Lori by Robert Bloch

"I'm very fed up playing the passive female," she told him.

After eating the blandest food I've ever encountered in a restaurant (apparently this place caters to the septuagenarian crowd) I scouted out the thrift stores and libraries in an Iowan college town, and at one large thrift store purchased three paperbacks for thirty cents.  Among these was Lori, a 1990 Tor paperback of a 1989 novel by Robert Bloch.  The book is covered with extravagant praise from horror titans Stephen King (he read it in one sitting!), Ramsey Campbell ("spinechilling!") and F. Paul Wilson (who calls it an enthralling gem.)  Harlan Ellison also has a blurb--in his two dozen words he manages to work in a pun and a Poltergeist II joke.

The cover illustration by Jim Thiesen is obscured by all kinds of text, which is just as well because it doesn't look too hot.  Is this a story about the green ghost of a girl who has a man's hands?

(When I googled Thiesen I discovered that he has done some pretty exciting work, so I guess he did the cover for Lori on an off day.  I love the Bosch-style monster in Evolution and the image of Death and the bizarre sculpture in The Crossing.)    

I read Psycho in 2013 and thought it was alright, and more recently I liked his 1938 story "Eyes of the Mummy," but during the life of this blog the Bloch I have read has often been kind of disappointing.  But for ten cents I'm willing to give Bloch another shot!  

After reading it myself, I can see why Stevie King was able to finish Lori in a single sitting.  The style is brisk and straightforward, the sentences, paragraphs, and chapters (44 in 282 pages) mostly short.  I can also see why Harlan Ellison thought his pun and pop culture reference appropriate.  Just about every page of Lori is enlivened with some kind of wordplay.  We get puns innocuous:

The fees were outrageous but this was Beverly Hills, and nothing was inrageous here.

puns macabre:

Dead.  Mom and Dad are dead.  Everything's dead now, even the phone.   

metaphors:

They knew that once accused of arteriosclerosis, charged and convicted with cancer, the sentence was death and there'd be no appeal.

and etymologies of people's names, this being one of Lori's scholarly interests.  (She majored in etymology at college.)

The 1989 hardcover edition has no gravestones,
and Harlan Ellison's blurb gets top billing;
I am always curious about these marketing decisions

Bloch provides details that give the novel a strong sense of its place and time; there are passing mentions of Beverly Hills, Sepulveda Boulevard, George H. W. Bush, Sylvester Stallone and Madonna.  And there are tons of references to literary and TV detectives.  I guess this is supposed to make the novel feel real, to help the reader identify with the characters and locations described so the horror elements are all that more shocking.  I get the theory, that I'm a boring suburban 20th-century American, so I should be more scared or thrilled when a fellow boring suburban 20th-century American is in danger than when Frodo or John Carter in Middle Earth or on Barsoom are in danger, but for me it doesn't always work that way.

Themes, or motifs, of the novel include the perception of a decline in American life over the course of Lori's life, due to increases in computer use, crime, inflation, traffic, pollution, etc.  Alcohol and drugs are a related theme: many of the characters relieve stress by turning to a bottle secreted in their homes, offices or vehicles, and people are always pushing drinks and sleeping pills on poor distraught Lori.

The plot:  Lori Holmes comes home from college graduation with her fiance to find that her parents burned up along with their house just in the last hour--the place is still in flames.  A frumpy young Jewish woman, a psychic, contacts Lori out of the blue and uses her ESP powers to find a metal box hidden in the smoldering ruin.  In the box is a 1968 college yearbook; a senior in the book, Jessica Fairmount, looks just like Lori!  Lori's parents' lawyer steals the book and plans to kill Lori, but mysteriously gets killed himself.  A police detective who has Dirty Harry and Murder She Wrote on his mind investigates the case, as does Lori's psychiatrist, an amateur sleuth who loves Sherlock Holmes.  Lori's fiance is an investigative reporter, and in the last third of the book he also runs his own private investigation.

The big reveal:  Lori was adopted after her mother, Jessica Fairmount, died in childbirth.  Her real father is the shrink, a crook who fled the US after Jessica died.  In the Caribbean he learned voodoo, and returned to California a few years ago with the plan of shifting Jessica's soul into their daughter Lori's young body so he could continue their affair.  At the last minute the cop and the reporter foil this scheme, rescuing Lori.  

Lori isn't bad; the wordplay is entertaining, and the plot is well-constructed: in the last few pages Bloch neatly ties together all the disparate threads and clues.  But I can't say it generated much enthusiasm in this reader.  For one thing, despite the ghost on the cover and all the talk about trembling and chills in the blurbs, this book is not scary; only in the last few pages did I feel that Lori was in any danger.  Lori is more of a Los Angeles detective story than a horror story, with the supernatural stuff taking up few pages, and I'm personally not very keen on LA crime stories, though I know there are many people who are.  One reason I read speculative fiction is to explore strange new worlds, like the aforementioned Middle Earth and Barsoom, and the Los Angeles of police officers I can see on TV every day doesn't fit the bill.

Lori is not an interesting character, and even though the novel is named after her, she is largely a spectator, with four or five other characters taking the initiative and driving the plot.  The psychic, the lawyer, and the cop are actually more complex and interesting characters than the static Lori.  Bloch more or less admits this is the case; on page 238 Lori says she is fed up "playing the passive female," and she is manipulated by her friends and foes from the start to the finish of the text.  Feminist critics friendly to Bloch could probably interpret the novel as an attack on our society, in which women are preyed upon by high status men (lawyers, doctors, etc), while such critics hostile to Bloch could judge the novel a symptom of our society, in which the bodies of young women are a commodity, like fertile land or money, which ambitious men compete over.    

