Stories from A Wilderness of Stars by Ray Bradbury, Poul Anderson, and Walter M. Miller, Jr.

Let's read some "Dazzling Stories of Adventure" in which "Man Meets His Future."  In 1969 Sherbourne Press published William F. Nolan's A Wilderness of Stars, an anthology subtitled Stories of Man in Conflict with Space.  Sounds awesome, right?  I own a copy of the paperback version of the anthology printed by Dell in the year of my birth, 1971, with an irresistible Robert Foster cover featuring some of our favorite things--lunar craters, a guy in a space suit, hideous tentacles, and a fetching lass in her underwear!  (I don't want to know where that red tentacle is coming from!)

A Wilderness of Stars presents ten stories; today let's check out four of them, each one by an author we already know we like: Ray Bradbury, Poul Anderson, or Walter M. Miller, Jr. (Miller has two pieces in the book.)  We also know we like Arthur C. Clarke, but I've already read his contribution to A Wilderness of Stars, "Sunjammer," which I can recommend with some enthusiasm--back in 2017 when I blogged about it I called "Sunjammer" "a great example of a hard sf story." 

"I, Mars" by Ray Bradbury (1949)

According to isfdb, "I, Mars" has never appeared in a Bradbury collection, and has only appeared in three anthologies, A Wilderness of Stars and two British anthologies, one of them R. Chetwynd-Hayes's Tales of Terror from Outer Space.  This is practically a "rare" Bradbury story!  Exciting, right?  "I, Mars"'s first publication was in the same issue of Super Science Stories as A. E. van Vogt's "The Earth Killers," a story (that I didn't think was particularly effective when I read it in 2014) about racists who nuke America from their base on the moon.

"I, Mars" is a clever story, sort of a variation on themes found in "The Silent Towns," one of the tales included in the famous The Martian Chronicles; maybe "I, Mars" has been neglected for this very reason, that it might be considered redundant by readers of that iconic collection.

Mars was colonized by Earthlings like 65 or 70 years ago, but shortly after humans had covered the Martian surface with small towns constructed in the style of America's Middle West, the colonists all rushed back to Earth when a world war erupted.  One young man stayed behind on Mars: Emil Barton.  We are with the aged Barton on his eightieth birthday when a telephone rings--who can be calling?  Barton answers, and is reminded that for years, to assuage his loneliness, he pursued various insane projects, like building an army of robots to populate deserted Mars.  (He eventually ordered the robots to march into a canal to their destruction.)  Another of these projects was to record his voice saying thousands of different things, and then program computers to use these phrases to have conversations over the telephone.  He set up the computers to telephone himself on his eightieth birthday and torment him!  Most of this story's text relates how 80-year old Barton responds to the harassment of his younger self.

I like it.  Pungent and to the point, "I, Mars" is worth the time of Bradbury fans who haven't yet read it.

"Ghetto" by Poul Anderson (1954)

"Ghetto" had its debut in the same issue of F&SF as the first installment of the serialized version of Robert Heinlein's Star Beast, which appeared in the magazine under the title Star Lummox.  (Star Beast is fun and memorable--I can still recall the experience of reading it as a kid, where I was and so forth.)  According to isfdb, "Ghetto" is the first story in the four-story Kith series, and reappeared in the 1982 Anderson collection Mauri and Kith.

"Ghetto" is one of those SF stories about Einsteinian time dialtion or whatever we are supposed to call it.  You know the drill: your spaceship travels near the speed of light for what feels like a few months or a year, but when you get back to Earth decades or centuries have passed, and cultural norms and political systems have changed radically and all the people you knew are old or dead, so you are a stranger in your own country.  The Kith are what the civilization in this story calls these spacefarers who witness thousands of years of Terran history, empires rising and falling, cities being built and then abandoned and then built again, even though their own lives are only the usual 80 or 90 years.  Between space flights, Kith live in an Earth ghetto that to normal Earthers looks like an historical artifact, a town that hasn't changed for thousands of years.  In the period of history in which this story takes place, Earth is run by an aristocracy who lord it over a middle class of cossetted slaves and a lower class of wretched freemen who live hand to mouth; people in this classbound society owe their position to genetic engineering, with the expendable lower classes ugly and with low IQs and the upper classes beautiful and blessed with high intelligence.  (The Kith, initially selected from tough men with high IQs and now having been genetically separate from the rest of humanity for thousands of years, are also ethnically distinct and generally superior.)  The aristos, most of them decadent hedonists who do little work and rely on the Kith to bring much-needed resources to Earth from outer space, have a contempt for the Kith, but also enjoy slumming in the "quaint" anachronistic Kith ghetto, while the plebians and proles have what amounts to a racist or bigoted attitude towards the space travellers, a bitterness that is their sublimated resentment of their aristocratic masters.

Presumably Anderson wants the Kith to remind you of Jewish merchants living in Christian Europe, an ethnically and culturally distinct group resented for their economic success but also relied upon for valuable goods and services.  More explicitly, he indicates that the decadence of the aristocracy and the rising disaffection of the lower orders are signs that this political system is on the verge of collapse.

The plot of "Ghetto" concerns a Kith man who, out in space, meets an aristo woman who was so fascinated by what she read about outer space that she decided to see alien worlds for herself; these two fall in love and the Kith considers abandoning his people and his space career to live out his life on Earth with the woman among the aristocracy.  Of course, Anderson's work often has a tragic tone, and it is no surprise that the Kith man finds himself unable and unwilling to fit in to the decadent and bigoted aristocracy and drops his relationship with the aristocratic woman and decides to marry a Kith woman and continue his life among the stars and in the Kith ghetto.

