"The Hungry House" by Robert Bloch

This is a pedestrian haunted house story from 1951.  A young couple moves into an old country house, they notice strange things, then learn the stories of how people died in the house decades ago.  The characters lack any definition or interest, and for some reason Bloch writes in a jocular tone which does not permit any tension to develop.  A limp effort.  

I read “The Hungry House” in the 2012 collection edited by the VanderMeers, The Weird.   

"Yellow and Red" by Tanith Lee

Yesterday, via a tweet from Joachim Boaz, I learned that Tanith Lee had recently received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the World Fantasy Convention.  The very same day I first encountered the colossal (1100 pages!) collection The Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.  The Weird includes a story by Lee I quite liked when I read it a year or two ago, “Yellow and Red,” and today I reread it.

“Yellow and Red” is a great little horror story, perfectly paced and a perfect length, with just enough detail to paint believable characters, settings, and images that have an emotional effect on the reader.  Lee uses the first person form (the story consists of diary entries and a letter) masterfully.  The plot is traditional (perhaps “classic” is a better word): in the 1950s, a wealthy middle-aged Londoner inherits a large old house in the country, full of an ancestor’s souvenirs of a successful career in the Orient.  The diarist gradually realizes that his adventurous ancestor brought back from the East something horrible that is in the process of destroying the family.  In Lee’s capable hands this straightforward plot runs smooth as silk and carries real impact.  Hints that Lee means this to perhaps be a feminist and anti-imperialist tale add depth.

Congrats to Lee on the recent award; “Yellow and Red” strongly suggests she deserves it.      

The Trouble Twisters by Poul Anderson

This is the second volume in Poul Anderson’s future history (at least that is what it says on the back cover of my 1976 Berkley Medallion paperback), this one containing three stories written in the 1960s that follow the adventures of David Falkayn, interstellar merchant. The first volume, Trader to the Stars, starred Nicholas Van Rijn, an established, overweight interstellar merchant late in his career.  Falkayn, in the period covered in The Trouble Twisters, is young and fit, the younger son of an aristocrat.  Having been expelled from the military academy because of a prank, Falkayn was apprenticed to a space merchant.

“The Three Cornered Wheel.”  In this first story, Falkayn is a 17 year old apprentice on a ship with a crew of four.  The ship’s power plant fails and is marooned on a planet whose native inhabitants have a sort of medieval level of technology and culture.  Luckily, an earlier human expedition left a small base on this planet, and if the base’s atomic power plant can be moved the thousand kilometers to the disabled ship, the ship can be repaired and all will be well.  Unfortunately, the natives are ruled by a class of priests who not only fear that the space merchants are a cultural threat to their theocracy, but have been preaching for centuries that the circle is sacred, so nothing round or spherical can be made.  Even the hafts of the natives’ axes and spears are octagonal instead of round.  If the space crew tries to build a wheeled wagon to move the nuclear reactor, the local peasants will massacre them.  And time is running out:  humans cannot eat the food on this planet, so if Falkayn and his comrades don’t get the ship fixed in a month or so, they will starve.

Falkayn enlists the help of a member of the native knightly caste, and, after surviving a murder attempt by the stick-in-the-mud priests, comes up with a wagon design that doesn’t use wheels; Anderson describes the geometry of this machine in detail but it went way over my head.  Meanwhile, the merchant Falkayn is apprenticed to, who is also a student of intellectual and scientific history, teaches some young native priests about Keplerian and Newtonian physics, and the Jewish Kabbalah.  These new ideas, he believes, will, over the course of time, undermine the conservative native religion and lead to new thinking and thus social, economic and political progress for the natives.

This story is pretty boring.  The characters are stock, the pacing is bad, the one action scene is uninteresting, and the long passages describing how to calculate planetary orbits, the secrets of the Kabbalah, and worst of all the complicated geometry of the wagon without wheels, are tedious or incomprehensible, and sometimes both.  Anderson also inflicts on us passages that describe in detail the landscape and fauna but add nothing to the plot or the atmosphere of the story.  I’m sympathetic to the story’s ideological content, the idea that inflexible religion can retard progress, but as entertainment or literature, the story is quite weak.  Thumbs down.

