The Stone God Awakens by Philip José Farmer

Ulysses was anything but exhilarated at his conquests.  The bloodshed depressed him.  Millions of years of sentiency had passed, perhaps four hundred thousand or more generations, perhaps twice that many.  Yet the sentients, the users of speech, the lords of the beasts, had learned nothing.  Or was that their lesson, that fighting and bloodshed were inevitable and would last as long as life lasted?   

The reference to a "recent" Hugo win is
presumably to Farmer's Hugo for
Best Novel for To Your Scattered
Bodies Go, the first Riverworld novel,
 though Farmer also got a '68 Hugo
for the novella Riders of the Purple Wage 

If you have been following the performance art project known as MPorcius Fiction Log, you know that back in July 2018 Joachim Boaz, the internet's vintage SF mastermind, made a very generous donation of over twenty pounds of SF books to the MPorcius Library and I have slowly been working my way through them.  Today we assail a twelfth volume from the Joachim Boaz Wing of the MPorcius Library, a 1973 paperback printing of Philip José Farmer's 1970 novel The Stone God Awakens.  I don't think Joachim ever actually wrote about this one, though he recorded his acquisition of it in 2016.  Our man tarbandu did review it back in 2013; I'll hold off on rereading tarbandu's review until I have read the novel myself and drafted my own post about it.*

Before we explore The Stone God Awakens, here is a list of the eleven books I have already read from Joachim's donation, complete with handy links to my rantings and ravings about them:

Slave Planet by Laurence M. Janifer
Three Novels by Damon Knight
Dark Dominion by David Duncan
New Writings in SF6 edited by John Carnell
Tama of the Light Country by Ray Cummings
Tama, Princess of Mercury by Ray Cummings
A Brand New World by Ray Cummings
Ultimatum in 2050 A.D. by Jack Sharkey
The Power of X by Arthur Sellings
The Enemy of My Enemy by Avram Davidson
The Bright Phoenix by Harold Mead

**********

Cat people!  SF is full of cat people, as I have observed in the past.  On the second page of The Stone God Awakens we see a cat person, but we don't spend much time with him, as he is stabbed to death by a raccoon person!  We SF readers don't see too many raccoon people, though I guess there is one in movies now and Chad Oliver did offer some up in his 1972 story "King of the Hill." 

SF is also full of 20th-century dudes who wake up in a crazy future world.  We just read a story like this by Keith Laumer, and, not too long ago, novels on this theme by Edmond Hamilton and Charles Eric Maine.  The Stone God Awakens is yet another of these tales of people who go to sleep in the century of Lenin, Hitler and Mao and wake up in a century full of weird politics and terrible violence and dangerous characters!

Biophysics grad student Ulysses Singing Bear, like so many of our most prominent academics, is part white, part Native American--in his case, Iroquois.  One day in 1985, in a Syracuse, New York research center, he was working on a device that could preserve a living thing by freezing it down to absolute zero, a state in which none of its molecules or atoms would even move, turning it into an invulnerable statue.  An accident occurred and Singing Bear himself was thusly preserved while sitting at his desk.  Millions of years later, a tribe of cat people with a stone-age level of technology discovered his frozen body, pulled him out of a dried lake bed and installed him on a stone throne in a wooden temple with columns like totem poles, where they worshiped him as a god.  Centuries later still, as the novel begins, a lightning bolt strikes the temple, setting it on fire and revivifying Singing Bear.  Our hero awakes during an attack on the cat people village by a tribe of raccoon people and soon finds himself in the middle of a tomahawk-swinging, assegai-flinging melee.

Like so many members of the SF community (but not Robert Silverberg!), Farmer loves Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the set up of this novel is in some ways like the first John Carter book--in an impossible manner a 20th-century guy appears among a bunch of primitives, learns their language (Singing Bear is an expert linguist, which comes in handy) and starts teaching them how to behave.  The cat people haven't invented archery, so Singing Bear makes a bow and some arrows and trains them in their use.  The cat people want to practice their shooting on a live target, a captive raccoon man, but Singing Bear stops them from committing this atrocity, as he does other of their murderous cultural practices.

The raccoon people also consider Singing Bear to be their god, and our hero sets out to end the warfare between the felines and the raccoon folk and unite them under his rule.  Then, he leads a multi-species company of a hundred or so warriors on an odyssey across the country.  They cross plains, ride rafts, and, most remarkably, penetrate a dense jungle, the main component of which is a single colossal tree thousands of feet high that occupies an area the size of a European country or small American state!  This tree has a myriad of twisting winding curling branches, each hundreds of feet thick--the fissures and wrinkles in its bark are so huge that over the centuries they have filled with dirt and regular-sized trees are growing out of them.  Singing Bear's party marches along these more or less horizontal branches, hundreds or thousands of feet above the surface, crossing from one branch to another via dense networks of lianas. 

Rather than seeing the vast tree as just a plant, the animal people think of it as a god or intelligent entity, one which is served by some races, like a race of leopard men, and wages war on others, like the cat people, whom the tree is trying to conquer and add to the ranks of its subordinate peoples.  As the novel unfolds, Singing Bear uncovers clues that shed light on the question of whether the tree is really sentient, or merely the tool of a group of intelligent beings who use it to dominate others.

The company of cat men and raccoon men has overcome various monsters, and do battle against other tribes of intelligent species, among them some dog men and the aforementioned tree-aligned leopard men.  Singing Bear's party has an edge over these adversaries because he has not only provided them with the science of archery, but taught them to ride horses and how to make gunpowder; the primitives have no metal, so Sleeping Bear can't make muskets, but he does produce wooden hand grenades and even wooden rockets fired from a bazooka-like tube.

Farmer adds a little interest to all these adventures with developments in Ulysses Singing Bear's relationship with the natives of this far future.  For one thing, there is the nerve-wracking need to maintain his status as a god, a challenge because he lacks the kind of omniscience and invulnerability the cat and raccoon people, perhaps, expect of their god--for example, his followers assume Singing Bear knows all about the local geography and flora and fauna, and of course he knows very little.  In addition, and perhaps as we expect from Farmer, who is famous for including unusual sex in his fiction (who could forget "The Henry Miller Dawn Patrol"?), Singing Bear is slowly falling in love with Awina, the cat woman who taught him the languages of her people and acts as his trusted servant and friend.  But can Singing Bear really be sexually attracted to a fur-covered person who licks herself clean and in the process ingests furballs?

Accompanying the feline and raccoon expedition is a person Singing Bear calls a batman--a short hairless guy with wings of bone and membrane jutting out his back who goes by the name of Ghlikh.  This flying dwarf makes his living by performing the role of diplomat, journalist and merchant, travelling all over this weird future world, conducting negotiations, exchanging news and gossip, and facilitating trade among the many stone age tribes of animal people.  Singing Bear badgers this slippery character into acting as his air force--Ghlikh somewhat reluctantly conducts reconnaissance and even tactical air strikes for Singing Bear's expedition, providing them yet another advantage over their foes.  But around page 70, in the middle of that jungle, the batman betrays them to a tribe of ogres, men eight feet tall who eagerly devour some of Singing Bear's followers raw.  Maybe this is Farmer's commentary on how far we should trust ambassadors, journalists and merchants--also, the scenes of the ogres eating people reminded me of the cyclops scenes in The Odyssey.  Anyway, Singing Bear comes to believe that the bat people are in charge of the tree, though they present themselves as its foremost servants.

