Trader to the Stars by Poul Anderson

Poul Anderson is one of the famous “deans” or “grand masters” of science fiction, having had a long glorious career, written dozens of books and won millions of fans.  My attitude towards Anderson’s work has always been mixed; I almost always like his plots and his point of view, but his style is never better than average, and his later work can feel terribly bloated.  In September in an Ames, Iowa used bookstore I picked up the 1976 Berkley paperback of Anderson’s Trader to the Stars (Z3199) which has a red Powers cover and blurbs declaring Anderson to be the most popular SF author.  

(I sometimes wonder about these Powers covers: why would marketing people think such an abstract piece would sell more copies than a realistic depiction of Nicholas Van Rijn, or of a space ship, or bizarre aliens, or men and/or women tensely gripping blasters?  Powers himself could paint and draw attractive and realistic people and space ships, as he did in profusion for Heinlein’s lamentable Number of the Beast – why not instruct him to? Maybe the abstract Powers covers were an effort to appeal to a more sophisticated audience?  Maybe the publisher knew the book would sell based on Anderson’s name, and used the abstract cover to save people embarrassment at the checkout counter or on the subway?  I know when I was on the New York subway I would wave a volume of Proust around like a banner, but bend and crush a Mickey Spillane collection all out of shape to make sure the cover was invisible.)

The bulk of the book consists of three stories featuring Nicholas Van Rijn, interstellar merchant during a period of history in which human beings are expanding their reach throughout the universe, meeting and trading with dozens of intelligent alien races.  There are also brief philosophical/historical passages that present a sort of background for the stories' libertarian capitalist setting.

I have to admit I expected Nicholas Van Rijn to be a slender or muscular hero type, either hard-bitten and blunt or sophisticated and flippant.  So I was surprised to discover he was an obese (we are told he has numerous chins) gourmand and lecher who splutters and complains at his employees like a sitcom boss.  This was an interesting surprise, though I did find Van Rijn's accent and speech patterns more irritating than amusing.   

“Hiding Place,” the first story in Trader to the Stars, has detective story elements, and a charming gimmick: the human crew of Van Rijn’s vessel have a brief period of time to figure out which group of alien creatures on a zoo ship are the intelligent beings who have the information they need to escape death at the hands of space pirates.  This is a particular challenge because the intelligent aliens have mistaken the protagonists for the murderous pirates, and are trying to hide every indication of their intelligence.  This is a fun and appealing story.  The intelligent alien race turns out to be quite reminiscent of the aliens described by Burroughs in Chessmen of Mars, written in 1921, making me wonder if Anderson had read that work.

I found the other two stories in Trader to the Stars, “Territory” and “Master Key,” less appealing and less memorable.  In both of them Anderson painstakingly develops preindustrial alien societies with complex social relationships, but the details about these societies faded from my mind as soon as I finished reading the story.

In “Territory,” Van Rijn is center stage, marooned on an alien planet when the spear-wielding natives rise up and drive off all the humans save him and a beautiful female do-gooder.  Van Rijn figures out the natives’ culture and society, gains their respect by defeating their champion in hand to hand combat, and then negotiates a business deal which will benefit himself and the natives, making Anderson’s point that private business and the profit motive are a better way to solve problems and order life than government and charity.  “The Master Key” has two first person narrators, a man who is visiting Van Rijn in his luxurious apartment and a Van Rijn employee who relates the main story, which is about his difficult experiences trying to establish trade with the natives on a newly discovered planet.  So sagacious is Van Rijn that he is able to figure out what makes the alien society tick just from his employee’s description.  Then Van Rijn passionately laments that most people do not truly desire freedom and independence, but prefer to be told what to do, provided for, and protected from others and from themselves.

Trader to the Stars is a readable, enjoyable, but average SF book, distinctive only because of its libertarian sensibilities, which will endear it to some but irritate others, and because its hero is fat (though being fat doesn't stop him from outfighting other men and getting the girl.)