“A Sun Invisible.”  This second story is far better than the first.  Falkayn is 20 years old, his apprenticeship behind him, and he is assigned his own small space ship, and a diplomatic mission representing the merchant league.  Some aliens have built a fleet of warships and are threatening to take over a sector of space.  The technology for the warships, and advice on how to use them, is being provided by an aggressive group of aristocratic humans of German descent.  These Germans hate merchants and will drive the merchant league out of the star sector if they conquer it.  Falkayn is to negotiate with one of these Germans, try to defuse the situation and prevent a costly war.

The merchant league can put together a war fleet that can overpower these aggressors, but the alien-German alliance has a big advantage: their home system is a secret, so in any war they can use all their ships for offense.  If Falkyan can get enough clues about the invaders’ home system during the negotiations, maybe he can figure out where it is and, by taking away the alien-German alliance’s advantage, convince them to call off their invasion.

This is a decent plot, and the characters in this story (including a non-human merchant Falkayn has to work with and the German representative, a beautiful woman who has traditional aristocratic disdain for businesspeople) and the science Anderson includes are far more entertaining and understandable than the characters and science in the opening story.  The action scene, star ships chasing each other, is also better.  So, thumbs up for “A Sun Invisible.”

“The Trouble Twisters.”  This story is about 100 pages long, as long as the first two tales put together.  Falkayn is now a full Master Merchant, and working for Nicholas Van Rijn.  He travels in a small ship with a crew of two other merchants, both nonhuman, his mission to discover and make contact with new planets to trade with.  He encounters yet another alien civilization with a medieval level of technology, and is surprised to learn that these short and frail sword-wielding natives employ as mercenaries a battalion of humans, the descendents of the survivors of a ship wreck some 75 years ago.  These humans have rebelled against their native paymaster, and Falkayn has to try to do the right thing for his fellow humans while at the same time maintaining good relations with the natives, with whom he wants to begin a lucrative trade relationship.

The plot is good, the non-human characters (including the ship’s computer) are fun, and the native culture is pretty interesting, so “The Trouble Twisters” deserves a thumbs up. 

I’m happy to recommend The Trouble Twisters; two of the three stories, 75% of the page count, are worthwhile. When I have the opportunity I will read the next book starring David Falkayn, Satan’s World.

The Bridge by Iain Banks

A tweet from SF blogger star Joachin Boaz alerts me to the fact that Iain Banks has been recognized with a special award at the 2013 British Fantasy Awards.  I read an Iain Banks novel, The Bridge, many years ago, and recently found in my archives a somewhat jocular and quite mixed review I wrote of it.  This review I paste below.

I sold my copy of The Bridge long ago, and could only find this one less-than-ideal image online of the paperback edition I read.

The Bridge by Iain Banks

As far as I can tell, The Bridge is about this working-class Scottish guy who, in college in the 1960s, begins an on-again-off-again love affair with a rich woman.  These two are left-wing hippies, having all kinds of promiscuous sex, using drugs, railing against capitalism, saying nasty things about Thatcher and Reagan and laudatory things about the Soviet Union and the Sandinistas.  As he gets older, the main character, despite his politics, becomes a very successful engineer, making piles of money and buying all kinds of expensive cars.  Then, one day, drunk and stoned, kaboom, he gets in a terrific car crash, and is put into a coma, during which he has vivid surreal dreams.

These surreal dreams, and not the banal "real life" story, form the bulk of the book.  The main dream is about the Scottish dude's life in a city of skyscrapers built upon a colossal railroad bridge, a life of amnesia lived at the mercy of mysterious people and powers, but there are also various "sub-dreams," including a sort of Conan/Elric/Aeneas pastiche and several episodes of a military character.  These dreams have a sort of unifying theme: that of powerlessness, all of them portraying people whose fates are determined by others.

