The Demon in the Mirror by Andrew Offutt & Richard Lyon

Tiana's long career as a pirate asea coupled with her certain knowledge of her own bastardy, had given her an ever-fierce thrust for independence and a will that was passing strong.  Both drove her now.  Her being flashed with scarlet anger.  Every ounce of her strength channeled into the arm that strove to drive her sword into this monster in human form.

I purchased my copy of the 1980 edition of 1978's The Demon in the Mirror because of my interest in Andrew J. Offutt's odd career.  I had no idea who Richard Lyon was.  A little googling indicates that Richard K. Lyon was a successful research chemist and a SF fan who, inspired by Robert E. Howard and by his own wife, wrote The Demon in the Mirror but found himself unable to sell it.  He shared the manuscript with Offutt, who revised or rewrote it and succeeded in selling it to Pocket Books.  (Lyon tells the tale of The Demon in the Mirror's genesis and talks about his career as a scientist at the website Bewildering Stories, a sort of web magazine devoted to speculative writing.)  The Demon in the Mirror is Part One of a trilogy entitled War of the Wizards; I own all three volumes of the trilogy, and if I like this first book, I'll read all three, one after the other.  If I can trust Andre Norton and Jerry Pournelle, whose gushing blurbs (Norton likens Lyon and Offutt's work to that of sword and sorcery icons Howard, Fritz Leiber and C. L. Moore, while Pournelle suggests Offutt and Lyon have contributed something innovative to the field) adorn the back cover of my copy of the novel, I can be certain I am going to love it!

Tiana is a beautiful lady pirate ship captain!  She fights with a rapier and wears a tight shirt so her boobs will distract the people she is trying to murder in the course of her profession!  She and the crew of her ship, the Vixen (sexy!), have just captured a heavily armed merchant ship and exterminated its crew.  While her men are drunkenly celebrating their victory, Tiana explores the prize, overcoming hideous monsters and deadly traps to get her mitts on the treasure the vessel was transporting--books of magic and a mummified hand.  The hand, as all readers were no doubt hoping, is still alive!

Squint or click to read the
ecstatic praise for The Demon in
Mirror from Andre Norton and
Jerry Pournelle

After the exciting opening chapter we learn our heroine's backstory, and as authors of popular fiction so often do, we find Offutt and Lyon trying to give their protagonist the cachet of both a rebel and an outlaw and an aristocratic establishment figure in order to appeal to people's democratic and elitist prejudices.  (Tarzan lives like an animal in the jungle but is also an English nobleman, Conan is not only a barbarian and a thief but also becomes a wise king, Elric is an emperor who becomes a wanderer and destroys his own society, and on and on.  Isn't that Harry Potter brat people are always talking about raised by evil stepparents in a slum but, in reality, the chosen one whose veins pulse with the blood of the grand dragon of the wizard church or something?)  Tiana is the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Reme, who was killed during an abortive coup while she was a child; her half-brother Bealost (oy, the names!) was the rightful lord of the Duchy of Reme, but presumed dead.  Tiana was adopted and raised by a black pirate and reformed cannibal, Caranga; this aged seawolf now serves as Vixen's first mate.

Back ashore, Tiana sells the magic books to a mysterious and sinister wizard going by the name of Lamarred; the sorcerer explains that the living dead hand is that of the wizard Derramal.  (Oh, boy.)  Some time ago, Derramal was chopped into pieces and the pieces scattered about the globe, but he can be brought back to life if all the pieces are assembled.  Why should Tiana put back together this human jigsaw puzzle?  Because Lamarred te;lls her Bealost is alive, but only Derramal knows where he is!

The meat of the book that follows, as Tiana and foster father Caranga split up to gather up all these dismembered wizard parts, is episodic, almost like a series of short stories, in each of which a fragment of Derramal's body is recovered.  Tiana retrieves Derramal's other hand from a cult of vampire women who worship a giant bat, and then a burglar called Bandari the Cat helps her defeat a tribe of barbarians and get to the top of an unscalable mountain, the burial site of Derramal's right arm.  The ascent is achieved by what amounts to parasailing on the updrafts generated by a thunderstorm--Bandari's  people call this "highriding."  This whole highriding bit was like something out of a SF story, as it is entirely based on chemistry and physics, not magic or supernatural powers.  To get down the mountain Tiana and Bandari slide down an ice field, a scene I suspect is an homage to a similar scene in Leiber's memorable Fafhrd and Grey Mouser tale "The Seven Black Priests."  Derramal's left arm is in some royal family's catacombs, and to spirit herself into and out of the closely guarded subterranean vault Tiana must outsmart doublecrossing aristocrats, torturers and guards; within the catacombs she has to contend with the resident ghouls before she can retrieve the grisly object of her quest. 

Meanwhile, Caranga, hunting for Derramal's legs, sails Vixen to an island where he and the crew outwit an evil alchemist and battle an army of spider-women who have the power to cloud the human mind with illusions.  Later, in this world's equivalent of Africa, they battle invisible monsters in the abandoned city where rest Derramal's feet.  In an interesting change of pace from the rest of the book's third-person narration, Caranga's adventures are related in the first person by Caranga himself.

Later editions of the novel crop Boris
Vallejo's painting, I guess to make it
uniform with other books
in the "Timescape" line 

Like so many of these swordfighting adventure heroes, e.g., John Carter, Conan, the Grey Mouser, etc., Tiana is the best swordswinger in her milieu.  The authors, however, don't just have her swordfight her way through every obstacle; instead Tiana uses a variety of strategies to defeat her enemies and accomplish her goals, ranging from negotiations and laying pitfalls to disguises and the aforementioned highriding.  Offutt and Lyon add variety and interest to the book by portraying Tiana not as a static character but as a person engaged in a continual process of learning; Caranga taught her to be a pirate, for example, while Bandari teaches her woodcraft and how to highride.  To secure the last part of Derramal, his head, Tiana has to break a siege of the town in which it lies; she accomplishes this by highriding into a thundercloud, where she bombards the besiegers with lightning bolts by seeding the cloud as  Bandari the Cat taught her.

In the last few chapters of the novel, by adding up clues she has collected along with Derramal's body parts, Tiana figures out the tragic truth of Bealost's fate and the horrifying relationship of Derramal to Lamarred.  (The ending of the book actually has some of the feeling of the climax of a detective story in which the protagonist explains how he or she figured everything out and exposes how earlier events held a significance the reader may not have realized at the time.)  By stitching together the body of Derramal (did I mention that Tiana is also a skilled surgeon?), Tiana precipitates the inevitable world-threatening showdown with a Lovecraftian alien entity that the world's most powerful wizards had been cowardly postponing, and via detective work and trickery she neutralizes this extradimensional menace and saves the world.