Deathbeast by David Gerrold

I loved dinosaurs as a kid, and I still love dinosaurs.  One time when we lived in New York I dragged my wife to a museum in New England specifically for the purpose of seeing old Charles Knight paintings and sculptures.  And I have enjoyed three or four of David Gerrold’s novels, in particular Yesterday’s Children (which I thought strongly reminiscent of an A. E. Van Vogt story) and A Matter for Men (which reminded me of Heinlein.)  So, when I saw a copy of Deathbeast on the shelf at a Missouri used book store, I did not hesitate to snap it up.

Gerrold does not waste time with a lot of preliminaries back in modern times; the book starts in the Cretaceous, with a flash and the appearance of the eight time-travelling hunters.  A minute later comes a dinosaur attack, and the hunters are blasting away with their energy weapons.  Gerrold also dismisses any concerns about time paradoxes or changing the past; whereas the hunters in Bradbury’s famous “Sound of Thunder” must keep to an elevated path and only shoot a dinosaur which would have died that day anyway, the hunters in Deathbeast trample the landscape, leaving a trail of dead animals and high-tech refuse behind them.

The plot is what you might expect: led by an obsessive macho man with some prostheses and a name (“Ethab”) that sounds suspiciously like “Ahab,” the eight hunters recklessly pursue a tyrannosaurus rex, suffering periodic losses to the canny beast and squabbling among themselves.  Gerrold tells his tale of modern human vs prehistoric beast with enthusiasm, describing in detail the hunters’ various scanners, ray guns, and other devices, and marshalling a blizzard of adjectives and metaphors to convey the might and fury of the terrifying monster.  (The tyrannosaur is “the furious god of dinosaurs” who “moved like cannon fire…like something evil and possessed…” on page 48; on page 179 the “stench of his breath was fire laced with graveyards.”  On page 186 the dinosaur “came on toward Megan like doom engraved in acid.”) Over the top, but fun and at times funny.  I do wish Gerrold had refrained from committing some of his more groan-inducing jokes to paper, such as page 66’s “Somewhere, something large was saying a lot of very bad words in dinosaur.”  He uses this dinosaur-language joke several times.  

There is also quite a bit of gore; the dinosaurs are able to suffer many injuries before dying, and Gerrold describes these wounds, and those suffered by the hunters, in some detail.  The copy on the back cover hints that the book may contain some kind of erotic content, but it does not.   Oh, those tricky ad men.

Gerrold informs us in a foreword that he has based the behavior of the dinosaurs in Deathbeast on a book by Adrian Desmond, The Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs, and an episode of Nova, the PBS documentary series.  Still, he commits some blunders that could have been avoided; for example, asserting that feathers had not yet evolved in the Cretaceous.  I’ll blame the editor for the fact that one hundred pages after telling us that grass has not yet evolved the text has a character throw her knife down into the grass.

     

Deathbeast is not a serious book, you don’t really identify with or feel for the characters, and it certainly doesn’t show the polish and literary ambition of the other Gerrold books I have read, but it is a wild pulpy adventure story and I enjoyed it.        

Michael Cisco’s “Machines of Concrete Light and Dark”

Two former friends meet as if by chance, and the dominant, taller, friend, Jeanie, convinces the subordinate friend, the narrator, to accompany her to her parent’s old house.  After a long train ride out of the city into the suburbs, they walk through a quiet, almost deserted town at night, to a house which is under construction, where Jeanie ritualistically murders the narrator.  Much of the story’s 16 pages are taken up by flashbacks, such as to when the narrator broke off her friendship with Jeanie some years ago, and by Jeanie’s philosophical musings about insanity – could it be that insane people have had parts of their minds co-opted by invisible predatory or parasitic machines, machines that consist of cobbled together fragments of the minds of their many victims?  I think there is the suggestion that Jeanie has shifted her consciousness to the narrator’s body while the narrator slept on the train, and imprisoned the narrator’s mind in her own body, and that she has been switching from one body to the next for a long time, but maybe I am mistaken. 