What you might call the novel's central "literary conceit" or "device" is how the "real life"and dream portions are interspersed with and influence each other, rather than being presented in strict chronological order.  A long fantastical segment will be followed by a briefer biographical segment, a sort of flashback, in which we learn the source of the elements present in the dream. 

Is this book worth reading?  It's not exactly bad (and many people seem to adore it), and some of the scenes in the bridge city and in the sword and sorcery parody are good and memorable, but as a whole it came up short for me.  The main character (who after all is shown to not be running his own life) is not very compelling, and the "real life" portion of the story is mostly a tedious exercise in nostalgia (again and again we hear about what sort of rock music the Scottish engineer likes.) The dream sequences really have the surreal character of dreams, which shows literary skill, but also imbues them with a sort of airiness, dimness, nebulousness and basic lack of reality that is characteristic of dreams, and makes one wonder what the point of them is.  In fact, the book as a whole leaves me with that feeling: there is no overarching plot, the the portions of the book that have a plot are dreams in which the narrator is virtually powerless, driven by the whims and wills of others, dreams whose significance lies in their containing mental artifacts from the dreamer's less than exciting real life.  So what is the point?  That under capitalism (or maybe life in general) we are at the mercy of forces not under our control?  Perhaps.


Since I read The Bridge a decade or more ago I have not read any more of Banks's work, and it seems unlikely that I will read any in the future.


  

Pandora by Holly Hollander by Gene Wolfe

Here we have a 200 page mystery novel by critically acclaimed SF writer Gene Wolfe, who, since I read his Book of the New Sun over ten years ago, has been my favorite writer. 

Wolfe writes this novel, Pandora by Holly Hollander, as if it is a first person narrative written by a woman, though it is not clear to what extent this fictional book, Pandora, is a novel, and to what extent it is a non-fiction account of a crime perpetrated by the writer’s stepmother against the writer’s father and others.  The first three sentences of the book are “Is this a historical novel?  Nope.  This is just one that took a real long time to sell.”  This is the beginning of the Foreword written by the narrator, Holly Hollander; this Foreword refers to the characters in the book as if they are real.  Further muddying this issue is the fact that the text of the book makes clear that the teenage Holly was both a fan of mystery novels, and considering a career in journalism.   Holly was a high school student at the time of the crime, the early 1980s; her book is being published about ten years after the events it describes.

      

Writing in the voice of a young woman is of course a somewhat risky undertaking for a man in his late 50s, and I have to wonder how women have assessed Wolfe’s effort.  Nancy Kress, quoted on the back cover of my edition, considers the book, and Holly in particular, delightful, so Wolfe has at least one female thumbs up.  

The plot is a pretty traditional murder mystery, with a terrible homicide, a bunch of suspects, red herrings, police detectives and amateur investigators trying to figure everything out, all that sort of thing.  I’m not exactly a connoisseur of mystery novels, but in my opinion the mystery plot works; it is interesting and makes internal sense, is hard to figure out but could, conceivably, be figured out by the reader.  In short, the much younger wife (Elaine, Holly’s stepmother) of a successful businessman (Harry Hollander, Holly’s biological father) manages a sort of raffle at the local fair.  At the climax of the raffle, when a nineteenth-century box labeled “Pandora” is opened to reveal the prize, there is a tremendous explosion, which injures many and kills several people, including the man with whom Elaine is carrying on an adulterous affair, a married Vietnam vet.  Who planted the bomb and why?  The people who have been making harassing phone calls to the Vietnam vet?  The vet’s jealous wife?  Holly’s insane uncle, Harry’s older brother Herbert, who would be running the Hollander company if he wasn’t in an asylum?  The impecunious ex-lawyer who lives on the edge of town with some hippies because he recently got out of prison for trying to bribe a judge?