I had hopes that the expedition being captured would radically change the course of the narrative, that Singing Bear would be hauled before the secret masters of this future world or something like that, but Singing Bear and Awina quickly engineer an escape and the party gets right back to marching through the elevated jungle and riding rafts and fighting tribes (now they have to fight the flying swarms of Ghlikh's countrymen) again.  By coincidence Singing Bear even comes across Ghlikh and captures him, so he is once again a member of our hero's party, though he is tied up and carried around instead of being sent ahead as a scout.  Maybe I should note here that, in the same way that John Carter improves Martian behavior but doesn't go so far as to abolish slavery on Barsoom, Singing Bear ends practices like human sacrifice among the cat and raccoon people, but is happy to make use of information gathered by torturing bat people.

This massive omnibus includes not only
The Stone God Awakens, but The Green Odyssey,
 which I read back in 2014, and
Lord Tyger, which tarbandu read in 2018

Finally, the expedition reaches the other side of the jungle, and leaves the tree behind.  They come to an abandoned village on the ocean, the remains of which suggest that actual human beings lived there but were carried off by ten-foot-tall elephant people, another race that resists the tree's efforts to dominate them.  Singing Bear teaches his party to manage a sailing vessel (Singing Bear apparently didn't waste his formative years watching cartoons and playing video games like I did, so he has a vast storehouse of practical knowledge), and they sail off to confront the pachyderm peeps.  It turns out that these elephant people, by digging up artifacts from an ancient city, have a much higher technological and civilizational level than the rest of the tribes Singing Bear has encountered--they have a written language and books, for example, and organic electronics and machines based on vegetables that, somehow, serve as circuit boards and batteries and motors.  The elephant folk are also masters of a large population of human slaves and servants.

The Stone God Awakens lacks a strong sense of narrative drive; during all the many pages of marching and climbing and rafting through the forest I sort of forgot why Singing Bear had launched this perilous expedition instead of just hanging out with his worshipers--I it was guess to investigate rumors of the tree and the possibility of there being a tribe of humans for him to make a family with.  But when Singing Bear finally meets what appear to be real humans (in fact, the humans living as second-class citizens among the elephant people are a different species than homo sapiens and Singing Bear cannot have children with their women), Farmer doesn't convey any excitement on Singing Bear's part.  Instead we are told Singing Bear has become determined to destroy the tree and its servants.  (I guess Ghlikh, who is actually probably the most interesting character in this book, and escapes from the elephant people's incompetent gaolers, really pissed him off.)  Singing Bear helps the elephant people develop new weapons--among them explosives and blimps--and much of the last sixty pages of the novel is concerned with war preparations and plans and raids and aerial battles.

Singing Bear is also allowed to visit the ancient underground city where the elephant people got their technology.  Accessing a sort of computer, Singing Bear learns something about Earth's history over the last few million years, including much about the origins and growth of the tree and of his own existence as an indestructible statue honored by many civilizations as they rose and fell.  Singing Bear is further enlightened when, at the head of his own elephant-financed air force, he fights his way through a Luftwaffe of bat men to the inner sanctum of the tree, where he has a tense conversation with that self-aware product of ancient genetic engineering.  In brief, mankind used up all the metal on the Earth and developed plants for use as machines.  The tree was bred as an environmentally-friendly, "be at one with nature," city.  Despite these efforts to embrace a green lifestyle, environmentalist aliens from Andromeda arrived and exterminated the human race because we were too mean to the environment; the Andromedans spared the animal people, in hopes that they would be of better character, but those people turned out to be almost as corrupt and violent as human beings, so the tree has been trying to get all intelligent life under its control via persuasion or by force.

The Stone God Awakens is, on the whole, kind of cynical and sad, or at least tries to be.  Farmer doesn't romanticize the page after page of fighting he depicts, and dwells on how crummy people are, with the brief foray into environmentalist talk with the tree and a general portrayal of all the animal races as bellicose and dishonest.  A major theme of the passages on the preparations for war among the elephant men is how slow and inefficient the preparations are in general and in particular how those in charge of the effort enrich themselves by selling substandard goods to the military--even during a major war for survival many people allow their laziness and greed to compromise the community's collective needs.  Occasionally Singing Bear will even muse about how life is meaningless and we all have to lie to ourselves about death in order to remain sane.

Perhaps in keeping with this downbeat tone, the novel ends inconclusively after a huge battle featuring dozens of pages of explosions, stabbings, ambushes, traps, and people being burned alive and drowned to death.  The tree is not destroyed and the batmen are not exterminated, so the war is doomed to continue.  In fact, any progress made in weakening the tree is mitigated by the fact that while Singing Bear and Awina and many of the elephant people's fighting men were away with the airships launching the inconclusive attack, the subordinate humans back at the elephant people city launched a rebellion, throwing Singing Bear's base and supporters into turmoil.  On the last page of the book Singing Bear reflects that he will have to make peace between the elephants and their former slaves if any of them are to survive the war against the tree and the batmen, and maybe he should also just make peace with the tree, if possible.

I like the plot of The Stone God Awakens and am willing to give it a mild recommendation, but there are plenty of problems with the book.  It is quite long, 188 pages of quite small text, and it feels long, in part because it is just one big chunk of words--there are no chapters to physically break up the wall of text and to organize it thematically or set off important plot developments.  The book can be a little wearying, and I think could have benefited by being separated into chapters with snappy titles like "The March to the Jungle" or "The Battle with the Elephant Monster" or "Captured!" or whatever, each chapter ending with the conclusion of an episode that gives the reader a sense of progress or a cliffhanger that spurs the reader's desire to find out what comes next.  Farmer could also have just left out some episodes or descriptions--the battles in particular can be pretty complicated and pretty repetitive, with each maneuver and operation being presented to us in detail.

As I have hinted when I talked about the novel's lack of narrative drive, The Stone God Awakens is kind of bland, lacking in passion and emotion.  Singing Bear is not a very exciting character and his motivations are a little vague, and when Farmer talks about his emotions he doesn't sound like a man of feeling writing a novel but like a psychologist writing a textbook:

There was also the problem of finding a suitable permanent mate, one who could father his children and be an enjoyable companion. 

Clinical and boring!  And just like the war plot, the love/sex plot isn't really resolved.  Does Ulysses Singing Bear ever declare his love for cat woman Awina and have sex with her?  He doesn't over the course of this novel, but maybe he will after it is over?

I am also wondering why Farmer didn't do more with his protagonist's Native American heritage.  In the book's first few pages we are told Ulysses Singing Bear is part Iroquois and Farmer makes a weak joke about it, but it is almost never mentioned again and plays no role in the plot.  Maybe Farmer planned to talk about how Singing Bear's ancient ancestors were at one with nature and man should have stayed that way or some such hokum, maybe during the scenes at the computer or in the discussion with the tree, and he just never got around to it or changed his mind.

