Mists of the Ages by Sharon Green

I sighed as I closed my eyes, called up a picture of the man in his fighting leathers to look at, and spent some time wondering if I would ever see him again.

Years ago, at one of the flea markets or antique malls my wife and I stopped at on one of our days-long car trips, I purchased a copy of Sharon Green's Mists of the Ages, a 1988 paperback from DAW.  I remember vacillating over the thing--I was curious, but would I really read it?  The book was over 300 pages, a serious time investment, and it gave every indication of living on the borderline of pornography--the description indicated that it was about a woman spy who teamed up with a male gladiator to investigate a "pleasure planet," after all, and one of the ad pages in the back was devoted to John Norman's Gor books.  (In a 2012 blog post reviewing Green's 1982 novel The Crystals of Mida, tarbandu directly compares Green's writing style and subject matter to Norman's.)  Well, all those years ago my curiosity overcame my reluctance to invest a dollar in the book, and this week my curiosity finally overcame my reluctance to invest the time it takes to read 310 pages of what I expected to be silly fights and nonconsensual sex--let's see what Mists of the Ages is all about; I like sex and violence as much as the next guy and maybe I will be pleasantly surprised!

Dalisse Imbro is the best burglar on planet Gryphon!  She's the best because she was mentored by the best, Seero, her surrogate father!  But Seero is dead, killed by the Twilight Houses, and now Imbro (her friends call her Inky!) is on a campaign of revenge against the Houses.

Chapter 1 gives us standard crime fiction stuff, starting in medias res with Inky in the middle of a burglary job, overcoming security systems and picking locks and stealing a document out of a hidden safe, and then we get all the background exposition at a bar, where Inky talks to her friends about Seero's demise and warns them not to help her on her campaign against the Twilight Houses because it is too dangerous.  Inky narrates the novel, and in these early chapters on Gryphon Green emulates the style of a hard-boiled detective story:

Getting out of my transportation brought me the stale but familiar smell of the air in that district, air that seemed to be holding itself as still as possible to avoid being noticed.  It was an attitude that seemed to be shared by a lot of the denizens of the area, and one that never failed to annoy me.

....

"I'm trying to say they weren't there," I answered, reaching for my cup of javi.  Black was the way I drank it, as black as my hair, and preferably as strong as my resolve for revenge.

Of course, instead of New York or L.A., Mists of the Ages is set in a space empire future where you ride your personal hover car to a night club and sit at a table drinking "javi," your privacy ensured by a "distortion field" that surrounds your table. 

In Chapter 2 we learn that Inky's method of taking down the Twilight Houses is to work with the local branch of the space empire's intelligence service: because the Gryphon courts are corrupted by bribes from the Houses, said Houses can only be successfully tried in Imperial Courts, and Inky steals the evidence that Imperial prosecutors need to make their case--Imperial prosecutors are permitted to use evidence obtained without a warrant or via a criminal act.  (Obviously the ACLU hasn't opened any offices in this space empire.)  When she goes to the intelligence service's HQ to deliver her latest burgled document, the intelligence people blackmail Inky into leaving the planet to join a team investigating weird goings on over on planet Joelare.  One entire continent of Joelare is covered in mists, and this continent has been turned into an amusement park called "Mists of the Ages" where wealthy people can spend time in recreations of cities from the past.  Lately people have been getting killed in mysterious accidents in the amusement park, and the Imperial cops think Inky's skills at stealing documents will be of service to them in their investigation--why bother with subpoenas and lawyers when you can just steal a company's records?

Chapter 3 covers an additional briefing Inky receives from an intelligence agent who flirts with her, and is a good example of the form most of this book takes.  Mists of the Ages is a talky book, and a typical scene consists of a long conversation larded with verbose descriptions of the furniture where the conversation takes place, the attire of the participants, and what my guide to the world of the legitimate theatre, Bertie Wooster, calls "stage business": what the talkers are doing with their eyes and what they are doing with their drinks--"I handed him a cup of javi," "he raised his cup of javi," "I sipped my javi," etc.  Green really wants you to know what a conversation between people drinking coffee looks like. 