Lori is competent and I didn't find it irritating, so I feel free to recommend it, but I'm not really its core audience, and it wasn't what I was hoping for.

The Acharnians by Aristophanes

"Oh, I know we always say hard things about the Spartans; but are they really responsible for everything?"

Years ago I purchased a 1973 Penguin Classics paperback of three plays by Aristophanes from one of the carts outside Alabaster Books in beautiful Lower Manhattan.  (You'll remember Aristophanes from that much-beloved episode of The Odd Couple.)  Work-related errands often found me in the area, and, since I was working for the government, I had plenty of time to hang out at Alabaster and leisurely pore over the bargain book carts on the sidewalk there on 4th Avenue by 12th Street, flip through the art books, stroll inside to scrutinize the small SF section in the back of the cramped little store.

I didn't purchase the little black paperback because I had a burning desire to read Aristophanes--I bought it because on its cover is a photo of my favorite Greek vase painting, the Achilles Painter's depiction of a woman bidding farewell to a warrior on a white-ground lekythos.  I haven't actually seen this vase in real life (it resides in Athens) but it is quite famous and often reproduced in books and online.  I love the spare and elegant lines, the perfectly proportioned faces and hands of the figures, and the colors.  The scenario is touching (is this the last time they will see each other alive?) and the military history buff in me adores the warrior's helmet and his shield, which has an eye painted on it.

This weekend I became curious about Aristophanes and so read one of the three plays included in the book, The Acharnians, translated by Alan Sommerstein.  I didn't even know who or what an Acharnian was before I started the play, so it was about as spoiler-free an experience as could be imagined.

The Acharnians, it turns out, are the inhabitants of the town of Acharnae, seven miles from Athens.  The play was produced and takes place in 425 BC, during the Peloponnesian War, when the people of Acharnae were forced to hide behind the walls of Athens because the Spartans were periodically destroying everything in the area.

The Acharnians in the play are represented by the chorus, a bunch of angry old men who lust for revenge over the Spartans:

Zeus and all ye gods in heaven,
   Never shall we rest from war
Till the pillage of our vineyards
   Is revenged in Spartan gore.

The point of Aristophanes's play is to advocate coming to terms with the Spartans, and so initially the Acharnian chorus plays the role of the heavy, rabidly assaulting any Athenian who advocates for peace talks:

Listen?--never while we've breath!Villain, now you meet your death!Die beneath a hail of stones:They will serve to hide your bones. 

The hero of the play is Dikaiopolis, an old farmer who wants peace, and earns the animosity of the Acharnians.  This is a comedy, and Dikaiopolis cracks a lot of jokes, and acts in a ridiculous manner.  He drinks some Spartan wine and declares that he has made a separate, personal, peace treaty with Sparta, waving around the wine skins and declaring them to be peace treaties (this is one of the play's numerous untranslatable puns--in Greek the words for "treaty" and "libation of wine" are the same.)  The Acharnians get after him, and he begs them to give him an opportunity to make his case:  he will lay his head on a chopping block, give his peace oration, and, if they don't like it, they are free to decapitate him!

Dikaiopolis's speech, which lays much blame for the war on Athens' own leaders, sways the crowd, and he escapes with his head.  He sets up a market to conduct forbidden trade with the Megarians and Boeotians, allies of the Spartans.  One Megarian, made destitute by the war, tries to sell Dikaiopolis his daughters, comically disguising them as swine.  Demonstrating the benefits of peace, Dikaiopolis makes a tidy profit at his market, despite the efforts of informers who try to interfere.  The final pages, the funniest in the play, contrast the pleasure of Dikaiopolis as he goes off to a party with gorgeous girls and the pain of the general Lamachus who marches off to fight in the bitter cold, only to be wounded while crossing a ditch.

Lamachus:     Friends, take me up and mind my leg:
                          Attend a soldier sick.

Dikaiopolis:   Girls, take me up and get a grip
                           On my rejoicing prick. 

The Acharnians is a pretty funny play, even though many of the jokes will be hard for a modern Anglophone audience to get at first glance.  Besides the untranslatable puns, there are tons of jokes about current events and celebrities of the day; in fact, much of the play is a spoof of a tragedy by Euripides (one which is no longer extant) and a lampoon of Euripides himself.  These jokes are explained in the endnotes (there are 85 such notes, and I broke the spine of this old desiccated book flipping back and forth while reading this play) and Sommerstein endeavors to use language a 1970s audience will laugh at (the first bit of dialogue has Dikaiopolis declaring "I'll heckle him like fury until he shuts his cakehole tight.")  Sommerstein has Euripides speak in Elizabethan English ("I'll give it thee; for subtle are thy schemes, and intricate the courses of thy mind") so he sounds pretentious, the poor Megarian in a working class (Scottish?) dialect.  And some of the jokes work in any context:

Megarian: Och, so-so.  When I left tae come here, the government was doing its best tae see we achieved a speedy and complete catastrophe.   