Above I referred to Edmond Hamilton's The Star of Life and Charles Eric Maine's He Owned the World, two other books about guys who wake up in a strange future.  Hamilton and Maine fill their books with war and adventure, just like Farmer, but they also try to say something about human freedom and the relationship of the common people to elites, and to integrate those ideas with their plots.  In comparison, The Stone God Awakens feels a little light in the ideological department.   With the exception of his portrayal of the elephant folks' war preparations, Farmer's environmental and misanthropic goop here in The Stone God Awakens isn't very well woven into the novel's plot or the relationships between the characters, much of it feeling sort of tacked on to his rambling and inconclusive tale.  And while I get the impression from the media that millions of people are apoplectic with fear that the world is going to end if I don't stop driving to the grocery store and flying to my in-laws' weddings, I personally find environmentalist stuff mind-numbingly boring (and I am also not seeing much evidence of people abstaining from driving to Grandma's house or flying down to Disney World.)             

So, I've got a lot of complaints, but the idea of a guy being turned into a statue and being revered by a long succession of societies is a cool idea, and Farmer does serve up some fun monsters and weirdos, so I'm giving this one a mild recommendation. 

*My big disagreement with tarbandu regarding The Stone God Awakens has to do with the length; while I found it too long and too detailed, he thought its style "unadorned" and found it "a quick read."  Maybe I am getting impatient in my old age!

ABC Part 2: Carol Emshwiller, Philip José Farmer, Daniel F. Galouye, and Harry Harrison

Let's read four more stories from Tom Boardman Jr.'s strange 1966 anthology, An ABC of Science Fiction, which prints 26 stories, each story written by a writer with a different last initial.  This time we've got stories from two Grandmasters with whose work I have some familiarity, Philip José Farmer and Harry Harrison, and two people whose work I don't believe I have read before, Carol Emshwiller and Daniel F. Galouye.

There's Myra and her creepy kid!

"Day at the Beach" by Carol Emshwiller (1959)

In the introduction to An ABC of Science Fiction, editor Boardman apologizes because there are only two women represented in the anthology.  Here's the first of the two, Carol Emshwiller.  Emshwiller's wikipedia article is pretty short, reminding us that her husband was important SF illustrator Ed Emshwiller (AKA "Emsh") and quoting Ursula K. LeGuin who heralds Emshwiller as a "consistent feminist voice."  Hopefully "Day at the Beach" isn't going to be a lecture on how I sit incorrectly on the subway and don't do my fair share of the dusting.

Four years ago there was a nuclear war (I guess) and Myra and Ben, a married couple, were among the survivors.  Neither of them has any hair, not even an eye lash!  What they do have is a three-year old son, the only child in the vicinity, apparently; it is hinted that the kid is a mutant, maybe a cannibal!

Emshwiller gives us vague clues as to the state of the world.  Ben "commutes" on a train during the week, and there is sometimes electricity, so I guess there is some kind of heavy industry and maybe government agencies still in operation, but there are very few cars and it seems like Ben doesn't bring money home after commuting but preserved food, and it sounds like it is common for fights over the food to erupt on the train. 

It is the weekend, and Myra talks about how before the cataclysm they used to go to the beach on the weekend, and now they just hide at home.  So they drive to the beach for the first time since the war.  At the beach they are menaced by bandits, but Ben, who was fat before the war but is now a lean hard fighter, beats the bandits' leader to death with a hammer, which scares off the rest.  Then the family goes home, Myra asserting, repeatedly, that it has been a good day.

This story is a sort of "slice of life" thing, with no flashy twist ending or shocking revelation that I could detect (I was hoping the three-year-old would try to eat the dead bandit, but he just sort of investigates it before Ben swats him away from it--Emshwiller was teasing me!)  Maybe "Day at the Beach" is meant to be a satire of bourgeois people, people who would continue their middle-class routine of commuting and going for weekend drives even after an apocalypse?  Maybe it is supposed to induce a mood, maybe horrify us by showing that a life of fighting for food and confronting child-molesting thugs and raising a monster can come to seem routine, that for Myra to retain any sanity she has to act like it is routine?  (It is perhaps significant that "It was no day at the beach," like "it was no picnic"--and Myra does actually pack a picnic basket--is a cliched euphemism for a dangerous challenge or arduous task.)

Both Judith Merril and Isaac Asimov (or likely Martin H. Greenberg) consider
"Day at the Beach" to be one of the best SF stories of 1959

"Day at the Beach" is OK, no big deal.  It is a commercial and critical success, however, having been reprinted numerous times in four languages after first appearing as a cover story in F&SF.  The effective cover illustration is by Emshwiller's own husband--the picture's composition is reminiscent of a Renaissance Madonna and Child, so maybe the story is supposed to be a hopeful one and I am totally misinterpreting "Day at the Beach" when I am thinking of it as a horror story or a satire of the bourgeoisie.  Maybe Myra's little cannibal child is going to be the redeemer of the fallen world!     

"The King of the Beasts" by Philip José Farmer (1964)

Oy, this is one of those allegedly clever one-page stories that people seem to love but which I consider a gimmicky waste of time.  Two people are in a zoo where extinct species are recreated.  We get a list of resurrected beasts--passenger pigeon, dodo, quagga, etc.  Then comes an animal so diabolical, so monstrous, so sinister, that the scientists needed special permission to resurrect one.  Of course, it's a human man, so we now know that the people talking are aliens who came to Earth after we also went extinct, no doubt because we threw candy wrappers in a creek or something of that nature.

Lame filler.  The most interesting thing about the story is that Farmer has one of the aliens (before we know they are aliens) say "You might say that man struck God in the face every time he wiped out a branch of the animal kingdom."  Is this just a trick to make us think the speakers are human, or, is this Farmer expressing his own religious belief, pushing back against the atheism typical of SF writers?  (Remember that article Farmer wrote for Brian Ash's Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction?)

"The King of the Beasts" was mentioned on the cover of the issue of Galaxy in which it originally appeared, and despite my distaste for it, has been reprinted many times.   

"Homey Atmosphere" by Daniel F. Galouye (1961)

Here's another one from Galaxy.  I don't think I have ever read anything by Galouye, who, wikipedia is telling me, is one of Richard Dawkins's favorite writers.  Hopefully "Homey Atmosphere" isn't going to be a lecture on how religious people are all insane and taking your kid to church is child abuse.

"Homey Atmosphere" is a traditional SF story about space travel and robots, people's reaction to machines which mimic life and whether there is any difference between "true" consciousness like you and I have and very sophisticated artificial simulations of consciousness.

Lorry is a young astronaut, and Burton an older one, on a months-long voyage exploring the galaxy, leaving a string of navigation beacons in their wake.  Their hyperdrive ship is managed by three computers which respond to voice commands; to keep the two spacemen from suffering psychological problems, the three computers have been given personalities, one that of a grumpy and forgetful old man, one an enthusiastic kid, one an attractive young woman.  When the ship starts to malfunction (perhaps because the forgetful computer has forgotten to lay in spare parts!) Burton wants to jump in the lifeboat and get back home, but Lorry is too fond of the "crew" to abandon them!  The astronauts argue over to what extent the personalities of the ship are "real" as the ship's problems increase in severity.  When the apparent risk reaches catastrophic levels Lorry and Burton finally abandon ship with the encouragement of their artificial shipmates.

