The Million Cities by J. T. McIntosh

Back in late 2007 I read J. T. McIntosh's crummy book, The Million Cities, and then wrote a scathing review of it on Amazon.  In 2008 someone at the Onion, the joke newspaper, took notice of my review and quoted me in his own hostile review of McIntosh's novel.   

Below I paste my entire Amazon review of The Million Cities.  Behold, the pinnacle of my career as a literary critic:

"The Million Cities" is an elitist, anti-democratic and anti-humanist celebration of conspiracy and political violence. The book is full of murders, riots, sabotage and torture, most of it committed by the protagonists, and McIntosh even echoes Stalin's assessment of mass death, writing "...what did a few million people matter? The world had too many of them anyway." (p 141)

Something so bizarre might be interesting if well-written, but McIntosh's writing is quite poor; he employs an irritating omniscient narrator who describes to you the characters' personalities instead of having the characters demonstrate them.

The novel also contains weird mistakes; on the first page of text (p 7) we are told that smoking has become taboo, and, in fact, that no tobacco has been grown for centuries. But in two later scenes (one is at p 22) characters smoke, and no explanation whatever is given; presumably McIntosh and his editor just screwed up. We are also told that the Earth's population continues to rise, despite a rigidly enforced policy of allowing each couple to give birth to only one child; does that make any sense mathematically?

"The Million Cities" is so strange it is a wonder to me that it even got published. I read (endured?) the 1958 paperback by Pyramid Books with the Virgil Finlay cover.

Half Price Books thinks I should read these "classics"

I got a free calendar at Half Price Books, but this wasn’t a sign of unconditional love. Half Price Books includes on the page for August (I still got time!) a reading list. A reading list! Is this what I have to do to show I am worthy of Half Price Books and their free calendar? Let’s see, maybe I’ve got a head start on my assignment.

1) To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
I read this in school, and thought it was pretty good. And of course I saw the movie. All you science fiction fans out there already know that Scout was the model for the young woman in Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage, a decent SF novel in the style of a Heinlein juvenile.

While I think To Kill A Mockingbird is good, I always suspect it is on these kinds of lists (and on the top of this list) because it advocates for the values the people who make these lists want us all to have and fear we don’t have. Is To Kill A Mockingbird really the best book of all time, or the book you most should have already read or whatever? I am skeptical.

2) Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Everyone is constantly talking about how great this book is, but somehow they have yet to overcome my sales resistance. Part of the problem is that I feel like I know all the ins and outs of the plot from seeing it on TV three hundred times, mostly the long version starring the pretty girl from “Absolutely Fabulous” and the pretty girl from “House of Cards.” The lead actress is also pretty, but I’ve never seen her in any other show, so I call her “the pretty girl from ‘Pride and Prejudice.’”

Maybe someday I’ll read Pride and Prejudice and be amazed at how great it is. But not before August.

3) Lord of the Flies by William Golding
We read this in school, and I read it once as an adult as well, and it is pretty good. We were all saying “Sucks to your assmar” for months afterwards. I mean as a kid, not when I read it as an adult. Well, not as much.

4) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Like Lord of the Flies we read this in school, and then I read it as an adult. Somehow it didn’t make the impression on me that it makes on a lot of people; I thought it was just OK. The thing I always remember about it is that it was the first time I saw the word “holocaust” outside the context of the German program to exterminate the Jews, without a capital letter.

Anyway, I think the “Great American Novel” is Moby Dick.

5) Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
I read this once as an adult, and it is pretty good, due to the plot and ideas. I don’t remember thinking the style was very good.

6) Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
I haven’t read this one. I read Cat’s Cradle at Rutgers, and I read at least one other Vonnegut book as an adult, but I wasn’t blown away by them, and have not read any more Vonnegut. (Well, we read “Harrison Bergeron” in high school, which was not bad.) Someday I may read Slaughterhouse-Five, but probably not before August.

7) The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
I have not read this, and am quite unlikely to. I read The Three Musketeers as an adult, and was amazed at how lame it was. A boring adventure story full of lame jokes? I couldn’t believe it. Not only was the alleged adventure boring and the alleged jokes not funny, but after spending my whole life being sympathetic to the Huguenots, in The Three Musketeers I am supposed to think of them as the enemy? I kept hoping a Huguenot sharpshooter would kill Balthazar, Melchior and/or whatever the other guy’s name was.

