The Land Across by Gene Wolfe

"Papa Iason isn't a good man.  I told Naala that already, and it's true.  He's a bad one trying to be good, like a lot of us."

I feel like I have been away from this blog for a long time.  This absence is due to several factors, some good (spending more time with the wife; additional work coming in; going through the closet and the basement preparing my old wargames to sell on ebay; seeing a nephew who is on leave from the USMC) and some not so good (mopping out the flooded basement of the house we rent.)  Another big reason I have not been blogging about the fiction I have read is that for over a week I have been reading Gene Wolfe's 2013 novel The Land Across.  I read it once, and then, in hopes of comprehending it better, I read it a second time.

The Land Across is the story of Grafton, an American travel writer who goes to some unnamed post-communist country in south east Europe, where he gets mixed up with the secret police (the JAKA) and their struggle against a coven of devil-worshiping magicians (the Unholy Way.)  To keep things complicated, also involved in Grafton's saga are a subversive religious group that is neither satanic nor magical (the Legion of Light), some magicians who are rivals of the Unholy Way, and the church.

The Land Across is about the struggle between good and evil, but it is as much (or more) about the struggle between good and evil within ourselves as it is about a fight between a bunch of establishment good guys and a bunch of renegade villains.  Almost all the characters are morally ambiguous, and it is not clear how far we are supposed to sympathize with Grafton, who is our narrator, or most of the other characters.  Grafton, and his closest associate in the JAKA, a female operative named Naala, do some things which are pretty terrible, and are not really in pursuance of their witch-fighting duties.  Wolfe subverts our expectations, trying to surprise us by having characters who at first seem to be villains turn out to be "good guys," and vice versa, and by showing the utility of institutions we are presupposed to have a bad opinion of (like a dictatorship and its secret police) and suggesting that institutions we tend to revere, like Western democracy, can fall into decadence and fail.  Several times characters voice the belief that human beings are made up of both good and evil, and most of the characters demonstrate this assessment, acting foully at some points in the book and nobly at other points.   

Structurally, the book is a kind of police detective-centered mystery.  People break into places looking for clues, search the city for fugitives, get imprisoned and escape, interrogate prisoners, and sit around in cafes, explaining to each other how they pieced together one facet of the mystery and then planning their next step in cracking the case.  There are fistfights with thugs and a climactic gun battle that reminded me of the memorable climax of Mickey Spillane's One Lonely Night.  The Land Across also reminded me of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, which I found quite difficult to follow.  The second time I read The Land Across I kept notes to make it easier to remember who is who, how they are related, and why they are doing what they are doing, and I realized that if you can focus and have a good memory (skills I don't really have), Wolfe gives you all the clues you need to follow what is going on.  Maybe that is true of The Big Sleep (which I read only once) as well.

Wolfe includes lots of horror and ghost story elements, including a haunted house wherein lies hidden treasure, a mummified hand that sneaks around and tries to strangle people, a lonely castle sitting on an island in the middle of a lake, voodoo dolls, and references to werewolves and Dracula.

Related to the horror elements, and central to the book, are its Christian elements.  Three characters are clerics, and of course there is the Unholy Way, who in the action climax try to sacrifice one of Grafton's love interests to the Devil.  Several times over the course of the book, particularly when Grafton is in a difficult situation, a character appears who reminds Grafton strongly of his father.  Grafton first sees this man in chapter one, and believes he is a member of a trio of border guards; this man takes custody of Grafton's passport.  This figure never speaks, and other characters don't seem to see him, but he offers Grafton moral support and, via gestures, provides our narrator with guidance that helps defeat the Unholy Way.  At the end of the book this man (or one who looks exactly like him) turns out to be the charismatic dictator of the country.  The dictator gives Grafton back his passport, calling it "a little gift."  All the clues (he is one of a trinity, he is like a father, and he provides salvation at the end of the adventure) indicate this character is a symbolic representation of God.

Similarly, there is a man in black who sometimes appears to Grafton.  This figure also never speaks, is not noticed by other characters, and guides Grafton via gestures, but he scares Grafton rather than buoying him.  The man in black also appears after one of the wizards who is not a member of the Unholy Way casts a spell.  Presumably, the man in black is the Devil.