I say "apparent risk" because on the last page we learn that the three artificial personalities have developed independent desires and curiosity, and their ambition is to explore the galaxy unsupervised!  All the problems with the ship were a sham designed to (humanely) get rid of the human astronauts.

An ordinary but acceptable entertainment.  Over twenty years after its original publication "Homey Atmosphere" would be the cover story of an issue of the Croatian magazine Sirius.

"Mute Milton" by Harry Harrison (1966)

Harrison has a very smooth and readable style and in my youth I read a ton of his books, and as an adult was impressed by the first two Eden books (the third, which I have been more or less planning to read for years now, awaits.)  So I have been looking forward to this one.

Harrison's work is often tendentious, attacking religion or the military or pollution or whatever, and "Mute Milton" is a heavy-handed anti-racism story.  An African-American college student from New York City, down in Mississippi, by chance meets a local college professor, another black man.  The college prof has invented a means of converting gravity into electricity--he can generate power practically for free.  The New Yorker is studying economics, and immediately recognizes that such a device could radically improve human life, but seconds later an overweight cop who is in the Ku Klux Klan murders the college professor and destroys the only working model of the device.

This is the kind of story whose point you can't argue against, but which is too over the top, too obvious and manipulative, to be effective as literature or entertainment.  There is no tension or ambiguity, the characters don't evolve, the villain is a flat caricature, etc.  It is like a homily for a child.  Thumbs down.  "Mute Milton" has been reprinted numerous times in Harrison collections, as well as in an anthology almost as gimmicky as An ABC of Science Fiction, A Treasury of American Horror Stories: 51 Spine-Chilling Tales from Every State in the Union plus Washington, D. C.--I guess there is a shortage of horror stories set in Mississippi?

**********   

It looks like today the Grandmasters gave us limp polemics bitterly denouncing humanity's failings  while the people I never read before made an effort to give us stories imbued with human feeling that press us to speculate on life in strange future circumstances.  Today our Grandmasters let us down!  Well, maybe a Grandmaster will live up to his title in our next episode, when we read another batch of stories from An ABC of Science Fiction?  Until then, Brian Aldiss, himself a Grandmaster, still has the best contribution to this anthology. 

Resurrection Days by Wilson Tucker

With bewilderment she said, "But you spoke to me--are speaking with me." 

"I talk to everybody.  I'm made that way." 

"You are...different?" 

"In more ways than one, cupcake."

I have written some pretty harsh reviews of novels and short stories, but I'm a softie compared to my man tarbandu of the famed PorPor Books Blog.  Recently he awarded a mere one star (of five) to Wilson Tucker's 1971 revision of his 1953 novel The Time Masters.  Reading tarbandu's review reminded me that I owned a Tucker paperback myself, one from later in the writer's career titled Resurrection Days.  I had purchased it because it promised to be one of those books about how crummy it would be if the world was run by women, like Edmund Cooper's Five to Twelve, and Gender Genocide, or A. E. Van Vogt's Renaissance.  These sorts of stories have a particular appeal to me.  So let's see if Resurrection Days, first published in 1981 and (it seems) never published again (not a promising sign, is it?) is any good.

Immediately upon starting the 191-page novel I was reminded of the work of Philip Jose Farmer, especially "A Bowl Bigger than Earth," but also the famous Riverworld books.  Like the guy in Farmer's "Bowl," Resurrection Days protagonist, Owen Hall, wakes up in a conformist and totalitarian world that is sort of a parody of 20th-century life.  The world in Tucker's novel is, in some ways, very technologically advanced. There are those moving walkways we see in so much SF, and factories full of machines which can manufacture goods practically out of thin air at the direction of their operators' minds.  Press your forehead to the concave plate on the machine, think of bacon, or a necktie, or a cigar, and voila, it appears inside the machine, on the other side of  a window.  Push a button and robotic hands wrap up the item for shipping. (On the other hand, the people here lack electricity and light their way with candles and torches.)

This world is stiflingly conformist; all the houses and yards look exactly the same, and everybody wears the same clothes.  The men who commute to and from those factories each day on that moving sidewalk (the town is a perfect circle and the single slidewalk, along which are all the homes and factories, marks its perimeter and travels only one way in an endless loop) do so silently, dully staring at their feet and obeying all commands without question.  Hall calls them "zombies," (which turns out to be very appropriate.)  The women he meets are astonished to hear Owen Hall speak, and to find him disobeying women's orders.  For it is women who run this world--all the cops and managers are pink-clad women, and at the top of the organizational chart sits "the Mother," apparently far off in another town--and the mindless men never dissent.

Besides being crushingly uniform, everything in the circular town (like the male workers it has no name, only a number) is shoddy, from the bad-tasting food to the poor construction of the cookie-cutter houses--most of the zombies who make everything in the "think-and-do" machines do a pretty poor job of visualizing what they are directed to create.  "The slave labor hereabouts may be cheap and compliant, but it wasn't worth a damn when it came down to quality workmanship; somebody just wasn't fitting the man to the job," is Owen's assessment.  I thought with this Tucker was perhaps making some kind of commentary on, or perhaps influenced by knowledge of, life behind the Iron Curtain--bolstering my theory is the fact that there is no money in this world, everything being rationed and distributed by the city government from a central storage facility via tubes (these tubes are visible in the cover illustration.)

At first Hall's memories of his previous life are very cloudy, but over the course of his first day in this strange new world he gradually remembers more and more things. He is "a New Deal Democrat" and a strong supporter of FDR and labor unions, and a proud citizen of Indiana, where he worked as a carpenter.  He was killed at age 28 in a road accident when the truck he was driving slid on the icy roads in the winter of 1943 and collided with a train.  Owen wonders if the fact that he is dead indicates that he is now in heaven or hell.

At the same time Owen gradually recovers his memories, he explores and puzzles out the weird realities of the world he has found himself in.  It is the far future, the women are all the product of parthenogenesis, and the men, including Owen, are the reanimated dead (the women call them "ambulatory recoveries")! Bones are dug up from 20th-century cemeteries and the men recreated in home versions of the think-and-do machines by women.  The women are careful to not allow the men much will or memory, but the woman who put Owen back together was drunk and accidentally restored his intelligence and personality (or deliberately made him more canny because she wanted to have sex with him--sex in this world is more or less outlawed.)  Once they get wind of him, the city government wants to toss Owen back into a machine and turn him into a zombie.

Owen spends much of the book in disguise, on the run, or in hiding.  Through charm and the application of alcohol he develops relationships with two women.  When he is captured in the end of the book he is dragged before the city government for a hearing, and they decide he is so dangerous that he must be executed and reinterred. Luckily for Owen the woman in charge of the cemeteries, who is given the task of killing the pesky Indianian, is one of the women he has managed to charm.  Instead of killing him (this would have been the first killing of anybody in centuries, as there has been no war or violent crime for ages) she severs his bonds and the two of them flee to the wilderness to live happily ever after.      

Resurrection Days is not very good.  Let's start with the elements I liked, however.

Most SF books are about bourgeois professionals (scientists, engineers, military officers or merchants), intellectuals, superheroes or aristocrats, so it was interesting to see a working class protagonist whose main topics of conversation include how great the New Deal and its architects are.  This portrait is not necessarily, or not wholly, a flattering one, as Tucker includes references to Democratic corruption; one example:

"The old Mother stories are true," Paoli exclaimed.  "Gods did walk the sky in ancient times." 