  

The story is readable and thought-provoking, and a few things resonated with me on a personal level – for example, I was reminded of how much I enjoyed riding trains when I lived in New York, how relaxing it was to lean my head on the window of the Metro North commuter train and drift off to sleep. The idea of unexpectedly renewing a relationship with an old friend is also compelling.  However, I don’t think the story is as well-crafted as “Violence, Child of Trust;” Cisco has included lots of poetical descriptions of things (trees, the sky, light and shadow, etc.) that don’t necessarily add to the story, and I am not sure the talk of predatory machines causing insanity is integrated with whatever it is that Jeanie does to the narrator.  Maybe we can read the narrator's first person tale, even though she is dead, because Jeanie is one of those machines and has preserved part of the narrator's mind?  

Still, while not a great story, “Machines of Concrete Light and Dark,” is a worthwhile read.  I read it in the 2009 anthology Lovecraft Unbound, edited by Ellen Datlow.

Three Murray Leinster novels

Besides The Other Side of Nowhere, which I finished today, I have read three Leinster novels.  All are worth reading for fun or to learn about SF history, though none are without flaws and none made a lasting impression on me. 

Operation: Outer Space

I read Operation: Outer Space in early 2012, and posted the Amazon review below on February 2 of that year. I obviously enjoyed reading the book, but today I can’t remember anything about it.

Operation: Outer Space is a fun sf novel, published in 1954. Through a strange concatenation of events, a TV producer comes to organize man's first trip to another planet. Leinster, with admirable economy, creates an interesting future Earth, likable characters, and sends them on an interesting journey, from Earth, to a space station, to a small moon colony, and then out of the solar system. There is quite a bit of material about TV programming, psychology, and biology that may be outdated, but this does not detract from the book's charm.

I read Signet Q5300, with the very cool astronauts on the cover.

The Forgotten Planet

In September 2011 I read The Forgotten Planet, and posted this review on Amazon on September 13. Whereas I praised the economy of Operation: Outer Space, in my review of Forgotten Planet I rap poor Murray on the knuckles for writing a book that is too long and repetitive. That said, I do remember several scenes from Forgotten Planet, while I remember none from Operation: Outer Space.

I read an e-book version of Murray Leinster's The Forgotten Planet, appearing in Planets of Adventure, edited by Eric Flint and Guy Gordon. I believe it is the same text as the 1954 edition published by Gnome Press, but I can't vouch for that.

Looking around the internet for a few minutes leads me to believe that Forgotten Planet is a beloved classic that generally receives glowing reviews, but I am going to have to play dissenter here. The style is acceptable, the plot not bad, but the book is two or three times longer than necessary, and gets very repetitive. Most of the book consists of the protagonist, an illiterate savage, fighting against or fleeing from giant arthropods. There must be 30 or 40 fights with ants, spiders, mantises, crayfish, wasps, etc. An even dozen would have been sufficient. Leinster breaks up the narrative a bit by relating some biological facts about insects and doing some theorizing about the psychology and sociology of primitive people and their rise to civilization.

Space Tug

I read the free Gutenberg version of Leinster's 1953 novel Space Tug, I think over three years ago. This was the book I had in mind when I tweeted that Leinster was “pleasant but forgettable,” and I don’t recall much about it.  A search through my archives has not turned up any notes, so I don’t have much to say. I believe there are Cold War elements, with the Soviet Union trying to blockade or destroy the world’s first space station, and that one of the heroes of the novel is a Native American astronaut (called "Chief" by his friends, as you might expect), so SF scholars interested in Cold War issues and race/ethnicity issues might want to peruse it.

 

The Other Side of Nowhere by Murray Leinster

Recently I had a brief twitter exchange with other SF fans about Murray Leinster in which it was suggested that Leinster’s work is pleasant but forgettable.  I had an unread Leinster, The Other Side of Nowhere (Berkley 1964, F918), on my shelf, so I dug it out and over the last two days have read and enjoyed its 142 pages.