The Acharnians is entertaining, and provides insight into life and ways of thinking in the long ago world of 5th century Greece.  Perhaps most surprising to modern readers will be Aristophanes' criticism of democracy; perhaps also remarkable is the fact that this play, which is so critical of Athens' leaders and government, was well-received by Athenian theatre-goers.  Definitely a worthwhile read.      

The Darkness on Diamondia by A. E. Van Vogt

"Man thinks with what used to be called modern logic.  But his basic nature, like the universe, operates on finite logic."

Today we complete MPorcius Fiction Log's impromptu A. E. Van Vogt marathon! The finale to this epic exploration of one of Canada's most unique exports is brought to you by The Darkness on Diamondia.  I read the Ace edition of this 1972 novel, which I believe is the first edition.  Some philistine scrawled "30" on my copy, obscuring the interesting cover illustration by John Schoenherr--wait, did somebody pay 30 cents for this thing?

The year is 3819, and the planet of Diamondia is in trouble!  Diamondia was settled by Italians a few centuries ago.  The colonists sought to replicate on the planet the glories to be found in 20th century Italy, from Renaissance palaces and churches to pizza and traffic congestion.  So, despite 2000 years of history having passed, people on Diamondia still recklessly drive ground cars with squealing rubber tires and have maintained their Catholic faith.  There have been some "improvements": the cars use non-polluting engines, the palaces and other classic works of architecture have been built five times the size of their models back on Earth, and the cobblestone streets have been covered with a transparent non-slip plastic that acts as a cushion if you trip and fall.  (Van Vogt doesn't say so, but I bet the pizza is gluten free and 100% organic!)

Native to Diamondia are the Irsk, people with tentacles in place of arms and legs.  For hundreds of years the Irsk were happy to work for the humans and many have taken up human ways (like eating pizza) but ten years or so ago a faction violently opposed to the humans rose up.  Since then a terrible war has been raging between the humans and the rebellious segment of the Irsk population.  Military units from Earth have been trying to pacify the planet, but with no end of the war in sight, the Earth taxpayers are war weary, and it looks like the Earth is about to withdraw its forces.

Future Glitter, the last Van Vogt caper we looked at, was largely inspired by Van Vogt's extensive readings in the history of communism in Russia and China.  Besides his readings in Italian history, it seems likely that Van Vogt wrote Darkness in Diamondia with the Nixon administration's decision to reduce the role of US ground troops in the defense of South Vietnam, a policy known as "Vietnamization," in mind. (By the time Darkness in Diamondia was published, American withdrawal from Vietnam was essentially completed.)

As seen in Wayne Barlowe's rendition here,
Irsk who are friendly to humans wear
green stripes on their clothes

Our main characters are Colonel Charles Morton and Lieutenant Lester Bray, officers from Intelligence on Earth and members of the Negotiating Committee. The Negotiating Committee is ostensibly on Diamondia to broker some kind of peace, but everybody knows that their real job is to put a good face on the fact that the Earth is going to abandon the 500 million Diamondians to their fate at the hands of the billion Irsk.  ("What you and I are here for--to get Earth federation armies out of this war--is too ugly.  We know perfectly well the Irsk will murder all the human beings on Diamondia when we're gone," Bray admits on the second page of the text.)  We follow Morton and Bray as they have various diplomatic, espionage, and superscientific/supernatural adventures. More than once our heroes get captured and then liberated by various interest groups.  Morton is seduced by a Diamondian woman, Isolina Ferraris, who hopes to convince him that the Earth armies must stay.  While Morton is out of commission Bray impersonates him and conducts interrogations and investigations among the Diamondians and the Irsk.

We know Van Vogt loves to write about mental powers and innovative systems of thought, and we get this kind of esoterica in spades in Darkness on Diamondia. Diamondia's magnetic field is unusual, and it turns out that this is because it is home to a non-corporeal alien being of tremendous power!  This creature (or is it a machine?) arrived two thousand years ago and provides a kind of mental network for the Irsk, diminishing their individualism and acting as a sort of ruler or government over them. Even the pro-human Irsk have kept this entity a secret from the humans, but with the arrival of the Negotiating Committee the thing takes action.  Morton and Bray, and other Earth humans, suffer periodic attacks on their psyches from the alien being, which they perceive as and christen a "darkness."  If they are unable to resist these attacks they fall unconscious and their minds are either ushered into the alien's presence (and exhorted to assist in the darkness's quest to exterminate all human life on Diamondia) or temporarily joined to the mind of some other person (Morton spends time in the skull of an important human-friendly Irsk, Lositeen, who may hold the key to defeating the darkness.)  People pop in and out of each other's bodies quite a lot in the novel, and the book also features lots of hypnotism that causes people to take on the personas of others.  With all the impersonating and body-switching going on, as well as the ways humans and the darkness have altered Irsk society, you could say that one of the book's themes is identity.

I got the impression that the simple and innocent Irsk, corrupted and exploited by both decadent human colonists and the merciless darkness, were meant to remind us of tribal peoples caught up in the struggles of European empires or Third Worlders caught up in the Cold War between the West and the communist powers.  I wish Van Vogt had spent more time with Lositeen, who, as a human-friendly Irsk pressured by the rebel Irsk to turn on his Diamondian employer and friends, had the potential to be a compelling character.  Unfortunately, even though Lositeen's name appears on the back cover of the paperback, he quickly fades into the background.

