A Forgotten Ace Double: The Puzzle Planet, by Robert A. W. Lowndes/The Angry Espers, by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

Ace Double Reviews, 51: The Puzzle Planet, by Robert A. W. Lowndes/The Angry Espers, by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. (#D-485, 1961, $0.35)

A review by Rich Horton

(I'm resurrecting this old Ace Double review today because April 17 was Lloyd Biggle's birthday.)

This qualifies as a pretty minor Ace Double in the scheme of things. The Puzzle Planet is about 41,000 words long, The Angry Espers about 48,000 words. The Angry Espers was also published as a complete novel under the title "A Taste of Fire" in the August 1959 Amazing -- I would assume that was a shorter version, though it's just possible that the whole novel appeared in the magazine.

Robert A. W. Lowndes (1916-1998) is of course primarily known as an editor. He worked mostly for Columbia publishing, and edited a host of magazines in several genres. He was notable for producing quite decent magazines on very limited budgets. Among his better known SF magazines were Future and Science Fiction Stories. He wrote a modest quantity of short stories, and four novels. The other novels are The Duplicated Man, a collaboration with James Blish (much of Lowndes' output was in collaboration), Believers' World, a 1961 expansion of "A Matter of Faith", published as by Michael Sherman (which was the name he used for the magazine version of The Duplicated Man) in Space Science Fiction, and The Mystery of the Third Mine (1953), a Winston juvenile. I might add that the book versions of The Duplicated Man and Believers' World came out from Avalon, the low end publishing firm where Lowdes was editor, and for that matter the The Duplicated Man first appeared in Dynamic Science Fiction, which he also edited.

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller)

Lowndes contributes a brief foreword to The Puzzle Planet in which he mentions John Campbell's assertion that an SF mystery was impossible -- because the writer could too regularly base his solution on super science or some other SFnal quality. Lowndes (as with many other writers, notably Isaac Asimov) responded that of course SF mysteries were possible -- it was simply necessary that the writer reveal to the reader any SFnal tricks he will use -- or perhaps better, make the solution to the mystery dependent on nothing SFnal. The Puzzle Planet is his attempt at such an SF mystery.

Roy Auckland has come to the planet Carolus in order to investigate some difficulties among the archaeological team studying the planet. These difficulties, it turns out, revolve around the controversial leader of the team, Dr. Howard James, who believes that the deserts of Carolus hold evidence of a long past powerful race of aliens. But the current inhabitants, the Vaec, are a pleasant but primitive people, much given to silly practical jokes.

James seems to have been the target of a couple of failed murder attempts. But there is something fishy about those attempts. And then another member of the expedition actually is killed -- in a very unusual way. The solution to the murder turns on unraveling not only the tangled relationships of the expedition members, but the secrets of the Vaec. I suppose Lowndes plays fair enough with the reader, but his mystery just isn't that interesting, and the Vaec secrets are hokum, basically.

Lloyd Biggle, Jr. (1923-2002) was one of the lesser known well-loved writers in the field. By this I mean that he was never really prominent, but that he was mentioned a lot as a writer worth trying out. I myself am not very familiar with his work -- all I have read is a number of short stories. Most of them appeared in the last few years of his life in Analog, and by and large these were not terribly good. The Angry Espers is the first of his novels that I have read. His reputation is as an extremely humane writer. He had a Ph.D. in musicology, and he was a Professor of ? at Eastern Michigan (indeed, he taught there while my mother was a student there, though she never took one of his classes). Many of his SF stories involve music.

(Cover by Ed Valigursky)

In The Angry Espers Paul Corban, a human space pilot, awakens in a hospital on an unfamiliar world. He is surprised that his attendants do not speak, and that they seem disgusted by him. Eventually he is taken to a facility with a number of other people, and he learns to speak the language of this planet. He learns that the planet is full of powerful "espers", and that he is regarded as a subhuman because he has no such ability. He has been confined to the equivalent of a mental institution, and his fellows are mostly natives who are truly mentally deficient in that they should have had esp powers but do not. He nearly despairs, despite beginning to have feelings for a sympathetic female doctor.

Then he discovers one or two more Earth humans in the institution. He lets some of the doctors know that he comes from another planet, but he (and the sympathetic doctors) have not figured on the terrible prejudice of most of the Espers against non-esps. A war is launched against the worlds of the Terran federation. The second section of the novel covers the war in some detail, mostly through the viewpoint of people connected to Paul. It is a terrible war, with Earth's technological superiority (a result of not relying on ESP for everything) only allowing them to slow the inevitable advance of a people that can anticipate every move, that communicate instantaneously, that can teleport, etc.

The third section offers some hope, rejoining Paul and his doctor girlfriend as they make a desperate attempt for political reform on the Esper planet, supporting a less-prejudiced government. Naturally they win, but the implication is a bit scary, because Biggle stacks the deck a bit in their favor (given his initial setup). One can't help but think that the real result would be extermination of Earth. (Biggle also cheats, to my mind, by allowing Paul (and by implication all humans) to have latent esp powers that he gains in moments of extreme stress.)

It's not a terrible novel, but nothing particularly memorable either. I shall have to track down a copy of one of Biggle's better known novels to try.