At 180 pages, The Demon in the Mirror may be too long, and the tomb-raiding episodes that make up much of the middle section of the book may be a little too similar; too many of them seem to involve Tiana or Caranga spotting a structural weakness in the temple or tomb they are raiding and taking advantage of this Achilles's heel to demolish the structure.  On the other hand, each individual episode is entertaining, and at the end Lyon and Offutt make an effort to neatly tie the whole novel and all its threads and incidents together with a bow, so that even if, as you were reading it, the book felt a bit like a series of self-contained stories, when you are finished it does feel more or less like a coherent whole in which early events and lines of dialogue were laying the groundwork for some kind of pay off later on.  I'd judge The Demon in the Mirror moderately good, and definitely more polished and better structured than the two sword fighting capers we recently read, Kandar by Ken Bulmer and Kothar and the Wizard Slayer by Gardner Fox; Offutt and Lyon's book feels like something the authors put some serious time and effort into.

What to make of our heroes, Tiana and Caranga?  The fact that The Demon in the Mirror's protagonist is a take-charge woman raises the question of to what extent we should see the novel as some kind of feminist work, and to what extent merely one that uses a female character to titillate male readers.  Obviously there is a lot of room for individual readers to decide this for themselves, but I will note that the text repeatedly draws attention to Tiana's "jiggle and bounce," to her "rounded thighs crowding her snug short breeks," her "large firm breasts" and on and on, and that the threat of nonconsensual sex is an oft-recurring theme, especially the danger of Tiana being raped but also the possibility of men being seduced by monsters that look like human women.  Also noteworthy is the significant number of female villains, and Tiana's repeated use of her sexuality to manipulate men.

Similarly, should we laud the authors for striking a blow against racism with their portrayal of Caranga as a brave adventurer, able leader, and wise and loving father, or cringe at their depiction of him as an oversexed and booze-loving former cannibal who provides much of the book's comic relief?  Is his relationship with Tiana a hopeful vision of amity between the races, or yet another instance of a "magical negro" selflessly guiding white people to success and glory?

Well, we'll see what Offutt and Lyon do with Tiana and Caranga in the second part of the War of the Wizards trilogy, The Eyes of Sarsis.

**********

My copy of The Demon in the Mirror has three pages of ads in the back, presenting to the SF community Pocket Books' line of fantasy and science fiction paperbacks.  Among the promoted books we see Michael Bishop's Eyes of Fire, a 1980 revision or "complete rewrite" of Bishop's 1975 novel A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire.  Since June 2015 I have owned a 1975 Ballantine printing of the original novel under the Funeral title, but have not read it yet.  Joachim Boaz considers the 1975 version "a masterpiece."

Advertised on the same page as Eyes of Fire we see Richard Cowper's Road to Corlay, which tarbandu wrote about in 2012, and Kate Wilhem's Juniper Time, which Joachim wrote about in 2014.  Also promoted is a one-volume edition of F. M. Busby's The Demu Trilogy from 1980; I read a 1974 edition of the first Demu book, Cage A Man, and liked it.

Listed on a page devoted to "science fantasy" (one which I've actually already written about, back in 2014), are the first two Dying Earth books by Grandmaster Jack Vance, the original collection of stories, which I feel is a bit overrated, and the first Cugel book, Eyes of the Overworld, which I adore and strongly recommend as a brilliant entertainment.  On the top of the "science fantasy" page is Cecilia Holland's Floating Worlds.  I don't own a copy of Floating Worlds, but I plan on reading it someday; a few years ago I read something about it someplace that made it sound weird, controversial and challenging.

If you have anything to say about any of the books advertised on these pages, don't hesitate to get it off your chest in the comments!

Four stories by Edmond Hamilton from the 1920s and '30s

In the past I've mentioned Del Rey's cool Best of series of paperback collections of stories by classic SF authors; in fact, back in early 2016, I read 1978's The Best of Eric Frank Russell, which has an introduction by Alan Dean Foster, cover to cover.  In 1977 Del Rey put out a volume dedicated to MPorcius fave Edmond Hamilton, edited by Hamilton's wife, Leigh Brackett, as well as a book of Brackett stories edited by Hamilton.  Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we'll be reading both of these collections of classic adventure SF.  First up, four stories from The Best of Edmond Hamilton that first appeared in genre magazines in the 1920s and early 1930s.

"The Monster-God of Mamurth" (1926)

On its second appearance in Weird 
Tales, "Monster-God" didn't get
a cover mention; I hope Hamilton 
didn't feel like he'd got demoted!

This is Hamilton's first published story, and it is actually mentioned on the cover of the issue of Weird Tales in which it appeared, which must have been very exciting for a writer early in his career.  The Best of Edmond Hamilton is actually dedicated to the editor who bought the story, Farnsworth Wright, who edited Weird Tales from 1924 to 1940. "The Monster-God of Mamurth" has seen quite a few reprintings, including a second Weird Tales appearance in 1935.

"The Monster-God of Mamurth" is a solid Lovecraftian-type story, complete with lost city, alien and/or prehistoric god, and invisible monster.  (Though I label these elements "Lovecraftian," they were not invented by Lovecraft, and Hamilton didn't necessarily get them from Lovecraft stories; in fact, I think Lovecraft's big lost city and invisible monster stories, like "The Call of Cthulhu," "The Dunwich Horror" and "At The Mountains of Madness" were published after "Monster-God of Mamurth."  Lovecraft's "The Nameless City" was published in an amateur periodical in 1921, but was not widely available until the 1930s.)  Hamilton includes a (mercifully brief) frame story--our narrator is a white trader in the North African desert, and one night an American archaeologist who is near death crawls into his camp.  The archaeologist luckily has the strength to take up the narration for fourteen of the story's sixteen pages, telling us how he stumbled on written evidence (an inscription on stone in Phoenician) of a previously unrecorded ancient city, and went there by himself, even though the people who wrote the inscription and all the Arabs he talked to strongly advised him to stay away.  At the ruined city he explored an invisible temple and had to fight for his life against an invisible monster, much like a spider the size of a horse, presumably the god worshiped by the city's long dead citizens.

Hamilton paces the story well, and the descriptions of dealing with an invisible building and an invisible enemy are good.  More action-oriented and less extravagantly written than your typical Lovecraft story; maybe we should call this one "Howard-like"--after all, the archaeologist escapes the multi-limbed god, and it is via an adrenaline-powered feat of desperate strength, not by using his noggin or some dusty old book!

"The Man Who Evolved" (1931)

I've already written about the second story in The Best of Edmond Hamilton, "The Man Who Evolved," so I'll be skipping it here.  I read it in Isaac Asimov's fun and interesting 1974 anthology Before the Golden Age.