I can't point to anything wrong with "Ghetto," but it just feels pedestrian, like a bunch of stuff (cross-class love, relativistic time shenanigans, an oppressed minority, an empire on the brink of collapse because its ruling class has become jaded and degenerate) we've seen before.  Reading it right after reading "I, Mars," I couldn't help but compare Anderson and Bradbury.  Anderson perhaps knows a bunch more history and science than Bradbury, but Bradbury is simply a better writer, able to affect the reader's emotions--"Ghetto" is full of long paragraphs explaining the universe the Kith inhabit, while "I, Mars" is mostly short sentences and short paragraphs that, bang bang bang, present a small number of powerful images and, more importantly, immerse you immediately in the mental world, the psychological universe, of the character.  Anderson's story is about a civilization and its history, but Bradbury's is about a person and his feelings.

Acceptable.

"Death of a Spaceman" by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1954)

You'll recall I have really liked some Miller stories I've read in the last two years or so ("Crucifixius Etiam," "The Triflin' Man," "I Made You") and so I am looking forward to the two Miller pieces in A Wilderness of Stars.  This first one obviously has a good reputation; after first seeing print in Amazing it has been included in several "Best of" anthologies and was even reprinted in Amazing when Ted White was editing the magazine in 1969.

Miller's "Crucifixius Etiam" was all about how conquering space is hell but still worth it, and addressed issues of class and religion, and "Death of a Spaceman" is of the same ilk.  Donegal is an old man, a lifelong spacer who served in the space force during the war against the Soviet Union and then spent a long career working in the cramped and uncomfortable engine rooms of rockets flying to and from the Moon.  Now he is dying at home in his little apartment with his wife at his side.  He is disappointed that his son is not going to become a spaceman himself, and he blames his daughter--her husband was a spacer, and was killed in an accident, and her resulting bad attitude (Donegal thinks) turned his son off from participating in the adventure of conquering space.

Donegal's family lives in a neighborhood that was once posh but is now in decline; alongside the old mansions are now blocks of humble flats.  Next door to Donegal's apartment building is one of the mansions that is still inhabited by rich people--in fact, it is home to the owner of the company that builds the sort of rockets Donegal used to fly in!  While Donegal lies dying those rich people and their cronies are holding a noisy party to celebrate their son's graduation from the space academy and the start of his career as a spaceman!  Donegal's daughter has a case of class envy and his wife resents the noise from the party, but Donegal identifies with the rich family--the company owner and his son are, like Donegal, committed to Man's grand quest of mastering the universe beyond Earth's atmosphere.  Donegal's fellow feeling for the wealthy people next door is reciprocated when the party goers are told an old spaceman is dying next door--a musician plays "Taps" and the party lapses into silence in deference to Donegal's last wish, that he be able to hear the launch of a rocket to the Moon from a nearby base.

(There's also a visit from a priest and plenty of talk about Donegal's soul--as you know, religion is a major theme of Miller's body of work and plays a prominent role in this piece as well.)

"Death of a Spaceman" is a sentimental story, and also full of the ambiguity we expect to see in serious literature: is going to space really worth it, as Donegal contends and his family doubts?  Are the ordinary spacemen exploited by business interests, or are the wealthy and the working class spacers partners in an heroic enterprise?  Is religion a goofy scam or does it really bring comfort to Donegal and his family, help them make sense of their lives, and serve as a bridge and a strengthening bond between different strata of society?

Thumbs up.

"Death of a Spaceman" has appeared in all of these anthologies

"The Lineman" by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1957)

"The Lineman" first appeared in F&SF, along with Robert Heinlein's quite good "The Menace from Earth" and, in editor Anthony Boucher's book column, an interesting discussion of L. Frank Baum's Oz books.  The issue also includes a collaboration between Damon Knight and Ken Bulmer entitled "The Day Everything Fell Down."  I would not have expected to learn that these two guys, one of whom I think of as a snob with literary pretensions and the other I think of as a mediocre hack, had ever collaborated on anything, and it seems that this story was never reprinted.  It looks like a dismal joke story, and I am in no rush to read it.

"The Lineman" is another of Miller's stories about how conquering space is costly and dangerous and might seem pointless; the story has religious overtones and also opines on sexual relationships.  It is a sort of slice-of-life story, not very plot heavy and lacking a strong conclusion.

The human race is in the early stages of colonizing the Moon, and the lunar surface is sprinkled with work gangs in vacuum suits and moon buggies setting up dome cities, digging mines, and laying cable to carry electricity and communications.  This work is incredibly hazardous!  Over the course of the longish story, which is almost 70 pages here in A Wilderness of Stars, many men are killed by bad luck or through negligence as tiny meteors penetrate their space suits or they forget the many rules one must follow to survive in a low-gravity zero-oxygen environment.  One character, near the end of the story, wonders how there could possibly be a God in a universe that is so dangerous, so cruel.

Besides the dangers presented by the natural world of physics and chemistry, there are social and political problems.  Years ago it was discovered that children cannot be raised in low gravity--their young bodies grow out of control and they suffer terrible deaths.  In response to this tragedy, Earth's world government passed the Schneider-Volkov Act, that, more or less, forbids co-ed operations on the Moon.  In effect, this means there are no women on the moon, and so the men setting up the mines and bases on Luna go for months or years without seeing any women, which causes all sort of psychological stress.

A dissident political party, apparently modeled by Miller on underground communist parties (it is made up of independent "cells" and its members act with absolute ruthlessness) has risen up to fight for the repeal of the Schneider-Volkov Act through such actions as an illegal general strike.  In the beginning of the story the main character, Bill Relke, the lineman of the title (he lays those aforementioned cables) and a man scarred by the fact that his wife back on Earth has taken up with another man, is being threatened by Party thugs--he considered joining the Party and was allowed to participate in a few meetings, but then declined to join, and the thugs are now pressuring him to change his mind as well as trying to keep him from exposing their plans to the higher ups.  These plans--to strike--threaten the safety of many in one of the new lunar cities, because if Relke's gang fails to complete a particular job on time the oxygen system at the city might fail.  Later in the story the thugs torture Relke, and then more conservative elements of the work gang in turn torture the thugs in an effort to achieve revenge and maintain order so the critical project is completed on schedule.  Miller does not provide us readers with exciting fight scenes or cathartic images of justice being served or romantic gush about right overcoming wrong--the violence in "The Lineman" consists of vicious beatings of essentially helpless people, and Relke reflects that in the absence of the stabilizing force of the heterosexual family, men resort, inevitably, to the brutal ethics of a street gang.

