The Sentinel Stars by Louis Charbonneau

He had sought to find some value in life other than the mechanics of push-button work, other than, as it had turned out, the purposeless pursuit of pleasure in freedom....In the end the only thing of value he had found was the personal concern one human being might have for another--a concern beyond physical need, beyond pleasure, beyond self.

Way back in 2014 I read Louis Charbonneau's 1967 novel Down to Earth and then blogged about the hundreds of things wrong with it.  Somehow, that experience didn't stop me from purchasing Louis C's 1963 The Sentiniel Stars when I came across it in Lexington, Kentucky last year.  Who could resist those wide-shouldered outfits, and the promise of a depiction of a rebel in a "hugely probable future" of "sodden slaves?"

Thomas Robert Hendley (the ID tag on his coveralls says "TRH-247") lives in City No. 9, an underground complex of tiny apartments, offices, stores and sliding walkways, one of a network of subterranean cities in our post-atomic war future, cities where bureaucrats and computers plan and schedule every moment of your life!  The video screens are full of talk of the "Merger" that has just taken place--henceforth, the long-hostile blocs of West and East will be united as one.

The Merger strikes an odd chord with Hendley--it is as if the last vestige of individual identity in a world without religion or the family unit or political parties or private property has been erased, all diversity and variety extinguished.  He feels compelled to rebel in a small way, to express his individuality, and his means of doing so is to skip work today!  Out on the slidewalk, just wandering around among the crowds, Hendley spots a pretty blonde.  He approaches her, wins her over, and he and ABC-331--she tells him her name is Ann--sneak out into the sunlight--Hendley's government assigned job is as an architect, and he knows the location of an exit into the outside world in the service area of a building he helped design.  Out under the rarely-seen sky they have illegal sex; every adult in City No. 9 is assigned a sex partner and you are only permitted to have sex once a week in an authorized Public Intercourse Booth!

The economic system undergirding this rigid society is based on "tax debt."  Everybody starts with a debt to the government, and works to pay off the debt.  Some services are free (the slidewalks, for example) but food and other things you pay for with your ID disc.  When you have paid off your debt you leave City No. 9 and move into a "Freeman Camp" on the surface.  Not having reported for work or provided a medical excuse, Hendley's disc stops working at the stores, so he must choose between turning himself in or starving.  When he turns himself in, the headshrinker ("Morale Investigator"), reminding me of Beatrice and Virgil in the Divine Comedy of Dante, authorizes Hendley to visit a Freeman Camp for 24 hours, thinking this will ease his worries and resolve his doubts about the system!

As it turns out, the Freeman Camp (which is more like an amusement park with attached hotels or a tourism-oriented city of casinos and restaurants and resorts than an actual "camp") is not all it's cracked up to be!  Sure, there are blue skies, live trees, live birds--beautiful things Hendley doesn't see underground.  And sure there are no government rules and regulations.  But living in a state of anarchy in which they have no responsibilities (the government robots provide free food and health care and so forth), the free people have turned to decadence and perversion in an effort to give their lives excitement and meaning--blood sports, drugs, alcoholism, gambling, violent crime and exploitative sex are the order of the day!  One of the freemen hates the meaningless and gruesome life of the camp so much he hatches a scheme to get out of there and into City No. 9--by stealing Hendley's identity!  This joker drugs Hendley and switches IDs with him, so that Hendley becomes a permanent resident of the Freemen Camp! 

In the Freemen Camp, Hendley finds not only rapists, murderers, dope fiends and muggers, but beautiful Ann; her government-assigned job is as a stripper and prostitute, and she must pliy her trade in the camp every two weeks or so.  Hendley and Ann declare their love for each other, but they have almost no opportunities to see each other, and, as the weeks go by, the culture of the Freeman Camp begins to corrupt Hendley, and he tries his hand at gambling and even mugging!  (Louis C seems to have a pretty dim view of human nature!  The  Freedom Camp section of the novel may be a pushback against the libertarian SF which is so skeptical or hostile to government--Louis C may be telling us that some government is necessary because we are all a bunch of selfish jerks who will run wild given the chance.)  Stepping back from the brink of total degradation, Hendley focuses on trying to escape, and eventually succeeds, though he is quickly captured by the authorities at City No. 9.