"A Conquest of Two Worlds" (1932)

First appearing in Wonder Stories, "A Conquest of Two Worlds" would be reprinted 16 years later by Startling Stories, whose editors heralded it as a "Hall of Fame Classic"!  Then Donald Wollheim, the hero behind DAW books and so many other laudable (and a few questionable) SF projects, selected it in 1951 for his Every Boy's Book of Science Fiction.  Sounds like a must read!

"A Conquest of Two Worlds" is a sort of "future history" in 32 pages of Earth's expansion into the rest of the solar system, a history which, as Brackett tells us in her spoiler-rich introduction to the volume, is surprisingly "downbeat" and "realistic."  This story, Brackett relates, is a response to SF stories in which the Earthman is portrayed as having the right to take over other planets, which are universally inhabited by evil monsters.  In this story the people of Earth are portrayed as driven largely by emotionalism and greed, while the aliens are largely sympathetic.

The plot: Some egghead invents an atomic power source--atomic propulsion systems and energy weapons soon follow. The boffin takes a single trip to scout out the inner planets and Jupiter, then dies in a crash upon landing on Earth.  The people of Earth quickly form a sort of world government, build a fleet of atomic rockets, and send out expeditions to exploit the vast natural resources of Mars and Jupiter; in a series of episodes that recall events in the history of British exploration and imperialism in North America, Africa and elsewhere, the Earthmen trigger and prosecute tremendous wars against the stone-age Martian and Jovian natives!  Like American Indians, the Martian and Jovian populations are seriously diminished and the survivors end up on reservations!

Besides depicting Earth settlement of Mars and Jupiter as resulting in immoral wars, Hamilton keeps reminding us how dangerous space travel and exploration are with many mentions of rocket ship crashes and illness due to cosmic rays and extraterrestrial environmental conditions.  This is a story drenched in pessimism, and unrelieved by the idea that challenges excite humanity to noble deeds of heroism, and in this it reminds me of Hamilton's 1952 story "What's It Like Out There?", which I read four or five years ago, during the Iowa period of my life, having borrowed from a university library via interlibrary loan a number of books of Hamilton stories.  "What's It Like Out There?" appears in The Best of Edmond Hamilton and I will be rereading it as part of this series of posts on Hamilton and Brackett.    

Most of "A Conquest of Two Worlds" reads like an encyclopedia entry about a military campaign, but there are dimly realized characters whose careers are pegged to the campaigns to conquer Mars and Jupiter.  In the last dozen pages of the story one of these characters, 60 years before Kevin Costner would do it, 70 years before Tom Cruise would do it, and almost 80 years before whoever the hell is in Avatar would do it, turns against his modern and imperialistic people and culture to join the primitive Jovians and aid them in their doomed struggle against the Earth!

While it is interesting as a pioneering example of a revisionist anti-Western-imperialism story, "A Conquest of Two Worlds," because it is dry and the characters are flat, is not very entertaining, so I'm awarding it merely a passing grade of "Acceptable."

A PDF scan of the issue of Wonder Stories in which "A Conquest of Two Worlds" appeared is viewable at the internet archive.  There you can see the included illustration by Frank Paul (depicting a major spoiler), a portrait of Hamilton, and an editorial introduction that tells you the story is about the crimes of the white race and greedy businessmen (everywhere I look I'm finding spoilers for this story.)  But that's not all!  The owner of the magazine hand wrote one-line reviews on each story's first page, and while he or she gushes about Jack Williamson's "The Moon Era" (and check out Williamson's slick hairdo and cool spectacles!), "A Conquest of Two Worlds" gets panned as "timeworn" and "hackneyed."  Ouch!

"The Island of Unreason" (1933)

Another piece that appeared in Wonder Stories and was accorded "Hall of Fame" status by the people at Startling, who only waited twelve years to reprint this baby.  As I learned at isfdb, "The Island of Unreason" also appeared in a mysterious 1946 publication along with another Hamilton story, "Murder in the Clinic."  This odd little book, published in Ireland by London outfit Utopian Publications, was part of a British series of books and magazines of short fiction by American authors whose covers were adorned with drawings or photos of naked women.  While many of the stories are by legitimately popular and important SF authors like Robert Bloch, Jack Williamson, Clark Ashton Smith and Ray Bradbury, it is hard not to suspect that the real selling point of the books was their covers, most of which you can see at isfdb, should you be curious.

"The Island of Unreason" takes place in a socialistic technocratic future that fetishizes "reason," efficiency and cooperation, and condemns emotion and individuality.  When Allan Mann, Serial Number 2473R6, an engineer in City 72 (the future name of New York City--what kind of media bias is this?--NYC should be Number 1!) questions handing over the atomic motor plans he has been working on for two years to another engineer because he wants to finish the designs himself, he is charged with a breach of reason.  The authorities exile him for an undisclosed period to the Island of Unreason, where there is no government.  Now, I know all you Kmele Foster fans out there are thinking an island without government would be a paradise ("please don't throw me in that brier patch!"), but the inhabitants of this technocratic society, including Mann see a place without government as some kind of living hell!  The director of City 72 thinks by exposing Mann to life outside the paternal state will teach him how essential government really is ("cure" him of "unreasonable tendencies.")

Mann is dropped off on the island and, while initially horrified, quickly learns to cope without all-powerful government with the help of the "unreasonables" already there, who have a primitive village and a rough and ready sort of social order.  When his sentence is up and the government agents arrive to bring him back to City 72, he decides he'd rather stay on the island.

This is a better story than "A Conquest of Two Worlds" not just because I like anti-big government stories, but because it focuses more strongly on individual characters and presents more vivid pictures of societies.  It is actually amusing to watch Mann, a member of "the world's fiftieth generation of vegetarians" who is used to eating the "mushy pre-digested foods" rationed out by the government, sleeping in a government dormitory and having sex with women whom the "Eugenics Board" orders him to impregnate, respond and adapt to a world in which he has to eat fresh meat, sleep on the ground, and compete for sex partners because people get to choose who they have sex with based on their own far-from-logical preferences.

While I am contrasting them from a literary and entertainment point of view, I think we can see strong thematic similarities between "The Island of Unreason" and "A Conquest of Two Worlds."  Both feature a character deeply embedded in his society, an elite member of that society, in fact, who changes his mind about that society after being exposed to a different, less technologically advanced, society.  Both also evince a level of skepticism about modernity and progress and make an argument that a concern for material well-being can lead a society to abandon traditional morality and compromise people's freedom to an atrocious degree.

Good.