In the middle of this Hobbesian milieu a rocket arrives, landing in an unusual spot, leading to speculation that it is a damaged Earth vessel making an emergency landing or perhaps even aliens.  In fact it is a French ship full of prostitutes whose owners exploit some legal loopholes and engage in financial shenanigans in order to operate this interplanetary whore house.  The arrival of the brothel gives Miller an opportunity to show how monstrous the Party members are and how unfulfilling can be sexual relationships unmoored from any sort of commitment.  The flying brothel also serves as an oblique impetus to the resolution of the short term plot (finishing the critical job on time) and the long term plot (recreating healthy family life on the Moon.)

This story is pretty good, though its valorization of the heterosexual nuclear family and dismissal of homosexuality may offend today's sensibilities.  Its portrayal of space colonization as hellishly dangerous and perhaps quixotic reminds us of the career of Barry Malzberg and of Edmond Hamilton's 1952 story "What's It Like Out There?"   

"The Lineman" has appeared in Miller collections and was selected for David G. Hartwell's The World Treasury of Science Fiction.

**********

Four worthwhile stories that suggest that leaving Earth is no picnic.  Hold those travel plans, folks!

Kandar by Ken Bulmer

Quantoch chuckled his evil chuckle again.  "Not so, O my valiant Prince Kandar, Lion of Akkar, last scion of Dreaming Ferranoz!  We have all the time in the world, for nothing will age in Ferranoz while we are gone!"

Let’s take a look at the MPorcius scorecard for Ken Bulmer. In 2013 I liked Behold the Stars, but in 2014 I didn’t like Cycle of Nemesis. In 2015 I found The Diamond Contessa bewildering, but not exactly bad. I’ve been ignoring Bulmer for a couple of years, but on my shelf is a copy of Kandar, a 1969 “science-fantasy” from Paperback Library which I purchased because of its Jeff Jones cover. The cover reminds me of Joust, one of my favorite video games, though Joust lacked anything like the gorgeous babe we see accompanying the bird rider on this cover. The crew at Paperback Library really went all out with this publication--the back cover includes a fun illustration totally distinct from that on the front. Let’s see if Bulmer, in producing the text, met the high standards of Jones and the other people responsible for the cover.

The walled capital city of Ferranoz, seat of the God-Emperor Pandin Heliodotus, lies at the heart of the Akkarian empire.  As Bulmer's novel begins, the city is subjected to a sneak attack by mysterious enemies whose flying warships bypass all the empire's defenses; soon Ferranoz is overrun by pitiless half-man, half-wolf soldiers.  The Empire's greatest wizard, Quantoch, and the God-Emperor's son, Prince Kandar, are away conducting experiments, and by the time they arrive on the scene, Ferranoz is in flames and the wolfmen have overwhelmed the imperial soldiery and are carting away the women, including Kandar's fiance Elthalee!  Quantoch tries to use his magic to save the city, but the unknown enemy has a wizard of exactly equal power--as a result, their magic cancels each other out and Ferranoz is frozen in time.  In subsequent skirmishes outside the city walls Elthalee and Quantoch are severely wounded, so Kandar puts them within the city; in suspended animation like the rest of the metropolis, so they won't bleed to death.

Kandar then searches the world for the secret of the mysterious enemies who have attacked his home town and the magic spells required to unfreeze the city.   He makes friends, meets wizards, fights monsters, has sex with various young women, finally gets the magic he needs to summon a higher being (an immortal callipygian woman who rides a dragon) to intercede with still higher powers to liberate Ferranoz and annihilate the wolfmen.  In exchange for their help, he has to pledge 21 years service to the higher powers, and in the end of the book flies off on the back of the dragon with the voluptuous angel; it is strongly implied he will be having sex with this zaftig divinity.

This novel is not very good.  The writing and editing are sloppy, Bulmer using words and phrases in odd ways and using words I've never encountered before.  Here's an example from pages 39 and 40:

This is one bad sentence!  I've never heard "bunched out" before--does it mean "bunched up" or "spread out?"  And why not write the sentence in such a way that you need only use the word "swung" once?  Annoying!

Here's another short para from page 40:

I don't like "poised" here, I don't like "sent the shaft to bury," I think "sheared" should be used for the action of a blade, not the action of a point, and I don't know what the hell "like a hop pocket" means; is that a typo?  Is "hop pocket" British lingo for a guy who is blind drunk?   

The fight scenes are silly, confusing, and difficult to visualize.  When he is charged by two lancers, Kandar grabs their lances and lifts himself up on them like they are parallel bars in a gym--all the time, it seems, still holding his own sword.  He breaks the end off of one of the lances, stabs a foe with the point, and then kills another enemy with his sword, which is said to "gnaw" into the victim's neck.  Using a word that suggests slowness like "gnaw" in a scene all about quick thinking and galloping horses is unforgivably dissonant.

Bulmer's plot is poorly constructed, full of repetition, dead ends and subplots that go nowhere.  After Elthalee is wounded and put in the city for safe keeping, Quantoch and Kandar decide to study their magic books right there on the battlefield instead of going to their secret laboratory; Kandar thinks the crews of the flying machines overhead won't realize they are alive if they sit still.  When the two bookworms are attacked, Quantoch gets hurt and Kandar has to go put him in the city.  This kind of repetition is irritating; Bulmer should have just had both of these minor characters wounded in the same fight and deposited in the town at the same time.

When we first meet Kandar he is conducting electrical experiments, and numerous times in the novel he laments that he has to use magic to overcome an obstacle, when he would prefer to use science.  Despite all this foreshadowing, he never ever uses science to accomplish anything.  Similarly, we never learn anything about the mysterious entities who built the flying machines and sent the wolfmen to Ferranoz; these evil higher powers have no speaking part and never appear "on screen."  We never even meet one of their intermediaries, like we meet the sexy angel who is an intermediary to the good higher powers.  In a well-thought out adventure story, Kandar would have discovered the attackers were scientists, and he would have used his own science knowledge to counter the flying machines; maybe even had a debate with them over whether science should be used to liberate or control the common masses.  Maybe Bulmer was planning on doing such a thing and just ran out of time or pages?  This novel certainly feels like it was written without an outline and without revision, like Bulmer was desperate to meet a deadline.