There are several motifs that pop up in the novel repeatedly.  Hands are an important image in the book; not only is there the animated dead hand (which is much more than a monster; it is actually a character with a personality and motives), but people often shake hands and hold hands in significant ways.  Another motif is the decline of the United States; Wolfe really seems pessimistic about the current condition of the USA. One character laments the end of the gold standard, Naala tells Grafton, "We do not seek the destruction of Amerika, which you yourselves have too much destroyed already....", and Grafton at one point wonders if the country he is in, which is ruled by a dictator and his ruthless secret police, and where only members of the government have access to telephones, automobiles or computers, is really any crazier than the US.

Of course, Wolfe is writing in the voice of Grafton, who at times seems like a shallow sort (he is always talking about clubs and clubbing, for example) and Wolfe is famous for employing unreliable and not quite sympathetic narrators.  (Hopefully women will keep this in mind when Grafton spends half a page complaining that women talk too much and are always telling you extraneous and distracting details instead of getting to the point.)

Wolfe writes The Land Across in a spare and economical style; dialogue makes up the lion's share of the text, and there aren't many fancy descriptions or clever turns of phrase.  (We do get at least one groan-inducing pun: the chapter in which some guy gets decapitated is titled "Getting Ahead.")  I liked the book, but I have to admit I didn't think the characters were particularly interesting, there were few exciting images, and I wasn't affected emotionally.  As an intellectual puzzle The Land Across excels, but I didn't really care whether this person got killed, or whether that person got back to America, or who fell in love with who, etc.  This is a marked contrast to Wolfe's monumental masterpieces, like the four volume Book of the New Sun or the three volume Book of the Short Sun, which are chock full of awe-inspiring visions, fascinating people, and heartbreaking tragedies, as well as puzzles that had me breaking my brain.

It falls short of the lofty heights Wolfe has achieved with his finest work, but by any normal standard The Land Across is a major success, with an intricate and surprising plot and a generous sprinkling of thought-provoking passages.  Worth your time, even if you are a dolt like me and have to read it twice.          

Three 1978 stories by A. E. Van Vogt

Via Twitter, Joachim Boaz reminds us that A. E. Van Vogt's birthday is this month.  To celebrate, I read three stories by my man Van which I had never read, from the collection Pendulum, DAW 316.  These stories all appeared for the first time in Pendulum.

Pendulum, published in 1978, provides insight into the powerful influence the first Star Wars film had on the people at DAW.  Besides the dreamlike (that's a nice way of saying "insane," right?) cover by Jordi Penavla, in which helmeted topless men use laser swords in their fight against cave men, we have the advertising pages in the back of the book, one of which is pitched directly at Star Wars fans.  The good people at DAW recommend to "Star Warriors" four of their series: Gordon Dickson's Dorsai novels; A. Bertram Chandler's space navy stories starring John Grimes; the Dumarest novels by E. C. Tubb; and Brian Stableford's Daedalus novels.  I can't assess how good these recommendations are because I'm not familiar with any of the listed books.  I have read four or five John Grimes books, and liked them OK, but none of those listed.  I've read one (non-Dorsai) book by Dickson and two books by Stableford in his Hooded Swan series, and didn't think them bad, but found them uninspiring and forgettable.  I've never read any Tubb, but Michael Moorcock considers Tubb's Dumarest of Terra books excellent, or so he says in a year 2000 article about Leigh Brackett entitled "Queen of the Martian Mysteries."      


"Pendulum"

The title story of the collection depicts a near future Earth facing a food shortage.  Our main character Hudman is a Dutch sailor working on a civilian ship employed by the U. S. Navy, lowering machinery to the ocean floor which will warm up the cold water there and make these areas of the ocean more hospitable for life and thus more productive as fishing waters.  In a bizarre turn of events (are there any other in these van Vogt stories?) these activities awaken a civilization of thirty billion people who have been in cryogenic sleep on the ocean floor for millenia.  Hudman is chosen to be the emissary between the surface people and this revived race, which it turns out has the technology to easily take over the planet.