"Thundering Worlds" (1934)

Back in March we read the story from this issue
attributed to Heald, a collaboration with
H. P. Lovecraft

Over the course of this blog's life we've seen a range of types of stories from Edmond Hamilton: mad scientist stories, stories about evolution, today a weird lost city story and two nakedly political stories expressing views about Western imperialism and the role of the state in our lives.  But Hamilton is perhaps most famous for his epics about interstellar warfare conceived on the grandest possible scale with the highest possible stakes, wars in which civilizations maneuver the very planets and stars like so many aircraft carriers and battering rams as they seek to avert or inflict genocide. "Thundering Worlds," first seen in Weird Tales, is just such a story.  I read "Thundering Worlds" during the same period in which I read "What's It Like Out There?", but I have no compunctions about reading it again.

It is the far future, and the human race has colonized all nine planets, and the system is ruled by a council consisting of the leaders of each of the nine worlds.  Our narrator is the top official of Mercury, and as the story begins he describes how mankind is under a terrible threat--Sol is cooling off and the nine planets will soon be uninhabitable! The solution to this crisis is to construct atomic thrusters of mind-boggling size on each of the nine planets and then drive them like huge ships across the black void of interstellar space to a new sun!

The Mercurian's narrative relates how the nine planets go from one star to another, looking for a home.  One star produces radiation that is deadly to human life (radiation looms large in Hamilton's oeuvre), while another star system is inhabited by hostile aliens, and a terrible space naval battle between swarms of human and alien craft results.  By some terrible coincidence, these aliens (amoeba people) live in a star system whose sun is about to go nova, so they have the idea of hijacking the solar planets to escape certain doom.  When the Solar space navy repels their invasion, the amoeba people construct their own colossal atomic engines and the nine solar planets are soon pursued by four amoeba planets!

When the human migrants finally find a suitable star to orbit their worlds around, a showdown with the amoeba people is inevitable.  The narrator decides that Mercury will make the ultimate sacrifice--all the Mercurians evacuate their little world and then the narrator rams it into the lead amoeba planet, causing a five-planet pileup that wipes out the amoeba race and leaves us humans masters of all we survey!  Go Earth!

This is a fun story.  The first-person narration and a sort of rivalry between the narrator and the rulers of Pluto and Jupiter means it doesn't fall into the trap of sounding like a dry encyclopedia article that "A Conquest of Two Worlds" does.  I'm a little surprised "Thundering Worlds" hasn't been reprinted more often; maybe its lack of social or political commentary made it less attractive to editors.

**********

All worthwhile reads by World Wrecker Hamilton, and pleasantly diverse in their subject matter and tone.  In our next episode we start The Best of Leigh Brackett with three of her stories from the 1940s.

Messenger of Zhuvastou by Andrew J. Offutt

All he had was a better-than-average set of reflexes and a fair ability at fencing, and what that Earthside shrink had called a born leadership ability.  And a tremendous knowledge of history--mostly wrong, since it came from movies.

Alright, here's one with a title I can't even pronounce. I'm sure the boys down in marketing loved this one. "Andy, would it kill you to call this one Messenger to Planet Z or Messenger from the Galactic Empire?" At least it has a terrific Jeff Jones cover, an heroic celebration of the human body and man's unquenchable desire to climb up the most dangerous precipice he can find while wearing as little clothing as possible.  A brassiere?  That shit would cramp our style!  A rope?  You have got to be kidding!  You can wear a metal circlet thing in your hair so you are looking your best when those creeptastic birds attack us, but that is where I draw the line!

(As we saw with The Yngling, Jones' evocative cover has nothing to do with the actual characters, setting or story of the book which it adorns.)

The people at Berkley presented Andrew J. Offutt's Messenger of Zhuvastou to the sword and planet community in 1973.  This one is long, 286 pages, and the print seems small--two randomly selected pages each have 45 lines on them, while similarly chosen pages in The Shores of Kansas have only 35 lines, and pages of The Yngling weigh in at 35 and 37.  The contents page lists 40 chapters, and they all have titles that refer, perhaps jocularly, to classic literature, history, or conventional phrases. I have a feeling this is going to be a long and crazy ride.  (This feeling was reinforced when I found that the very first word of the text included a typo!  In fact, this book is full of typos.  Shame on you, Berkley!)

Moris Keniston, a minor celebrity as not only the wealthy son of a Senator of the Galactic Empire centered on Earth but also a talented athlete, wants to prove to himself that he has what it takes to succeed on his own without Daddy's money and connections. He finds just the place to prove his prowess: Hellene, a planet whose more or less human natives, a violent, hedonistic and even sadistic lot, live a sort of ancient/medieval lifestyle, with fortified towns, mail armor, crossbows, etc.  Ostensibly, Keniston is going to Hellene in pursuit of his fiancee, Elaine Dixon, who has flown the coop. (I followed the love of my life from New York City to Iowa, so maybe following a chick from Earth to a death world isn't all that unbelievable.)

Years ago I read a bunch of L. Sprague de Camp's tepid sword and planet tales set in his Viagens Interplanetarias universe.  (I thought de Camp's efforts to make a John Carter story more "realistic" drained much of the fun out of the whole business.)  The title and opening scenes of Messenger of Zhuvastou lead me to believe that Offutt was writing this novel as a sort of homage to de Camp--like de Camp's Viagens tales, Hellene is characterized by the pervasive use of "Z" proper nouns, and, just like the protagonists of de Camp's books, Keniston has to have an interview with an official of the Earth imperial administration before setting foot on Hellene.  The authorities confiscate all Keniston's high tech equipment (lest it fall into the hands of the bellicose natives) and provide him an elaborate disguise so he can pass for a native.  This disguise involves invasive cosmetic surgery--the Hellenes have blue hair, manila folder-colored skin, and very wide mouths, and our hero has to go under the needle and the knife in order to get the look that won't get too many looks.  (People get similarly extensive disguises in the Viagens books.) Keniston's cover is as a royal messenger in the employ of the emperor of Zhuvastou; a role which will render Keniston's wealth and extensive travels less suspicious.

Offutt seems to have also taken up de Camp's mission of making the planetary romance more realistic.  Keniston doesn't fight off dozens of foes single-handed like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert Howard heroes sometimes do, and Offutt reminds us again and again how unlike a fictional hero Keniston is, how scared he is during fights, for example.  When Keniston kills a man for the first time, he vomits, a reaction the sadomasochistic natives find surprising. (The novel's most memorable scene is when a Hellene woman is sexually aroused by this victory of Keniston's and begs the fatigued Earthman to take her violently, to hurt her, her "dirty talk" consisting of a wound by wound recounting of the gory fight.)