In a later scene Kandar (who learns to be a passable wizard after spending an hour or two reading a book) is able to preserve the souls of two good men he killed due to the machinations of an evil wizard and a beautiful woman.  At first the spell works, and Kandar hears the voices of the men in his head--he has preserved their souls in his own body.  But then the spell fails, and the voices fade away--we are even told that the spell failed because Kandar forgot some elements of the spell.  Then a few pages later he hears the voices again; the spell worked after all!  Why does Bulmer go through this rigmarole of the spell working and then not working?  And why does he include this element at all?  The voices, as far as I can tell, don't provide Kandar any actual help, don't help move along the plot; I think they are just comic relief.

If my withering criticism hasn't
discouraged you, you can get an
electronic version of Kandar from
the good people at Gateway

Bulmer does periodically try to enliven his novel with lame jokes and juvenile wordplay, but the gags are never funny.  Sample joke:  A barbarian who yells out oaths like: "By the supple hips of sweet Vashtilulu the Buxom!"  Sample wordplay: "Quivering, quaking, querulous, Quantoch screamed and fell back." 

These anemic attempts at comedy, and a few sword and sorcery cliches (like demon worshipers trying to sacrifice somebody and that somebody being rescued in a nick of time) make me wonder if perhaps Kandar is meant to be a (in the event a not at all funny) parody of sword and sorcery stories.  The novel includes what feel like references to the work of Michael Moorcock and E. C. Tubb, Bulmer's (more talented) comrades in the trenches of the British sword-fighting adventure story industry.  Like Bulmer's Ferranoz, Imrryr, the capital city of Moorcock's famous empire of sorcerers, Melnibone, is called "The Dreaming City,"and like Prince Elric, Prince Kandar accidentally stabs his fiance.  E. C. Tubb's most famous character is Earl Dumarest, and Bulmer gives the name of "Dumarest" to one species of fantastic creature in Kandar.

Perhaps even more egregious than Bulmer's poor style and sloppy plot is the fact that the book is full of printing errors; on numerous pages we find lines printed in the wrong order, or lines printed multiple times.  Irritating!

A shoddy piece of work.  I have to give Kandar a thumbs down.

Chieftain of Andor by Andrew J. Offutt

An atavist, they called him on Earth.  A throwback, a semibarbarian.  A "savage," a man who preferred a free life and personal justice, given and taken.  And they were right.  Thus--he belonged here.

In October of last year I read Andrew J. Offutt's The Iron Lords.  That novel, the first of a trilogy, was intriguing enough that I have been looking for the sequels every time I am in a used bookstore, and in the course of this quest buying other paperbacks by Offutt.  This week I decided to read Chieftain of Andor, a 1976 novel by Offutt.  (I own the 1976 Dell paperback; British editions from 1979 bear the alternate title Clansman of Andor--now there's a painful demotion!)  Before starting Chieftain of Andor, I googled Offutt's name and came upon a fascinating and even moving and shocking profile of Offutt by his son, Chris Offutt, himself a critically acclaimed writer, that appeared last year in The New York Times.  I strongly recommend the article to anybody interested in genre literature and the people who write it.  (This year Chris Offutt published a full length book about his father.)

Chieftan of Andor is an adventure story full of elements to be found in other Edgar Rice Burroughs-inspired fiction I have read over my decades-long career of reading books about guys fighting aliens and monsters with swords, sprinkled with some idiosyncratic components reflective of Offutt's own interests and opinions.

The 203-page novel is split into three parts.  In Part I we meet Robert Cleve, a 20th-century American who seeks adventure and so answers a newspaper ad seeking such adventurous men.  We've seen such ads in Robert Heinlein's 1963 Glory Road and Ken Bulmer's 1983 The Diamond Contessa.  Cleve meets a guy named Gordon who represents a secretive organization that wants to transmit a capable man's soul, or consciousness or mind or whatever you want to call it, to the planet Andor, into the head of Doralan Andrah, a fighting man of a medieval society who is dying of a brain tumor.  (Why Gordon's group cares what happens on that alien planet is never divulged.)  If my memory serves me, in Otis Adelbert Kline's 1929 Planet of Peril and Lin Carter's 1972 Under the Green Star, 20th-century Earthmen's minds were transmitted into the bodies of sword-swingers on other worlds.  (I think Michael Moorcock's John Daker stories, like The Eternal Champion, have a somewhat similar, but even less sciency, premise.)

Cleve agrees to take part in this crazy scheme.  Gordon warns him that on Andor magic is real and he should beware witches; Offutt explains this magic with references to "fields" (ensuring that this book is nominally science fiction.)  Reminding me of Poul Anderson's 1954 Brain Wave, Offut tells us that as solar systems and galaxies drift through space, they pass in and out of fields that nullify Aristotelian logic, allowing sorcery to operate.  The Earth was, apparently, in such fields during the lives of Moses and Jesus, allowing their miracles to take place; Andor is currently in such a field, fostering the careers of witches both malign and benevolent.