In Chapter 4 Inky gets on the space liner to Joelare, and Green shifts gears; the noirish tone is abandoned and in its place we find the letter and spirit of one of those romantic comedy movies that infest our cinemas and cable networks.  On the liner Inky has her "meet cute" with the gladiator mentioned on the book's back cover--walking in a crowded corridor he is looking at a hot chick and Inky is looking at the hot chick's jewelry, so Inky and the muscleman blunder into each other and each blames the other for the collision.  Inky is told that this dude is Serendel, the most popular gladiator in the galaxy, and Green tries to wring some comedy out of the fact that Inky's fellow secret agents, female electronics expert Lidra and medical man Chal, are star struck at the sight of him while Inky finds him oafish and exasperating.  Of course, by the end of Chapter 5 Inky and Serendel are already softening towards each other after, in the liner's gym, he shows signs of being not a meathead but a gentleman, and she shows signs of being not a ditz but a talented athlete.

In Chapter 6, a third of the way through the novel, our three government spooks, undercover as tourists, and their new buddy, stud and arena star Serendel, arrive at Joelare and don the costumes they will wear as roleplayers in the amusement park.  The middle third of Mists of the Ages almost entirely ignores the espionage/law enforcement plot, and is instead about the relationships among our four protagonists, the development of which we directly observe and indirectly learn of via tediously long conversations.  We endure page after page of flirting and lovers' spats as Inky and Lidra play hard to get and try to maintain their independence in response to Serendel and Chal's pursuit of their favors, and page after page in which Chal or Lidra talks to Inky about the absent characters behind their backs.  These conversations are the same cliched glop you can hear on the TV every single night: Chal wants to "make a life together" with Lidra, but fears Lidra is reluctant because "she's been hurt in the past;" Lidra and Chal make each other jealous by flirting with Serendel and Inky; Lidra eventually explains that what she is really worried about is getting involved with men she works with; Lidra and Chal urge Inky to be more open to the gladiator's advances, etc.  Mind-numbing!

Independence is a theme of Mists of the Ages and we see it not only in how vigorously the ladies resist the men's advances.  Inky reminisces about refusing to join a clique in high school; Inky tells us how she doesn't care that the average person thinks that stealing is wrong (halfway through the book we learn that Seero and Inky aren't really thieves anyway, but more like vigilantes because all their breaking and entering is of the properties of bad people); when a member of the amusement park staff warns our four heroes to obey his advice in the interests of safety, they object: "Paying for the privilege of being bossed around isn't my idea of a fun vacation" says Lidra, and Serendel adds, "I don't obey anyone without question."  Serendel repeatedly complains about the burdensome responsibilities and limits put on him by his fans and trainers.

Over the course of Chapters 7 through 15 our heroes visit two of the amusement park's historical recreations.  The first of the two milieus the characters explore is ancient Llexis, where lords compete over women through the medium of their magicians.  Inky objects to roleplaying a woman subordinated to a lord, and decides to go off by herself; when she gets scared by some of the park's simulated dangers (actors in monster suits), Serendel appears and comforts her.  When another tourist's magician defeats Serendel's magician and, by the rules of the game, Inky is supposed to have sex with this guy, she and Serendel simply refuse to follow the rules.  I have to wonder why Green bothered with this whole "amusement park recreating many strange cultures" gimmick if 1) there are only two cultures represented in the book and 2) the characters just ignore the customs of these places that are actually strange and might present the reader with some kind of entertainment. 

As the final third of the novel begins, Inky and Serendel declare their love for each other and consummate their relationship.  It's the best sex of Inky's life!

Because tarbandu tells us The Crystals of Mida includes nonconsensual sex, I was expecting some nasty sex scenes in The Mists of the Ages, but, in fact, Green in this book practically fetishizes consent.  When trying to comfort her, Serendel asks Inky if he can put his arm around her shoulders and she rhapsodizes over how wonderful this is in comparison to all the times men in the past put their arms around her without asking first.  (Does this milquetoast attitude about sex really sit comfortably next to the novel's Death Wish/Dirty Harry attitude towards vigilantism and the use of illegally obtained evidence?)  Maybe in The Crystals of Mida Green was answering John Norman's Gor books by having women sexually exploiting men instead of the reverse, and here in The Mists of the Ages she is doing the same by having nobody exploit anybody and instead portraying safe space sex.