 

There is much more to the book than the mystery, though.  Wolfe adds many interesting touches, such as literary criticism of mystery novels in the voice of Holly, lots of talk about Greek mythology and the wisdom of the Greeks (mostly from the ex-lawyer) and about World War II (Harry served in combat at Anzio and elsewhere in Europe, and has several war souvenirs that figure in the plot), and lots of talk about books, all things Wolfe cares about.  

Pandora by Holly Hollander, as the title suggests, is also about women, women’s place in society, and men’s attitudes towards women.  The killer turns out to be evil step-mother Elaine, who is ruthless and greedy enough to blow up innocent strangers and gun down poor crazy Herbert in her pursuit of her husband’s wealth, and who uses her sexual wiles to try to camouflage her atrocity.  Several times the lawyer character, who is portrayed as well read and intelligent, makes what you might call sweeping generalizations about women, that women are curious, that women writers tend to use particular words more than men and write in a certain style more than men.  Two versions of the Greek Pandora story are related by the ex-lawyer: the one in which Pandora’s curiosity unleashes evil upon the world, and the one in which the gods create Pandora, the prototype woman, as a means of punishing men.  This is not a flattering view of women!

At the same time, the women in the book are all victims of men, or neglected by men, in one way or another.  It was Herbert’s murder of his wife that put him in the insane asylum.  The Hollanders' housekeeper recalls how her mother was often given black eyes by her father.  The ex-lawyer, Holly’s spying reveals, has broken some woman’s heart.  And in the very last line of the book, we learn that Harry, whom Holly adores, can’t be bothered to remember his own daughter’s birthday!   Not a flattering view of men, either.

Looking at the back cover blurbs, we learn that not only Nancy Kress but also Charles de Lint think that this book is “a delight to read.”  The New York Review of Science Fiction calls it “a bright bauble.”  I think it’s a very good book, but my perspective is a little different: I suggest that Pandora by Holly Hollander is about the prevalence of evil in our world, again as you might expect from the title.  The main plot is about a mass murder and the total collapse of a teenage girl’s family.  (After Elaine is arrested Harry moves out of town and Holly moves in with the impoverished lawyer and the hippies.)  Again and again Wolfe reminds us, in well integrated little asides, about the Nazis, Indian wars, atrocities in Vietnam by both the communists and the anti-communists, police and government corruption and incompetence, etc.  There is a dearth of functional, fulfilling love relationships in the book.  And what is the Hollander business which is so successful?  Manufacturing locks and safes, a business that thrives because the world is full of killers and thieves!    

Of course, Wolfe is a Christian, and the novel does offer a measure of hope and redemption.  Perhaps the ex-lawyer, having paid his debt to society and made sure Elaine and not one of the other suspects was punished for the murders, and Holly, who has maintained a good attitude despite the trials she has been through, can make a happy life together in that ruined old house on the edge of town. 

             

This is a well-written and complex novel that rewards careful reading and reflection.  Wolfe is a master of economy, there is no fluff or gratuitous decoration in the book, each sentence has some purpose and meaning.  Wolfe respects the reader, and assumes the reader is smart and knowledgeable, but even if you miss some allusions and nuances, as I’m sure I have, there is much to enjoy and appreciate in the novel.  Another superior effort by a great writer. 

Harry Harrison - rambling reflections

Yesterday Joachim Boaz of SF Ruminations tweeted a link to a review of Harry Harrison’s Deathworld at Speculition which is well worth any SF fan’s time.  I thought this was as good an occasion as any to record my thoughts about Harrison.

As a teen in the '80s I read many of Harrison’s books and short stories, some of which include scenes I remember vividly all these years later.  As an adult I reread four of these books, and took notes and wrote draft reviews, but these documents were destroyed one day when I was cleaning up a hard drive and accidentally shredded the wrong folder.  (Remember to back up your files, kids.)  A look through my boxes of papers has yielded much fascinating material (1993 GRE scores are in the fascinating category, right?  What about my certificate for passing New York State sexual harassment training?) but it looks like I didn’t print my Harry Harrison notes.  So my reflections here will be more or less at random and at the mercy of my faulty memory.  (I will welcome being corrected regarding which arm Bill lost in the Chinger war.)  