The people from under the sea declare that their benevolent rule will improve everybody's life.  One of the first things on their agenda is to eliminate all the disparate and confusing human languages and replace them with a single logical language, which will be easy enough with their "mind-to-mind" teaching methods.  Hudman is then deluged with exhortations, threats, and bribes from people who try every possible means to preserve their own dialects from extinction.  "Pendulum" is a story about ethnic pride and what van Vogt calls "race consciousness," and the lengths individuals will go to to honor and preserve the culture and memory of their peoples.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the violence people are willing to employ to protect their own dialects and honor their ancestors is a sign that van Vogt was skeptical of ethnic pride and sympathetic to the "melting pot" view of American race/ethnic relations which, nowadays, has been abandoned.  In the end of the story, in order to protect him, the submarine people transport Hudman to a city in a distant time period - Hudman eagerly embraces the culture of his new home, "determined to fit in with no thought at all about his past."  

"The Male Condition"

From racial and cultural diversity issues to gender and sexual issues!

I think of van Vogt as a guy who often writes stuff that is kind of crazy.  "The Male Condition" definitely fits in the crazy category.  It also seems to be in part or whole a kind of joke, one which some may find in poor taste.  I cannot deny that the audacity of the story, its twisted surprises, the lengths van Vogt was willing to go, made me laugh.

We open in a government office where two academics, psychologists, are talking.  We are immediately alerted to the fact that this is a strange world when we learn that 30 is considered an old age and that the male psychologist, Jolo, is smoking a "kolo," a product introduced by aliens.

Crazier still, Jolo tells the junior psychologist, a woman 23.25 years old named Lasia, that there have been no cases of rape in 38 years.  Sounds good, right?  But this phenomenon presents the researcher with a problem: Jolo is directing work on an encyclopedia of human nature, and how can the book be complete without a rapist to study in the flesh?

The rapist shortage, apparently, is the result of an additive in drinking water that makes people unable to feel anger.  Jolo proposes injecting himself with something that will make him a rapist(?) and having Lasia act as observer, which is to say, rape victim(!).  Lasia needs the money, so she signs onto the project!

This 13 page story is stuffed with wacky elements: aliens only women can see, psychologists whose whole therapy technique consists of having sex with their patients, a computer database put together by a feminist government agency which lists men with whom women are forbidden to have sex (if this story had been written after 2001 presumably this would be called the "no-fuck list.")  Lasia turns to a male psychologist for help, but he takes advantage of her, so she then fools Jolo's wife into taking her place as rape victim.  The intervention of aliens into this demented slapstick leads to murder, necrophilia, and a jury trial at which the aliens save the surviving characters from going to prison.

Crazy man, crazy.

"Living with Jane"

This story, with its convoluted plot and characteristically van Vogtian sentences, was a little hard to follow.

The year is 2288.  Androids are on the market which are almost impossible to distinguish from real humans.  Parents of young children who get divorced routinely buy an android replica of their former spouses, so that their children will not suffer the psychological problems that result from living in a single parent home.  In a way that van Vogt explains but which I didn't understand, living with androids has given our heroine, teenaged Jane, what amount to psychic powers.

A new type of android has been built, a model even more human-like.  Unfortunately, these super-androids have decided to take over the world.  Jane's father, a scientist, is the natural leader of the resistance to the android takeover, and a natural target of the androids, who contrive to enter Jane's home and hold her and her mother hostage.  The androids threaten to kill his family if Jane's dad doesn't cease working against their takeover.

Fortunately, Jane's high intelligence and mental powers mean she is up to the task of neutralizing her captors.  Jane saves the day, not through any kind of violence, but through charm, persuasion, and logic.  Having lived her entire life with androids, Jane likes them and understands them, and is able to manipulate and even befriend them.  The story has a happy ending; Jane will be able to assure peace and freedom for everybody, human and android, and now she has an android duplicate of herself who will be the twin sister she has always wanted.        

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It is hard to recommend such strange stories to other people, but I enjoyed them. 

Pendulum contains three more pieces of fiction which I have not read before, so I will be grappling with Van Vogt's weird plots and clunky verbiage in the near future.

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.