"We called them fly-boys." 

"Are you an ancient fly-boy?" 

"Nope, I'm an ancient Democrat--vote early and often."

Resurrection Days also has "meta" or self-referential elements that will please the longtime SF fan.  Owen, back in the '30s and '40s, was a dedicated reader of science and science-fiction magazines (he subscribed to the fictional Amazing Mechanics) and aspired to be a dirigible pilot.  The book is also a sub rosa celebration of Robert Heinlein.  When he first sees the moving sidewalk, Owen uses the phrase "roads must roll," a winking reference to Heinlein's 1940 short story, since inducted into the SF Hall of Fame, "The Roads Must Roll."  ("The Roads Must Roll" was the Heinlein story assigned in the class I took on science fiction at Rutgers University back in 1990.) When Owen sees the robotic hands in the think-and-do machines, Heinlein, though again not named, is referenced a second time:

Owen recognized those fingers as a form of waldoes.  They'd been invented by the same man who invented the rolling road, and both inventions were duly reported in the science-wonder magazines.  

CONFIDENTIAL--DO NOT RELEASE TO A THIRD PARTY

So there are these nice little touches, but as a whole Resurrection Days is weak.  It feels slow, with scenes that are too long and which don't advance the story very far. The whole tone of the novel is faintly humorous, so even though the material (death, slavery, tyranny, one man struggling against a vast system) should be exciting and suspenseful, there is no tension or fear.  Owen takes everything in stride, never losing his aggressive confidence, always cracking a joke.  The novel is brimming over with little jokes which are not funny.  Way too many of the jokes revolve around Owen's use of early 20th-century slang, which, of course, the women don't understand. You've seen these sorts of jokes on TV a billion times; a kid says "groovy" and an adult doesn't understand, a black person says "that's bad" and a white person doesn't realize "bad" means good, etc.  Again and again Owen says something like "go fly a kite" or refers to "booze" and the future-born character asks "What is booze?" or says "I don't understand you," and again and again it is neither amusing nor interesting.

In case you were wondering, this is what
the Canadian printing looked like

Another problem is the book's theme.  I bought the book thinking it was likely a criticism of feminism or a defense of traditional gender roles.  (Over the course of this blog's life we've seen Heinlein, Leigh Brackett, and Andrew Offutt make such arguments, some subtly, some not so subtly.)  But Tucker doesn't doesn't do anything of the kind.  There is nothing particularly feminine about the town or government or even the female characters (they aren't flighty or emotional or gossipy or any of the other negative stereotypes of women, neither are they mothering or generous or any of the stereotypical virtues we associate with women), nobody gives sexist (misandrist or misogynist) speeches, it is never explained why the entire government is made up of women and why sex is outlawed or how the government, culture and economy got to be the way they are.  The Mother doesn't appear.  There isn't even a narrative reason for the gender divide in the story; the plot would work just as well if half the sentient people were men and half the zombies were women. Resurrection Days feels more like a tepid criticism of collectivism or an examination of management-labor relations than a critique of feminism or women, which was disappointing!

It wouldn't be fair to say Resurrection Days is bad, but I can't recommend it--it kind of just sits there, inspiring little intellectual or emotional excitement.  Too bad.

My Lord Barbarian by Andrew J. Offutt

"Sword-armed men...barbarians indeed!  But all of us, not just we of Branarius, so long called the Barbarian World.  Sword-armed men, Jheru, concerned with their mail-coats, counseled by so-called wise men called Elders--for we are really stupid men indeed--living under ages-old lights and riding from world to world in ships built in the mists of pasts. Ships whose mechanisms we understand not at all."

Followers of my thrilling twitter feed may recall that I have been buying up Andrew J. Offutt paperbacks.  Well, here's one with a title that makes you wonder why Fabio isn't on the cover: My Lord Barbarian, from 1977.  Maybe my copy has suffered sun damage, or maybe it's because I'm sitting under a fluorescent light, but it looks, to me, like our hero has a green face and purple hair.  Maybe he's some kind of human-alien hybrid?  We see those from time to time in our science-fiction wanderings, don't we?

Our tale takes place in the future, in a region of space colonized by Earth in a distant age.  For centuries now the planets here, forming the Empire of Seven Worlds, have been cut off from the rest of the universe, and while the spaceships of the Ancients and a small number of other artifacts still operate, for generations people have been reduced to writing with quill pens, fighting with swords and riding horses around.

As our story begins, Valeron of planet Brasarius has just pacified and united that previously war torn and anarchic world, most primitive of the Seven, making himself King of Brasarius.  The Emperor of the Seven Worlds invites Valeron to the capital planet, Carmeis; he thinks Valeron, a fellow fighting man, would make a great husband for his daughter, Princess Aleysha, and a great heir to the imperial throne. The bookish prime minister, Darcus Cannu, however, begs to differ, and when Valeron arrives at the palace the PM murders the Emperor and has Valeron framed for the crime!

The slender and sexy princess, now Empress (though merely a figurehead under the thumb of Darcus Cannu, who even has the temerity to start planning their wedding!), met barbaric hunk Valeron when she was 13 and has been nursing a crush on that heroic slab of beefcake for the six years he's been away unifying Brasarius by cracking skulls, so she helps Valeron escape the dungeon.  Then Aleysha's curvaceous and sexy slave girl, Jheru, helps sneak Valeron into Aleysha's bedroom (where he relieves Aleysha of the burden of her virginity) and then helps him steal a spaceship and get the hell off Carmeis.  While elegant Aleysha's aid came in the form of her slipping him a dagger through the bars of his cell, lusty Jheru gets her hands dirty in hand-to-hand fights at Valeron's side.

Valeron and Jheru travel to one of the other of the seven planets, where a council of the kings of all the lesser planets is convened.  Our heroes convince the council of Darcus Cannu's guilt, and Valeron and Jheru then lead them and their armies to Carmeis to overthrow and punish Darcus.  All you due process types out there will be happy to know Darcus is afforded a trial before the council, where he gets a chance to use his silver tongue to explain all his good selfless reasons for murdering the Emperor and putting the blame on war hero Valeron.

This is an entertaining adventure story with all the elements we've seen a million times: guys (and Jheru) swordfighting, getting captured, escaping, putting on the uniforms of the enemy to sneak around the palace, plotting sneak attacks and pincer moves, etc.  One way Offutt adds some interest is by introducing some superficial but colorful characters, like the Elders who worship the god "Siense" and try to figure out the lost technology of the Ancients, the hairless savages known as the Sungoli who formerly terrorized Brasarius but now follow Valeron, and the various Kings of the Seven planets, one fat, one a religious fanatic, one a tested fighting man who earned his throne on the battlefield much as Valeron did, etc.  Offutt tries to create the impression of a vast and diverse world with a small number of short strokes.