This cover illo accurately reflects
a scene in the novel

Morton and Bray not only have to face the challenges presented by the troublesome Diamondians, the rebellious Irsk, and the strange darkness, but the obstruction of their fellow Earthmen.  Many of the Earth officers on Diamondia are incompetent, and the worst of them is a traitor, a physicist who has already figured out how to manipulate the darkness, and who strives to use it to make himself ruler of Diamondia.

In Voyage of the Space Beagle Van Vogt presented us with Nexialism, a science which subsumed and superseded all earlier sciences. In Darkness on Diamondia our man Van enlightens us about "finite logic."  The modern logic with which we are familiar ignores the fact that no two things are truly alike; we think in sets, like "a dozen eggs."  Finite logic acknowledges the reality that there are no sets, that no two items are identical--each of a dozen eggs is unique.  He who embraces finite logic can achieve great power (one minor character who has mastered finite logic has lived for 400 years.)

The various people and groups in the novel demonstrate the finite logic concept. Morton, a student of finite logic, is able to outwit the darkness because the darkness uses modern logic.  Thinking the flesh creatures on the planet are interchangeable, ("They were all like one person to that thing in the sky," says one character) the magnetic field creature has difficulty finding Morton among them.

Colonialism and innovative logic aren't the only issues Van Vogt tackles in this book's 250 pages.  Sex and gender roles, which we recently witnessed the Canadian mastermind of science fiction address in Earth Factor X, are also a topic in Darkness on Diamondia.  In fact, I suspect the main reason Van Vogt chose to have Italians colonize the planet is because of the stereotype of Italian men as brutes who leer and catcall at women, as exemplified by that iconic (perhaps staged, perhaps misinterpreted) photo by Ruth Orkin of an "American Girl in Italy, 1951."  In fact, the Diamondians are repeatedly portrayed as a bunch of selfish, unscrupulous, and bumbling jerks, and I wouldn't be surprised if Italian readers found the novel offensive.  (One of the many complaints about the Diamondians comes from Bray: "These Diamondians are the damnedest bunch of assassins you ever heard of.")

Sorry folks, there is no evil
monster tree in this novel

Van Vogt posits that by the 39th century on all the many planets inhabited by humans (except Diamondia) women have banded together to form "unions" which, by setting and enforcing various rules, protect women from being sexually exploited and having their hearts broken by callous men.  (A similar idea appeared in Van Vogt's story "The Male Condition.")  There are no such unions on Diamondia, which leads some Earthmen to consider the planet a paradise where it is easy to get laid.  Life for Diamondian women among the hypermasculine Diamondian men, however, is no picnic, as demonstrated by Isolina Ferraris's dialogue ("Diamondian males...you can't imagine what those men are like...") and a scene with her father.  At the end of the novel Isolina is overjoyed to be able to settle down with Earthman Morton.

In the same way that Van Vogt seems sympathetic but condescending towards the "natives," who are either the victims or beneficiaries of advanced imperial powers, I thought he was sympathetic to women, but saw them as weak and lacking in agency, creatures vulnerable to male abuse who deserved to be protected by decent men like Morton.  When Irsk or women misbehave, Van Vogt makes it clear they are emulating, or responding to, the Diamondian men.

Darkness on Diamondia is certainly an interesting specimen of Van Vogt's strange body of work, addressing all kind of topics and including many of his usual themes. However, the plot has many moving parts and is quite convoluted; I found it difficult to keep up with what was going on and to keep all the many characters straight.  I think it all makes sense if you are willing to grit your teeth and reread many passages and work it all out, but is it worth the effort?  A Gene Wolfe novel can be difficult, but the beautiful prose makes reading even a Wolfe novel that you don't quite understand a pleasure, and Wolfe's work usually has some kind of emotional impact.  Van Vogt's writing style is poor, and I didn't really care about the characters in this one.

Darkness on Diamondia is perhaps the most challenging and frustrating of the Van Vogt works I have read, so I'm going to have to say that this one is for Van Vogt diehards only!

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Back in late 2013 SF blogger 2theD wrestled with The Darkness on Diamondia; check out his thoughts at Potpourri of Science Fiction Literature, where he includes a scan of the paperback's first page, which one assumes is advertising but reads more like "Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here."

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The Ace edition of Darkness on Diamondia is full of interesting advertising.  Bound into the book is a page of glossy ads:

I can only imagine how many readers thought, "Maybe booze or drugs would help me understand this crazy novel."

At the end of the paperback is an ad for Heinlein books, all of which I have read and can recommend, and one for Ned Calmer's The Anchorman, which lays bare to the American public the many loves of a TV news broadcaster--endorsed by legendary newsman Chet Huntley!

Future Glitter by A. E. Van Vogt

"Comrades, workers, supporters of the New Economic System.  I imagine that you were all surprised this morning when you saw my image on one or another wall in your house."

We are told that one reason for Damon Knight's famous hostility to A. E. Van Vogt is the latter's apparent sympathy for autocracy and skepticism of democracy.  There is plenty of evidence for Van Vogt's opinions on these matters; he devotes one of Earth Factor X's short chapters to pointing out how the people of Earth "needed somebody to look after them...definitely needed somebody to tell them what to do," for example. Between the covers of Future Glitter we find additional evidence of Van Vogt's political beliefs.

I read the Ace 1973 printing of Future Glitter, which I believe is the book's first edition.  I like the colors on the cover painting by Bart Forbes (I'm guessing it's a watercolor) and the woman with the long neck.  Unfortunately, the text is full of typos. Shame on you, Ace!  If you really thought this was Van Vogt's greatest novel, you would have assigned a proofreader to the project, wouldn't you?