Offutt doesn't just nod to de Camp in the book; Messenger of Zhuvastou comes off as a celebration of dozens of his other favorite books and movies--hardly a page goes by that doesn't refer directly or subtly to somebody like Ian Fleming, L. Frank Baum, Mark Twain, Cecil B. DeMille, Charlton Heston, W. C. Fields, or Alexandre Dumas, and the list goes on and on. 

Messenger of Zhuvastou's plot is episodic and picaresque--Keniston travels from walled town to walled town, spending lots of time in inns, making friends and tarrying with women, learning about Hellene society and getting mixed up in capers.  He befriends a member of an ethnic minority (these people have grey skin) and preaches against racism.  He uses his wits or his fencing skills to survive drunken brawls, confrontations with the police, and assassination attempts.  He helps a woman escape servitude in one town to join her lover in another.  He crosses a swamp full of monsters and an arid desert haunted by bandits, nearly dying of thirst in the process. He falls in love with a woman (she turns out to be a princess in disguise) and has to rescue her from a dungeon torture chamber before they can get married.

There's a lot of sex in this book, though not any really explicit sex scenes.  There are prostitutes and harem girls everywhere, and Offutt obsessively describes women's secondary sexual characteristics and skimpy attire.  Offutt, who is pretty hard on Christianity (he follows the line that Christianity caused the "Dark Ages" and retarded European development for centuries), reminds us repeatedly that the Hellenes don't have an "antisex" religion that stifles their urges, so everybody on the planet is promiscuous and nobody associates marriage or deep meaningful love relationships with monogamy; men share their girlfriends with each other, for example.  

Gender roles, and relations between the sexes, are a big theme of the book, and Offutt comes down firmly on the side of traditional gender roles.  In the last third or so of the book Keniston arrives at Zhavalanko, a fortified city which has undergone a feminist revolution.  A cunning woman, using high tech devices like radios and firearms smuggled onto Hellene despite the precautions of the Galactic authorities, has murdered the king and taken over, ruling as a dictator at the head of an all-female army and an all-female priesthood.  This tyrant is Elaine Dixon of Earth, whom we learn was not Keniston's fiance after all, but his brother's: Dixon murdered Keniston's brother and escaped from a prison planet, and Keniston's true mission to Hellene is one of revenge.

Even though Offutt (and Keniston) admit women on Hellene are second class citizens, they have no sympathy with Dixon's revolution, calling it "unnatural" and comparing her ruling party to the Nazis and the Communists.  Offutt makes clear his belief that men and women have natural roles and it is folly to tamper with this natural order, he even describes the sight of a city street full of women who have taken up bourgeois professions like banker and merchant as a "nightmare."  Psychologically healthy women, he believes, naturally desire a man to be in charge of them and take care of them, and members of Elaine Dixon's all female army prove eager to desert and join the counter revolution once they find it is lead by strong competent men like Keniston and his friends.  Keniston's counterrevolutionary army overthrows Dixon and returns men and women to their rightful places in society, and in the end of the book Keniston decides to stay on Hellene as the ruler of Zhavalanko.  

These Edgar Rice Burroughs/Robert Howard style stories often ask the question, "Is it better to live as a civilized man or a barbarian?" To me this seems like what the kids call "a no-brainer"; of course it is better to sit in an air conditioned art museum across the street from a skyscraper and read a novel than it is to sit in a tree in a steaming jungle gnawing on a raw baby allosaurus leg while bugs gnaw on you and Momma Allosaurus waits at the bottom of the tree, ready to serve up some harsh justice. Somehow, John Carter, Tarzan, Conan, and the guy from Almuric have trouble with this easy question and have to do lots of field research, living in both the civilized town and the hellish wilderness gathering evidence, and somehow they always come to the wrong conclusion, that a life of danger and savagery is to be preferred to a life of leisure and sophistication.

Offutt and his hero Keniston follow in the august footsteps of their predecessors; despite all the fear and danger, Keniston comes to prefer life on Hellene where people are constantly trying to beat him up, stab him or shoot him.  Halfway through the book we are told that he

liked the weight of the sword at his side, the long cloak flapping at his heels, the short unencumbering kilt.  This, he had begun to believe, was the way life should be lived, not existing on Clement Keniston's bequest and trying to run his business empire...

By the end of the book Hellene's bloodthirsty mores have begun to rub off on him, and he is declaring that Moris Keniston is dead and that his cover name is his true name, his true identity.  Hellene, for all its dangers, gives him the opportunity to be who he really is, a natural leader and man of action; life in cushy Galactic society wouldn't bring out his true potential.

But just as John Carter, who abandoned Earth to go native on Barsoom, worked to reform Martian culture and religion, Keniston, uncomfortable with the racism and the power of the priests on Hellene, works to diminish these characteristics of Hellene culture.  And he doesn't fully embrace Hellene's sadomasochism or the way women are relegated to second class status.  The woman Keniston falls in love with and marries is well-educated, a brave fighter, and a skilled rider, and Offutt presents multiple incidents in which her resourcefulness saves Keniston's life.  Keniston also refuses to beat her, even as she enviously admires the bruises proudly borne by other wives.  (Like so many exploitation writers, and the producers of such ubiquitous TV programs as Law and Order: Perverts Division, Offutt has his cake and eats it, too, titillating the audience with talk of denigrating sex and wife beating but maintaining membership in decent society by denouncing such unsavoury practices.)

So, is this long novel which baldly presents Christians and feminists with innumerable reasons to find it enraging any good?  The plot is not bad; fighting monsters and bandits, climbing mountains and crossing deserts and swamps, falling in love and rescuing gorgeous women, and overthrowing tyrants is what we more or less expect from these books.  And the plot is well structured, Offutt offering the reader mysteries to unravel, foreshadowing later developments, and showing how Keniston's actions early in the book make possible his triumph at its end.  But there are lots of problems. The tone and the characters are very bland, and the style is flat; I didn't care who got killed or who had sex with who.  Offutt includes many jokes, and they are all mild, neither funny nor offensively bad, but they help to defuse any sense of drama or terror; we are told Keniston suffers terrible hardships and fears, but the reader never suffers along with him, just watches, detached, knowing another joke is coming along in the next paragraph.          

The biggest problem is perhaps the length and pacing of the novel.  We often praise economy here at MPorcius Fiction Log, and this is a quality Offutt's novel severely lacks; considering how much actually happens in the novel, it is very very long, and the pace is quite slow. The text is repetitive, with Offutt providing a superfluity of incidents that demonstrate each character's personality traits. Offutt also spends a lot of time describing clothes and people's physical appearances, but in a way that fails to add to their characterization.  Offutt's verbosity does not really add to the atmosphere of the book or make its world more vivid or memorable; it just makes the book longer. Typographical errors, the use of esoteric words (maybe if I had gotten my degree at Princeton instead of Rutgers I'd have recognized words like "vermiform," "muliebrity" and "cruor") and of words Offutt has simply made up (the names of Hellene animals, for example) also serve to slow down the reader.  (It is hard to explain exactly why, but when Tom Disch in Camp Concentration or Gene Wolfe in Book of the New Sun hurls some word nobody knows at you it deepens the book's atmosphere, tells you something about the character and his environment, but in Messenger of Zhuvastou the hard words are just obstacles that make the story more vague or opaque.)