As the title and cover illustration hint will be the case, and the ad copy on the first page promises (for some reason Del Rey decided to forgo inclusion of glowing blurbs from the Wall Street Journal and New York Times on this page), love and sex ("ROMANCE!") play a prominent part in My Lord Barbarian.  We learn early on that Valeron has had multitudes of women and has left a trail of illegitimate children (fifteen according to rumor) behind him during his campaigns across Brasarius. Offutt expends lots of ink describing Aleyasha's and Jheru's bodies, how their breasts move when they brush their hair and so forth, and while there are no explicit sex scenes, there is a lot of aggressive, flirtatious, S&M-tinged play between Valeron and Jheru; the barbarian warlord smacks her bottom, twists her arm painfully while they act out a kidnapping, and jovially talks about raping her, treatment Jheru seems to relish.  (Could Offutt have been inspired by, or be catering to the fans of, John Norman's Gor series?)  One of the plot's threads is how Valeron is torn by the choice between Empress Alyesha, who represents ultimate power and civilization, and Jheru, who, like him, is boisterous and lusty, and more than willing to slip into a suit of mail, slap on a helmet and fight the Empire's enemies up close and personal.  In the last pages of the book Valeron passes up the chance to marry Aleyasha and become Emperor and instead returns to Bresarius with Jheru as his bride.

The contrast between barbarism and civilization and the uneasy relationship between the barbaric and the civilized are the main themes of the book.  Valeron, like Tarzan, was raised in an alien and savage environment (by the Sungoli), and after mastering that environment left it for a more sophisticated milieu, where he again emerged as a leader, in part because of the skills he learned from his adoptive barbaric culture. Valeron is motivated by a need to prove to sophisticated people, and to himself, that, despite his upbringing among the lowest savages on the most primitive of the seven planets, he is as good as any civilized man.  One of the novel's plot threads concerns the attitude of the Empire's leaders towards Valeron; Darcus Cannu commits the crimes he does because he thinks a barbarian unfit for the role of Emperor, and while Valeron wins over the kings of the five civilized planets and they accept his leadership of the army that overthrows Darcus Cannu, there is always an undercurrent of skepticism and fear about the unsophisticated, almost alien, Valeron, and the other kings are relieved when he declines the Imperial throne.

Paralleling how he contrasts barbarism and civilization is how Offutt presents a contrast between the low technology of the Empire of Seven Worlds and the high technology of their ancestors.  Some of the most memorable scenes of the novel concern Valeron and Darcus Cannu's explorations of the robot- and computer-inhabited elevators and control rooms that lie beneath the palace on Carmeis; they are the first to tread those corridors since the Days of Wrath that led to the collapse of the ancient technological civilization centuries ago.  Offutt paints a mixed picture of high technology; the characters all marvel at it and many covet the advantages of mastering more of the Ancients' knowledge and equipment, but most are aware that it was just this technology that destroyed the Ancient civilization, and when Darcus Cannu attempts to defeat Valeron with advanced weaponry he has found beneath the palace, it backfires on him.  As the novel ends it is clear that under Empress Aleyasha (who seems slated to marry a king who is uniquely knowledgeable and enthusiastic about Ancient technology) that the Empire will embark on a campaign of major technological and societal change.

My Lord Barbarian is a diverting sword and planet story I can recommend to fans of the genre.  In his dedication Offutt invokes the names of Poul Anderson (remember when I detected similarities to Anderson's work in Offutt's Chieftain of Andor?), Leigh Brackett and Alfred Coppel.  My Lord Barbarian actually reminded me quite a bit of Philip Jose Farmer's The Green Odyssey: both are "swashbuckling" tales set on planets littered with mysterious high-tech artifacts and both feature capable female characters who save the hero's life as well as themes of sexual dominance.

Finally, I know all of you are wondering about Valeron's hair.  Well, on page 72, Offutt does refer to  Valeron's "mass of long purple-red hair"!  It looks like Boris Vallejo actually read the book!  (I still can't figure out the green face, though.)

It Was the Day of the Robot by Frank Belknap Long

And how can a man take pride in his independence and proclaim that he is really free when he cannot make love to a woman, and feel her slender sweet body moving beneath him, and experience a rapture that blots out the present and the past, and makes only one moment seem eternal, as long as forever is.

Remember when I fell in love with the cover of a paperback I found in an Iowa antique store?  It was Belmont Books of fabulous New York City that had published this unforgettable masterpiece, and the heroes at Belmont had more than one arrow in their quiver!  The cover of Novelets of Science Fiction had prehistoric reptiles, militaristic astronauts, the birth of a brilliant red star (from an egg?), and a green-skinned alien fashion model with two big beautiful...eh, wings.  But what iconic component of science fiction was it missing?  A robot!  Well, Belmont has the crucial robotic-American demographic covered with the terrific illustration adorning the cover of 1963's It Was the Day of the Robot.  I've wanted to own this beauty for quite a while, having seen scans of it online, and was pretty stoked (that's what the kids say nowadays) to discover it in Wooster, Ohio recently.

Written by Frank Belknap Long, an intimate friend of H. P. Lovecraft and a famous writer whose high reputation, to be frank, I have found to be a little mystifying, It Was the Day of the Robot is an expansion of Long's 1957 story "Made to Order," which I have not read.  Long won various high profile awards as well as the praise of people like Lovecraft; maybe It Was the Day of the Robot will be the work that convinces me he deserved all those accolades?

Based on its cover, and the cover of so many foreign editions, I expected It Was the Day of the Robot to be like a Godzilla movie, about a cyclopean robot running amok while the government's top scientists and the National Guard scramble to end its campaign of destruction.  In fact, Long's book is about love, sex, and a war of independence against tyrannical paternalistic government!

It is the year 2263! Mankind is ruled by a computer known by its adoring fans as the Giant Computer, and colloquially, by skeptics, as The Big Brain. One of BB's signature policies is a strict eugenics regime that judges every individual's right to reproduce based not only on his or her fitness, but on the current needs of Society.  (BB's supporters put a capital "S" on "Society.")  As our novel begins, first-person narrator John Tabor has just had his third application for a license to mate rejected--he is a perfect physical specimen, but Society already has a sufficient number of his type.

Standing next to John in the "computer vault" where you go to collect BB's judgements, which are printed on metal strips that get spit out of the wall (I'm visualizing this place as like a cross between the automat and the DMV), is a beautiful woman, Agnes. Agnes has also just had her right to sex denied. Agnes and John fall in love then and there, but then there is a disturbance and when John turns back, Agnes has disappeared!

The solar system is full of men bereft of sexual relationships either because they have been deemed dysgenic by BB or because only men are allowed on Mars and Venus, where human habitations are under construction.  Luckily, substitutes for women are available! These include parlors with hypnotic helmets which provide simulations of sexual relationships, and, new on the market, android women! Lonely and horny, John orders an android woman.  (All of a sudden the title of the original story is making sense!)  By studying the narrator's own genetic code (genetics is a major theme of this novel) the android makers promise they will be able to produce a woman who exactly matches John's deepest sexual desires.  Well, physically, at least--the eggheads admit they haven't quite mastered creating artificial brains and John's android dream girl will probably have the mentality of a seven-year-old!