This cover is nice, but has nothing
to do with the story

I also like the British hardcover edition's cover. UK paperbacks of Future Glitter were retitled Tyrannopolis, and given less abstract, more dramatic covers.

In the three and a half pages of the introduction to Future Glitter Van Vogt brags that he is an expert on communism and the People's Republic of China, having "read and reread approximately 100 books on China and Communism" while writing his 1962 novel The Violent Man.  Van Vogt assures us he is a "middle liberal" (a phrase I don't think I've ever encountered before and which, because Van Vogt doesn't provide any context, could mean a number of different things) and then tells us "We must remember that dictators can often solve problems by fiat." Van Vogt provides examples of problems in Peking that a Communist Party official, in the US in 1971 on a UN mission, told him were solved thanks to Party policy.  But Van Vogt warns that some may not like the price to be paid for solving problems via such methods.

I was pleased to find that Future Glitter, published within a year of Earth Factor X, was better written, had a better plot, and included images considerably more arresting and characters much more compelling and sympathetic than that novel.

In the clever first section of the novel, 30 or so of its 200 pages, we meet the elderly Dr. Dun Higenroth, one of the top scientists of the 23rd century, a time when the Earth is ruled by a collectivist dictatorship.  Thanks to the dictator, Martin Lilgin, the world has been spared hunger, war, disease, and pollution for over a century.  On the other hand, there is no private property, the government periodically subjects everyone to invasive psychological testing, and also has absolute control over where you can live, who you can marry, and whether you can reproduce.  The paranoid Lilgin, over the course of his 200 years as ruler, has executed a billion people, based on whims or for such infractions as "questioning the Official Religion."

Nota Bene: There actually is no scene in
 the novel in which people fight in the arena

Higenroth has developed a technique that allows the precise control of "fields" and electricity.  ("When Higenroth discovered that electricity can be made to move from one location in space to another in a simpler way than in nature, many problems in spatial relations became resolvable.") These techniques, generally called "The Pervasive System," provide their user tremendous power, the ability to teleport oneself or others, for example. Higenroth comes up with a way to use his new technique to record and transmit images; by a mere act of will he can cast a field around Lilgin and cause live moving images of the dictator to be projected on the plastic walls of every residence on the Earth.  Higenroth hopes that thus exposing the dictator will undermine his rule.  (This idea hearkens back to the spy rays used by the Weapon Shops to expose the corruption and cruelty of the Empress Innelda in Van Vogt's famous Isher tales.)

His dissident ideas having come to the attention of the authorities, Higenroth is sentenced to public decapitation.  One of my favorite elements of the novel is how the dictatorship's propaganda has convinced the populace that when it beheads intellectuals (apparently a common occurrence) it is not a punishment, but an honor, and a way of immortalizing the man so honored: Higenroth's students divvy up parts of their mentor's brain, and believe that upon his death portions of Higenroth's vast store of knowledge will be transmitted to their own minds.

One of the themes of the novel is how Lilgin uses sex to manipulate important men, like bureaucrats and scientists, whose help he needs but whom he also fears.  The dictator's agents scoured the world to find the prettiest teenage girl on the planet, and married her off to Higenroth two years ago.  This young woman has refused to have sex with her aged husband since their marriage.

In order to keep Higenroth from trying to escape, his wife is instructed to occupy his attention by surrendering her body to him for the very first time.  After finally consummating their marriage, Higenroth acts to preserve his scientific breakthrough for the future: he uses a device upon his sleeping wife that embeds the critical knowledge in the cells of the zygote of their child!

The lion's share of the novel concerns Higenroth's son, who is spirited away from his mother immediately after birth and raised by foster parents he believes are his own. The dictator knows the boy, named Orlo, has the secret of the Pervasive System hidden in his cells, and, hoping to acquire this knowledge, keeps a close eye on him. At the age of twenty Orlo is brought to the dictator's palace and put in charge of a colony of scientists who live in what amounts to a prison (Van Vogt tells us in the intro that he got this idea from reading Solzhenitsyn.)  Lilgin wants Orlo to be close at hand and under government control when the potentially world-shattering knowledge he unwittingly carries bursts forth.

You'll be happy to learn that this cover illo
does actually represent a scene in the novel

Like in a lot of Van Vogt stories we follow the protagonist as he learns the reality of his own life and his world, develops amazing mental powers, and then causes a paradigm shift. Psychological and political theories are also presented.  Like Hedrock in the Isher books, who refuses to depose the House of Isher but instead hopes to moderate it and limit its excesses, Orlo decides that it would be pointless to overthrow the Lilgin dictatorship; his project will be to reform its policies and provide a little more freedom to the human race.  Echoing the cynicism of Earth Factor X, when the knowledge lurking in Orlo's cells is activated and all the world can watch the tyrant's every move, 24/7, this only briefly discomfits the canny dictator.  The charismatic Lilgin directly addresses the common people, and a mob five million strong rushes to his aid and preserves his dictatorship!

Here and in the Weapon Shop books Van Vogt argues that firm rule is preferable to anarchy and war, though he also advocates for checks on that rule--not necessarily democratic or republican checks, mind you, like elections or referenda, but the moderating power of an additional, confrontational, elite.  (To be fair, there are sections of The Weapon Makers which stress the importance of constitutionalism, portraying the fact that the Weapon Shop council is not, or should not be, above its own laws.)  I have already pointed out how in Earth Factor X Van Vogt suggests that ordinary people crave authority and want to be told what to do, and he does that in Future Glitter as well.