Because I am interested in the whole sword fighting on an alien planet genre, and I find Offutt's odd career interesting, I found Messenger of Zhuvastou worthwhile, but only just barely.  I can only recommend the novel to the sword and planet completist or the Offutt collector, and even then, it suffers in comparison to the classics of the genre or Offutt's own better work. Even for its target audience, Messenger of Zhuvastou is merely acceptable.

**********

The marketing boys at Berkley got their way when it came to advertising.  Bound into the spine of the book was a color ad; the ad in mine was torn out by a previous owner, so I don't know what it was shilling; often such ads are for booze or tobacco products. There are also two pages of ads at the very end of the novel, promoting Berkeley SF titles by authors more famous and critically renowned than Offutt hmself:

The boys down in marketing get their final revenge on the back cover, with a mysterious ad for Dream Power which lists no author or description for the volume, just the promise that "IT CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE."  Both Offutt and I may have our gripes with the 21st century, but at least nowadays we have google to solve these mysteries in a matter of seconds.  Dream Power, it turns out, was a top-selling self help (or shall we say, "self-awareness?") book by Dr. Ann Farady, who advises us that our dreams contain vital messages.  If Dr. Farady is to be believed (and hey, when was the last time a doctor made a mistake?) my recent dreams are telling me to move back to New York because Jerry Seinfeld is eager to be my friend and to stop driving because I will soon be in a terrible automobile accident.  Hopefully my next dream will explain an easy way to finance these oh so welcome life changes.

1979 stories by S. P. Somtow, Orson Scott Card, Richard Wilson & Richard Cowper

Cover of the hardcover edition

Let's read four more stories from Donald Wollheim's 1980 Annual World's Best SF.  Today let's look at stories by people with whom I am not very familiar.

"The Thirteenth Utopia" by S. P. Somtow (as by Somtow Suchartikul)

Some of us barely have the energy and dexterity to roll out of bed every morning and make the espresso for the wife without burning down the house.  And then you have those heroes who are fluent in multiple languages, compose symphonies and ballets and operas, are intimately familiar with the major American poets, and publish dozens of novels and scores of short stories.  S. P. Somtow (who published much of his fiction under the name Somtow Suchartikul) is just such a hero.  "The Thirteenth Utopia," one of his earliest published stories, is the first in a long series of stories known as the "Inquestor" series, and first appeared in Analog.  I have never read any of this dynamo's work before; let's see what's up with him.

(Earlier this year Joachim Boaz gave a middling review to Somtow's award-winning first novel, Starship and Haiku.)

Unfortunately, "Thirteenth Utopia" fits into two categories of stories which make me groan: the "guy visits hippy utopia and goes native" story, and the "we humans are violent and would be better off if we were conquered by aliens" story.  I've had to wade through a lot of these sorts of stories in my career as an SF fan, and I try to avoid them, but sometimes they ambush me.  These stories are just as much silly wish fulfilment fantasies as all those stories in which a guy fights monsters and/or in wars and marries a princess (John Carter) or beds lots of women (Conan.)  But while those Burroughs or Howard stories offer excitement, adventure, tension, horror, and an allegory of life as a struggle in which the good person (John Carter) or selfish ubermensch (Conan) can achieve lofty goals, perhaps improving the world or at least enjoying himself, most of these hippy utopia stories and "please conquer us, E.T." stories simply offer tedious lectures and bitter denunciations of the human race from an author who considers himself better than the common run of humanity.  If I need to offer a list of examples, consider these from just off the top of my head: Theodore Sturgeon's Cosmic Rape and "The Skills of Xanadu;" 75% of the Chad Oliver stories I have read, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, Kate Wilhelm's The Killer Thing, Robert Crane's Hero's Walk, J. Hunter Holly's The Green Planet, and the movie The Day The Earth Stood Still.  You can probably think of more; hell, I have probably written about more on this blog and since forgotten them.  

"Thirteenth Utopia" is set in a universe in which there are many human-inhabited planets, most part of a sort of empire that is constantly embroiled in wars. The story's protagonist is an Inquestor whose job is to go to planets that are disconnected from the empire and are rumored to be utopias. He has already been to a dozen utopias, discovered their fatal flaws, and acted to overthrow their utopian regimes and integrate the planets into the space empire so their human and material resources can be used in all those wars.

His thirteenth target is Shtoma.  Here, everybody lives in harmony with nature, is in touch with their feelings, and has a lot of promiscuous sex.  There is no mental illness, crime, or war.   All the earlier utopias the Inquestor encountered had a rottenness at their core, their surface happiness based on a foundation of atrocious exploitation or murderous totalitarianism, but on Shtoma no flaw is to be found. There must be a flaw, the Inquestor knows, because man is a fallen creature, is himself fundamentally flawed. Then the Inquestor learns the truth--this planet's population has lost (the bad?) part of its humanity because the system's sun is alive and radiates into the people its "love," "cleansing" them.  As usually happens in these utopian stories the visitor goes native, and the Inquestor does not return from whence he came but joins the people of Shtoma in their happiness.

Why Wollheim thought this one of the best SF stories of 1979 is beyond me.  There are no new ideas and the style is unremarkable.  Is there any chance Somtow, in a subtle way that my sensors failed to detect, is attacking the tired and boring subgenres of which this story is an example?  (After all, the Inquestor is a man of passion and deep feelings who has lived a life of service to a cause and of adventure, while the people of Shtoma seem pretty frivolous and shallow.  Even so, gotta give this one the thumbs down.  

"Unaccompanied Sonata" by Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card is famous and important, what with that Ender's Game which everybody talks about all the time.  I've never read Ender's Game because I feel like I already know the plot and the surprise ending just from exposure to pop culture. Years ago I did read a short story by Card, a horror story called "Eumenides in the Fourth-Floor Lavatory," which I thought was effective, but I never went back to read any more of Card's work.  Well, here is my chance to further investigate Card's body of work.

"Unaccompanied Sonata" first appeared in Omni, and I was surprised at how good it is; it probably is one of the best stories of 1979!