These androids are sort of a grey market item, and so it is no surprise when the cops come knocking at the establishment where John is picking up his artificial inamorata, whom he decides to call "Claire."  A scuffle and chase ensue, and John and Claire flee to the ruins of New York City, where live society's outcasts, eking out a rough existence beyond the oppression, but also the law and order, of BB's government. Most of the people in the ruins left BB's domain because they were denied the right to have sex by the electronic dictator, and there is much violent competition between men over women among the ruins of my old Manhattan stomping grounds.  In a wild coincidence, the first outcast John and Claire encounter is Agnes, whom John never expected to see again!  We've got a love triangle on our hands!

It doesn't take John long to choose between these two chicks, however.  Almost immediately Agnes is revealed to be an agent of the Big Brain, sent to John to seduce him. You see, John has telepathic powers, and spent two years working on Venus.  The men on Venus, far from BB's direct supervision, have gained an appreciation of freedom, but are frustrated by the lack of women.  BB has uncovered a conspiracy among these Venusians, an independence movement, and thinks John is just the man to infiltrate it!

Of course, our hero is, in fact, just the kind of guy who wants to sign up with the Venusian patriots!  He and Claire skip out on Agnes and run around the ruins, engaging in fight scenes and chase scenes that have brutish men trying to seize Claire to satisfy their lusts and BB's cops trying to capture John. All the while our narrator has to explain the simplest things to Claire, who has the mind of a child.

John and Claire try to hide themselves in a crowd of people going to the "bicycle races."  In the same way that it permits the New York ruins to remain outside its authority as a safety valve that bleeds off potential revolutionaries, BB permits an arena to operate where desperate men can race bicycles.  These races are based on the chariot races of ancient Rome, firmly embedded in the pop culture consciousness by the 1880 novel and various film versions of Ben Hur--the cyclists are armed with lances and flails, and while thousands of bloodthirsty spectators watch, the cyclists engage in brutal fights, hoping to impress the women in the stands.  John ends up escaping the cops by participating in the race himself, winning, and being carried away from the field by the adoring crowd.

All of the sexual and gender elements of It Was the Day of the Robot are going to set off alarm bells for the 21st-century reader. We are told that Claire shares many of John's genetic traits: "She would undoubtedly resemble quite a few of my great-great-grandmothers."  This reminds us of incest. Claire has the mind of a child, which reminds us of pedophilia. John repeatedly strikes Agnes, even throwing her against walls.  The women in the novel are what your college professor might call sexist stereotypes: Claire always needs help and needs everything mansplained to her, and Agnes is a spy and seductress, a femme fatale, who tries to get John to betray his principles. It Was the Day of the Robot is no safe space!  

This cover matches the actual themes
and content of the story better than the others  

Of course I won't hold any of this against the book.  I don't read science fiction to hear orthodox opinions repeated, and I don't read books from 50 years ago expecting to hear today's elite-approved opinions parrotted.  Science fiction has a long tradition, including among its most honored practitioners (Sturgeon, Heinlein and Farmer were all accorded Grandmasters by their peers) of questioning sexual taboos and depicting sexual relationships of unusual and potentially offensive character.  

Unfortunately, in the last scenes of the book Long craps out on us.  After the bicycle race, Claire and Agnes have a showdown, and it turns out that Claire is a normal woman, an agent of the Venus independence movement who has been pretending to be an android, while Agnes is an android pretending to be a real woman, built by BB to snare John.  So John didn't really smack around a (real) woman and didn't really have sex with a child or an artificial person, or really do anything that crazy at all.  Agnes isn't even killed by John or Claire in the final battle--she slips and falls on her own knife.  Lame!

More damningly, Long's style is not very good.  Long is very long-winded, slowing down the narrative with long dissertations on psychology and sexual relationships--even minor characters give lectures on love and sex. Long overwrites all the action scenes, deadening the pace with tedious descriptions of each yard of a chase or blow of a fight and with detailed explanations of the narrator's tactics and strategy. The bicycle race has elaborate and convoluted rules explained by a sports announcer whose own psychology and sexual history is explored by Long.  Long also shows off his erudition with many mentions of Freud and references to Watteau, Shelly, and Gourmont that don't necessarily add much to the novel's entertainment value.  (Though I have to admit that I don't think I've ever heard of Remy de Gourmont before.)

I like the novel's pro-individualist/anti-technocracy ethic, and having sex with an android, hiding out in the New York ruins, fighting in the arena, and fighting for the independence of Venus are all good ideas.  But I can't deny that Long bungled or undermined most of this material.  It Was the Day of the Robot didn't quite bore me or annoy me, and at 140 pages it didn't overstay its welcome, so I will award it a "barely acceptable" rating, but I am probably being generous.        

Chieftain of Andor by Andrew J. Offutt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**********

My copy of Chieftain of Andor, Dell 4551, has five pages of ads in the back, describing books about a real-life British commando raid, a fictional haunted U. S. Navy submarine, and a celebrity scientist's speculations about extraterrestrial life, as well as a science fiction novel written by Philip 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!   

1971 stories by Michael Coney, Poul Anderson, & Christopher Priest

Let's continue reading The 1972 Annual World's Best SF, the work of DAW Books and its founder, Hugo- and Nebula-winner Donald A. Wollheim.  Are these really three of the best science fiction stories of 1971?

"The Sharks of Pentreath" by Michael G. Coney (1971)

MPorcius Fiction Log superfans will be well aware that I recently aquired a copy of Charles Platt's 1980 book Dreammakers, a collection of what you might call "New Journalism" interviews of SF authors.  This book is a treasure trove for the reader of 20th century SF.  One of the interviewees is Hank Stine, who currently goes by the name Jean Marie Stine and identifies as a woman.  Stine's interview is fun in part because he was not afraid to take a hatchet to many individuals, from Dean Koontz and Piers Anthony to Lin Carter and John Varley, as well as wide swathes of the American population, from Catholics to the middle class to those who think science can solve our problems.  Stine picks out Michael Coney for particular criticism when he suggests that too many SF novels of the 1970s are based on outlandish, "unworkable" premises; he uses Coney's Friends Come in Boxes as an example.

Stine's opinion does not appear to be a consensus one: Theodore Sturgeon, Brian Aldiss, tarbandu and Joachim Boaz all seem to have a soft spot for Coney--Joachim praises Friends Come in Boxes specifically.  I read some Coney stories myself in the period before I started this blog, and while I have to admit I don't remember them at all well, my notes suggest I thought them acceptable.  Stine's interview has got me curious not only about Stine herself, but about Coney, so I'm eager to see what's up with "The Sharks of Pentreath."

Like the novel Friends Come in Boxes (which I myself have not read),"The Sharks of Pentreath" is about a drastic societal response to the problem of overpopulation. Reminding me a little of Philip Jose Farmer's novel Dayworld and the story upon which it was based, 1971's "The Sliced-Crosswise Only-On-Tuesday World," in Coney's story the human race has been split into three groups ("rotations" or "shifts.")  Every two years out of three, people are confined to steel cabinets and survive on an IV drip; this period is called "Stilllife."  During Stilllife people are conscious, and control robots called "remoters."  Through the remoters people act as tourists, travelling as widely across the world as their budgets allow.  During their "Fulllife" periods people work at jobs, accumulating the money they will spend on trips during their next Stilllife period.