Van Vogt is hardly alone in his (apparent) beliefs; in fact, a contempt for the common people and acceptance of undemocratic elite rule are sentiments we see often in the work of Golden Age SF writers.  L. Ron Hubbard's Final Blackout depicts how the rule of a single superior man brings peace and stability after a long destructive war.  In "Slow Sculpture" Theodore Sturgeon calls for an elite to prune and mold humanity like a gardener would a tree.  Cyril Kornbluth's "Marching Morons" has a sympathetic elite manipulating the masses, who are too stupid to look out for their own interests.  I haven't read any of Isaac Asimov's fiction since I started this blog, but aren't those Foundation books about how a small intellectual elite should be manipulating the rest of us for our own good?

I'd like to see a larger
image of this intriguing cover

The Golden Age writers we think of as libertarians also exhibit some of these attitudes. Many stories by Robert Heinlein stress the importance of respecting the authority of the captain of a ship.  In his The Moon is a Harsh Mistress the common run of humanity isn't interested in and won't pursue freedom, and our heroes deceive and manipulate them in order to achieve their goals.  Poul Anderson seems skeptical of authority and government power, but in "Master Key" we see his adventurous merchant character, Van Rijn, express contempt for the people whom he sees as the majority, those who would rather enjoy government-provided security than take responsibility for running their own lives.

I think it is fair to say that there is an element of snobbery to SF; this is something that I am not always comfortable with.

Van Vogt fans should definitely seek out Future Glitter, but, unlike House That Stood Still or Earth Factor X, I am also willing to recommend it to general SF fans: there are plenty of surreal images, speculations about politics and psychology, and characters who made some kind of emotional impact on me.  I think basing a book on his readings of Chinese and Russian history (instead of just his dreams and psychological theories as it seems he sometimes did) paid off for Van Vogt and for his readers.

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A side-note: The phrase "politically correct" appears to be in the news again, so it was a weird bit of synchronicity finding Van Vogt use the phrase in this 1973 novel: "A politically correct statement spoken with the tiniest lapse from correct tone of voice--Lilgin heard the lapse.  That man was not allowed near him again."

Earth Factor X by A. E. Van Vogt

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

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

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

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

Nobody saw fit to depict the cannon!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The House that Stood Still by A. E. Van Vogt

"What's all this about?  Who are those people who were whipping you?"

"Oh--" she shrugged.  "Members of a club."

"What kind of a club?"

"The most exclusive club in the world," she said, and laughed softly.

The House That Stood Still first was unleashed on an unsuspecting world in 1950, as a hardcover.  Since then it has appeared under numerous titles and in numerous forms. Its second publication was an abridged version in a 1951 issue of Detective Book magazine, and the novel includes much of the apparatus of a hard-boiled detective mystery.  There are murder investigations, drugged drinks, stakeouts, lists of suspects, and a protagonist who has a contentious relationship with the D.A. and who drives around town interrogating people and rifling through desk drawers looking for clues. In the final scene the hero gathers together all the characters to announce who the murderer is.  But this still is an A. E. Van Vogt story, so we also get immortals, mind readers, ray guns, space craft, and revelations of the secret cabal that hides in the shadows, pulling the strings.

This weekend I read the 1968 Paperback Library edition.  The description on the back is quite misleading--there are no "indestructible aliens" and there is no "catastrophe that threatened to obliterate the universe from the heavens."  I don't even know what "obliterate the universe from the heavens" means.

Allison Stephens is our hero.  A strapping veteran of the Pacific War (like Mike Hammer), Stephens studied law after the war and is now representing Tannahill, a guy who owns lots of real estate in a little sea side town in California.  One of the buildings owned by Tannahill is a mysterious house made of marble that is over a thousand years old, known as "the Grand House."

Despite what you see on the covers,
Mistra Lanett is blonde

Like those Mickey Spillane novels, The House that Stood Still has its salacious elements.  The indispensable website for Van Vogt fans, icshi.net, suggests that some or all of this erotic material was added to the novel for a 1960 version entitled The Mating Cry.  Within the first ten pages Stephens is busting into one of the rooms in an office building Tannahill owns to find that a bunch of weirdos with a taste for pre-Columbian art have tied up a beautiful blonde, stripped her to the waist, and are whipping her bare back.  A few pages later she is offering her body to Stephens as a reward for rescuing her (he accepts the offer).

This woman, Mistra Lanett, is no damsel in distress.  Instead, she is a femme fatale, one of the group of immortals who are all hanging around the Grand House.  These jokers all have access to high technology, including "night vision glasses," energy pistols that shoot "needle beams," masks which make you indistinguishable from the person you want to impersonate, and space ships.  Like Empress Innelda in The Weapon Makers, Lanett is a woman with lots of power and limited scruples, who has realized that what she really wants out of life is a husband and children.  When it comes to husband material, Stephens fits the bill.  But first, she has a test for him.