The Deathworld Series

I read the first three Deathworld books in my youth in an omnibus edition from the library.  As a kid I loved the idea of a planet where you have to shoot everything that moved.  I guess because my mother was a smoker and because there was a lot of anti-smoking propaganda at school, I’ve never forgotten the argument at the start of Deathworld 2 in which we learn that tobacco in the future will have no carcinogens and Harrison has the hero argue that the villain, who is against smoking, is a puritanical hypocrite.

I read the first three Deathworld books again as an adult, over a period of years, by chance in reverse order.  I enjoyed them all, but I remember nothing about Deathworld 3, and sold my copy at some point.  My review of Deathworld 2 has survived on Amazon, and is pasted below.  I still have my copy of Deathworld 2 because I love the cover. 

Deathworld 2

A pretty good and fast-paced adventure tale, I suppose you could call it a planetary romance; a spacefaring thief is shipwrecked on a planet inhabited by various barbaric/medieval tribes. In his efforts to get back to interplanetary society, Harrison's smartass hero plays the part of a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, introducing various pieces of technology to the primitive world. The novel is enlivened (some might say encumbered) by Harrison's attacks on religion and advocacy of moral relativism. Deathworld 2 is no masterpiece, but is definitely fun if you take it in the right spirit. I read the September 1964 Bantam paperback with the beautifully sinister brown painting on the cover and the ad for Winston Churchill's The Second World War on the last page.

The Stainless Steel Rat Series

I read the first four or five Stainless Steel Rat books in my teens, but only remember the first three, which I read in a thick hardcover omnibus from the library, with any fondness.  I recall that, with each new book, the jokes become more and more broad and the social/political commentary more obnoxious.  I have a paperback collection of those first three books now, and have reread the first as an adult.  I enjoyed it as a fast paced adventure story, but probably not enough to read the other two books in the collection.

The Stainless Steel Rat is “Slippery” Jim DiGriz, one of the few criminals in a future in which eugenics and other policies have almost entirely eliminated the criminal element.  Like the protagonist of the Deathworld books, DiGriz is a smartass, which I guess I appreciated as a kid.  DiGriz finds modern society boring, and commits crimes for fun, crimes which never physically hurt anyone and which DiGriz figures make the newspapers more interesting.  When he is arrested by the government they recruit him to help capture the ultrarare dangerous criminals; it takes a thief to catch a thief, as they say.  I believe his first case is the pursuit of a man who is building a space battleship, a dangerous threat in this era of peace in which the government has no space battleships of its own.  As it turns out, this guy was only building the battleship because of the manipulations of a woman criminal.  DiGriz falls in love with this female malefactor, captures her, and the government wipes her brain of criminal tendencies, and Di Griz marries her.  As a teen I thought this was all cool, but as an adult the book made me consider various moral issues around theft and personal identity (shades of A Clockwork Orange.)

      

Bill the Galactic Hero series

I loved the broad absurdist satire of Bill the Galactic Hero when I read it.  I won’t read it now, as I expect I would find it irritating.  The book is a parody of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (while Heinlein found his time in the Navy a positive experience, service in the Army Air Force fostered in Harrison a hatred of the military) and an anti-military and pro-environmentalism satire.  I think I read Bill the Galactic Hero before I read Starship Troopers, oddly enough.  Bill loses an arm while serving in a war against innocent aliens who are victims of human aggression, and the inefficient military bureaucracy has a replacement arm grafted on, but not only is it a different skin color from his own, it is a left arm – it was a right arm that Bill lost, so now Bill has two left arms.  I also recall scenes about how some planet is making too many dinner trays that are not biodegradable, so the planet is being overrun with dinner tray filled landfills.  As a youth I loved crazy stuff like this, but now this sort of thing seems tired and annoying – I feel the same way about Monty Python, which, when I was young, I adored.

