On Wings of Song by Thomas M. Disch

I have read quite a few books and stories by Thomas M. Disch, and how I have felt about them runs the gamut. I thought The Prisoner poor and forgettable, Echo Round his Bones mediocre. I thought The Genocides memorable but a bit weak in execution. 334 I thought above average, and Camp Concentration I thought far above average. Disch’s criticism is also interesting; he seems to not only dislike but bitterly resent Ray Bradbury, for example.

This week I read On Wings of Song, Disch’s 1979 novel, in the ugly 2003 trade edition. (I mean that the cover’s color and stock images are ugly; I actually like the old-looking typeface of the main text inside.)

On Wings of Song is set in a near-future dystopic world in which the United States is in terrible shape, subject to terrorist attacks, food shortages and power shortages, but still better off than the rest of the world; early on we learn that Tel Aviv has been destroyed by rockets, that Iowa is full of refugees from Italy, and that potentially dissident populations, like Basques in Spain, Jews in Russia and Irishmen in England, carry implanted in their bodies explosives that can be detonated by government radio signals should they cause any trouble.

Iowa is a theocratic police state, home to the book’s protagonist, Daniel Weinreb. Daniel’s father immigrated to New York from Israel, and Daniel was born in New York, but moved to Iowa as a child when his father was sent there to practice dentistry.

The United States is riven by a controversy, what we might call a “culture war,” over the issue of “flying.” By connecting themselves to an “apparatus” and singing, people can leave their bodies and fly around as invisible “fairies.” Not everybody can do it; achieving flight takes a high level of commitment. Some people fly once and are never able to do it again, some try and never succeed, despite much effort. Some leave their comatose bodies behind for good.

Religious people are opposed to flying, and there have been attempts to pass Constitutional Amendments outlawing it. In Iowa flying is forbidden by state law, the type of music people are permitted to listen to is tightly controlled, and even newspapers which run ads for flying gear are illegal. Daniel, as a teen, gets in trouble with the law because he has been delivering black market copies of the illegal Minnesota newspaper. The authorities have been turning a blind eye to the sale of the paper, but when Daniel’s best friend disappears (apparently running away from home with $845 of stolen money because he wants to fly) Daniel is arrested in hopes that he will be able to provide information on his pal’s whereabouts. He cannot, and is stuck with a substantial prison sentence.

In prison Daniel meets a woman who has flown, and a cold-hearted murderer who is also a talented singer, and he is inspired to devote his life to music and achieving flight. After he has served his sentence he starts a relationship with a wealthy girl, Boadicea Whiting, the daughter of the richest man in Iowa. Soon Daniel is married into this wealthy family, which lives in what amounts to a feudal manor; because of all the crime and terrorism, farms in Iowa are developing into high security complexes behind the walls of which the farm workers as well as the farm owners live. Daniel isn’t above enjoying the luxuries afforded by his new access to the Whitings’ wealth, but he also feels that money is inevitably corrupting.

On their honeymoon, a trip across the world, Daniel and his teenage wife stop in New York where they check into a hotel that caters to people who want to fly for the first time. In separate soundproof studios they each strap into an apparatus like a dentist’s chair, affix wires to their heads, and begin singing songs they have specially chosen. Daniel tries to fly for hours but fails, while Boadicea succeeds and leaves her limp drooling body behind… for fifteen years. Their airplane flight to Europe leaves without them and the jet explodes over the ocean, presumably blown up by terrorists who hate Daniel’s in-laws, though I thought there was a hint of possibility that the in-laws themselves had arranged for the disaster.

Having registered at the flying hotel under a false name, and believed by the world to be dead, Daniel takes up a precarious residence under a new identity in an economically depressed and crime-ridden New York City. For a few years he lives by pawning Boadicea’s jewelry, and when that runs out he works odd jobs, like waiting in lines for theatre tickets for people too busy to wait for their own tickets. He isn’t above working as a prostitute or begging. Daniel not only has to keep himself alive, but pay for a place for his comatose wife and the IV fluid she needs - he feels it is his duty to keep her body alive so she can return to it, should she wish to.

Daniel continues to aspire to sing professionally and to fly, and eventually falls in with the opera crowd, meeting various bizarre characters, among them castrati, whites who admire blacks and have their skin dyed in order to emulate their idols, and a hunchbacked recluse who writes operas that are pawned off as rediscovered 18th century originals. Daniel’s good looks, and a bit of luck, land him the position of concubine to the leading castrato, and in the final stages of the novel he is the world famous star of a new opera about cartoonish bunnies. Boadicea returns to her body, urges Daniel to continue to try to fly so that he might join her, builds up her strength over a few months and then flies again, never to return. Daniel returns to Iowa a hero, where he is murdered; Disch leaves open the possibility that Daniel has flown right before he dies – it is not clear if he is in a real flight apparatus when he dies, or a fake one, whether he has truly flown or is shamming.

Over the years, when I read ads and references to On Wings of Song, I had assumed it would be all about the liberating nature of creative expression, and I guess that is part of it, but in the main the book is bitter and cynical. Disch suggests that the world is incurably corrupt and unjust, that we are all at the mercy of circumstance and none of us masters of our fates. One of the book’s themes is how successful or happy people are putting on an act, fooling the world and themselves. In prison Daniel reads a book on religion which argues that, while Christianity is obviously absurd and incredible, by pretending to believe it, acting as if we believe it, we can make ourselves happier and our lives better. Boadicea presses upon him a self help book which advises readers to “Always pretend to be your favorite movie star – and you will be.” The richest man in Iowa wears a false beard in public because it helps him to act, and thus become, a “gentleman.” In New York Daniel not only takes a fake name but grows a beard as a disguise, and later wears blackface to further his career as a prostitute and a singer. Daniel’s last act is an attempt to fool people into thinking he can fly when he cannot.

Disch also really seems to have it in for Iowa, where he was born and spent his childhood years, and for that iconic Iowan, the farmer, as well as for religion and religious people in general. I guess it is not surprising that a gay man interested in the arts would prefer New York City to the Midwest, and be hostile to religion, especially in the time period in which Disch lived his early life and wrote On Wings of Song.

Finally, what are we to make of flying? It appears to be a metaphor for artistic expression, though at times the novel seems to be comparing it to drug use or sexual experimentation; the response to flying of religious people in the novel certainly seems to be based on real life religious people’s attitudes towards sex and drugs. But flying takes special equipment and a level of skill and commitment, and is thus reserved for an elite; Daniel himself (it appears) never flies, even after he has become a world famous singer (though of ridiculous material.)  Perhaps Disch is telling us that truly transcendent art requires talent, dedication, and sacrifice, and that only a few people can produce such art; probably this is what we should expect an accomplished art, theatre and poetry critic like Disch to believe. I do have to admit that when I first picked up the book I expected its vision to be more democratic; after all, even the least talented people find pleasure in singing, if only in the privacy of the bath or in the anonymity of a church service.