Lanett and the other immortals face a dilemma: they are aware that an enemy nation plans to launch a devastating nuclear attack on the United States later in the year, so they have to decide whether to stay on Earth or flee to their base on Mars.  Lanett wants to use her space ship to launch a preemptive strike on the enemy in the next few days, destroying their nuclear bombs while they are still in the factories and warehouses, before they are distributed to the submarines and bombers.  Operating a space ship on a strategic bombing mission is tough work (who knew?) so she wants her dreamboat Stephens to accompany her on her ship.  If he joins the mission, she promises to make him immortal and to love him forever.  But should he trust her? Does he want to risk getting shot out of the sky?  Could he live with the deaths of hundreds of civilians, in an undeclared private war, on his conscience?

(For some reason Van Vogt doesn't finger the Soviet Union as the country which is going to nuke America into oblivion, but the fictional country of "Lorillia."  The Lorillians, Lanett tells Stephens, have "the most powerful anti-aircraft defense in the world."  It's an odd choice, considering that I assumed the novel was set in the early 1950s, when it was written, a time when few countries were manufacturing nuclear weapons and had fleets of submarines and strategic bombers to deliver them.)

Everything in this 159-page book is confusing and crazy.  For example, Tannahill, one of the immortals, has amnesia because he was shot in the head two years ago; at the start of the novel he has just arrived in town from a hospital back east. While in the hospital he had dreams of being buried alive, which of course were not dreams at all--the other immortals were using him as a decoy, shuttling his unconscious body between a New York hospital and a California graveyard for use at a funeral.  I also didn't quite understand where the immortals got their high-tech equipment; none of those we meet seems to be a physicist or engineer.

Anyway, the basic plot behind all the confusion turns out to be this: in ancient times an alien robot star ship crashed in California.  The telepathic "robot brain" convinced the local people, Stone Age Indians, to help repair the ship.  So that the Indians would live forever (it takes a long time to fix a star ship, apparently), the robot brain applied a radioactive treatment to the marble structure he directed the Indians to build above the buried ship.  This special radioactivity keeps whoever resides in the Grand House forever young.  Over the centuries various people, like Lanett, the daughter of a Roman official in 3rd century Britain, ended up at the Grand House, which became the scene of various struggles between those who realized that it conferred immortality on its residents.  In one such struggle Tannahill, then a conquistador called Tanequila the Bold, seized the house and killed most of the Indians.  (After reading this book I can't get that Procul Harum song out of my head.)  During the period of the novel there are 53 immortals, and one of the few surviving Indians, Tezlacodanal, is trying to wrest control of the Grand House from the others, which leads to the wounding of Tannahill and the murders Stephens is trying to solve.  Tezlacodanal has an advantage over the whites, because none of the whites realize there is an alien star ship buried underneath the house; in fact, Tezlacodanal wants to use the alien craft to rule the world!

In the end, Stephens finds the ancient star ship, and working with the robot brain, eliminates Tezlacodanal and stabilizes the whole situation.  He and Lannett marry, and he hopes to give to the world the gift of immortality and to explore the universe with the robot.

Take that, Lorillia!

I didn't enjoy The House that Stood Still nearly as much I did the two Isher books.  For one thing, I'm not crazy about complicated mystery stories, trying to keep track of all the suspects and motives and clues and all that.  (I'm not even sure why the book is called The House that Stood Still; maybe you should take my interpretation of the plot above with a grain of salt!)  Secondly, the Isher books have a fascinating setting and address interesting ideological issues, which this novel does not.

The material in The House that Stood Still provides Van Vogt opportunities to engage the emotions of the reader, but he does not take them. Stephens does not participate in the attack on the enemy nuclear facilities, and the air raid takes place "off screen" and succeeds even without his help.  Why include the war stuff at all if the war is won without the main character's participation, and if he gets the girl without taking the risk and making the sacrifice she asked of him?  Van Vogt drains the excitement out of both the atomic war plot and the sexual relationship plot right there.

Tezlacodanal could have been an interesting villain, a man driven by a lust for power/and or passion for vengeance on the Europeans who destroyed his people and stole their life-giving building, but this guy almost never appears "on screen."  (I guess this is partly because a convention of murder mysteries is that the murderer's identity is kept secret til the end.)  Similarly, Van Vogt doesn't spend any time making the two people who got murdered, a black groundskeeper and an elevator operator, anything more than props, so we don't really care that they got killed or whether their killer is brought to justice.

I am going to have to give The House that Stood Still the all-to-common "barely acceptable" rating.  A disappointment after the Isher books, to be sure.

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The last page of my copy of The House that Stood Still is an ad for No Right To Bear Arms by Carl Bakal, which (apparently) argues that the government should strictly control who is permitted to own firearms.  I thought this an amusing choice for an ad in a book by Van Vogt, in whose famous The Weapon Shops of Isher is expressed the sentiment "The Right to Buy Weapons is the Right to be Free."

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The Van Vogt marathon at MPorcius Fiction Blog continues!  In our next installment, the 1974 novel The Secret Galactics, in its 1976 DAW edition, which appeared under the title Earth Factor X!      

The Weapon Makers by A. E. Van Vogt

Before Hedrock could explain the simple elements of human nature involved, the titanic thunder raged down again at his mind:

"MAN, WHY DID YOU RISK YOUR LIFE SO THAT OTHER HUMAN BEINGS CAN GO TO THE STARS?  AND WHY DO YOU WANT TO GIVE THE SECRET OF IMMORTALITY TO OTHERS?"