Pentreath is an English seaside town which survives on the tourist trade.  Our main characters are a married couple; the husband, our narrator, is one of the "sharks" of the title, one of the not-quite-scrupulous small businessmen who take advantage of the tourists.  (His wife acts as a foil, being generous and kind, "putting people before profits" as the pinkos propose.)  Over the course of the story we learn the background of this future world, and get to know the protagonist, who is kind of a jerk, and the other "sharks."  An encounter with an elderly couple (who are visiting via remoters) works a change in our callous and misanthropic narrator; we have reason to believe that in the period after the story he will turn over a new leaf and endeavour to have a warmer and more human relationship with his wife and with his community.

Coney's style is good, and the physical settings and all the characters are believable, so I enjoyed the story.  "The Sharks of Pentreath" is certainly vulnerable to the charge Stine lays against Friends Come in Boxes, that its premise is unrealistic--I don't think people in a free society (and the England in the story still has freedom of association and private property and all that) would accept the system it describes--but this didn't diminish the pleasure I derived from reading it.

Another possible criticism is that the science fiction element of the story is superfluous--this is a story about how the example set by another couple opens a man's eyes to how to better interact with his own wife and community, it is a conventional piece of fiction about "the human heart" with an unnecessary SF element just laid on top of it.  Again, while a valid criticism, this "problem" didn't stop me from enjoying the story.  

"A Little Knowledge" by Poul Anderson (1971)

I compared an earlier story from The 1972 Annual World's Best SF, Stephen Tall's "The Bear with the Knot on His Tail," to a weak version of a Poul Anderson tale.  Well, here's the real deal!  Our buddy Poul starts us off with a two-page astronomy lecture.  (If you don't already know what Roche's Limit is, Anderon provides you incentive to look it up on google.)  You see, there's this big planet, which under ordinary circumstances would be an uninhabitable "subjovian," but it's got this oversized moon in a lopsided orbit, see, that has been scooping away at the atmosphere for millennia....
    
This is a fun, entertaining story that comfortably fits in the classic SF template of hard science, engineering, space ships, blasters and aliens embedded in an adventure plot.  And if you are wondering what interstellar trade might be like (I know with the election going the way it is going some of you businesspeople out there are scrambling for a way to get off the planet), "A Little Knowledge," like Larry Niven's "The Fourth Profession" in this same volume, presents some ideas.

Three human career criminals hijack a space ship piloted by a single small alien, a member of a sophisticated, artistic, and ambitious culture.  (I thought Anderson had perhaps based this alien society, with its elaborate courtesy and embrace of Terra's high technology, on Japan.)  The pirates have a scheme to get rich using the ship as the nucleus of a space navy they will build among belligerent aliens who are at a pre-hyper drive technological level.  The short alien triumphs over the pirates and spares galactic civilization a border war through his superior knowledge of the hard sciences and engineering.

"A Little Knowledge" first appeared in Analog, and is set in the period of Anderson's Polesotechnic League--Nicholas Van Rijn, whom we have read about several times during the course of this blog's life, even gets a mention!

Just the right length, density and tone--I liked it.

"Real-Time World" by Christopher Priest (1971)

I liked Priest's Inverted World (check out tarbandu and couchtomoon's laudatory reviews of that BSFA-winning novel), but the ending disappointed me, partly because I couldn't understand the science behind it, partly because it undermined the exciting setting the first part of the book had so evocatively described.  (Sometimes I regret finding out what the man behind the curtain is up to.)

"Real-Time World," which first boggled the mind in New Writings in SF19, is reminiscent of Inverted World in a number of ways--people in an enclosed structure discover they have been deceived about the nature of the outside world, and that their perceptions are perhaps not to be trusted.  There is also some science which I couldn't quite wrap my brain around.

The setting is what the narrator calls an "observatory."  He tells us that mankind has developed a time machine (hooray!) but it can only send you back in time a nanosecond (awwww....)  But don't be discouraged--if you are a nanosecond back in time you are invisible to everybody else!  This invisibility can negate the observer effect (sometimes colloquially called Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle) and so one of these time machines, this very observatory, was deployed on an alien planet where a bunch of scientists can observe the life and environment there surreptitiously.

But studying the alien world isn't the only research going on in the observatory!  The researchers themselves are the subject of an experiment!  "Real-Time World" is, in part, about "the news."  In an effort to figure out how much "the news" affects a person's life, the people running the experiment only dole out a small, carefully selected, portion of the news from Earth to the observatory staff.  (There is a lot of exciting news from Earth because of all the Cold War tensions, food shortages, pollution, race riots, and other 1970s obsessions going on.)  Of the observatory staff, only our narrator is in on the experiment, and he carefully records the effects of the lack of news on the scientists.  In a way I didn't understand, the change in their diet of news gave the scientists the ability to predict the future.  As the story draws to a close, they reveal their most shocking prediction: that a catastrophic war between East and West has erupted on the Earth's surface!

The scientists have also realized what the narrator already knows, that the observatory is not on an alien planet at all!  The researchers were hypnotized into believing this lie, a deception bolstered by prerecorded films played on their viewscreens that simulate views of the fictional alien planet.  But there is something the narrator and the eggheads disagree about.  The narrator believes the observatory is on Earth's moon. The boffins are sure they are in fact on Earth.  Who has been conditioned to believe an illusion, and who recognizes the truth?  The stakes in this dispute are high because the scientists insist on opening the airlock and going outside!  They have no space suits, so if the airlock opens onto the surface of the moon they will be killed at once! As the story ends, the narrator sits safely in his office, and we can't be sure whether the scientists are dead on the lunar surface or exploring an Earth ravaged by atomic war.  In fact, we can't be sure anything in the story was true and not simply an illusion inflicted on our narrator.

I wanted to like this story because I liked the claustrophobic setting described in the first few pages (for example, the observatory is apparently beset by dangerous cracks that could let in the outside vacuum) and that the narrator was the sole non-scientist among a group of scientists, and thought of himself as the only sane man among a multitude of insane people.  I've often found myself the only grad school drop-out among college professors, the only Easterner among MidWesterners, the only white person among nonwhites, the only American among foreigners, and so forth, and identify with this kind of situation (in our modern world of diversity, nonconformity and cheap travel I think many people have these kinds of experiences.)  But Priest doesn't do much with these themes, instead moving on to many other ideas (I guess those cracks were just an illusion seen only by the narrator.)

These stories which end with you doubting every single thing that happened in the story make important philosophical points (our senses are not to be trusted, free will is a myth, maybe you should have paid more attention to the lectures on Descartes and Hume back in Philosophy 101) but are not necessarily fun to read.  In our last episode I gave the "doubt everything" story by Joanna Russ in The 1972 Annual World's Best SF, "Gleepsite," a sort of guarded passing grade, but her story was short and tight, and made me furrow my brow as I tried to figure out the puzzle.  In comparison, "Real-Time World" seems long and unfocused, full of extraneous matter, and made me roll my eyes; I think I have to give this one a marginal thumbs down.

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Taken as a group, not bad; I enjoyed the human-centric Coney and the meat and potatoes hard SF Anderson, and I am sure lots of people are keen on the Priest.

In our next installment, three more pieces from The 1972 Annual World's Best SF: we've got one-of-a-kind scribe R. A. Lafferty, movie-tie-in machine Alan Dean Foster, and Leonard Tushnet, about whom I know nothing.