Disch’s style is very good, very smooth, making On Wings of Song a joy to read, and the strange world Daniel explores and the issues Disch addresses are all interesting and thought-provoking. On Wings of Song is a very good novel, and I highly recommend it, with the warning that some might find it offensive or depressing.

Past Master by R. A. Lafferty

As I admitted in the comments to my blog post about Utopia, the main reason I read Thomas More’s famous work at this time was as preparation for reading R. A. Lafferty’s first published novel, Past Master, which I purchased in late November along with some other Lafferty paperbacks.

The back cover of my copy of Past Master, the 1968 Ace Science Fiction Special, includes lengthy and detailed praise for the novel from people much smarter and more successful than I am.  Praise for Lafferty and this book, we are told, is unanimous! Dare I buck the trend? Luckily, I need not dare; the book is good!  Almost every page of Past Master confronts the reader with a bewildering mystery, a strange oddity or a striking image, and I enjoyed it.  The praise is still unanimous!

It is the 26th century. Humanity has colonized several planets, but by far the most populous and prominent, in fact overshadowing Earth, is Astrobe. The novel begins in a building on Astrobe that is under attack by “mechanical killers” with “ogre faces.” Taking cover inside the building are three men, the three leaders of Astrobe: Cosmos Kingmaker, the wealthiest man on Astrobe, Peter Procter, the luckiest, and Fabian Foreman, the smartest. Each of these three men believes he is the true ruler, and is manipulating the other two.

The mechanical killers have come to destroy Foreman; their mind scanners can detect doubts about "the Astrobe Dream," the ruling ideology of the planet, and Foreman is going through a period of skepticism about how things on Astrobe are run.  He knows a secret way out of the building, but before he flees the three leaders most come to an important decision. Astrobe, described by Kingmaker as “the last chance of mankind,” is in jeopardy, and a man must be found who can lead Astrobe out of these troubles, or at least serve as the public face of the ruling clique as they strive to solve the crisis. It is decided to send an agent back to Earth and back through time to enlist a great man from history for this task, and the man they settle on is Thomas More, the English lawyer and Catholic saint, opponent of the Protestant Reformation and author of Utopia.

The agent is a man called Paul, a man experienced in dealing with danger, who is pursued by the same types of mechanical killers that are after Foreman.  He fights and connives his way to a space ship and to Earth, which is 1.5 parsecs away. In one month the Hopp-Equation Drive on Paul's ship can propel a space ship 1.5 parsecs, a distance it takes light five years to cross, but such travel has unnerving side effects. For one thing, travelers are subject to “reversals;” during the voyage men become women, right-handers become left-handers. Space travelers also experience as much psychic activity in that one month as they would normally experience in five years.  This manifests itself in thousands of vivid dreams, one following after the other.  These dreams can be symbolic and even precognitive.

Lafferty’s version of Thomas More is a charming character who, when brought forward in time one thousand years, embraces tobacco and mystery and science fiction novels, and asks Paul if the fishing is good on Astrobe. He tells Paul that he has been visited by time travelers before, and expresses dismay that so many people have seen Utopia as a blueprint for an ideal civilization when in fact he meant it as a satire and a warning of the kind of sick society he feared would result if trends he detected in early 16th century Europe were allowed to continue.

After landing on Astrobe Paul and More fight their way through their mysterious enemies, aided by equally bizarre allies, to safety.  More is enthusiastically welcomed by the ruling class of Astrobe and begins to investigate the mysteries presented by the planet to him and by the novel to the reader.  Life is easy in the well-organized cities of Astrobe, where poverty and illness have been eliminated, along with individuality. (The Astrobe Dream holds that a society is like a body, and all the citizens have to work together the way all the cells of a body work together.  Following this analogy, an individual is like a cancer.) What exactly is the crisis that is threatening Astrobe?  Is it the high suicide rate?  The fact that a large proportion of the population has lost faith in the ideology of Astrobe and gone to live in reeking unhealthy slums or wild feral areas where they are in danger from ravenous monsters?  Or is it Ouden, a sentient celestial nothingness worshipped as a god by the artificial people of Astrobe, who wishes to extend his dominion to include the natural old-fashioned humans?

The climax of the novel comes when More, performing the duties of a rubberstamp president, refuses to rubberstamp a single piece of legislation, one outlawing belief in God.  More is sentenced to death, and his public execution inspires an upsurge of feeling among the citizens of the perfect cities and an attack by an army from the slums.  Lafferty compares the death of Thomas More in the year 2535 with such epoch-marking incidents as the fall of the Roman Republic, the Protestant Reformation, the discovery of America, and the birth of Jesus.  A new age is dawning, an old world is dying and a new world being born.  Whether this new age will be better than the old Lafferty does not say, but he says we can and should hope.

This is a dense novel, full of strange characters with weird powers and mysterious agendas, dreadful fights, and allusions to religious and political topics, and sprinkled with bizarre dreams and tall tales.  More himself, rather than some stalwart exemplar, is a complex, shifting figure whose faith in Christianity comes and goes, and whose allegiance and objectives change back and forth.  Lafferty is no doubt opposed to the atheistic and tyrannical Astrobe dream, but admits that the idea of a perfectly planned, perfectly easy life can be very attractive, so seductive that a man as wise as More might fall for it.  But a life that is too easy is not worth living; the people of Astrobe are committing suicide by the millions and abandoning in droves the perfectly organized cities because a life without challenge or struggle is not a life at all.

Lafferty doesn't use words like "socialism" or "collectivism" or "communism," but I still think it is fair to see the book as, in part, a (hostile) commentary on socialism and an expansive welfare state.  Lafferty employs one of the traditional criticisms of socialism, that it requires a brutally repressive enforcement apparatus that polices people's very thoughts, but I think it is interesting that he abandons one of the other traditional attacks on socialism, that the lack of property and price signals would lead to inefficiencies and poverty.  Instead, Lafferty suggests that even if socialism succeeds on its own terms and produces plenty for all, that it is inhuman and soul destroying.  Multitudes of people on Astrobe freely choose to work dangerous jobs in a polluted slum rather than live a life of total ease and absolute comfort in the shining cities.

Machines and artificial people (Lafferty never says "robots") are very important to the novel.  It is these machines, which can do all the boring or dangerous jobs as well as read and even manipulate minds, which make the efficient Astrobe economy and oppressive Astrobe police state possible.  The sympathy More feels for the Astrobe Dream is partly or wholly due to psychic probes, sent by the nihilistic leaders of the artificial people, which put thoughts into More's head as well as words into his mouth.  (When More is aware of these probes he calls them "snakes.")  Past Master may be as much a criticism of technology as it is of government intervention into private and economic life; when men become too reliant on soulless machines, Lafferty suggests, men lose their souls and become mere machines themselves.