Interestingly, Leinster in this novel portrays interstellar travel in the far future as a dreadful experience.  Space ship crew members are crude brutes who never ship out on the same vessel twice because they routinely grow to hate each other over the course of a single voyage.  It is against the law to bring weapons on a space ship, but most crew members and officers carry a blaster or a knife to defend themselves from each other.  Leinster repeatedly describes conditions in a space ship as being like a prison, and the design of a space ship as not streamlined, but bulbous and ungraceful.  During an interstellar voyage the officers and crew have little to do because the ship basically flies itself, and spacemen do not love a space ship the way sailors traditionally love their boats and ships, perhaps Leinster’s commentary on the psychological cost of our automated, mechanized society.

The ship on which the story takes place is the largest ever built, and is on a dangerous mission, carrying the heaviest cargo in galactic history and planning to land on an uncivilized planet not via the usual foolproof force field, but on old-fashioned rockets.  The captain is grossly obese, and the crew, five thugs, tries to beat up the main character, who is signing up to be the ship’s second in command, on the second page of the book.  Luckily the main character is better at fighting than the crew, because he is from a high-gravity planet.  Just hours after he signs on somebody burgles his blaster from his quarters, so he starts a brawl and outfights all the crew members (the second time in one day!) and steals all their blasters.

 

The ship has passengers, who are also trouble: the passengers on a space ship are supposed to remain in their quarters the entire voyage, but these passengers consist of movie stars and a film crew who want the run of the ship to do shooting in its corridors. 

     

This bizarre and cynical milieu, in which mutiny is the norm and everybody hates each other and is ready to argue or fist fight on any pretext, only gets more crazy as the book proceeds.  The various people on the doomed ship all have their own agendas, and take irresponsible risks to further them, leading to tense struggles in which the officers, crew and passengers pit their wits and ray guns against each other.

Leinster’s plot and characters are not complicated, but they are engaging, as is the book’s hard-boiled tone.  Where Leinster lets the reader down is in his writing style.  The sentences are often clumsy, and I kept rewriting them in my head, like when I am copy-editing a student’s paper, which was distracting.  Still, The Other Side of Nowhere was a fun read; the best Murray Leinster I have read.

Dissenting Reviews: Rogue Moon, Hyperion, Out of the Silent Planet

Algis Budrys, Dan Simmons, and C. S. Lewis are three highly intelligent and well-educated men who have won critical acclaim and penned volumes that are widely considered classics.  But in late 2007 I didn’t let that stop me from announcing to the world via Amazon.com that I thought their books were crummy.

Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys, reviewed December 6, 2007

This book has a very high reputation, so I was surprised by how weak it was. Maybe the original story upon which it is based is better.

The SF premises at the core of Rogue Moon are compelling: teleportation, the duplication of human beings, and the exploration of a structure on the moon that is so alien that the human mind can only dimly comprehend it and human photography can only capture the most vague image of it. However, these issues take up rather little of the book's 176 pages; the actual exploration of the deadly alien structure takes up less than 10 pages. Mostly, Rogue Moon consists of long soap opera conversations between passionate, driven men and women who are trying to psychologically manipulate each other. Budrys isn't writing an adventure story here, but using the SF elements to explore what a "man" is, in the physical sense (if a computer scans your body and makes a duplicate perfectly identical down to the last molecule, is it as much a man as you, the original, are?) and the macho sense (one of the characters is a daredevil who takes insane risks in order to prove to himself and others that he is a "man.")

Unfortunately, the characters and their dialog are all way over the top; every character is insane or on the very edge of sanity, prone to making a long histrionic speech or punching a wall or bursting into tears at any moment. The characters and their relationships thus ring false, and, because every conversation is supposed to be tense (even buying gasoline in this novel is a psychological battle between gas station attendant and motorist) the novel has only one tone and the reader feels none of the tension Budrys was trying to convey.