Christian Haroldsen is a genius born into a static, technocratic, totalitarian world of the near future.  The government gives every child a battery of tests and can determine with almost perfect accuracy what job a person is best suited for and will make him most happy; each person is trained for and assigned this dream job, and everybody in the world is happy!  Haroldsen is found to be a musical prodigy and is groomed for membership in the tiny isolated elite of creative people known as the Makers.

One of the laws Haroldsen must follow is that he listen to no other music, only his own; his only influences are to be natural sounds, the wind in the trees and the calls of birds and such.  When he breaks this rule around age thirty he is punished, assigned the job of delivery truck driver and forbidden to ever make music again.  When he does make music (on an ancient piano in a bar) he is again punished, this time severely (his fingers and thumbs are severed with a laser beam!), and assigned to work on a road construction crew.  When Haroldsen makes music yet again, this time singing, he receives the ultimate punishment--he becomes a government agent, a Watcher, tasked with enforcing all these terrible laws against the Makers!

"Unaccompanied Sonata" is well-written and even moving, and brings up several uncomfortable questions about art and our lives.  To what extent should art be original, and to what extent do we accept derivative work as successful art?  Does (high) art really make us happy, or does it challenge us in ways that are disturbing and can actually make us less happy?  If a planned economy could be made to work and a totalitarian government put in the hands of people who are not corrupt or vindictive, would we all be happier with far less freedom than some of us today consider absolutely essential?  I am always against censorship, planned economies, technocracy and limits to individual freedom, but Card (in this story, at least) questions my values in a way that is more intriguing, and less boneheaded or insulting, than most suggestions that we need more government and less freedom.

Powerful and disturbing; strongly recommended!

"The Story Writer" by Richard Wilson

I've never read anything by Wilson, but isfdb lists three novels and about one hundred short stories published stories by him, ranging from 1938 to 1988.  Looking at the covers of his novels, I am lead to suspect Wilson is one of those guys who writes wacky stories full of silly jokes and inflicts broad satires of politicians on his readers. I try to avoid this sort of thing, but as I have suggested, sometimes my spider sense fails me and I get ambushed.  Well, this blog post is about exploring new territory, so let's get on with it!

"Story Writer," which first appeared in Destinies, a sort of periodical in book form edited by Jim Baen, appears to be one of Wilson's most famous short stories: it earned Wilson a Nebula nomination and is the title story of the 2011 collection of Wilson stories put out by Ramble House, a publisher all classic genre lit fans should keep an eye on.

"The Story Writer" is a sappy, sentimental, self-indulgent and pandering tale of 42 pages about a pulp writer who made enough money churning out western and detective stories and then TV scripts to retire in his fifties, who then starts hanging out at flea markets, banging out stories on the fly on an old typewriter for customers. I can see why "The Story Writer" would appeal to Nebula voters, what with the way it romanticizes writers and name drops so many old pulp writers and genre characters.  (The Nebulas, of course, are chosen by professional writers.)  The story is also full of details about what it is like to hang around flea markets and antique stores.  As followers of my Twitter feed know, the wife and I spend a fair amount of our free time at flea markets and antique stores, so I guess I am the target audience of this story in more ways than one, but somehow this stuff left me cold--I don't read SF to see my own boring life reproduced.

Anyway, a mysterious man comes to the flea market and the protagonist writes a story about how the mystery man is one of an alien race hiding on Earth, sought by the government, while the writer himself is the hero foretold in the aliens' prophecy.  He goes to another dimension, and then to Washington, D. C., to hash out a modus vivendi between the humans and the aliens.  So we have a weak story serving as a frame for a feeble story.

The plot is absurd, banal and tired, and the style isn't any good either, long-winded and boring, with long lists of items and of people and of song titles that are supposed to make you nod knowingly when you recognize them, a monotonous chain of metaphors when one metaphor would suffice, and plenty of superfluous prattle about the protagonist filling his pipe or drinking root beer or whatever.  And then there is the poetry....

Bad!

No, no, please, no....

"Out There Where the Big Ships Go" by Richard Cowper

As Joseph Banks and William Bligh could tell you, sometimes you explore new territory and find fascinating new specimens, and sometimes you explore new territory and your friends get eaten by cannibals.  But we can't let these setbacks discourage us from our odyssey of literary exploration; our motto must be "to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield," even  if "the world, which seems/To lie before us like a land of dreams/So various, so beautiful, so new,/Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain," and your foreign minister cares so little for transparency and national security that she lost or stole thousands of official communications and half of the twenty electronic devices full of confidential info she used.

Richard Cowper seems to have a pretty good reputation among the internet SF community (check out Joachim Boaz's posts and links here and tarbandu's review of a Cowper novel here) so maybe this story will salve the wounds I suffered at the hands of Richard Wilson.

"Out There Where the Big Ships Go" takes place in a post-Space Age future; during the lifetime of many of the characters the last of Earth's spaceships returned to Earth, never to leave again.  Because of a lack of fossil fuels (I guess, or maybe some other reason), international commerce is conducted via high-tech sailing ships.  Our main character is Roger, a 12-year old boy staying at a Caribbean resort with his mother (this whole set up, the story's tone, and various small details, like a maternal kiss, reminded me of Proust;could Cowper be consciously emulating In Search of Lost Time?)  Roger meets a beautiful woman, and the captain of that last space ship, a man of great wisdom, and in the second half of the story we readers learn about that last voyage and how it changed the world.  You see, the crew of that last voyage encountered peaceful and immortal aliens who play an elaborate skill-based board game, somewhat like go. When the game was introduced to the Earth, mankind became devoted to the game and imbued with its zen-like wisdom, ending wars and poverty.  A little sappy and utopian, maybe, but Cowper's style and delivery sell the story.

Charmingly written, this is a pleasant, entertaining piece.  Quite good.

**********

So we've got two winners here, from Card and Cowper, a below average story from Somtow, and a story by Wilson that is so poor I'm guessing Baen and Wollheim published it mainly to honor an old hand who started in the genre fiction racket way back when (Wollheim in his intro notes Wilson was one of the Futurians) and devoted his life to it.  Looking back at them, I see three of the four stories are about ways of creating a happy human society, and question whether happiness should even be mankind's primary goal.

In our next episode, more science fiction short stories selected by a celebrated editor--these will be from the 1960s.

Assault on the Gods by Stephen Goldin

"The gods claim to be good, yet I've seen them do some things that even they say are bad.  They claim to be wise, yet sometimes they act foolishly.  I'm learning very quickly not to believe everything the gods have told me."