Compared to the other Lafferty novels I have read, The Devil is Dead and The Reefs of Earth, Past Master, in plot and style, is a little more in line with those of a conventional science fiction novel; there are well-realized and sympathetic characters, the presentation of futuristic technologies and societies, and a plot arc full of twists that generates suspense and ends with a climactic paradigm shift.  Past Master has fewer silly jokes, though there are some good ones.  Past Master is probably more "user friendly" than The Devil is Dead and Reefs of Earth, though it still is distinctly a Lafferty work, often folksy in tone and with numerous references to life after death, which seems to be something Lafferty is very interested in.  (We are reminded more than once that More himself died a thousand years before his adventure on Astrobe, there is a scene in which hundreds of skulls in niches on a crypt wall respond to the approach of an immortal woman, and there is a character called Adam whom we are told has died many times.)

Highly recommended to fans of literary science fiction and to classic SF fans curious to read something new and different but made up of so many of those classic SF elements we all love, like space travel, time travel, oppressive governments, telepathy, robots, aliens, monsters and wars.      

*******

If you are interested in Lafferty and SF that is a little off the beaten path you should definitely check out valued commenter Kevin's great blog, Yet Another Lafferty Blog.  Envy his Lafferty collection!

Utopia by Thomas More

Way back in my Rutgers days I was supposed to read Utopia by Thomas More in a class on Tudor England taught by Professor Maurice Lee. I must have had some video games to play or something, because I didn't read it. Maybe I was painting some Games Workshop tanks and artillery that week? Anyway, this week I downloaded an electronic version of Utopia and completed the assignment, less than 25 years behind schedule.  I didn't let you down after all, Prof Lee!

More starts off his book, presented to the world in 1516, with a first person narrative about his diplomatic mission to the Continent.  In the Low Countries he meets a wise and well-traveled man. At a friendly meal this traveler, Raphael Hythloday, starts criticizing the English and French ruling classes and their governing policies. Thieves, he claims, are driven to crime by hunger, hunger caused by the policies of the rich, and so hanging thieves is immoral and counterproductive. The nobility and their hangers on are idle and greedy. The French government is damned for maintaining a standing army, and the English upper class denounced for the “enclosure movement” we talked about ad nauseum in college, whereby farm land held in common was turned into private pasture for sheep, leading to increased efficiency and the dislocation of many rural people. Everybody, rich and poor, spends too much money on fancy clothes, on gambling, and in taverns and “infamous houses,” writes More, the guy who wore a hair shirt and thought flagellating himself was a good way to spend his down time.

So, More has a lot of gripes about the powers that be (who doesn’t, buddy?) and even ordinary people who want to relax with a little sex, booze, dice and cards. But does he have solutions? Well, he does; or at least he acts like he does.  Hythloday relates how thieves are dealt with among the Polylerits, a fictional autonomous bunch of people in Persia - thieves become slaves to the public, forced to wear distinguishing marks and follow complex rules that keep them from fleeing or fomenting revolution. More is so impressed by this idea that he proclaims Hythloday a genius and urges him to become a royal adviser, but Hythloday declares that his ideas are too radical to be welcomed by courts and kings.

Hythloday then drops his bombshell. There is no hope, he tells More, of a just and prosperous society until property has been abolished and equality enforced, as it has been in a wonderful land he visited and spent five years in, Utopia. More (the character) makes the obvious objection to collectivism: that with no prospect of reward, people will not work. Hythloday tells More that if he will spare him some time, he will explain in detail how things work in Utopia, a country with no money, no property, and a happy populace. Seeing as there are no video games yet, and Games Workshop has yet to be founded, More has time to listen to Hythloday's description. So begins the discourse on the fantasy land which gives its name to More's book and has been applied to the entire literary genre of exemplary ideal societies.

Utopia has a scientifically planned economy, with experts keeping track of how much food needs to be grown and what quantities of other resources are required and directing who is to produce them and where they are to be sent. These experts draft people to work in the fields, whether they want to or no, and everybody has to work on the farm for at least two years. The government determines what professions people can pursue, and directs people to those professions the experts feel are in need of more practioners.

Every little detail of life has been planned out and is under government control. The island of Utopia has 54 towns, and they all are built on the same plan. In fact, even the houses and streets all look exactly the same. People are assigned where to live; if your family has lots of children some will be assigned to a family which has few children; if your city has lots of people some will be sent to a city where some disaster has lowered the population. Everyone wears the same clothes, and fashions never change. The government makes sure you spend an appropriate number of hours a day working, an appropriate number of hours sleeping, and a healthy number of hours at wholesome recreation. If you want to go visit some other town, you have to ask permission from a government agent, and since there is no money, while in that town you have to pay your way by working. No one is allowed to be idle or waste time and resources on things like making nice clothes of different colors or designing or constructing different styles of architecture.

Order is maintained in Utopia by compelling all men to live in full view where there is no opportunity to form political parties; there is no privacy (doors are not locked) and no such places as taverns or brothels. Government magistrates are forbidden to talk about politics in private; such a crime is punished with death. Lesser crimes, like leaving your town without permission, get you tossed into slavery.

The Utopians have no money, and Hythloday argues at the end of the book that most crime would cease if money were abolished. The Utopians have such contempt for gold and silver that they use these metals to make chamber pots, as well as chains for their slaves. Pearls and diamonds are worn only by children. For fun everybody reads and attends lectures; More tells us that the Utopians find gambling and hunting totally uninteresting, even disgusting - all necessary butchering and hunting is done by slaves.

More's vision of Utopia is so extreme and repellant that we have to wonder how seriously he is promoting Utopia as a model of a just and efficient society, and how much his image of a totalitarian state with no property and no money is in fact some kind of satire. (In the last paragraph of the book More muddies the waters and leaves us with a puzzle when he says he endorses some but not all of the policies and beliefs of the Utopians, without specifying which. Tricky!)

How much sense does it make for a guy to criticize how real life governments abuse power, and then propose a government with far greater power? How much sense does it make for More to decry the way rural people are forced off the land in the interest of efficiency by rich sheep farmers, and then argue that it would be great if the government, in the interest of efficiency, told you where to live and what work to do and if and when and for how long you could take a trip to the next town? Maybe More is attacking English government policies by exaggerating them and showing how terrible they would be if more universally applied?

On the other hand, I suppose it is not hard to believe that More, a successful lawyer and politician and a well-read and pious intellectual who thought it was just fine to burn heretical books and heretical people, would like the idea of smart industrious ascetic guys like himself organizing everything and enforcing their own prejudices, making the lazy work, the vain abandon their fancy clothes and jewels, and the vicious put down their dice and cards and pick up improving books. More probably looked at the world, which is full of wars and crimes and poverty and famine, and figured he, or a cadre of people like him, could do a better job of running things. More also didn't have the benefit we have of 20th century examples of countries where policies abolishing property and planning the economy were put into practice.