The characters move to the next recreated historical society, Bulm, where the crime story rises from the dead.  Inky and Serendel are to roleplay out a game in which she is chained up as a sacrifice to a monster and the gladiator is to rescue her, but instead of an actor in a suit a real monster shows up.  Fortunately Serendal has been carrying his gladiator sword with him all this time--it's essentially a light saber, a hilt that generates a force field blade when he turns it on--and our heroes kill the creature in a long fight scene in which we get detailed descriptions of the box Inky climbs up on and the chandelier she hangs from so she can wrap a chain around the towering monster's neck.

In the last 40 or so pages of the book our heroes sneak into the amusement park's HQ to seize the evidence they need and learn that the Mists of the Ages management are drug dealers who are spreading a powerful new drug throughout the galaxy by addicting tourists.  Inky distracts guards so her friends can escape, and is captured and tortured.  Luckily Imperial soldiers rescue her before she is actually killed.

The real climax of Mists of the Ages isn't this police stuff, but the fact that when Serendel realizes Inky isn't a full-time secret agent, but in fact a thief, he breaks up with her because he hates thieves!  A thief killed his sister!  Wait, how can a romantic comedy end with the main characters broken up?  Because Mists of the Ages is the first of an aborted series about Inky and Serendel's relationship!  The novel ends in a cliffhanger when Inky refuses to go on a second mission against the drug dealers for the intelligence apparatus and they threaten to haul her off to prison.  Presumably in volume two of the series, which was never published, Inky would win Serendel's love again (and continue the whole Twilight Houses plot.)

At the level of the individual sentence and paragraph, Mists of the Ages is more or less competently written, and some may appreciate its message about women's independence and the ability of women to steal and spy just as well as men, but I cannot recommend it--it is long, boring, and lacks originality.  It is only nominally a science fiction story--SF elements like the gladiator sword or the properties of the mist are essentially superfluous--or an adventure story--the pace is slow and there is very little excitement or suspense.  This is a comedy about meeting your soulmate hung on the skeleton of a detective story, but the characters are bland, their relationships conventional, and the jokes anemic, so Mists of the Ages fails in its real purpose as well as its ostensible one.     

Earth Factor X by A. E. Van Vogt

Resentment seethed...Damn those male rats!  Doesn't a man ever have a human feeling for a woman?  Is it all just sex?

In 1974 The Secret Galactics appeared as a large-sized paperback; on its purple cover were emblazoned the words "ONLY THE BRAIN-MAN COULD STOP EARTH'S TAKEOVER!"  The cover also claimed that Van Vogt was "America's greatest science-fiction writer."  It is debatable who had the most reason to find this bold declaration irritating, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, or the people of Canada, where Van Vogt was born and lived the first 30 years of his life?  Well, if we've learned one thing reading all these SF books, it is that you can't take the things written on their covers too seriously.  So, no hard feelings, Canada!

Two years later DAW printed the novel in paperback with the title Earth Factor X.  DAW No. 206, a copy of which I own and read this week, has an embarrassingly amateurish red cover by Deane Cate.  Later DAW editions of the novel would have a banal but competent white cover by Greg Theakston.  

The heroes of Earth Factor X are Dr. Carl Hazzard and his estranged wife Marie, a couple of Nobel-prize winning scientists.  A year ago Carl was "murdered," but the world's finest brain surgeon managed to save Carl's brain and hook it up to a life-sustaining machine.  As the novel begins Carl has just been installed in a robot body equipped with six wheels, claws, a blow torch, and a powerful rifle (Van Vogt at times describes it as a "cannon.")  It is fun to compare how Hazzard in his robot body is depicted by different artists:
 

Nobody saw fit to depict the cannon!

Early in the novel Hazzard travels around town (I think Los Angeles) in a specially modified box truck, doing detective and counterespionage work.  From within the truck he can fire weapons, but he isn't afraid to roll out of the truck and get his claws dirty, breaking and entering, eavesdropping and hunting for clues.  The wheels of his robot body are "flexible" and each can be "manipulated separately," allowing him to climb stairs.  Carl, following tips from Silver, one of his many mistresses, learns about the impending conquest of Earth by aliens who currently live among us in disguise!