The first 50 pages of the novel concern court intrigue as Cleve, in Andrah's body and with both his own memories and Andrah's, unites tribes under his leadership and takes back a walled town from a usurper.  As king, Cleve is seduced by an ambitious witch, the slender and beautiful Shansi.  A second witch, Ledni, who has been friends with Andrah since their childhood, tries to save Andrah/Cleve, but is outwitted.  In that New York Times article I recommended to you we learned that Offutt got some kind of erotic charge out of depicting women in pain or torment, and in Part I of Chieftain of Andor get graphic descriptions of how poor Ledni (as well as another attractive young woman) are murdered by Shansi's magic.  (I was surprised by the death of Ledni, whom I had expected would be the love interest, so early in the book, the same way I was surprised by the death of Suldrun so early in Jack Vance's 1983 Suldrun's Garden.) With Ledni out of the way, and armed with a sample of Andrah's sperm (she secreted a sponge in her you-know what!), Shansi is able to cast a spell on sleeping Cleve/Andrah which separates the Cleve and Andrah personalities.  When Cleve wakes up in Part II in Andrah's body, laying on a raft travelling down a river in a cannibal-infested jungle, he is at a total loss!  He doesn't even remember being king in Part I!

"My God!  He did it!  Gordon did it--but he failed!  I'm not on Earth.  But I do not have the memories he said I would have!"

Cleve quickly makes friends with some cold-blooded merpeople by fighting alongside them first against some cannibals and then against some kind of alien octopus.  They take him to their underground city where, having already slept with a witch (though he sadly doesn't remember that caper) he adds a mermaid to his record of conquests--this ectothermic cutie pie can't resist his warm body!

You may recall that when John Carter went to Mars he didn't just participate in wars, marry a princess and make himself top calot of the planet--he also tried to reform Martian culture, teaching the violent Martians to be kind and exposing their bogus religion. Well, when Cleve goes to Andor he doesn't just overthrow usurpers and bed witches and mermaids; he also tries to reform the native culture, by preaching the gospel of tolerance!

"We're both men, Zivaat.  Just...slightly different.  Men need not always be enemies, because they are different."

But don't waste your time nominating Cleve for some diversity award--in a full frontal assault on feminism that cites Stendhal and "all those psychologists I've read," he also expresses the belief that women are creatures driven by emotion who have a natural desire to be a strong man's subordinate, a helpmate whose life is directed by her man. Efforts to emulate and compete with men, or to dominate men, will only lead to female unhappiness!

(I'm assuming all of Cleve's philosophical sallies reflect Offutt's own thinking--"Robert Cleve," like "Gordon," not only reminds the reader of British adventurers in the "Orient," but resembles one of Offutt's oft-used pseudonyms, John Cleve.)

John Carter and Tarzan go native, and Burroughs' fanciful versions of Mars and the African jungle serve as a means of criticizing civilization, and Offutt does a little of this with Andor.  Reminding me of the protagonist of Robert Howard's 1939 Almuric, Cleve is an "atavist" more suited to the primitive and violent world of Andor than to Earth.  Even though the Andorans we meet in the novel are always enslaving people and conspiring to stab people, including Cleve himself, in the back, Cleve persists in his arguments that they are better than Earthmen.  For example, Andorans care more about honor and fairness and less about money than do people on Earth.  Cleve is even willing to excuse Andoran cannibalism!  Not only does he consider many of the predatory elites of Earth no better than cannibals (the Communist Party governments of Russia and China are mentioned specifically), but asserts that our disgust at eating human flesh is just an irrational taboo, man!:  "...what could be more childish than to express disgust at the customs of other people?"  The Christian religion also comes in for some rough criticism from our man Cleve, making me think of Offutt as a kind of 20th century Kentucky-based Marquis de Sade.  

The merpeople live in the base of a mountain; in pitch black tunnels above them live people who have evolved in such a way that they are blind and "see" via echolocation. When Cleve realizes that the merpeople are plotting to maim or murder him he sneaks away with one of these eyeless people, whom the merpeeps have been keeping as a slave.  After he has sex with one of the eyeless women Cleve climbs further up the mountain and outside to its snowy top, where he fights hulking brutes whom he suspects are relatives of the Earthly sasquatch and yeti.  Fortunately he has what amounts to a ray gun, given him by the blind people, to defeat these monsters.  (While Tarzan, John Carter and Conan routinely defeat, by hand, dozens of human assailants as well as lions in a way that challenges our credulity, Cleve wins his fights via trickery, teamwork and superior technology.)  

In Part III of Chieftain of Andor Cleve finds, at the base of the mountain (on the other side from the cannibal jungle and river) the bustling port city of Sharne, whose economy relies largely on the slave trade.  Suave Cleve makes friends there, including with another sexy witch, Lahri, who is eager to share her bed with him.  Lahri, a good witch, can read his mind and detect that there are two personalities in there, and she helps him reintegrate his Andrah memories.  The novel ends as Andrah and friends flee the city on a ship, foiling the pursuit of the soldiers and sailors of yet another witch, Queen Kelas, tyrant of Sharne.    

The novel seems to end in the middle of the story, and lacks a conventional climax, as if Offutt was running into a page limit and/or expected to pen a sequel.  Presumably Cleve/Andrah is headed back to where his adventures started, to liberate Andrah's people from Shansi's rule and avenge the murder of poor Ledni; there is also a prophecy that he will return to the port of Sharne to overthrow Kelas.  It doesn't appear that these adventures were ever committed to print, however.  (Maybe in a sequel we also would have learned why Gordon wanted to save Andrah and why Shansi spared Andrah instead of summarily executing him like she did half a dozen other people.)

I enjoyed Chieftain of Andor, it moves briskly, and all the strange and silly philosophical and scientific asides about feminism, cultural relativism, how merpeople and eyeless people might evolve, how magic could work and how stone age people might construct a ray gun out of radioactive rocks, are fun.  It probably qualifies as rushed hack work, but it doesn't slavishly ape Burroughs or Howard, and doesn't rely on repetitive fight scenes or graphic sex--there are in fact far fewer pages devoted to sex and violence than I had expected.  I don't know that I can recommend this strange piece of work to the average reader, but committed devotees of sword and planet/planetary romance stories may find it an interesting, entertaining curiosity.

**********

My copy of Chieftain of Andor, Dell 4551, has five pages of ads in the back, describing books about a real-life British commando raid, a fictional haunted U. S. Navy submarine, and a celebrity scientist's speculations about extraterrestrial life, as well as a science fiction novel written by Philip José Farmer but credited to fictional author Kilgore Trout, who was based on Theodore Sturgeon--these books all sound pretty good!  (Behold the power of advertising!)  There's also a list of SF titles from Dell that look like they are worth checking out, featuring Robert Silverberg, Jack Vance, and more names readers of this blog will recognize.