I tried to read one of the Bill sequels, written over 20 years after the first, but it was horrible and I was older and I quickly abandoned it.

Eden series

If my memory is to be trusted, these books are more serious and less polemical than the other Harrison books I read.  They depict an alternate Earth in which, while humans developed in one part of the world, lizard people developed in another.  The plot of the books concerns the resistance of Stone Age humans to efforts by the lizard people to colonize the human territory.  It was in these books that I first encountered the idea of organic technology: instead of making a gun or a boat out of wood, metal, plastic, gasoline, gunpowder, etc., the reptile men (somehow) bred a small lizard which could expel darts out of a sphincter for use as a gun, and bred a big aquatic animal to act as a ship.  I also enjoyed the many illustrations in the paperback editions of these books of the cool lizard people and their weird living equipment.  I would definitely try rereading the first of these, West of Eden.  

UPDATE: In the last week of December 2013 I read West of Eden, and quite enjoyed it.

  

******

I haven’t read any of Harrison’s later work, and it doesn’t look very interesting (alternate history Vikings and alternate history British intervention in the U.S. Civil War aren’t doing it for me.)  But I enjoyed and can recommend much of Harrison’s earlier work, and have to commend Harrison on his exciting and fruitful career, which included lots of editorial work, moving to Ireland to escape taxes, the quixotic advocacy of Esperanto, and collaborations with one of the best comics artists, Wallace Wood.   That's a full life, and we SF fans are richer for it.

“The Dogtown Tourist Agency” by Jack Vance

This is the first of the two Miro Hetzel outer space detective stories, and originally appeared in the hyperbolically advertized anthology Epoch, where I read it.  In my paperback edition of Epoch “The Dogtown Tourist Agency” takes up 102 pages; in the ad for Epoch on the last page of my edition of Poul Anderson’s Trader to the Stars it is touted as “a complete novel.”

Hetzel is an “effectuator” in the Gaean Reach, the vast human space empire which is the setting for many of Vance’s works.  Hetzel is not a very vivid or memorable character, he is just the detective guy who, for hire, carries out investigations, so readers hoping to encounter an unforgettable character like Cugel the Clever or a protagonist driven by deep personal psychological or political issues, like Kirth Gerson or Glawen Clattuc, will be disappointed.

The story takes place on Maz, a planet at the intersection of three space empires--the human Gaean Reach, and the empires of two different species of inscrutable aliens.  The natives of Maz are a violent warrior race whose fighters know no fear; they have only an Iron Age technology, but if they were given access to modern weapons and space ships they would pose a threat to all three space empires.  So, the three space empires all have representatives on Maz, to make sure nobody smuggles weapons to the natives or hires them as mercenaries.  A small ramshackle human town known as “Dogtown” that caters to human tourists sits near the official building where the delegations of the three space empires meet.

        

Hetzel has come to Maz at the behest of a major manufacturer of precision electronics.   A new competitor has appeared, selling goods equal in quality to those of the established firms, but at lower prices.  How this is possible is a mystery, as is the location of the new firm, though clues indicate the items are secretly shipped from Maz.  Are the items being sneaked into the Gaean Reach from one of the alien civilizations, or built on Maz by a native labor force at the direction of some unknown agent?  Hetzel is to solve the mystery, and, if possible, put an end to this unwanted competition.

Once on Maz, Hetzel gets involved in all manner of strange and terrible events including murders, kidnappings and wars.  Tragedy strikes every person and group in the story, except Hetzel himself, who accomplishes his mission and accepts a generous fee.

This is an entertaining story, with a few laughs here and there, an unfolding mystery, bizarre crimes, and a weird alien race which Vance succeeds in making both very unlike any human culture, but also reminiscent of Earth nonwestern cultures whose traditional way of life has been shaken by contact with the wealth and values of the West.  Another solid tale from Vance that I do not hesitate to recommend.