I think maybe Half Price Books is going to break up with me.

8) Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Like Pride and Prejudice, this one has lots of good PR, but I have yet to be sold on it. Like Pride and Prejudice I have seen more than one version on TV, and the plot seems OK. Maybe I’ll read this one day.

Or maybe not. In college (on the banks of the old Raritan, as we say) I read Hard Times, and didn’t think it was very fun. (I had a hard time reading it, ha ha.) My other exposure to Charles Dickens, like everybody else with a pulse, is from seeing three million versions of "A Christmas Carol," three million times each. As a kid I always thought Grand Moff Tarkin, Darth Vader, and Boba Fett were cooler than Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, and I had the same thing going with Scrooge and all those nags trying to get him to stop saving his money. When the Death Star explodes, or Boba Fett gets eaten by that, uh, well, we all know what it looks like, I feel a little deflated, and I always feel a little deflated when Scrooge gives in to the nags and starts throwing his money around, trying to buy their love or maybe their silence. I don’t know if Great Expectations is a celebration of nags and a denunciation of frugality, but I fear it could be.

9) Animal Farm by George Orwell
Orwell is a good writer with a very good style, and this is a good book. Of course, I may be vulnerable to the charge that I like this book because I am hostile to the Soviet Union. Maybe there are Bolshevists out there who think Animal Farm sucks, and suspect it is on these kinds of lists because the people who write these lists are members of the bourgeoisie and are trying to brainwash the proletariat. Maybe it is on this list at number 9 as a sop to those of us who are going to roll our eyes when we get to number 10 and it is The Grapes of Wrath.

10) The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
I haven’t read this, and I doubt I will. I saw the movie and it seemed about as subtle as a sledge hammer and sickle. If I want to hear somebody’s extravagant moaning about being poor, I’ll call up my mother.

And as I’ve already said, I think Moby Dick is the “Great American Novel.” Captain Ahab uber alles!

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Alright, let’s look at the totals. I’ve read half the books Half Price Books thinks I’m supposed to read. But I’ve read some of those twice, so maybe Half Price Books will cut me some slack. And maybe I’ll get some bonus points if I’ve read some of the 30 additional books on the list at the website. (A reading list of 40 books! Half Price Books is high maintenance!) I haven’t looked at this full list of 40 books yet, and I sure hope Homer, Virgil, Dante, Nabokov, Boswell, Proust, and Melville are Half Price Book’s idea of “classics”; if J. K. Rowling and that The Life of Pi guy are on the list, I may be in trouble.

Phthor by Piers Anthony

In my teens I read lots of Piers Anthony, largely because of all the sex.  Earlier this year I reread Chthon, and thought it an OK adventure story about a guy imprisoned in a mine and having to go on a long underground trek and fight weird creatures.  Last week I reread the sequel to Chthon, 1975's Phthor.

Phthor is the story of Arlo, a young man living alone with his parents in the tunnels and caverns of Chthon.  This subterranean world is inhabited by many dangerous creatures, but Arlo is in psychic rapport with the god of Chthon (a sort of "mineral" entity, hostile to all life) which can control all the monsters and protect Arlo; Arlo, it seems, is the "chosen one" of the god of Chthon.

As the novel opens Arlo is 16, and meets, for the first time, another young person, a girl who calls herself Ex.  Apparently, she has escaped from the prison section of Chthon. (Interstellar human civilization has abandoned the death penalty and sentences the worst criminals to life imprisonment in the caves of Chthon.) Arlo is fascinated by Ex, and rescues her from various dangers.  She is also the cause of a rift that develops between Arlo and the god Chthon - she is, in fact, a sort of advanced scout for an all-female commando team from the planet Minion that is about to land on Chthon and try to destroy the god - the mineral sentience, it turns out, will soon have the power to kill all life in the galaxy.

Anthony includes in Phthor some of the sexual/erotic elements that have made his work controversial.  He concocts situations in which sadism, masochism, incest, and sex involving minors is "natural" for some of the characters.  The women of the planet Minion, for example, are emotionally telepathic, but perceive emotions in reverse, so that if someone hates them, they perceive it as love and enjoy it, while if someone were to love them, they would feel pain.  These women are almost indestructible, and so can safely enjoy being beaten. A woman of Minion lives for centuries, always looking young and beautiful (of course), and when her husband dies, usually at around fifty, she takes her son as her next husband.   