Quit your job, ignore your spouse and read all of these!   

The Diamond Contessa by Kenneth Bulmer

He had answered three previous ads asking for adventurous young men, to find they were needed to sell brushes and cosmetics door to door.  That might be adventurous, right enough--and damned difficult--but the kind of adventure he meant involved shooting machine guns at tendriled monsters.

It is true that I have had a mixed experience with Ken Bulmer's work.  I thought Behold the Stars presented an interesting conception of space travel and decent action scenes, but I thought Cycle of Nemesis was lame.  But when I saw Ken Kelly's cover for DAW 542, The Diamond Contessa, I knew it was time to give Bulmer another chance.  While I wish Kelly had done a better job of finishing up the chained man's face, I love the composition of this picture; it is the perfect mix of sex, monsters and alien cities to thrill the component of my brain which is still 13 years old.  Besides, I am told that, like David Hasselhoff, Bulmer is a big deal in Germany.

The Diamond Contessa was printed in 1983; for the record, my copy's pages were printed in Canada for the New American Library.  It has not been printed since, which is why this post is going to be "picture-lite," though you can get an electronic text from the people at The SF Gateway.  The Diamond Contessa is the final book in an eight book series (the first seven books appeared from 1961 to 1972 as components of Ace Doubles), something I didn't realize until some time after I had purchased it.  This week I decided to read it anyway, which may have been a mistake.

The novel starts out like a somewhat childish wish fulfillment fantasy.  Harry Blakey is the son of neglectful drunken parents, but he learns he has been born with special powers: he can see and travel through the portals (Harry calls them "casements") between the dimensions that litter the landscape but which most of us never notice. One such portal lies in his parents' cellar, and leads to a sort of refuge or safe room in a world dominated by war robots.  Here Harry meets a surrogate father, Uncle Jim, who teaches Harry about the casements and his "trajector" powers, and even implants in Harry's skull a tiny device that will allow him to understand the various languages spoken in the many different "parallels."  Because the other dimensions are full of killer robots and monsters, Jim puts an "interdict" on little Harry that will dampen his abilities until he is an adult.  As the novel proper begins, Harry is returning to his childhood home, a British Army combat veteran.  His parents have died, and Harry immediately goes to the cellar, finds his powers coming back, and begins traveling from one dimension to another, having thrilling adventures.

If you read adventure novels you won't be surprised to learn that Harry gets captured on page 18 (by a fat woman with some kind of stun pistol) and escapes on page 20, only to get captured again on page 32 (by slavers who employ tentacled monsters) but escape on page 37.

Besides getting captured and escaping, Harry's adventures involve making friends and picking up girls with ease (everyone is just wild about Harry) and battling various monsters.  Bulmer seems to love devising wacky monsters.  In the middle of a battle Harry learns that there is a sort of army devoted to rescuing people from the all-too-common scourge of cross dimensional slavery, an army apparently based on Earth (the soldiers speaka da English and drive Panhard armored cars.)  One of his girlfriends gives him a map to frequently-used casements, and he makes his way back to Earth to join this army (he answers their ad in a New York newspaper.)

Eighty pages into the 175-page book we get our first inkling of a reference to the Diamond Contessa when Harry and some of his comrades in arms are captured and taken to be slaves in the town she rules, the City of Diamonds, where the streets teem with luxuriously dressed fops and ladies of fashion known as Valcini, hideous monster guards of various types, and pathetic slaves.  One of the themes of the novel is a contempt for the bourgeoisie and aristocracy, a sympathy for slaves and workers, and an admiration for barbarians and fighting men.  "The male Valcini wore disgusting two-tone shoes, sharp-pointed, decorated, cream and brown, black and white--ghastly."  I read this sentence once, then read it again, and then realized why it had struck a chord with your humble blogger: "Hey!  I wear two-toned shoes!"

Bulmer actually spends a lot of time describing people's attire, and people clad in fancy clothes and jewels are generally villains.  Bulmer also seems to have it in for fat people.  

If the child-with-abusive-parents-has-magic-powers elements reminded me of a child's wish fulfillment fantasy, the scenes of robbing a factory and mugging a Valcini seem to appeal to class envy.  I toyed with the idea of considering The Diamond Contessa an anti-authority/pro-individualism text, but Harry is actually quite eager to be a part of a collective and sacrifice himself for the group, as long as the group has a leader who displays martial prowess.  Probably we should think of the novel as a series of examples of just and unjust authority, and a condemnation of those who accept unjust authority.  Another theme is Harry's growing maturity; at first he thinks of trajecting from one dimension to another as a kind of holiday, but as he grows into his powers he begins to realize how much he has yet to learn, to take responsibility for others, and consider the moral implications of his actions.

After an escape attempt Harry is recaptured, and his powers are put to use serving the Contessa's business interests.  He then is made the personal servant of a female big game hunter, haughty and beautiful.  During a safari she takes Harry aside into the bush to satisfy her carnal lusts, giving him a chance to escape and hook up with the liberation army again.  (Don't worry, he satisfies her before sneaking off.)

In the final quarter of the novel the army attacks the City of Diamonds and, would you believe it, Harry gets captured again.  But don't worry, he escapes a few pages later. A friend makes him a map to the parallel where resides that girlfriend who gave him that first map.  Harry gets to her, borrows a suit of powered battle armor, and gets back to the City of Diamonds in time to turn the tide of the battle--the armor gives him enough firepower to wipe out entire squadrons of tanks and entire battalions of infantry, singlehanded.  When he finally catches up to the Diamond Contessa, instead of killing her, like everybody else in town wants to, he sends her into exile in a lonely icy parallel.