Can I recommend Utopia, even though I am emphatically opposed to Utopia?  It's not exactly a thrill ride or a page turner, but if you are interested in politics, economics, religion, and European history, as I am (in my own haphazard and lazy way), it certainly is worth a little of your time.  The book provides a view into another world, that of early 16th century Europe, and addresses important contentious issues, like the role of the state and relations between social classes, that have been at the center of Western civilization for thousands of years and are still at the center of political and social debates in our day.

The Reefs of Earth by R. A. Lafferty

This 1968 novel, like the other Lafferty works I have read, is unconventional, a bizarre fable or fairy tale full of silly jokes that disregards believability, character development, pacing, and other typical literary concerns. The book is punctuated by brief tall tales told by the characters and includes numerous references to some of Lafferty’s particular interests, Christian theology and Native American Indian history and lore. Lafferty also takes swipes at government welfare and agricultural policies and government inefficiency and corruption in general; it is notable that Reefs of Earth was a preliminary nominee for the 1984 Prometheus Award Hall of Fame for Best Classic Libertarian SF Novel.

I read the 1977 Berkley Medallion paperback, with the Richard Powers cover. The last four pages contain advertising for the works of Robert Howard, Poul Anderson, Robert Heinlein and Frank Herbert, including a listing for the 1978 Dune Calendar by John Schoenherr.

Reefs of Earth is the story of the Dulanty family, four adults and seven children (or, perhaps more accurately, six children and one ghost child) who are members of the alien race known as the Puca. The Dulantys were sent to Earth to scout around, learn Earth culture, and perhaps solve the problem presented by Earth. Earth, we are told repeatedly, is the meanest, scariest, stupidest planet in the universe, and most of the human characters act as evidence for these assertions. Exceptions are made for some humans, including American Indians, a priest, and the writer of The Gospel According to Luke. The bulk of the novel takes place in and around the small rural town of Lost Haven, site of a coal mine and a commercial fishery.  Lost Haven is run by three murderously corrupt men: Coalfactor Stutgard, his right hand man Crocker, and lawyer and politician Mandrake Marshall.

The Puca can pass for human, but most look odd - we are told their features resemble those of goblins, ogres, or kobolds. The alienness of their appearance waxes and wanes depending on their mood or health. The Puca have great power; their Bagarthach verses, when recited, can (among other things) bring inanimate objects to life and kill humans. Lafferty includes many of these four line poems in the text, and it seems that he wrote them to be intentionally bad, for humor value.

Despite their superiority to humans, the Puca have a very difficult time on Earth, being susceptible to “Earth Allergy.” This malady, to which the adults are particularly vulnerable, leads to weakness and death, and during its course it causes terrible psychological damage; Puca afflicted with Earth Allergy may sour on life, become unwilling to forgive trifles, and even begin to fear death as humans do.  Healthy Puca understand, of course, that death is simply the passage to a new and exciting period of existence.  As in The Devil is Dead, in this Lafferty novel there are numerous references to life after death.

The four adult Puca are incapacitated early in the story, due to death, illness, and incarceration by the authorities on trumped-up charges. The seven children set off on their own to avoid being scooped up by the welfare system. They buy the town drunk’s raft with a stolen bottle of whisky, and, accompanied by the drunk’s goat, set sail on the ambitious mission they have set themselves: the mission of exterminating all human life on Earth.

The Puca children, despite their best efforts, never actually manage to kill anyone, though they do cause lots of property damage and are pursued by the authorities. Indians (some alive, some dead) help the children evade capture. Meanwhile, the two male adult Puca, also aided by Indians, contend with Stutgard, Crocker and Marshall. There is a jailbreak, a blistering chase, and a violent showdown, and in the end all of the adult Puca, as well as Stutgard, Crocker, and Marshall, are dead. The six children (the ghost child has vanished), have been matured by their adventure, and when they sail away from the newly liberated Lost Haven, they are still intent on fixing the Earth, but have decided to try to do so without killing all of mankind.

What to say about such an odd piece of work? It is entertaining, and its inherent strangeness makes it engaging and novel, so I can recommend it, but as far as ideas, plot, or characters (the most well-realized and interesting character is Mandrake Marshall, the lead villain) are concerned, there is not much going on. Maybe I am missing some allusions to the Bible or to Irish or Indian folklore, and there is more going on than I realize. So, a recommendation, but a conditional one.

West of Eden by Harry Harrison

I read West of Eden in my early teens, I think, and have never forgotten the setting of the 1984 novel, though the plot very quickly faded from my mind. Now, almost 30 years later, finding time in the midst of a lot of holiday travel and visits, I have reread it, and have to say it is pretty good.

The Setting: West of Eden takes place in an alternate version of our world in which the extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs, pterosaurs, mosasaurs, etc., did not occur. Human beings evolve in one part of the world, but over most of the Earth the giant reptiles survive, and continue to evolve; at the time of the novel, in fact, a race of intelligent lizard people is the dominant form of life over most of the planet. While human beings have a stone age level of technology, hunting with spears and arrows with stone points, the cold-blooded, matriarchal reptile people have developed genetic engineering. Instead of having weapons and vehicles made of wood, stone and metal, they have bred giant squids to act as boats, huge ichthyosaurs to serve as ships, even living creatures that perform the roles of microscopes and cameras!

The Plot: The Earth is undergoing climate change, and the increasing cold is forcing the human tribes south to the warm areas where the dinosaurs and other cold blooded reptiles live. The humans have a violent hatred of the reptiles, and kill any they find. The lower temperatures are also making life difficult for a city of reptile people in Africa, so they are starting a new colony in the tropical region of the New World, exactly where the humans have just started hunting.  When the humans and lizard people meet a racist genocidal war immediately erupts!

There are numerous plot threads and subplots; this book is over 450 pages, after all. Happily, the book does not feel long, because Harrison moves the story along at a brisk pace and everything that happens is interesting or exciting. There are numerous human and reptilian characters, but each is distinctive enough that we can tell them apart and are curious what will happen to them. We watch the growth of the reptile colony and the politics among its members. A human child is captured and learns all about the lizard people’s language and society from the inside. That society is in the midst of major changes, not only because of the need to move to warmer climes, but because a new religion is blossoming amongst its members, a religion of peace which sees the war on the warm-blooded creatures as immoral.  We also get a look at religion and diplomacy among the nomadic human tribes.

As the book jacket informs us, Harrison corralled an international team of scientists to try to make this book “realistic.” For example, a British linguist helped develop fake languages for the humans and the lizard people. The lizard people communicate not only vocally, but with hand and body movements and by changing the color of parts of their skin, I guess like cuttle fish.  I'm a little skeptical about how much creating entire fictional languages for the characters actually adds to the novel - the reader only experiences these languages as aphorisms acting as pendants to some of the chapters and words sprinkled here and there in the text.  Maybe for some readers this helps create a believable atmosphere of alienness.  On the other hand, the biology and society of the reptile people is quite well realized and are at the core of the novel, so I think at least some of the scientists consulted by Harrison really did make a worthwhile contributions to the book.

