursed Galaxy" and "Devolution" from the 1930s, for example.)

Nelson manipulates events so that Shan Kar hears the recording, and he switches sides and, as he dies from bullet wounds, helps finish off the mercenaries and orders his followers to abandon their sinful rebellion.  Nelson of course stays in the valley to live with Nsharra, who is now ruler of L'Lan, her father also having died on the fighting. Not only does Nelson have the hots for Nsharra, but he couldn't stand to live in the outside world, where people treat horses like slaves!  (This is pretty bogus, in my opinion--the deer and rabbits and mice in the valley don't have intelligence, so the intelligent tigers, wolves and eagles devour them with a clean conscience--why shouldn't the intelligent humans outside the valley exploit the unintelligent horses out there with similar insouciance?)

The Valley of Creation is a below average performance from our man Hamilton. Firstly, the characters and setting are just plain boring.  Secondly, building an entire story around talking horses and wolves, even if all the talking is via telepathy, feels too childish and goofy to me for a serious adventure story, which this is meant to be (there are no jokes and there is tons of blood and death.)  Thirdly, the novel feels kind of cobbled together, with too many loose ends, some of which I have already pointed out--The Valley of Creation's moving parts just don't move together smoothly enough.

Another problem is that it is way too obvious that Nelson is going to switch sides and help out the Brotherhood.  The fact that Hamilton chooses some of the most beloved and romanticized animals possible--horsies, eagles, tigers and wolves--is an obvious sign who the real good guys are--why not challenge yourself, Ed, and try to make us side with rats, spiders and cockroaches?  Shan Kar tortures an eagle on page 25 of the 159-page book, making him pretty unsympathetic from the get go, and his urge to rebel against the egalitarian status quo of thousands of years makes no sense, so Nelson has no philosophical reason to stick by him.

Shan Kar's lack of any motivation for his rebellion is a good example of how weak the characters in this book are.  The animals haven't started causing trouble all of a sudden, so his rebellion has no rational practical basis, and the fact that Shan Kar changes his tune when he hears the recording that proves humans and animals are equal indicates that he has no personal emotional reason to rebel, no lust to be dictator of the valley or get revenge on the horses because stepping in a pile of manure ruined his first date or something.

It is also too obvious that Nelson is going to end up with Nsharra, as she is the only woman in the book--who else could Nelson end up with?

If we compare Valley of Creation to some of the other Hamilton/Brackett novels in which guys go to other worlds and get involved in their disputes that we've read recently, Hamilton's A Yank at Valhalla and City at World's End and Brackett's Sword of Rhiannon, the deficiencies of Valley of Creation are thrown into sharp relief.  The characters in those other books, in particular the villains and the people who switch sides, are all more interesting, more believable, and more nuanced.  Shan Kar's rebellion makes little sense, but it is easy to see where Loki (in Valhalla), the Sarks and Rhiannon (in Sword), and the galactic government (in City) are coming from, and the changes of heart of Ywain the Sark, Rhiannon the Martian god and Varn Allen of the galactic government are more surprising and satisfying as drama than are Nelson's and Shan Kar's.  In Sword there are two beautiful princesses (a psychic Sea Kings princess as well as war-like Ywain) whom the reader might suspect the hero will end up with, and in City at World's End the main character has to choose between his nice (if boring) fiance and gorgeous space babe Varn Allen.

(City at World's End also pushes Hamilton's anti-tyranny and anti-racism themes in a far more sophisticated and compelling way than does Valley of Creation.)

I don't want to say Valley of Creation is bad-- the story comes to life for those chapters in which Nelson is in the body of the wolf--but it is certainly disappointing.  I guess we'll call this one barely acceptable, and tell you to read all the other Hamilton books you see before this one!

Don't Bite the Sun by Tanith Lee

A body change seemed to be in order, and a sex change as well.

Above the bikini babe on my copy of DAW UE1486, Don't Bite the Sun, is Marion Zimmer Bradley's assessment of this 1976 novel by Tanith Lee: "Probably the finest book you have ever published."  Talk about effusive praise!  I've never read any fiction by Bradley (check out tarbandu's skeptical take here, here, here, and here), and Bradley seems to have been a dangerous fiend who belonged in a prison, but I suppose I should be thankful for her championing of Lee, of whom I am a big fan.

On the back of the book are similarly ecstatic blurbs from a student newspaper and something called "Tangent."  Google reveals many periodicals have been named "Tangent" or "Tangents," ranging from a fashion magazine to a poetry journal to a magazine dealing with gay issues.  The Tangent in question is probably an SF fanzine, some fun 1975 and 1976 cover images of which I found on ebay.

So, does Don't Bite the Sun deserve this praise?  On the weekend I read the 158-page novel in an effort to find out.

Don't Bite the Sun is set in the super high tech future, when mankind has conquered distance, disease and death, on a desert planet where people, descendents of long-forgotten human colonists, live in domed cities, sheltered from sandstorms, volcanic eruptions and aggressive semi-intelligent natives.   Robots and computers do all the work and make all the decisions, so the humans spend all their time entertaining themselves with drugs, sex orgies, and interactive, pre-scripted dreams.