The Diamond Contessa is a crazy book that feels like it was written in a rush, with little or no revision or polishing.  The plot is a little sloppy.  There are lots and lots of characters, but most of them only get a few pages of attention before Harry flits off to some other parallel and leaves them behind.  The most interesting characters in the book are the Diamond Contessa herself and her chief assistant, who knew Uncle Jim, and betrays the Contessa and saves Harry's life during that final battle, but they are only "on screen" for about 20 pages.  Similarly, Harry visits scores of alien worlds, but we learn very little about most of them; many of them are treated like subway stations, with Harry just passing through them for a few moments en route to someplace else.  I wondered if Bulmer expected to write a sequel in which the Contessa and her various relationships were fleshed out, and a little research online after finishing the book suggests that the earlier seven books in the series include, in greater depth, characters and parallels mentioned only briefly here.  Maybe I would have appreciated the book more if I had read those earlier volumes.

Bulmer's writing feels clumsy.  There are odd metaphors, like these two from page 21, when Harry is clinging to a log, being carried downstream by a raging river:

He just had time to think that this was a damned fine parallel he'd jumped into before the first of the rocks went by like crazed whales pursued by sharks.

The runnels of spuming foam like veins of fat in meat sluiced the log between the rocks.

These metaphors do more to distract the reader than clarify a situation, paint an arresting image or inspire some kind of feeling.

Bulmer also uses words I've never encountered before.  Harry befriends some mercenary soldiers who "pubick" their slain foes; Bulmer compares this to the scalping done by Native Americans here on Earth.  At first I thought these creepos were castrating their enemies, but it becomes clear that what they are cutting off and sticking onto the spikes of their helmets is just the pubic hair and attached skin. (These mercenaries have a marching song in which they sing about "pubicking" people, and Bulmer favors us with four verses.)  The leader of these pubic hair collectors has a "shushy gravelly voice."  I thought maybe "shushy" meant raspy or breathy, like when you shush a person in a theatre or library, but a little googling suggests "shushy" is British slang denoting a campy, extravagant style.  I guess it makes sense to adopt a campy style when you are walking around with other people's pubic hair stuck on your helmet.

"Fleering" shows up as an adjective to describe flags or hair blowing in the wind.  Bulmer also employs "snout" as a verb:

If you trajected yourself into a highly civilized city and appeared brandishing a sword or snouting a rifle, you'd be run in and locked up muy pronto.

...in the fighting tops of this phantasmagoric barge the muzzles of machine guns and machine cannon snouted.

I guess Bulmer has his own idiosyncratic lexicon.

The Diamond Contessa is a difficult borderline case; can I say I liked it?  Can I recommend it?  Obviously a million things are wrong with it, but I was more bemused and bewildered by its deficiencies and eccentricities than irritated.  Though the book was often disappointing, presenting characters and settings and then swiftly abandoning them, I was never bored.  I guess I'll have to say it is a curiosity that fans of planetary romance/sword and planet stories may find interesting, if not truly engaging.  

Classic SF Mysteries: Harry Harrison's 1971 introduction to Thomas Disch's One Hundred and Two H-Bombs

In his intro to the 1971 Berkley edition (S2044) of Thomas Disch's collection One Hundred and Two H-Bombs, Harry Harrison makes a number of provocative claims.  For one thing he says that the New Wave writers "brought a breath of fresh air into the dusty SF establishment at that time [the early 1960s] that still has the fossil saurians shivering."  Who are these dusty dinosaurs? Arthur C. Clarke?  Robert Heinlein?  Poul Anderson?  Isaac Asimov?  I wish Harrison would name names instead of just making these vague allegations.  I suppose Harrison had his career to worry about, but now I am going to be wondering who exactly Harrison is contemptuously condemning here in the same way I am still wondering who Jack Vance denounced to that New York Times reporter and who Harlan Ellison was sneering at in the intro to The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World.

In praising Disch and the New Wave writers Harrison also asserts that they enjoy writing, that readers can sense the pleasure experienced by New Wave writers as they compose their work.  This sounds like boilerplate ad copy that the reader is free to accept or reject as he sees fit, but Harrison goes a step further, claiming that lots of SF stories are hack work produced by people who don't even like what they are doing:

There is also more than a touch of authorial pleasure in their [the New Wave writers'] writing, an ingredient that is missing from all too much of science fiction.  If a writer is not writing for his own pleasure or interest the fact is immediately obvious to all except the most cynical of editors and dimmest of readers.  The vacant interstellar spaces of SF contain far too much of this; less than an atom of interest per cubic meter.    

Who is Harrison talking about here?  What SF writers (and he seems to think there are many of them) were active in the '60s and early '70s who could be credibly accused of not enjoying their work?  Is Harrison talking about big name writers whose politics he didn't like, like (I'm guessing) Heinlein, Anderson, and E. E. Smith, who glorified businesspeople and fighting men?  Or prolific writers of straightforward adventure stories like Edmond Hamilton, E. C. Tubb, Ken Bulmer and Lin Carter?  I've read all those writers, and even when I didn't like something they did, I felt they were doing it with enthusiasm.  (Maybe I am one of the "dimmest of readers.")  If Harrison is talking about minor figures, people almost forgotten today, like John Glasby and Lionel Fanthorpe, then I think he may have been overstating his case.

Readers are invited to nominate candidates for Harrison's rogues gallery of dusty dinosaurs and uninterested hacks in the comments, based on knowledge of Harrison's other criticism or pure conjecture, in the comments.

Cycle of Nemesis by Kenneth Bulmer

In early 2013 I read Kenneth Bulmer's 1965 novel Behold the Stars.  At a used bookstore in Lexington, South Carolina I paid one dollar for the 1966 Mayflower Dell paperback, which across the pond, in the mother country of jolly ole England, back in the Swinging '60s, went for three shillings and six pence, guvnah.  Notwithstanding the cover illustration, just about the worst and least ambitious I have ever seen on a paperback, I liked Behold the Stars, it having an interesting take on space travel and space warfare. 

Curious to read more of Bulmer's work, I recently purchased the Ace paperback of 1967's Cycle of Nemesis, which has an exciting Kelly Freas cover.  This week I read the 190 page novel.