I read a library copy of the 1984 Bantam hardcover. The book includes dozens of charming illustrations by Bill Sanderson, a pleasant addition.  I include two of these here, along with some fun hyperbolic blurbs from the jacket text that compare the novel to Clan of the Cave Bear and Dune, books I myself have not read. The cover, by David Schlienkofer, is just mediocre, I suppose a sort of ironic reference to the biblical story of Adam, Eve, and the serpent that echoes the novel's title.

West of Eden delivers the kind of stuff many of us like to see in a science fiction adventure: a cool alien society, action and suspense, plus mastodons and dinosaurs. And if you are into ruminating about gender roles, cultural conflict, imperialism, religion and that sort of thing, West of Eden does a little of that, too. I’m happy to recommend West of Eden.

Half Price Books' List of 100 SF Novels: 26-50

Here we have Part 2 of my look at Half Price Book's list of 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy novels, covering selections 26 to 50.  This idiosyncratic list was selected by 3,000 bibliomaniacs, or so says the Half Price Books website.

26) Eye of the World by Robert Jordan
I read the first volume of this series when it was new, and enjoyed it, but didn't pick up the second volume when it came out.  Perhaps for the best.

27) The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
I'm not really into alternate history or any of that, and I think stuff like the I Ching is ridiculous.  Still, if I was living in an alternate universe in which I had to read a Dick novel, it would probably be this one, as it is so highly regarded.  Also, the title is good poetry.

28) Robots of Dawn by Isaac Asimov
Is this the detective one in which the shock ending is that a woman had sex with a robot?  I read this as a kid, and was disappointed that there wasn't something more to it.

29) Elantris by Brandon Sanderson
What?

30) I Will Fear No Evil by Robert Heinlein
I'm a little surprised to see this on the list instead of Starship Troopers, which is so famous and controversial and includes the awesome and influential opening chapter in which the heavily armored human marine fights aliens with a hand flamer.

I read I Will Fear No Evil as a kid, and, looking back, I am surprised I finished it.  Presumably I was charmed by the idea of a friend in my head to keep me company, and I guess there must have been some sex in the book.  I do want to reread this one; I think Heinlein has a good writing style, and there is no way it could be as bad as Number of the Beast.

31) Faith of the Fallen by Terry Goodkind 
This is the Objectivist fantasy epic, right?  I'm sympathetic to Ayn Rand's individualistic philosophy, but I don't want to spend time reading a long book about it.  I haven't read any Ayn Rand's own novels, and I'm not going to read any of this guy's novels.  Those two page articles in Reason magazine about Rand are enough for me to get the gist of her thought and move on.

32) A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs    
This is one of my favorite books.  I love everything about it; Burroughs comes up with a very exciting, even beautiful, version of Mars, and his writing really brings it to life.  The fact that the book is so old, and written in an old-fashioned style, and espouses old-fashioned values (it is basically an apologia for 19th-century imperialism, isn't it?) makes it even more alien and perhaps paradoxically even more believable.  At the same time it is an over the top wish fulfillment fantasy: John Carter is immortal, the best swordsman in the solar system, and also scrupulously honest and decent.  He doesn't use his superior fighting ability to rob people and sleep around like Conan; he is faithful to his wife and tries to teach the people of Mars how to behave.  Somehow Burroughs makes it work and people like Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Gene Wolfe have been singing Burroughs' praises ever since.

33) Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
I read the four Hitchhiker books as a kid, and I enjoyed them, but I remember little now.  I might read these again.

34) Dragonsinger by Anne McCaffery
I read a bunch of these Pern books as a kid; I liked the idea of having a little friend dragon that would keep me company all the time.  Also, the idea of the Thread attacking the planet every century or whatever is exciting.  As an adult I tried to read Dragonflight, which I think is the first of these Pern books, and thought it was horrible and wrote a scathing review on Amazon. 

35) The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks
I loved the Elfstones of Shannara as a kid; it was like 300 pages of guys running around, fighting with swords and bows and magic fire.  I imagined that the Elfstones were like my light blue plastic D&D dice.  Then I read The Sword of Shannara, and I liked it, but I found the end disappointing, anti-climactic.  It was trying to teach you a lesson about telling the truth or something, which I found condescending.  I can still remember sitting in the car, riding home from Nana's in my Dad's car, reading by the dashboard light, finishing the book and thinking, "Is this really how it ends?  This is like a book for kids."  I got the Wishsong of Shannara as a gift, and started it, but the magical artifact wasn't as cool as the Ellfstones, I was older, and the story seemed repetitive, so I abandoned it.

I've been thinking of reading Elfstones again, but I'm afraid the same thing might happen as happened when I tried to read Dragonflight.

36) The Once and Future King by T. H. White
My mother gave me a paperback copy of this and it sat on my bookshelf for twenty odd years.  I don't know where it is now; maybe my brother has it.

37) Brave New World by Aldous Hiuxley
This is pretty good.

38) Foundation by Isaac Asimov  
I tried to read this as an adult; I read the first two or three stories, and then abandoned it.  Asimov's writing style was feeble.  Even worse was the plot: besides being outlandish (a guy can predict exactly what will happen hundreds of years in the future?) it is terrible drama.  (A guy teleporting to Mars and sword fighting everybody is outlandish but good drama.)  The stories consist of a guy sitting in a room, watching a movie of a dead guy telling him what to do; then he does it, all goes perfectly, the end.  There is no humanity, no feeling, no tension, it's as exciting as watching a guy order a burger at McDonalds' drive thru; wow, look, he ordered a quarter pounder and... he receives a quarter pounder! 

What is the ethic, the ideology of these stories?  That an elite of smart guys should manipulate the rest of us behind the scenes?  Sickening. Who does this appeal to?  Smart guys who want to manipulate other people?  I've heard that Paul Krugman and Newt Gingrich love Asimov's Foundation books, that they were inspired by the idea of using math to bend history and society in the direction they want it to go.  Horrible.

I remember, as a kid, reading an essay by Isaac Asimov.  I'd like to read it again, but of course I can't recall the title or where I saw it.  It must have been in an SF anthology or something.  Asimov was decrying stories in which a barbarian defeats a wizard.  Presumably he was referring to Conan.  I had never read such stories, they not being at the local library, and I remember thinking it odd that Asimov, who had like a dozen books at the local library, was attacking writers whose work I had never seen as if they were a ubiquitous plague.  Asimov thought it bad that the smart guy in the story was the villain, and the strong guy the hero, that this would teach people the wrong values or something.

Obviously, in the Foundation stories we see Asimov doing the opposite, giving us a story in which a smart guy tricks the strong guy.  In one of the stories I read in the first volume of the Foundation series the heroes win by selling to the villains a space battleship that they have sabotaged.  The villains are so stupid they don't realize the ship has been sabotaged and try to use it to conquer some planet or other, and of course are humiliated when their weapons don't work.  Maybe this is the wish fulfillment fantasy of a smart but weak kid, but to me, this is not drama.