Using truth drugs, the law enforcement apparatus picks his brain, and he finds himself on trial alongside Ann.  Convicted of rebellion and sedition, the two are exiled to the desert beyond the city!  Fortunately, they meet a tribe of descendants of earlier exiles, and as the story ends we have every reason to believe that they will live happily with this tribe, and their children or grandchildren will overthrow the city government and liberate humankind.
    
After suffering through Down to Earth, I was expecting to have to denounce The Sentinel Stars as a piece of garbage, but in fact it is not bad.  It's obviously not original--there are plenty of SF stories about oppressive socialistic futures and plenty of SF stories about decadent utopias which don't meet man's need for challenge and meaning--but it is an entertaining little thriller.  The style is smooth, the pace fast, and the action scenes (e.g., the "hunt" sequence in which Hendley is the prey) and suspense scenes (like when Hendley gambles for his life against a robot) are good.  The SF (genetics and computers and robots and all that) and philosophical (what is true freedom?) elements give the reader a little additional meat to chew on and all the sex adds a little extra spice.

(My crazy literary theory for today, which I have already hinted at, is that Louis C loosely based this novel on Dante.  As all the medieval literature scholars who follow my blog already know, Dante begins "a new life" when he sees the beautiful Beatrice dressed in red.  Well, when Hendley first sees Ann, she is dressed in red!  Obviously, like Dante in the Comedy, Hendley has a chance to explore the next stage of existence after suffering doubts about the prevailing ideology, and like Dante his final exploration is of a place of love and happiness.  In the Freedom Camp a guy acts as Hendley's guide, sort of like how Virgil acts as Dante's guide in Hell.  Also, the title of The Sentinel Stars makes no sense, unless it is a reference to how Dante ended each of the three parts of the Comedy with the word "stars."  I know this theory is a stretch, but I like it!)

Much to my surprise I am giving The Sentinel Stars a mild recommendation to people who like quick-paced SF stories about guys rebelling against the system.  (And people who are experts on Dante who want to play literary detective!)  Our Italian friends produced a translation in 1965, and in the 21st century the novel has appeared as an e-book twice, and been most recently printed as a double from Armchair Fiction, bound with Alfred Coppel's Warrior-Maid of Mars, so it is still widely available! 

Down to Earth by Louis Charbonneau

"I'm his father," Dave said with emotion.  "In every way that counts!"

My copy, front and back covers

Here we have another genius Paul Lehr cover.  But is this book, 1967's Down to Earth by Louis Charbonneau, which we are told is a "stunning science-fiction flight into the unearthly future" that is "fantastically realistic," more than just a pretty face?

The Perry family--father Dave, mother Alicia, teen daughter Kathy and adopted 11-year-old boy Jackie-- have been living alone for three years on a tiny planetoid covered in churning seas of dust.  They are manning what amounts to a lighthouse in outer space, an "emergency landing station."  This area of the solar system actually no longer has any regular traffic, so the family sits and monitors screens for months at a time during which nothing happens (the supply ships come twice a year.)

One day in 2135 the station's systems mysteriously start to malfunction, causing dangerous accidents.  The first 45 or so pages of Down to Earth read like a haunted house story: Why is this door open?  Who could have tampered with this intercom?  Then we learn that Jackie's natural father, Rakow of the space navy, who lost a custody battle to Dave and Alicia like ten years ago, has sneaked into the station and is sabotaging everything.  Am I watching one of those Lifetime movies?

(Nobody was monitoring the screens when Rakow's spaceship arrived, and the station, apparently, doesn't have any kind of automatic radar, nor any alarm when somebody opens the airlock.  You know, even my Toyota Corolla beeps to warn me when somebody has opened a door!)