Our story begins a few centuries in the future.  The solar system and the ocean floor have been colonized.  The human race is at peace under a world government, but a terrible threat looms, and almost nobody knows about it!

Hall Brennan is a sort of upper-middle class archaeologist adventurer type.  He has discovered that, 7000 years ago, a high civilization flourished in what is today Iraq.  A horrible monster, Khamushkei the Undying, utterly destroyed this civilization, but the last survivors of this doomed society were able to imprison the unkillable monster in a "Time Vault" that would contain it for 7000 years.

Realizing that Khamushkei is about to escape and destroy human civilization a second time, Brennan makes it his life's work to find the Time Vault and deal with the creature.  Brennan is joined in his quest by some other upper-middle class types he meets at an auction at an old aristocratic house in the English countryside.  Khamushkei is aware of their doings, and sends monsters from Mesopotamian myth (lamassu and utukku) to kill them.  When the adventurers easily defeat the monsters with their ray guns (future England has abandoned all that gun control jazz, apparently) Khamushkei uses his powers to snatch the party and transport them through space and time.  Khamushkei whisks them to a series of different eras and locations, one after another, where the British travellers face monsters, aliens, ancient Assyrians, earthquakes, tornadoes, and crocodiles.  (Khamushkei never thinks to transport them a mile up in the air so they fall to their deaths, or a mile under the Pacific so they drown, I guess.)  Finally, one of Brennan's comrades gets to the Time Vault where he reads a spell and Khamushkei is imprisoned for another 7000 years.

This book is quite poor.  The plot is a little weak; it feels like Bulmer carefully planned out the beginning and end, and they do mesh together (our heroes see visions of themselves at the auction in the first chapter, and when they return to the auction at the end of the book they realize what these visions signify) but then just stuffed the long middle of the book with a jumble of disjointed and tedious episodes in order to reach a particular page count.  The characters are boring and I didn't care which of them lived or died.  Most crippling is the style; there are feeble jokes and many of the sentences are long and burdened with extraneous details and clumsy metaphors.  Here are two sentences from early in the proceedings that had me grimacing:

"The shaky old lady against whom I had been bidding turned laboriously in her chair to see her competitor, her silks and nylons and strings of beads hampering her movements, her yellow old face like that of a bird inquiring of the bird table in the garden, and before she could make up her mind whether to go on or not the hammer fell in sonorous sealment."  (30)

"The butter rich slabs of sunshine that lay across the carpet in Pomfret's lounge and dazzled from his windows, the fresh air, the sound of birds, the scents of early flowers drifting in across those sunbeams, all these homely natural comforting things chilled as Brennan began to speak."  (34)

I think I'm a generous reader, willing to forgive weaknesses in a story or novel if it has compensating good points, but with Cycle of Nemesis I couldn't find a single thing to hold on to, so reading it was a boring chore.  I have no choice but to give Cycle of Nemesis a thumbs down; it is unlikely I will be reading any more Kenneth Bulmer novels soon.   

The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction edited by Brian Ash

Tarbandu at the PorPorBooks blog recently has featured the cover of Brian Ash's Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction on his site, and blogged about the similar Encyclopedia of Science Fiction edited by Robert Holdstock. Drake University has a copy of the Ash volume (sadly, the spine is quite broken and the pages threaten to achieve their liberty at any moment) and I spent some time looking through it.

After like 60 pages of timeline (called "Program"), listing major events in SF in from 1805 to 1976, the book is organized by themes (or as the book calls them, "Thematics") such as "Robots and Androids," "Mutants and Symbiotes," and "Warfare and Weaponry." This is the heart of the book, in which numerous stories and books are described. Then we get essays on topics like "Science Fiction as Literature," and "The Value of Science Fiction" in the "Deep Probes" section, and finally discussion of "Fandom and Media." Many of the sections of the book are written or introduced by recognizable SF authors and editors, including such important figures as Asimov, Anderson, and Pohl. This being a British book, British authors are well represented, including not only big names like Brian Aldiss and J. G. Ballard, but some I feel like I don't hear much about, such as Ken Bulmer and Edmund Cooper.

All 19 of the "Thematics" are introduced by "name" SF writers.  A. E. Van Vogt's contribution is characteristically bizarre; my man Van barely addresses the issue he was asked to talk about, espouses some of his weird theories, and actually calls out the people who produced the book he is writing for, saying "I observe that my current work is not appreciated by British critics of the genre; but it sells well...." Zing! Philip Jose Farmer writes about his religious beliefs, asserting that if we are not immortal, life has no meaning. Ouch! Ken Bulmer's contribution is all over the place; he decries technology as evil, complains that in SF "artefact" is usually spelled "artifact," and takes time out from his pessimism party to praise SF artists for their "honourable labour." The photo of Bulmer reminded me that I need to shave and get a haircut.

(I'll list all the Thematics and their introducers below the fold, as newspaper people say.  All you fashionistas will find Ken Bulmer's photo down there, too.  Get your clippers ready. )

I don't really like the design of The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.  The font is tiny and ugly and the pages feel crowded and cramped (every single page has a horizontal heading at the top of the page and most have a vertical heading on the outside margin.) There are many illustrations, mostly book covers and magazine illustrations, which of course is great, but I thought many of them mediocre.  I also don't understand why some particularly weak illustrations, like a panel from a Barbarella comic, are allowed to take up an entire page.  On the plus side, any illustration you haven't seen before has some kind of information value, and this book is full of illos I have never before encountered. There are many photos of author's faces, and, adding to the cramped feel of the book, many of them are cropped very close, the writer's chin and forehead beyond the borders of the image.

As with the illustrations, the text, even when I don't think the style is good, is full of interesting information about books, stories, and authors I have never heard of.  And the 19 Thematics intros provide some kind of insight into the character of writers with whom we may be familiar primarily through their fiction.  The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is definitely worth a look for classic SF fans, even if I don't grok some of its artistic and design decisions and I think some of the Thematics intros are wacky.