So, who are these aliens?  We are told there are numerous alien races represented on Earth, sitting in positions of power in the government and business, but only three play a prominent role in the story--the Deeans, who have decided to take over the planet and have sent a huge space ship (almost a mile long) to accomplish this task; the Sleele, who are universally considered untrustworthy, and the Luind, the most advanced and benevolent of the alien races.

A third of the way through the novel Carl and Marie are captured by the Deeans, but with Silver's help Marie manages to escape.  (Silver is married to one of the Deean leaders and provides Marie with an energy gun.)  Marie also receives aid from the Luind leader on Earth, who is one of her lovers.  We witness quite a bit of diplomacy between the three main alien players.  In the end Carl, the Luind leader and the Sleele leader work together to trick the computer running the Deean ship to fly back home, which totally ruins the Deeans' plans (the ship won't be back for 100 years.) Van Vogt suggests that all three of them are acting not in the interests of the people of Earth, but in order to further their relationships with Marie, Silver, and other women.        

Despite the alien takeover plot, Earth Factor X is about gender roles and sex; maybe the title is a reference to the X chromosome?  The prologue of the novel is a "Special Report" from the alien "Galactoid-Embrid Institute" to members of the Deean invasion force.  The subject of the report is "Human Women" and it asserts "It is agreed by all: women of earth have to be experienced to be believed.  In the entire universe there seems to be no female quite so complex and unpredictable."  The aliens lament that their failures to conquer Earth have been the result of neglecting to take the human female into account.

Because he is a disembodied brain that can't have sex, Hazzard, who has been obsessed with sex since his youth and has had nearly 200 sex partners, is wracked by doubts about his manhood.  Before he was "murdered," Hazzard was writing a book on "the whole mystery of women's behavior," inspired by his own difficult sexual relationship with Marie.  This work, entitled Women Are Doomed, was never published, but Hazzard had a copy bound and he shared its wisdom with his friends. One female friend wrote a rejoinder, Men Are Doomed.   Van Vogt treats us to sample aphorisms from both of them:

"A large part of a woman's brainwashing includes a set of assumptions that men do the risky things that have to be done in this world....So long as a woman, or women, permit such attitudes to control them, she will deliver sex as a payment and never as a gift."

"The terrifying neurosis of the Real Man is that he wants what he can't have, and doesn't want what he can." 

Earth Factor X is full of discussions between men about women and sexual relations (or as Hazzard puts it, "the man-woman thing"), and conversations between male characters which reveal that all of them, be they alien spies, cops, scientists, whatever, live lives that revolve around their relationships with their wives and girlfriends. There are similar conversations between women which indicate the primacy of men in their lives. We also get Marie's internal monologues about her own sexual encounters, and flashbacks to Carl and Marie's marriage.

I'm not sure to what extent Van Vogt is endorsing the ideas about male and female psychology and sociology put forward by Carl and the other characters, and to what extent he is challenging them.  Carl is kind of a jerk, and misjudges Marie, which calls into question the value of the wisdom to be found in his book.

So, is this book any good?  I don't think I can recommend Earth Factor X on its merits.  I don't feel like I wasted my own time reading it because I am curious about Van Vogt's crazy career, but I doubt it will appeal to the typical person, someone who reads SF books in hopes of finding adventure, excitement, jokes, good writing, or unusual new ideas.

Van Vogt is to be commended for using science fiction as a vehicle to talk about gender and sex, but nothing he has to say is particularly groundbreaking; women like to spend [other people's] money, men are obsessed with sex, women like to get attention, men get bored of having sex with the same woman, women are attracted to ruthless powerful men, and playing hard to get is an effective sexual strategy, are all things we've heard before.  And it's not as if Van Vogt is a Somerset Maugham or a Vladimir Nabokov, someone with a good writing style who can create memorable characters and thus pull our heartstrings with timeworn plots about marital infidelity and sexual frustration.  The writing in Earth Factor X is poor; half or more of its sentences could be rewritten profitably, and this time Van Vogt doesn't have the excuse he had in Computer Eye, that he is writing in the voice of a nonhuman.