Like many of his stories, the publication history of A. E. Van Vogt's body of work can be quite confusing.  The Weapon Makers is considered a sequel to The Weapon Shops of Isher (it appears after The Weapon Shops of Isher in omnibus editions of the two novels, for example) but The Weapon Makers appeared in book form before The Weapon Shops of Isher did, and it was serialized in three issues of Astounding in 1943, years before one of the component stories of The Weapon Shops of Isher appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1949.  I guess what matters is that the events recounted in The Weapon Makers take place seven years after those described in The Weapon Shops of Isher.

Greenberg's fun logo

I own a hardcover copy of The Weapon Makers, published by Greenberg in 1952.  This is a revised edition; apparently the text is different from the text in the 1943 serial and the 1947 hardcover edition by Hadley.  This week, immediately after reading its predecessor, I cracked open the 63-year old volume.

In The Weapon Shops of Isher we met Hedrock, a relatively minor character who was, secretly from everybody, immortal.  Hedrock is a big wig in the Weapon Shop hierarchy, and in The Weapon Makers he is our main protagonist.  We learn he became immortal thousands of years ago in a freak accident related to a technique that physically enlarges living things.  Over the centuries since, he has killed thousands of rats in experiments (don't tell the folks at PETA!), trying to duplicate the accident so he can offer immortality to the entire human race (don't tell the folks at ZPG!)

Over the course of The Weapon Makers we learn some of the many things Hedrock has been up to in his long life, each of them dedicated to the purpose of guiding the human race to a finer future.  Hedrock, for example, founded the Weapons Shops which have served to limit the excesses of a tyrannical government, and has often married and fathered members of the House of Isher, the rulers of that government.

Hedrock, who in the novel often performs as a super spy and super detective, has insinuated himself into the court of Empress Innelda, but in the first chapters of the book both the Empress and the Weapon Shops become suspicious of him--Innelda orders him executed at once, and the Council of the Weapon Shops eventually comes around to her belief that Hedrock must die.  Hedrock finds himself on the run from both of the powerful institutions that dominate the Empire of Isher.

That artillery piece is a mere
"ninety-thousand cycle unit"

Our main plot concerns the fact that a small team of scientists, independent of both the House of Isher and the Weapon Shops, have developed an interstellar drive.  Innelda wants to stifle this development, because she knows that her subjects will flee her rule as soon as they can get out of the Solar System.  The Weapon Shops want the secret of this invention revealed to the people.  Hedrock is right there in the thick of things when a criminal who has stolen the interstellar ship from the scientists hides it in plain sight in the middle of Imperial City, and the Empress's army, backed up by heavy energy artillery ("one-hundred-million cycle guns") storms the vessel.  Hedrock makes use of the interstellar drive and escapes to the far reaches of outer space, where he meets powerful aliens that look like spiders.

These aliens are totally lacking in any emotion and absolutely selfish, and send Hedrock back to Earth in order to study him.  As the incredulous spider people observe, Hedrock, Innelda, and other people take risks and make sacrifices in the interests of abstract causes and their fellow human beings.

In the Earthbound climax of the story, Hedrock uses that growth technique to make himself 150 feet tall and, reminding me of my favorite sequence from Little Nemo in Slumberland as well as my beloved Godzilla, marches through dozens of cities, smashing buildings and demanding that Innelda release the secret of the interstellar drive.  All the while Innelda's flying navy pursues him, blasting away with their batteries of energy cannon.  (Libertarian readers take heart: before launching this act of Brobdingnagian terrorism Hedrock has memorized the locations of the many businesses he has secretly acquired and developed over the centuries, and so all the buildings he is kicking over are his own!  And he attacks on the weekend when nobody is at work!)  This scene took me by surprise, even though Van Vogt had cleverly foreshadowed it and it appears on the cover of Italian edition of the book.

Hedrock the Immortal is probably a better title
 for the novel than The Weapon Makers

Perhaps just as startling, in the same chapter as the kaiju scene it is revealed why Empress Innelda has been making so much trouble for everybody by launching her costly attacks on the Weapon Shops: she is sexually frustrated!  Luckily, there's a cure for that--marry the man she has loved against her own will since she met him: Hedrock!  (Don't expect to see a glowing notice of The Weapon Makers in the book review section of Ms. anytime soon.)

Having a husband, and the prospect of having children, revolutionizes Innelda's whole psychology.  But tragedy strikes nine months after Hedrock and Innelda's wedding--suffering through a catastrophically difficult childbirth, Innelda must choose to sacrifice the baby, or herself.  Determined that the bloodline of Isher continue to hold the throne, she dies that her child with Hedrock might live.  

In the novel's final "sensawunda" paragraph the spider people, having witnessed the altruism and love they have never before encountered among any other civilization, realize that the human race is the greatest of all intelligent species and will someday rule the universe.  (At least I think that is what the mysterious final sentence of the novel means.) 

Full to bursting with ray guns, rocket ships, time travel, space aliens, mental powers, declasse political and psychological theories, and bizarre plot twists, The Weapon Makers is very entertaining.  And I have to admit that, having read and seen so much SF that argues that humans are a bunch of jerks and aliens or elves (or even Neanderthals!) are our superiors and should be telling us what to do, I enjoyed the ending which asserted that humans are the greatest thing in the universe.

A brilliant example of Golden Age SF, with all the characteristic elements people love or hate about the SF of the '40s and '50s.

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My next read: A Van Vogt novel from the same period of his career as the Isher books, The House That Stood Still.