To what extent Anthony includes this sort of thing in his book to explore a bizarre alien society, to shock the bourgeois attitudes of the reader, and/or to appeal to people with unconventional sexual appetites, I cannot say.  Anthony presents the incestuous desires of many of the book's characters as a direct challenge to traditional mores; Arlo, who has never left Chthon's caverns, learned to read from a compendium of pre-space age Earth literature, and we are reminded more than once of the incest taboos he learned from this compendium.  Most of the human characters in the book are forced to choose whether to violate or honor these taboos.

Arlo's mother tells her son that "There is no right and wrong, objectively," and perhaps this is Anthony talking; Anthony certainly argues that in the war between Chthon and Life (and implicitly in any war) neither side is fully Good or Evil.  Perhaps Phthor is meant to be a refutation of most or all ideas of morality, of Good and Evil.  Anthony does seem to be using the novel to argue in favor of compromise and against war, and maybe he would claim he rests his argument on practicality, not morality.

Phthor also includes many references to Norse mythology, and showcases Anthony's interest in coming up with alien life forms with novel means of reproduction.  The first half, in which Anthony introduces his strange setting and concepts is interesting, but the second half, with boring action scenes and a lot of dialogue as the mineral sentience Chthon and the alliance of Life both try to get Arlo to join their side in the war, drags a bit.  I have to admit, the very end, when we don't know which side will win or if instead Arlo can negotiate a mutual peace, had me guessing.

I guess I'm giving Phthor a marginal recommendation.  My life would be easier if everything I read was as obviously laudable as Gene Wolfe's Pandora by Holly Hollander or Tanith Lee's short stories, or as blatantly irritating as Judith Merril's Tommorow People and Algis Budrys's Rogue Moon, but much of the fiction I read falls on the vague borderline between "acceptable" and "unacceptable."

I read the Berkley paperback, from 1982.  The cover painting is by Clyde Caldwell.  Through the 1980s my brother and I played lots of RPGs, mostly Basic/Expert D&D, 1st ed AD&D, and Star Frontiers, and we had a subscription to Dragon magazine.  Caldwell was one of the artists who did work for TSR, and so we saw many of his illustrations.  Caldwell always seemed to include in his depictions huge translucent gems, whether or not they were appropriate, and so my brother and I called him "The Gemster" and felt like art connoisseurs because we could always identify a specimen of his art.

The Starmen of Llyrdis and The Big Jump by Leigh Brackett

Via Twitter, Joachim Boaz of SFruminations reminds us that it is Leigh Brackett's birthday.  I have enjoyed a number of Brackett's books and stories, most recently (in January of this year, I believe) The Starmen of Llyrdis and The Big Jump.  I wrote reviews of these novels, then in a computer mishap erased them, but have drafts of these reviews that I will paste below; the Big Jump draft looks almost finished.

There is a blog dedicated to Brackett that does not appear to be updated regularly, but includes quite a few interesting posts: http://leighbrackett.blogspot.com/.

The Starmen of Llyrdis

This was a competent SF adventure story, not very innovative, but not bad.  A mid 20th century guy who has never felt like he has ever belonged, despite being the US Air Force's best test pilot, traces his roots in Europe and learns he is the offspring of the union of an alien and an Earth person.  It turns out that the universe is full of intelligent life, but only one race of space aliens (one that can breed with Earth people) has the mutation necessary to survive interstellar travel.  This race, thus, has a monopoly on interstellar trade.  They have been secretly buying Earth goods, like Scotch whiskey, French perfume, and American movies.  The main character joins this race of space merchants and travels the galaxy with them, becoming involved in rivalries between various factions of the merchant race and getting involved with a dangerous femme fatale.  There is a very effective scene on a planet covered in a fungus forest. 

The Big Jump

Originally appearing in 1953, then published in 1955 by Ace, The Big Jump is a noirish/hard-boiled tale of man's first extrasolar exploration.