This one is for Van's devoted fans only, and people new to Van Vogt should start with Isher and Rull stuff, and Voyage of the Space Beagle.

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Perhaps in keeping with the sex theme, my edition of Earth Factor X includes an ad for the DAW editions of John Norman's books, including Norman's sex manual and guide to "the man-woman thing," Imaginative Sex.

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In our next installment, Van Vogt again tackles the tough issues!  We'll be looking at 1973's Future Glitter, perhaps better known to our British friends as Tyrannopolis.

The Green Odyssey by Philip José Farmer

"'It was the hand of man struck him down, my boy.  If it's violent death you are trying to explain, don't drag in the supernatural.  There's enough murder in the hearts of humankind to take care of every case.'"

I don't run into the word "roistering" very often. But here it is on both the front and back covers of my 1966 printing of Philip José Farmer's 1957 novel The Green Odyssey. And from two different sources!

If these blurbs are to be believed, The Green Odyssey is a superlative, one-of-a-kind adventure.  According to the New York Herald Tribune it is the "most agreeable interplanetary adventure novel" ever, and according to Inside S-F it has a heroine who is "unique" and "magnificent."  (Alert the feminists, their dream book has arrived!) Sounds terrific, and the Powers cover sure looks terrific.  Let's see if this 152 page paperback lives up to the hype, and to Power's impressive illustration.

Like Adam Reith in Jack Vance's Planet of Adventure books, and Jason dinAlt in Harry Harrison's Deathworld 2, Alan Green crash landed on a relatively primitive planet.  (Ralph Nader should look into these persistent problems with space ships crashing.)  Green ends up in a country where most of the free people are short brunettes; he's a tall blonde, like most of the slaves, and is quickly enslaved himself.  As the novel begins he is a sort of butler and male concubine to a beautiful but stupid and annoying duchess, Zuni.  Green also has a wife, Amra, who is beautiful but domineering and only respects a man who can dominate her in turn.

(On second thought, do not alert the feminists, this is not their dream book after all.)

Word comes to Duchess Zuni's court that another space ship has arrived on the planet, and its two-man crew has been taken captive.  (The superstitious natives don't know about space and think these space men are demons.) The Green Odyssey follows Alan Green's adventures as he flees slavery and tries to hook up with these fellow marooned spacefarers and get off the planet.  He cuts a deal with a merchant, fights his way out of the castle, and sails away as part of the crew of the merchant's wheeled square-rigged land ship.  His canny wife figures out his plan, and joins him on the voyage with her gaggle of children, one of whom is Green's.

The land ship crosses a vast flat plain to the kingdom where the spacers are imprisoned. Along the way the land ship is attacked by pirates and then by cannibals.  Green also has trouble with the ship's crew and the merchant; fortunately the clever and resourceful Amra is there to help him; she is instrumental in saving his life more than once.  The cannibals kill some of Amra's children, but Farmer doesn't dwell on how horrible an experience this must be.   

One of the themes of the book is how absurd and counterproductive religion is, and how supernatural beliefs grow out of misunderstandings of mundane phenomena.  The planet is covered in high tech artifacts, which the superstitious inhabitants interpret as the work of demons or gods.  Green's modern and rational outlook enables him to outwit everybody else.   I think Farmer must have been an atheist or agnostic when Green Odyssey was written, but as I learned in his essay in The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, his thinking about religion would later evolve.

Green activates a huge aircraft the natives think is a hill, killing numerous people in the process, and takes to the skies, terrorizing the kingdom where the one surviving spaceman is held captive.  The king and the priests surrender the spaceman and the two-man scout space ship, and, after teaching Amra how to operate the invincible aircraft, Green heads to Earth, promising to return to Amra as part of a large expedition that will investigate the many secrets of the planet's ancient technological civilization.  (The flat plain, for example, was created by these mysterious ancients and has been maintained by their robots for centuries.  Like his famous Riverworld series and his World of Tiers books, Farmer's The Green Odyssey is set in an artificial world shaped by mysterious beings.)