I read the 1960 Gold Medal paperback. If you like the idea of an alien death trap that must be explored I recommend Robert Silverberg's Man in the Maze.

Hyperion by Dan Simmons, reviewed October 11, 2007

Dan Simmons and his Hugo-winning "Hyperion" in particular are very highly thought of, so I guess I will be providing a minority viewpoint here. I found the writing to be extravagant, histrionic and melodramatic, with the sex and fights like those in a run of the mill thriller or a Schwarzenegger movie. I also didn't particularly appreciate the by now cliched anti-imperialist/anti-globalist themes of the novel nor the banal government conspiracy plot line, though I know that sort of thing is very popular.

The element that alot of people (I suspect) love about "Hyperion," the pervasive literary and cultural references, are way way overdone and way too "in your face" for my taste. It seems like there is a reference to Keats or Virgil or Jack Vance or some other luminary on every page, and entire chapters are pastiches of (chapter 5 is an unsubtle tribute to (or imitation of) hardboiled mysteries) or homages to (chapter 6 includes a scene identical to the famous sword fight in "Romeo and Juliet") earlier works. I cringed when the characters started singing "We're off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of Oz!" in the very final scene.

SF fans should probably read "Hyperion" because it is important, and because it is widely revered, but I cannot count myself among the reverent ones.

Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis, reviewed October 11, 2007

This is the first C.S.Lewis I've read, and I have to say it is a bit of a disappointment. I didn't know what to expect, but I didn't expect what I got, a rather typical and traditional SF story about a guy who unexpectedly goes on a trip through space to another planet, where he meets some wise aliens. (Their wisdom consists of a sort of Christian Stoicism, an eager submission to the will of God, which is contrasted with the overweening ambition of humanity.) Lewis's writing is a little flat, and while he seems to be trying to inspire wonder in the reader at the beauty of his alien planet, he just as often inspired boredom in this reader. I have to admit, I prefer stories in which the alien planet is the scene of heroic battles or grim terror, as in Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars books or Jack Williamson's The Legion of Space; Lewis is aiming higher than they did, but whereas they hit their targets squarely, he misses his mark.

I read the 2003 Scribners trade paperback, which is a disaster. Many paragraphs appear to be lacking their proper indentation, and it looks like in the process of Americanizing the punctuation many apostrophes were turned into quotation marks. Whoever managed the preparation of the text should be ashamed.   

A World Called Solitude by Stephen Goldin

In early 2012 I stumbled on a copy of Stephen Goldin's A World Called Solitude in a flea market.  The jacket copy was interesting enough that I purchased it and read it not much later.  I thought it pretty good, and wrote the appreciative review reproduced below on Amazon on February 11 of 2012.  


Scientist Birk Aaland is a castaway, living alone on an alien planet covered with the deserted cities of a technologically advanced but now extinct civilization, his only companions the millions of robots that quixotically keep the cities operating. Years of solitude, and memories of terrible abuses at the hands of Earth's tyrannical government, have disordered Aaland's mind, and his sanity receives further shocks when another human arrives on the planet with news that the Earth's space empire is under attack by ruthless aliens.

A World Called Solitude has some of the standard adventure and SF elements (space ships, ray guns, robots, strange aliens, warfare) but is primarily a psychological, even philosophical, novel that focuses on people's states of mind and on the relationships of people with each other and with society. Each of the half dozen or so characters (men, women, robots, and aliens) in the novel has an opinion of what he or she owes society and to other individuals, and each character has to make a choice of how to act in relation to others in a stressful situation and then live with the consequences of that decision. There are many (maybe too many) scenes in which people under emotional stress weep or "flip out," and many scenes in which people have emotional arguments.

Goldin tries to do something interesting here, and his writing style is reasonably good, so A World Called Solitude is a worthwhile read. I will likely try some other specimens of his work in the future. I read the 1981 hardcover from Doubleday with the regrettably generic, boring, and inapplicable cover art by Jan Esteves.