An earlier edition with a considerably
more appropriate cover illustration

As in what is perhaps Lee's most famous work, The Silver Metal Lover, our first person narrator is an emotional teen-age girl.  She lives in domed city Four BEE and is a "jang."  Jangs are the youth, those who have graduated from hypno-school but not yet joined the ranks of "Older People." Jangs are encouraged to act irresponsibly and explore the possibilities of life, and one of the questions the novel seems to ask is: are there any real responsibilities and real possibilities in a world of perfect safety run flawlessly by machines?

Jangs often change their bodies for cosmetic reasons, or based on a whim, and when designing a new body can not merely determine things like height, weight, and sex, but add additional eyes, wings, antenna, tentacles, even multiple heads.  The machines can also bring back to life those killed in accidents or violence, and so Jangs will take terrible risks for fun, or simply commit suicide when moody.  Our narrator regularly drowns herself when she is depressed, and has a friend who has died crashing his airplane into the same building dozens of times.

The narrator does not find satisfaction in the jang lifestyle, and applies for permission to become an "older person" early.  When, after a battery of psychological tests, she is denied permission by the robots, she tries to find meaning in work or art, but there is no work to do, and it turns out that even artists rely on robots to create their art for them.  Her next idea is to have a child and become a parent, and after donating an egg she leaves Four BEE, via mass transit, to seek an acceptable mate in other domed cities, Four BAA and Four BOO.  (I'm guessing the names of the cities are Lee's jocular references to hive insects; sheep, which are proverbially mindless followers; and maybe ghosts.)

Our narrator fails to find a partner she feels comfortable having a child with, and, at Four BOO, she changes her sex.  "He" returns to Four BEE to try to donate sperm and be both father and mother of a child, but this does not work.  "You have killed your child," the robots tell the narrator, throwing her into despair and leading to her latest suicide by drowning.

Unlike most people on the planet, the narrator found the deserts between the domed cities she saw through the windows of the "sand ship" fascinating, and so, back in a female body, she jumps at a chance to join an archaeological dig at a ruin out in the barren waste.  On this adventure, the climax of the novel, she gets lost in a sandstorm, endures real danger and witnesses real rain and real flowers blooming, interacts with real animals that were not gestated in a test tube, and suffers a real loss when a pet of hers is killed.

In the final pages of the book Lee gives us some ideas of what important things are missing from this world where there is no danger, no toil, and few restrictions on sensual pleasure.  The narrator utters the phrase, "Oh God," before fainting, even though she and her friends have no idea what the word "God" means.  One of the narrator's male friends who has chosen to wear a hideous monster body wants to marry her, and the narrator agrees, on the condition that he get a new, attractive body.  But the friend insists that he wants her to love his inner self, not the changeable surface, and the marriage does not occur. The narrator's aviator friend, who dies in scores of suicidal plane crashes, reveals that he kills himself this way because it is painful, because "pain is a reality."

Lee seems to suggest that, while 20th century people suffered all sorts of dangers and restrictions, all manner of fear and bigotry, their lives had meaning thanks to things like love and religion (and work and art), things almost unknown in Four BEE.  Also, that a life divorced from risk, from death, is also divorced from the natural world and reality.  

So, why did Marion Zimmer Bradley and the others who provided blurbs on my copy think Don't Bite the Sun was so singular, so special?  This is obviously a more philosophical and unconventional book than the numerous sword and sorcery capers and space operas put out by DAW; maybe we should see it as "New Wave."  In addition, Don't Bite the Sun is largely about rules, and rule breakers, something I suspect appealed to Bradley.  Bradley, a lesbian who married men, who seems to have had contempt for taboos and laws against incest and pedophila and edited a book about pederasty, a feminist who abandoned Christianity for paganism and who wrote a version of Arthurian myth focusing on women instead of men, appears to have been the kind of person who didn't take rules very seriously, or only took them seriously when she was overturning or undermining them.  Don't Bite the Sun shows a world in which almost every custom or law of middle-class 20th century society has been overturned by technology, and features a protagonist who doesn't just accept the state of the world she was born into, which in so many ways seems like a 1970s counterculture vision of utopia, but rebels against it, trying to escape its restrictions and break out of its own traditions and rules.

Cleverly, and satisfyingly, Don't Bite the Sun exhibits a mature and thoughtful attitude about rebellion and rule breakers.  The novel celebrates those who break the rules, but also critiques them, depicting the price of rebellion and suggesting that changing the rules can have negative as well as positive consequences.  "DO NOT BITE THE SUN, TRAVELER, YOU WILL BURN YOUR MOUTH" reads an inscription on an ancient artifact the characters discover on their archaeological dig, and our narrator comes to interpret it as a warning that breaking the rules can have painful consequences ("The sun is the Ordained Way of living... I'd bitten ceaselessly and hopelessly, and I was burned....")  The narrator broke the rules and has suffered, and perhaps her society, by conquering death, nature and scarcity, has also broken rules and thus suffered the loss of the comforts and pleasures of love, work, religion, and the natural world.

Don't Bite the Sun is thought-provoking, and I found the tragic events of the last third or so of the book to be emotionally affecting.  It is not a horror story or a sword and sorcery adventure, like so much of Lee's work, and it isn't as well-plotted a human drama as The Silver Metal Lover, but it does address Lee's oft-addressed themes of decadence and unconventional sexual relationships, and I think it will appeal to philosophically-minded SF fans.   I enjoyed it, and I'm quite curious about the sequel, Drinking Sapphire Wine, which I will pick up as soon as I encounter it in my travels.