The book exhibits considerable hostility towards the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie; I guess we could call this another theme.  The aristocratic women are sexy but stupid, and the aristocratic men are obese.  The merchant character is a skilled leader and sailor, but also fat, greedy, and a ruthless backstabber.   It is also perhaps significant that those children of Amra's who are killed by cannibals are products of her liaisons with aristocrats; we never learn their names.

When Green needs a land boat he just steals one, with the aid of one of Amra's sons. Green sucker punches the guy guarding it, while Amra's son beats him over the head with a pipe.  We are told the owner of the land yacht (whom we know nothing about and who never appears "on screen") must be rich, which in the eyes of some may excuse the theft, but what about the poor guard?

isfdb image of 1957 edition

This attack on the yacht's guard brings up some more themes of the novel, moral relativism and man's propensity for violence.  We are told that Green's modern space faring civilization is a peaceful one, in which children are taught to abhor violence.  Under ordinary circumstances Green would not enjoy any kind of violence, but life on this violent planet has had an effect on him. Green gleefully throws a dog who has been tormenting him for months off a castle balcony, enjoys shooting wild dogs from the crow's nest of the land ship, and is thrilled during a battle, crying out "This is living!"  He also forgives the bloodthirstiness expressed by Amra and her son.  What makes moral sense in some places and some situations doesn't make sense in others. Farmer further suggests that there is a "philosophy of the body," a natural propensity to enjoy action, danger, and violence, that is "older and deeper" than rational philosophies that teach a loathing of violence.  This "philosophy of the body" may lead the cannibals to commit horrible atrocities (we are told that "like all undisciplined primitives," in their initial assault they "killed indiscriminately and hysterically,") but Green needs it as much as his modern logic and science knowledge to survive.

Farmer's body of work is uneven--I recall Maker of Universes, the first volume in the World of Tiers series, being pretty lame--but in The Green Odyssey Farmer gives us a well-realized and interesting setting that includes a believable culture, strange natural and man-made elements, and entertaining characters.  I'd say it is moderately good; the reviewers are correct to say it is entertaining, though I would not share their breathless enthusiasm. 

I recommend The Green Odyssey as a fun adventure.  It is also your chance to see the word "roistering" in action; Farmer uses it twice in the text, presumably inspiring his admiring reviewers to follow suit.

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The last page of my copy of The Green Odyssey have some interesting advertising. 

There is a full page ad for the first of John Norman's Gor novels, Tarnsman of Gor.  In my teens I read Tarnsman of Gor, and thought it a fun Barsoom-style adventure.  It didn't (as far as I can recall) include so much of what the later Gor books became famous for, what Wikipedia calls a "focus on relationships between dominant men and submissive women."  I never read any of the later Gor books, I think they were not at the library (where I got Tarnsman of Gor.)

The final page of The Green Odyssey lists some "early classics" published by Ballantine, most of which I have some familiarity with.  Ahead of Time includes the very good story "Home is the Hunter," as well as "Or Else," which I recall not liking very much.  Brain Wave is good, and To Live Forever is alright, I think below average for Vance.  (I think nowadays we are supposed to refer to To Live Forever by the author-approved title Clarges.)  I read the novella version of Nerves and didn't think much of it. I haven't read Gladiator-At Law, which I assume is some kind of satire attacking lawyers.  I haven't read The Space Merchants, a satire attacking advertising, either.  I'm not into those broad satires, and I don't have any particular animus against people in advertising or the law. 

Lallia by E. C. Tubb

For Christmas my brother got me an iTunes gift card.  I don't listen to a lot of new music, and when I do, its on YouTube (I guess I am vulnerable to the charge of stealing the food right out of poor Hope Sandoval's mouth.)  So I recently used the credit to purchase from Gateway e-books of some of E. C. Tubb's Dumarest novels.  Today I finished Lallia, the sixth Dumarest adventure, reading it on my iPhone.

I won't deny that I would rather have a paperback copy of Lallia (in particular I am always curious about the interior illustrations you find in Ace Doubles), but I've not seen one in a used bookstore, and for price and convenience, the Gateway digital edition beat out Amazon and Abebooks' used copies.