The moon, mars, and other parts of the solar system have been colonized for genberations, buyt only noew has a ship tavelled to another star and returned.  However, only one member of the crew, Ballantyne, has come back with the ship, and he is an emaciated near-comatose wreck who dies soon after his return.  What happened to the others?  The only clue are Ballantyne's last words, whispered to his friend, musclebound construction worker Arch Comyn.  Comyn is determined to find out what happened to the expedition because he owes a favor to one of the men left out in space, and tpo do so he has to contend with various members of the wealthy Cochrane family, a ruthless bunch of robber barons wjho financed Ballantyne's expedition.

A pleasant pulpy sort of thing about tough guys, a sexy dame and hit men, as well as space travel and alien planets; people who like a little Mickey Spillane mixed with their rocket ships should check it out.
 

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.  

Post Office by Charles Bukowski

Yesterday I reread Charles Bukowski’s first novel, Post Office, copyright 1971.  This slim volume (the 1974 Black Sparrow edition I read is just 115 pages) is the semi-autobiographical story of Bukowski’s alter ego “Henry Chinaski,” who works on and off for the postal service in Los Angeles as a carrier and then a clerk, taking time off to go to Texas where he marries an heiress (she divorces him) and then to try to live off his winnings at the racetrack.  The book describes Chinaski’s generally sad, and sometimes brutish, relationships with women, as well as his encounters with various strange characters.  There is little overarching plot; for the most part Post Office is a series of humorous anecdotes, written in a simple, smooth style that employs short and direct sentences.  As these anecdotes pile up, however, they do succeed in generating a sense of the sadness and futility of life.

I think Post Office is laugh out loud funny, but it is crudely sexist, and I do not doubt that some might find it offensive on that score. The unflattering picture Bukowski paints of the black men he meets over the course of his postal career may also raise the ire of readers. Part of the appeal of Post Office is Bukowski’s effort to shock us. Through a little intellectual jujitsu one could perhaps claim that Chinaski’s objectifying women and treating them shabbily is Bukowski’s way of indicting our sexist society. I doubt you could convincingly claim that, when Bukowski describes how blacks at the post office do no work because they will assault any supervisor who gives them an assignment, he is criticizing the racism of our society.

I have no idea how accurate his depiction is, but I found Bukowski’s description of what it was like working in the post office in the 1960s interesting. But I’m also the guy who enjoys the scenes in Moby Dick about whaling. On the other hand the paragraphs about horseracing: the odds, how to choose the winner, etc., bored me.

Bukowski is similar in some ways to Henry Miller. In both men’s most successful fiction we find the first person narrative of a writer, living down and out, casually describing to us his misbehavior and unconventional and/or uncouth opinions, implicitly justifying his misbehavior by pointing out how corrupt and absurd the world and people in general are. Where Bukowski differs from Miller is in how unpretentious he is; Miller repeatedly tells us how his friends proclaim him a genius, Miller talks about his love of such great cultural figures as Proust and Dostoevsky and cult authors like Hamsun, Miller thinks we are interested in his opinions about India and the theories of Spengler, Miller regales us with page after page of his surreal dreams. For the most part Bukowski sticks to funny anecdotes which reveal (revel in?) how much of an outsider and how much of a jerk he is, and sticks to his straightforward pithy style.

I read all of Bukowski’s novels in the 1990s, thinking Ham on Rye the best and Pulp the worst. Post Office made me laugh quite a bit, so I am considering rereading more of Bukowski soon.

Two SF Adventures by Edmond Hamilton: “Monsters of Mars” (1931) and “World of A Thousand Moons” (1942)

Project Gutenberg is a good source for classic science fiction and fantasy that have fallen into the public domain.  Last night and this morning I took advantage of this fact and read two stories full of ray guns and dangerous aliens by Edmond Hamilton, SF pioneer and husband of famed SF writer and Hollywood screenwriter Leigh Brackett.

“Monsters of Mars”

The entire April 1931 issue of Astounding Stories is available for free at Gutenberg.org. The cover story is by Hamilton, the story of three men who travel to Mars, entitled “Monsters of Mars.”

Physicist Milton and his two colleagues have been in radio communication with Mars for two years. They are eager to visit Mars and meet their new friends, but, in this story spaceships are impossible! (O ye of little faith!) Luckily, the Martians have developed a matter transmitter device. They radio the plans to the Earthmen, who build the device. Jealous of their professional reputations, the three scientists don’t tell anyone about their contact with the inhabitants of the Red Planet. They are also not suspicious that the Martians are willing to send them the blueprints for a teleporter, but are too shy to reveal anything about their own appearance or society or history. Milton and his assistants enlist one additional friend to join them on the Mars trip, but don’t waste time telling other academics or newspaper reporters or the government or anybody like that about their jaunt to Mars. So, unbeknownst to the world, three Earthmen (one stays behind to operate the matter transmitter) are zapped off to Mars. The teleporter will operate again in exactly 24 hours.