Maybe it was not obvious to Asimov, but it seems obvious to me why stories of strong guys fighting hand to hand with enemies and monsters is appealing -- it is an allegory for our lives, which are a long lonely struggle which we are doomed to lose.  And it is obvious why people like the story of the ordinary man who defeats the smart man who has specialized knowledge.  In our everyday lives we are all at the mercy of people who are smarter than we are, or have knowledge we lack: lawyers, politicians, doctors, bankers, car mechanics, etc.  These people could use their specialized knowledge to take advantage of us, and sometimes they do.  And of course many people envy the wealth that clever people in our modern society can accumulate.  So of course people like the idea of the barbarian overcoming the crafty wizard.  Who would identify with a guy who sells another guy defective merchandise, a guy who wins by lying, by trickery? A lot of people, apparently, because we see Foundation on these lists all the time, but I don't get it.  

39) Northern Lights by Phillip Pullman
This is the guy who hates religion, right?  I'm an atheist already, so what would be the point of me reading this book?  Religion in the West has been in decline for centuries; is it fun to kick a man when he is already down? 

My brother read some of these His Dark Materials books, and said the early ones were good, but they got worse as more and more anti-religious stuff took over the page count.

40) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick
This is the basis of the film Blade Runner, I believe.  I thought that movie was OK, but apparently it is common for people to praise it extravagantly.  Once I was sitting with two college professors, and one of them told the other that Blade Runner was the movie that best portrayed "the urban space," or some jargon like that.  I think they were talking about the movie Children of Men, which he had just seen and thought was Blade Runner's only competition for top spot in depicting what city life was all about.  I haven't seen Children of Men, and I haven't read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and I don't need to use the I Ching to tell me I am probably not going to do either.

41) Anathem by Neal Stephenson
This guy has a good reputation, but somehow his books always look like a slog, like a project, and self-consciously educational. Forbidding.

42) The Black Company by Glen Cook
I have read all ten of the Black Company books, and enjoyed and recommend the first four.  The first one, or maybe the "spin off," The Silver Spike, are the best.  As the series ground on it became slower paced and eventually tedious, but out of curiosity I read them all.

The Black Company are a bunch of ruthless jerk offs, a mercenary unit in a world dominated by warring evil wizards. In the first episode of the book the Black Company betrays and murders the people who have hired them because they realize they are on the losing side of a war. The cool thing about the first book is that Cook conceives of ten bizarre evil wizards, each one with a cool name, like The Hanged Man or Nightcrawler or The Howler, and each one has a weird deformity, strange mannerisms, and special powers.  I would have loved reading about these wizards and their insane adventures trying to conquer the world and each other.  Unfortunately, these wizards all get killed pretty quickly.

The books in the Black Company series are the record of the Company's career, written by the unit's annalist.  Early in the first book the Black Company is hired by a female wizard known as The Lady, the most ruthless, evil and powerful wizard in the world.  In a bizarre piece of foreshadowing, the annalist entertains the Black Company's troops by writing and reciting pornographic stories about his imaginary love affair with The Lady!  (This pornography is not reproduced in the book.  You can decide on your own if this makes the books more attractive or less attractive.)  Then, to my dismay, the Lady is overthrown and joins the Black Company and turns out not to be a bad person after all and the Black Company starts being the good guys.  With the Black Company now the good guys, the series loses much of what made it distinctive. 

The Silver Spike is a sort of noirish story of criminals who mess with an undead wizard or something like that; there are lots of plot twists and double crosses and so forth.  I liked it.

43 & 44) The Dragon Prince by Melanie Rawn and The Magic of Recluce by L.E. Modesitt Jr.
I saw these, but I didn't touch them.

45) Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll      
I haven't read this.  My wife read it some years ago.  I may read it someday. 

46) Legacy of Heorot by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes
It took three guys to write this?

I read this when it was new, a million years ago.  As I remember, some guys try to explore or colonize a planet, and some monster attacks them.  This novel is an homage to "Beowulf;" the monster is called "a grendel."  I'm not exactly a fan of the whole "I'm going to rewrite Romeo and Juliet and put it in a New York slum," or "I'm going to write Moby Dick, but in outer space," or "I'm going to write a feminist version of the Trojan War," school of literature.  I guess everybody thinks they can do this because James Joyce did it.

I did like when Gilligan and the Professor put on their own production of Hamlet, though.

I guess I liked Legacy of Heorot, but was disappointed that there weren't more monsters or something else going on with the plot.  Or maybe Niven's, Pournelle's and/or Barnes's writing style wasn't doing it for me.  Still, I'd consider reading this again.

Niven and Pournelle aren't exactly master wordsmiths, but they seem like smart guys and Niven definitely has good ideas when it comes to setting.  I liked the setting of the two Integral Trees books, and Ringworld was alright, and Mote in God's Eye was pretty good.  I'm a little surprised Legacy of Heorot is here and not Mote.  I'd bet a million dollars Mote is more famous and sold more copies.

My rule of thumb, based on my career working at book stores and in academia, is that when more than one author is listed, the last person listed probably actually wrote the book.  So I'm guessing Steven Barnes did most of the work on Legacy of Heorot.  [UPDATE AUGUST 19, 2022:  As a helpful commenter pointed out, I mixed up John and Steven Barnes here.  Doh!]  I have two John Barnes books on my shelf, but I haven't read them yet.  I bought them because Orson Scott Card and Poul Anderson both compare Barnes to Heinlein.  I should make an effort to read them.

47) Dark is the Sun by Phillip Jose Farmer
I am surprised this is on here instead of To Your Scattered Bodies Go.  I have mixed feelings about Farmer, who tries to do adventure stories like, say, Edgar Rice Burroughs, but tries to make them more "modern" or sexy.  I've read several of Farmer's books, with To Your Scattered Bodies Go being good, Maker of Universes bad, and Dayworld and Dare average.  I might read Dark is the Sun if I stumble on it for a few dollars or at a library.  The cover looks like that of a solid adventure story, and my man Tarbandu at PorPor Books Blog praises it.


48) Off Armageddon Reef by David Weber
I've considered reading Weber, but never actually done it.  I am interested in military history (I have big piles of books about WWII tanks and planes and ships, books about Horatio Nelson and the Duke of Wellington, a stack of those Osprey books about medieval knights and WWII infantry tactics, etc.) and like the idea of space navies fighting vast wars, but the few times I've tried to read "military SF" I've been disappointed.  Heinlein's Starship Troopers, Haldeman's Forever War, and the Aubrey/Maturin books by Patrick O'Brian are good fiction about guys participating in wars because Heinlein, Haldeman and O'Brian are good writers, and their books are about more than just fighting, they are about politics, society, human relationships, etc.  I guess I'm worried that Weber's books will just be page after page of people shooting it out, and I have no idea if Weber is a good writer.  Perhaps I am doing him a disservice.

49) Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg
This is, in my opinion, Silverberg's best book, and the book of his I'd expect to see on a list like this, a book that is quite like a modern mainstream literary novel, about a smart guy living in a big city, trying to face life and its challenges and changes.  I think this is the kind of book a person who reads Nabokov and Saul Bellow, but looks down at science fiction, could enjoy.

50) Watch on the Rhine by John Ringo and Tom Kratman
Most of what I say about David Weber above could probably go for John Ringo.  This book, according to the synopsis on Wikipedia, seems kind of crazy, like it was deliberately written to piss people off.  Aliens attack the Earth, so the Earth raises the Waffen SS from the dead to fight them?  Cripes!   

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

Tomorrow the saga of Half Price Books' list of 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy books will continue.     

The Green Planet by J. Hunter Holly

Here we have a paperback by an author I had never heard of, 1960’s The Green Planet by J. Hunter Holly. The Author’s Profile informs us that J. Hunter Holly is the pen name of Joan C. Holly of Michigan, and that she did very well in college. My edition was printed by Monarch Books in 1961. Monarch Books, we are told, is dedicated to publishing books of literary merit, like hagiographies of Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Kennedy, guides to alternative medicine, and soft core pornography.  I paid two dollars for this book, and the list of titles on the advertising page (among them Sex Fiend and Campus Girl (hubba hubba), $50 A Night (ah, the days before inflation), and Brother and Sister (yuck!)) provides a roller coaster ride of titillation, nostalgia and terror worth at least three dollars all on its own.  (Prolific mystery writer Donald E. Westlake seems to have produced many of the more striking titles.)

In the future, humanity is ruled by the totalitarian League. Radical egalitarians, the League has as its goal “to get rid of the sub-normals and the super-normals until there was a stable population of nothings.” People opposed to the League get a free ticket for a three-month-long one way trip to Klorath, planet of exile. The Green Planet tells the story of the ninth shipment of rebels to Klorath, 11 adults and two children. The first thing they find on Klorath after getting off the robot shuttle is a pile of human bones; the first eight shipments of rebels haven’t fared too well!

But what killed the earlier settlers? Disease? Giant bulletproof pterodactyls? Native barbarians? All of the above? As the exiles wait for the tenth shipment of rebels and try to build a little colony, constructing cabins and planting crops, they suffer repeated attack from native life forms. Their numbers dwindle, but the two manly men among the group still find time to fight over who should be leader.  The last half or so of the book deals with the human exiles' efforts to develop a relationship with the Klorath natives, who bear a striking similarity to Native American Indians and have a close relationship with nature and their god.  Negotiations are difficult because, it seems, the last eight groups of human settlers spoke with forked tongue.  The crisis is resolved when the humans take up the worship of the god of the natives (a big crystal sphere) and achieve collective consciousnesses.  

This is a pedestrian piece of work with nothing special to make it stand out or stay in your memory. Holly tries to liven it up with lots of psychological stuff, people stricken with fear, cracking under stress, committing suicide, the two men of the group who aspire to lead trying to manipulate the weaker-minded exiles, etc. Unfortunately Holly’s writing style is uninspired and the characters are boring. I couldn’t bring myself to care who lived or died.

Holly is also undermined by irritating errors. For example, Holly (and her editor) don’t seem to know anything about guns, so we get sentences like “In a desperate chance, he blasted forth with a whole round, in a volley.” I guess she means he fired off an entire magazine? There are also quite a few typos, missing quotation marks, missing prepositions. “Jason wanted smash their complacency.” (page 80). This sounds like a line from The Incredible Hulk: Political Activist. These are the kinds of mistakes you can brush off in a good book, but in a mediocrity they rankle. Why should I bother reading this thing if your copy editor didn’t?

I don't regret giving a new writer a try, but this one has to get a marginal thumbs down.  I won't be seeking out any more of Holly's work.  

The Devil Is Dead by R. A. Lafferty

This is an unusual piece of work that makes no effort to be realistic (critics often describe Lafferty’s writing as being like “a tall tale”) and at times is self-consciously difficult. The introduction, which is titled “Promantia,” even ends with the lines, “Is that not an odd introduction? I don’t understand it at all.”

The plot of the first half of The Devil is Dead consists of the voyage of the ship Brunhilde, among whose passengers are numbered: the Devil; Anastasia, a Greek woman who claims to be a mermaid; Marie, a murdereress and some kind of leftist scold (she considers “being a lady” and “happily-ever-after” to be “bourgeois conceits,” and thinks good and evil are merely superstitions); and the main character, Finnegan, a “bugle-nosed dago with an Irish moniker,” who is not only a talented painter and draughtsman but has clairvoyant powers (Finnegan reads a letter through a sealed envelope, and has lots of hunches and premonitions.)

The novel starts with Finnegan coming to his senses, but not knowing where he is, what time of year it is, his own name or that of his companion, Saxon X. Seaworthy, millionaire ship owner. I didn’t know if Finnegan was an angel, a demon, a drunk, or a metaphor for a human soul just about to set out on life’s journey. Several times throughout the novel characters claim that Finnegan is not one of the “regular people” but one of “the other people.” Finnegan tells Seaworthy that he has “an upper life and a lower life,” and Seaworthy responds “Who hasn’t! All of our sort indulge in amnesia….” Late in the book Finnegan implies that if he, and his kind, don’t like people, they set them on fire (page 139). Does this mean Finnegan is a (fallen?) angel? On page 27 the third person narrator declares that there are two sorts of people in the world, those who belong with “such as Finnegan and Anastasia... with all good people everywhere…” and the “wrong sort” who “belong in Hell.”

Soon Seaworthy’s vessel, the Brunhilde, is under weigh (or perhaps underway.) Finnegan and his companions sail around the world, following the coast from Texas south along Latin America then across the Atlantic to Africa and north to Europe. The ship stops at every port, and in each port the Devil does his work – Finnegan, reading the newspapers, realizes that each town they visit is stricken, a few days later, by mass murder, riots, or similar large scale mayhem. The crew and passengers of the Brunhilde split into hostile factions and become embroiled in a sneaky back-stabbing fight against each other which culminates in a tremendous firefight in Greece with WWII rifles and machine guns. Anastasia and the Devil are among the dead, while Seaworthy, apparently the leader of the victorious faction, and Finnegan, who sat the fight out, survive.

In the second half of the book Finnegan seeks revenge on Seaworthy, whom he blames for the death of Anastasia, but when Seaworthy survives Finnegan’s attack, Finnegan flees across the United States, a squad of murderers on his tail. The page count of this part of the book largely consists of strange and amusing stories not directly connected to the Brunhilde/Finnegan/Seaworthy plot at all, stories about and told by the various characters Finnegan meets while on the run.