The Gateway edition of Lallia has a blurb on its cover from Michael Moorcock.  As those of you who follow my every move are aware, it is just such a Moorcock comment about Tubb that led me to start reading the Dumarest books in the first place.  I certainly agree that the Dumarest books are "fast-moving and colourful."  Another reason Moorcock, who describes himself as an "anarchist," has famously attacked more conservative writers like J. R. R. Tolkein, Robert Heinlein, and C. S. Lewis, and has engaged in what you might call feminist literary activism (revising his own work to be more sensitive to womens' issues, and trying to stigmatize and marginalize John Norman's Gor books), might appreciate the Dumarest series is that Tubb populates them with callous aristocrats, greedy businessmen, and manipulative intellectuals, as well as the legions of poor desperate people who suffer from their indifference and exploitation.

The other four Dumarest books I have read have included secondary plots about competing elites who enlist Dumarest in their struggles, but in Lallia it's all Dumarest; I think he appears in every scene. Dumarest, as part of his quest across the galaxy in search of Earth, a planet most people see as a fiction, joins the crew of a small space ship.  This ship, the Moray, is bad news. The ship's captain tries to make a profit by carrying cargo and passengers between planets, but they are just barely getting by, and don't even have the money to keep the ship clean and properly maintain its systems.  Tubb pithily characterizes each member of the doomed Moray's crew; the captain, who is horrified of space and indulges in the use of an alien symbiote that provides him vivid dreams, the dipsomaniac engineer who puts everyone at risk by getting drunk when he should be carefully tending to the sensitive hyperspace drive, the naive young steward who doesn't know what he has gotten himself into by signing up.

One of the themes of the Dumarest books which I haven't mentioned in earlier blog posts is religion.  In every book the bizarre Cyclan, a galaxy-wide organization of scarlet-robe-clad geniuses who have had brain surgery to disable all emotion, appear.  The members of the Cyclan use their fantastic mathematical ability and ice cold logic to manipulate others and increase their influence.  The foil of the Cyclan is the Church of Universal Brotherhood; they have also appeared in all the Dumarest books I have read.  The members of the Church try to help the poor and wretched, giving them food, helping them negotiate with the middle class for jobs and medical care, that sort of thing.  Tubb (at least in the books I have read) has always portrayed the Church monks as selfless and sincere, but there is a Clockwork Orange aspect to the Church; those who accept food from the monks are expected to kneel before the "benediction light," which conditions them hypnotically with the command "thou shalt not kill."  (You can believe that Dumarest, who regularly finds himself fighting for his life against assassins, gladiators, and monsters, has never knelt before the benediction light.)

Religion takes center stage in Lallia.  The most responsible and sympathetic of the crew of the Moray is the navigator, who is a student of ancient religions and a committed believer.  One of the planets the Moray lands on is home to a primitivist "back-to-nature" sect that considers metal "a thing of the Evil One" and uses only wooden and stone implements.  In the end of the novel the ship crashes on a planet called Shrine, the destination of scores of sick or deformed pilgrims.  These people seek a miraculous cure, and sometimes receive it, for on Shrine is an ancient alien artifact which nobody understands, but which truly has healing properties.  Tubb's view of religion is nuanced, and each character, through his words and actions, evinces a different attitude towards religion, and we see religion employed as a tool to dominate others, as a comfort to those in trouble, and as an inspiration to perform good works.

This may be a book in which the author presents views about religion, but primarily Lallia is still an adventure story.  As in earlier volumes, Dumarest ends up fighting for his life as a gladiator and rescuing a beautiful woman who has psychic powers.  He also has to contend with a Cyclan assassin; the Cyclan is still trying to retrieve the ring that book 4's beautiful psychic woman, Kalin, gave him, a ring which has encoded within it a priceless technological secret.  Lallia also moves the plot of Dumarest's saga forward; when he touches the artifact on Shrine Dumarest receives a vision of the galaxy, with the region where Earth lies highlighted.  

Another solid Dumarest adventure; interesting characters, strange creatures and technology, plenty of violence and tragedy.  Next up on my iPhone, Technos, the seventh Dumarest caper.