The Martians turn out to be rapacious crocodile men who plan to use the matter transmitter to invade and colonize the Earth, Mars being worn out. They seize the three humans for a little pre-invasion experimentation. Two of the Earthlings manage to escape, and flee to the jungles that surround the Martian city. Here they are captured by hideous ten foot long worm creatures. One of the scientists suggests that these worm monsters may be descended from humans! (Evolution played a role in the three Hamilton stories I read on November 14, and here it is again; I guess Hamilton was interested in evolution.)

The worm people are just about to sacrifice the Earthlings to their worm god when the crocodile men attack with their disintegrator rays and walking vehicles. In the confusion, the humans get a hold of one of the walking vehicles, drive back to the city, rescue their buddy (I guess they didn’t experiment on him after all) and jump in the matter transmitter just in time. Back on Earth they wreck their own matter transmitter and burn the blueprints. Hamilton doesn’t tell us if they call up Mars to taunt the crocodile men.

This is a lightweight story. There is nothing really wrong with the main plot, but to be a good story something more is necessary. There is no twist or surprise; I was hoping the worm creatures would recognize the Earthlings as their allies and that the humans would lead the worms in an apocalyptic war on the city, but the evolution idea is dropped immediately. The human characters are totally uninteresting, each indistinguishable from the other. (The most interesting character in the story is the ruler of the Martians, a freak with one huge head atop three normal-sized bodies who gets to make a fun “You dummies, we have wanted to conquer your world for centuries and now you have opened the front door for us!” speech.) Hamilton conjures up an interesting vision of the Martian city, with its conical skyscrapers, walking vehicles, wide canals and suburban jungles, but there is nothing about Martian culture, politics, or society. Hamilton doesn’t pull off any particularly effective horror or action scenes either, though this material is ripe with possibility; his style here is too bland.

I often complain that a story is too long, and praise writers (I think on this blog I have praised Gene Wolfe and Tanith Lee thusly) whose stories are economical, each sentence adding to plot or atmosphere. “Monsters of Mars” presents the rare case of a story I think is too short. A story about scientists who teleport to Mars and fight crocodile men in a city and worm people in a jungle could be a thrill if the scientists are interesting characters and the crocodile men and worm people have some kind of vivid society for us to fear and/or deplore. This story made me smile, so it was worth a read, but with some fleshing out it could have been so much more.

“World of A Thousand Moons”

The December 1942 issue of Amazing Stories included a story by Hamilton, “World of A Thousand Moons.” The story is advertised on the cover, but the cover painting is for a different story, one by Howard Browne about a prehistoric man.  (Incidentally, this story, "Warrior of the Dawn," is also available at Gutenberg.org.)

“World of A Thousand Moons” is much better than “Monsters of Mars.” In the first few pages Hamilton sketches out an interesting milieu: a multicultural interplanetary society with a hardened human spaceman, a ruthless Jovian criminal, and members of the decadent Earth bourgeoisie in the foreground, and Martian and human working class and lower middle class people, a notorious space pirate, and the Space Patrol in the background. We can easily visualize these people, imagine their motivations, and feel for them or hope they are brought to justice.

Lance Kenniston, human, and Holk Or, Jovian, are desperate space-sailors looking to buy a space ship on Mars. When they find none are for sale they fool young Earth heiress Gloria Loring and her hangers on into agreeing to transport them on their pleasure yacht to the dangerous asteroid belt. Kenniston tells the rich kids they are partners in a treasure hunt; in fact Kenniston is delivering them into the clutches of infamous space pirate John Dark, whose ship, shot full of holes by the Space Patrol, is stranded on Vesta, a particularly large asteroid covered in monster-haunted jungle.

The plot that follows includes startling revelations, double crosses, speculative medical science and lots of mayhem. And a happy ending (well, except for the nameless innocent crewmembers who get killed in the struggle for the space yacht.)  A fun tale.

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Hamilton was a prolific writer, and I look forward to reading more of his work in the future.