The identities of the characters in The Devil is Dead, and their statuses, are always in flux. People in the novel often die, are buried, and then reappear, so much so that on page 118 (of a 224 page book) Finnegan declares, “I become a little impatient with people who are supposed to be dead and who keep reappearing. It loses its humor after a while.” Characters have multiple names, characters who look alike impersonate each other, characters change appearance, different characters share names. I was often wondering if a character was a human, or an angel, or a devil, or The Devil. There is even a hint that Finnegan, Seaworthy, and some other characters are members or descendents of a Lovecraftian “old race” which ruled the Earth before mankind and is still pulling the strings behind the scenes. (Even though much of Lafferty’s references and themes seem to be Christian, by mentioning A. E. Van Vogt and Murray Leinster on page 164 he seems to invite the reader to think in SF categories.)

A large part of the appeal of The Devil is Dead comes from the fact that Lafferty fills the novel with odd jokes, jokes which hover between the “bad” and “bad enough that they are good” categories. There are also cryptic references and what appear to be parodies of epigrammatic wisdom. Two examples:

A description of Anastasia’s grandmother:

She was vital and pretty, she had been prettier than Anastasia Granddaughter, though fairly destitute. She would have been able to feed a small family of visiting mice, but that was all. She wouldn’t have been able to feed a large family of visiting mice.

A description of a Greek mountaintop at night:

The moon lacked a week of being full, but the night was very bright. Here on top was nothing but rocks and gnarled old branches and stump trees. That is the way the top of the world always looks. But by Greek moon it was even stranger. Moonlight is different in Greece. As you know, it was the Greeks who invented the moon.

I read the 1971 Avon paperback (V2406) with the black Bosch-style cover. The history of the book seems almost as crazy as the story it tells. According to Wikipedia two portions of the book are missing from this edition, including the final chapter, which the publisher didn’t receive in time. I get the idea this is a relatively rare paperback; I paid almost ten times the cover price for it at Half Price Books; luckily the cover price is 75 cents.

I enjoyed The Devil is Dead and recommend it. It is unconventional, but once I fell into step with Lafferty’s style it felt comfortable, I laughed at many of the jokes, and even the Promantia was explicable when I reread it after finishing the novel. Readers interested in literary SF, Roman Catholic SF, or books you have to “figure out” should definitely give it a whirl.

Proscription List #2: Silverberg, Fast, Anthony

To help defray the expense of the Lafferty and Van Vogt books I recently purchased, and to make space on my book shelves, I have decided to sell eight SF paperbacks which I have read and am not in love with.  I had decent notes on the last four I blogged about, but the notes about today’s four were lost in a computer hard drive related disaster.  (Always back up your files, kids.)  Still, I think I can dredge up something from the old gray matter to say about each of them.

Lord Valentine’s Castle by Robert Silverberg

Like everybody, I like Robert Silverberg; he is one of the heroes of SF, from his fiction to his valuable work as an editor to his interesting descriptions of life as a professional writer to be found in the recent collections of his SF short stories and elsewhere.  But in his prolific career he has written many types of books and tried various different styles, and they aren’t all to my taste.

Lord Valentine’s Castle was a big seller for Silverberg and has been followed by many profitable sequels, but it didn’t move me.  It seems like an homage to Jack Vance; as in various Vance novels, a guy loses and must recover his memory, a guy has a picaresque adventure on a huge planet with many different cultures on it, a guy sparks a revolution.  Unfortunately, Silverberg (in this book at least) fails toi provide much of what makes those Vance books enjoyable: a charming writing style, an interesting point of view, some laughs, and/or a wacky or otherwise interesting character.  Also, Vance’s books are pretty economical; Lord Valentine’s Castle seems to go on forever, and there is never any kind of twist or surprise.  Silverberg also does his thing in which a character achieves an altered state of consciousness and so Silverberg can write a surreal dream-like scene; this is the characteristic of Silverberg’s writing I like least.  In The World Inside he did it at a rock concert, in Shadrach in the Furnace he did it in a drug den, and in Lord Valentine’s Castle the guy goes into an altered state of consciousness while juggling.  These scenes always make my eyes glaze over.

I know a lot of SF fans really enjoyed Lord Valentine’s Castle, and I really wanted to enjoy it myself, but I just couldn’t do it.  Borderline thumbs down.   

Conquerors From the Darkness by Robert Silverberg

This one I remember very little about.  It was not offensively bad, but mediocre; I guess I would give it a weak recommendation.  As I recall, the Earth is ruled by aliens who have raised the seas so almost all of the planet is covered with water.  The main character brings together an army of humans and dolphin people to overthrow the aliens.   

The Secrets of Synchronicity by Jonathan Fast

I bought this one because the back cover blurb claims this book is strongly reminiscent of Heinlein’s work.  I am a sucker for advertising.  This book is a satire on our Western materialist society (I think), and strongly influenced by Vedic mythology (so it says).  The protagonist starts out enslaved in a mine.  Is it just me, or do lots of people in SF get enslaved in mines?  Thank God they always seem to escape.  I enjoyed this book, and thought Fast’s writing style pretty good, but once was enough, so it’s back to Half Price Books for this one.

I have actually found a few lines of notes I penned on Secrets of Synchronicity:

This is a decent adventure story, about a guy living in a corrupt, decadent and perverse society in an interstellar empire, who escapes slavery, participates in a safari, becomes spiritually enlightened, and becomes the leader of a prophesied rebel movement.  As it goes on Fast layers on the satire thicker and thicker, and the book becomes more and more outlandish and silly.

Fast’s author bio on the last page is also interesting: he was a child prodigy, spends several hours a day practicing yoga, and longs for a cogent universe.  Sounds good.

People interested in SF work that is influenced by non-Western religions in particular will want to check out Secrets of Synchronicity, but it’s a worthwhile read for the rest of us as well.

Chaining the Lady by Piers Anthony

I read a ton of Piers Anthony in my youth, but this is one I never got to until recently, when, in my 40s, I got curious about Anthony again.  Chaining the Lady, a space opera full of stuff about the Tarot (which I admit is ridiculous) isn’t bad, but it is way too long.  Each of several different alien races gets an adventure, but these adventures parallel each other, and so get a little repetitious.  There’s a lot of shape-shifting psychic jazz going on as the main character infiltrates the various alien races’ ships and then uses aspects of their biology and culture to get them to side with the good guys in the intergalactic war, or something.  Two hundred pages of this would have been good, 340 pages is too much.  One or two fewer alien races would have been a good idea, but the number of races is probably related somehow to the Tarot, so maybe Anthony was stuck.

 

The back cover blurb suggests that the book is going to be full of kinky sex, but I don’t remember any erotic sex scenes, though there is a lot about alien reproduction.  Stick with Anais Nin for the kinky sex, people.    

I can't decide if I should give this one a borderline thumbs up or a thumbs down.  It's teetering on that edge.