Our Italian friends are right;
Killer on the Asteroid is a better title

It takes the family like 40 more pages to realize what is going on; for a while Dave thinks his adopted son is playing pranks or that his wife has gone batty.  Around page 100 Rakow tries to rape Kathy ("It's been a long time since I had an Earth girl...") but she escapes.  Dave calls for help from Earth, but it turns out that a few days ago Earth civilization was wiped out in an atomic war.  (Another thing that happened when the Perry family wasn't watching the screens.  Who hired them for this job?)  There's a scene in which Rakow proves he's racist against robots (they cause human unemployment) and a firefight on the dark planetoid surface between Dave and Rakow. Rakow drags Jackie around at the end of a line, like Long John Silver dragging around Jim Hawkins, for use as a hostage or human shield.  Then comes a long drawn out chase throughout the station, culminating in victory over Rakow, whom the Perrys allow to leave the planetoid in his space ship.  Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent--don't the Perrys consider that Rakow may murder or rape someone else's family, or come back to seek revenge on them a second time?

The Perrys don't seem too upset that all their friends and family back on Earth are probably dead; in fact on the last page of the book, page 187, they seem excited by the possibility that Kathy, with her blonde hair, "narrow waist" and "small, high breasts" is now the sexiest girl alive!

This book has a multitude of problems.  The science is one problem.  Where is this planetoid?  At one point Jupiter appears "huge" in one screen, and later Kathy reports that "just the other night" Earth looked "so normal."  You'd think the planetoid would be too small to have much gravity or atmosphere, but there is that sea of dust, perpetually blown by the wind. There are several passages that suggest Louis C is confusing gravity with atmospheric pressure:

"With his weight only a fraction of what it would have been in Earth's heavy atmosphere, reduplicated inside the station, Dave did not plummet into the well of dust but dropped slowly like someone sinking in water."  

Another passage indicates that Louis C thinks radar uses sound waves, and I also suspect he thinks "galaxy" and "solar system" are synonyms.

I don't read these books to learn about science (sorry, Isaac), so a bigger problem for me is the novel's length and pacing.  The book feels long, with long scenes describing how the station is supposed to operate and filling us in on innumerable technical details.  (Again and again we hear about the holographic illusions that make the sterile station appear to be in the middle of a bustling city; this is supposed to prevent the Perrys from getting too homesick for the crowded Earth.)  We also listen in on all the characters' thoughts, learning all about their psychologies and emotional lives: Kathy wishes she was on Earth with friends and boys, Jackie worries that Alicia and Dave don't love him because he is not their biological son. We even get stream of consciousness from the station's robot.  Most memorable is Dave's jealousy of Alicia's first husband whose name ("Bob! Oh God Bob!") she has cried out during sex with Dave.  When Dave has to go out onto the planetoid's scary surface for the first time in like a year, Louis C gives us this passage:

"What would Jackie think if the boy saw him literally shaking in his boots?  And what of Alicia?  What would she think, remembering good old Bob, who laughed at the risks of space exploration, who reveled in naked space like a woman in a bubble bath--and who was a memorable performer in the narrow four-by-six space of a bed?"   

Our British friends called it
Antic Earth

One of the interesting things about the novel is the hostility it exhibits towards servicemen.  Both Rakow and Bob are astronauts who have been on dangerous space missions, and both are described as arrogant and unable to have mature healthy relationships.  Rakow has a career of rape and murder behind him, and when the Earth goes kaboom the space navy tries to set itself up as dictator of the universe.  It makes you wonder if a naval officer or fighter pilot stole Louis C's girlfriend during the Korean war or something.

As the quotes above perhaps hint, the style isn't great.  So there is not much good for me to say about Down to Earth.  The "About the Author" paragraph at the end of the book informs us that Louis C also wrote westerns and suspense novels, and it is true that the most competent parts of Down to Earth--the gunfight in the dark, the character of the alienated and evil murderer and rapist Rakow, and the triangle between Jackie, Dave and Rakow-- would have fit in perfectly in a novel about 19th frontier settlers and a debased cowboy, or 20th century suburbanites and some kind of gangster or crazed Vietnam vet.  If this book was half the length it is and focused on those elements maybe I would be giving it a mildly positive review.

As it is, though, thumbs down for Down to Earth.

*****************

Bound in the center of my copy of Down To Earth is a fun ad from the Science Fiction Book Club, promoting Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy.  For a mere ten cents you can receive a hardcover edition of this "famed epic" worth $10.50!  Just place a dime inside the "coin carrier" provided, fold it up origami style, and send it off to Garden City, New York, today!