Back in 2012 I read Stephen Goldin's 1981 novel A World Called Solitude and gave it a positive review on Amazon.  Since then I've read three Goldin short stories, two good, one bad.  So Goldin's name is always rattling around inside my skull, and when I spotted the 1977 Fawcett paperback edition of Assault on the Gods with a striking Don Maitz cover (I love the faces and the weapons) I picked it up.  I was intrigued by what I presumed to be the in-your-face political content of the book, not just the promised "fiercely independent" female protagonist but the anti-religious slant. Goldin, on his website, tells us "we're living in scary times. The Religious Right is trying to form a band of thought-police and turn America into a theocracy. Nothing less than the freedom of thought is at stake, and I refuse to be silent."  Let's see if Goldin strikes any telling blows against the "fanatical Xtians" he envisions are trying to "cram their puritanical dogma down our throats."  

Space Captain Ardeva Korrell is a member of what in grad school we called a marginalized population; not only is she a woman (she provides evidence that fewer than 2% of space captains are women) but an Eoan.  Planet Eos is the most rational and sane human society in the galaxy--Eoans are "beyond morals" because they are so wise.  ("Anthropos [the founding guru of the Eoans] saw morals as arbitrary rules imposed by Society on its less mature members....") This gives Eoans a reputation for arrogance and snobbery.  In the first dozen pages of the story Korrell complains that prejudice has held back her career, that crewmen don't obey her, that she is making less money and getting less respect than she deserves, and that employers are always making passes at her.  Am I reading a SF novel or an article from Ms.?

The cargo ship Korrell is currently commanding is stopped on planet Dascham, where the illiterate natives look like teddy bears and live in filthy huts. (For the record, Assault on the Gods appeared six years before Return of the Jedi, but over 25 years after the first appearance of Poul Anderson and Gordon Dickson's Hoka stories.  I have to admit that if the paperback had a teddy bear instead of gunslinger girl on the cover I would not have picked up Assault on the Gods.)  The natives are mired in poverty and primitivism because of their stifling religion.  When a drunken member of Korrell's crew denies the existence of the gods of Dascham he is struck dead by lightning and a 12-foot tall glowing teddy bear angel with a flaming sword flies down to upbraid the survivors.

The Daschamene "gods" are in fact aliens who maintain a totalitarian rule over the natives, ruthlessly controlling population levels, forbidding technological development, outlawing dissenting speech and exploiting them as slaves.  An extensive network of listening devices keeps the natives under surveillance and the "angels," in reality war robots, inflict swift and merciless punishment.  When one of the natives, disillusioned with the gods, sneaks onto Korrell's ship looking for help in overthrowing them, Korrell's boss, the ship's owner, decides to exterminate the gods and liberate the natives, primarily in hopes of reaping a considerable monetary reward offered by the dissident. Korrell reluctantly goes along with this terribly risky (their ship is not a naval vessel but an unarmed merchant ship, after all) scheme.

The ship is shot down in the attack, and Korrell and her small crew must resort to fighting on foot with laser rifles and grenade launchers.  They climb a mountain, penetrate the gods' fortress, defeat their army of robots, and uncover their secrets, among which is the fact that the gods are mentally and physically feeble.  Fortunately Korrell and company discover an ancient starship in the gods' stronghold so they can escape the planet, though not before Korrell's employer becomes drunk with greed and power and tries to succeed to the place of the defunct gods, necessitating that Korrell execute some rough justice on him.

Assault on the Gods is s pretty good space opera/hard SF story, full of fun descriptions of space equipment and weapons, plenty of scenes of our heroine using logic and technical knowhow to get herself out of sticky situations, and tense scenes of human-alien interaction, both diplomatic and combative. The structure and plot elements of Goldin's novel strongly remind me of something by Poul Anderson; the protagonists are business people, like Van Rjin and Falkayn, not government employees, and their struggle is against stifling tyranny. (Goldin also does the same thing that other icon of libertarian SF, Robert Heinlein, does, arguing for freedom and individualism as well as for the seemingly paradoxical idea that on a ship the captain's word is irresistible law.) Goldin's style is good, the pace is fast, and the book feels short (it's like 180 pages of text, but the print is pretty large.)  The anti-religious sentiment and boilerplate feminism (which will inspire cheers from some and eye-rolling from others) don't overwhelm the narrative--the feminist talking points rarely make an appearance after page 20 or so, and the anti-religious stuff, while pervasive, is pretty broad and vague; Goldin doesn't really single out Christianity or any other religion, unless we count the "neo-Buddhist" member of the crew, who is characterized by passivity.

One "problem" with the novel is that Korrell is smarter, more sophisticated, more courageous, more compassionate, and more ethical than all the other characters. Since we see this sort of shortcoming in so much of popular fiction, from Sherlock Holmes to John Carter to Kal-El to Conan, we can hardly hold it against Goldin here.  Should we see Korrell's superiority as representing some better way of life, the way we sometimes see Conan as representing the (alleged) superiority of the barbarian over the civilized man, or Superman representing "the American Way?"  Presumably she represents the superiority of the rational individual over the ignorant and superstitious masses of society and the selfish and manipulative religious and/or government establishments which exploit them. 

Korrell is perhaps worthy of some kind of feminist analysis.  She plays exactly the same role in the story we often see men play in adventure stories--she is the leader, she solves the intellectual puzzles and overcomes the physical obstacles and enemy combatants, and represents the author's ideological point of view. Goldin seems to have consciously refused to give her any of the kind of attributes we typically associate with women.   Korrell doesn't seem to care much about her looks or her clothes and is a poor cook.  She doesn't express interest in sexual relationships or family relationships (she seems to have been brought up in some kind of orphanage or barracks on Eos, but it wasn't clear to me whether this was due to special circumstances of her life or if all Eoans are raised in such communal institutions).  She loves to read but seems to read popular science texts, not fiction (though she does refer to The Wizard of Oz. The love for Baum we see in so many SF writers--Heinlein and Farmer come to mind at once--is making me think I have to read Baum.)  Whether women will appreciate this depiction of a career woman who has no (apparent) thoughts of love, children or fashion, or find it to be a flat, unrealistic and unconvincing depiction of what women are like, I have no idea.  

Another interpretation of Korrell and the novel that I toyed with as I read Assault on the Gods was Korrell as a strict and long-suffering mother and the crew as her unruly children.  Again and again Korrell orders the crew around, scolds them or punishes them for misbehavior, pulls them out of trouble, assesses their strengths and weaknesses and tries to guide and manipulate them accordingly.  Evidence for this interpretation includes the way Eoan philosophy stresses how mature Eoans like Korrell are while other humans are essentially immature.           

A good space adventure; I enjoyed it and suggest Assault on the Gods is worth the time of hard SF fans and those interested in anti-religious SF and SF "with a strong female protagonist," as they say.  Maybe I should keep my eye open for other books by Goldin.

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.

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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 Jose 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!