(Cover by Leo Summers, image courtesy of Galactic Central)

Hugo Ballot Review: Provenance, by Ann Leckie

Provenance, by Ann Leckie (Orbit, 978-0-316-38867-2, $26, hc, 439 pages) September 2017

A review by Rich Horton

Provenance is Ann Leckie’s fourth novel. The first three (Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, and Ancillary Mercy) make up a trilogy about an “ancillary” of the Imperial Radch who becomes involved in a conflict between two versions of the Emperor. This new novel is set in the same universe, at roughly the same time, but outside the Radch. It is engaging and fun but frankly seems just a little thin next to the Ancillary series. There’s no crime in that – I think it’s a good thing when an author reaches the point where her readers are glad to read each of her books, and are satisfied by them – but also admit that they are not each equally as good (or progressively better). Solid and enjoyable work is nothing to sneeze at. That said, if I’m saying that, it probably means I don’t consider Provenance one of the best five or six SF novels of the year – and that’s true. But it doesn’t disgrace the award by its nomination either – and, indeed, it fits with all the nominees I’ve read so far, in being enjoyable and entertaining but not exceptional.

The main character is Ingray, a decidedly privileged young woman from the planet Hwae. Ingray’s mother Netano is a very powerful figure on Hwae, and Ingray has long believed that her brother Danach is her mother’s preferred heir. (In using terms like “young woman”, “mother”, “brother”, and “heir” I’m glossing over some interesting complexities of the social and gender organization on Hwae, including that people choose genders at roughly majority, that there are three choices (he, she, and e), that children (at least in powerful families) are often adopted), etc. etc.) So Ingray, in a desperate effort to impress Netano, has arranged to retrieve Pahlad Budraikim, the disgraced child of one of her mother’s rivals from “Compassionate Removal”, a ghastly seeming prison planet used by the Hwae in lieu of the death penalty. And now she has the person in question – except e claims to be someone else entirely. And Ingray is broke.

So Ingray ends up, a bit fortuitously, with a trip back to Hwae on a ship captained by one Uisine. But that has its owned complications – in particular, Uisine is wanted for stealing his ship from the Geck. So the Geck want him, but technicalities allow Uisine to take Ingray back home. Uisine is guilty, with extenuating circumstances – he is one of a group of humans who live on the Gecks’ homeworld, but who must be adapted to their aquatic lifestyle. And his gills never came in.

Complications keeps piling up. There is Ingray and her problems, Uisine and his, and “Garal”, as the person Ingray thought was Pahlad, Burdraikim and eir problems. Things don’t get easier back on Hwae – Ingray gets involved with some foreigners who want to study an area of “ruin glass”, which has implications for Hwae’s own history, and its accepted beliefs about that history, which are pretty fundamental to their culture. Then someone is murdered. And another group, from the planet Omkem, invades and kidnaps a group of children, looking for access to stargates …

There’s a lot going on, and it’s pretty involving stuff. It’s mixed with worthwhile cultural details, varying from human group to human group, and complicated further when aliens are involved. There’s some believable and fun action. The characters are engaging. The exploration of gender roles on Hwae, intertwined interestingly with class, is nice (there are parallels with the way gender is chosen in J. Y. Yang’s Hugo-nominated novella “The Black Tides of Heaven”, and frankly I think Leckie’s depictions of gender selection more interesting than Yang’s). So, then, why did I say it sometimes seems a bit thin? One reason is that everyone seems basically an early 21^st Century human, and lots of the background details of their lives don’t differ a lot from our lives. Other than that, the whole book, while remaining fun, does seem to work out a bit conveniently. It all adds up to a book I enjoyed plenty, but a book I that I don’t quite think stands among the very best novels of 2017.

(I’ll caveat this by noting that while I know and am on good terms with a great many SF writers, including several Hugo nominees this year, I probably know Ann Leckie a bit better than some of the others, for the simple reason that she lives in a neighboring suburb to mine, that we sometimes go to the same grocery store, that our kids went to the same high school at about the same time, and that she, for example, signed my copy of Provenance at a local independent book store. So take anything I say with whatever heaps of salt you wish.)

Another Ace Double Review: The Ballad of Beta-2, by Samuel R. Delany/Alpha Yes, Terra No!, by Emil Petaja

Ace Double Reviews, 82: The Ballad of Beta-2, by Samuel R. Delany/Alpha Yes, Terra No!, by Emil Petaja (#M-121, 1965, 45 cents)

a review by Rich Horton

April 12th is Emil Petaja's birthday, so I figured this is a good day to repost this review, first written in 2008. And any day is a good day to post a review of a Samuel R. Delany novel!

(Covers by Jack Gaughan and Ed Valigursky)

I used to speculate as to which of an Ace Double pair was considered the "lead" title. I've since decided that there wasn't necessarily one at all -- that both were by default considered "equal". But if there was a lead one, surely the much longer one, by the older, more established, writer would be it? And when this Ace Double appeared, maybe that was the case, and maybe the marketing focussed on Emil Petaja's Alpha Yes, Terra No! After all, it's 50,000 words long, by a veteran writer (who ended up being named SFWA's first Author Emeritus). The Ballad of Beta-2 is only about 29,000 words, and while it was Samuel R. Delany's fifth book, Delany was still very young (23), and his books hadn't really made much of an impact yet. But from the perspective of 2008, the Petaja novel is the curiosity, the appendage which (I suspect) is more likely to be read because it happens to come along with a Delany story than on its own (let's be honest, rather limited) merits.

Of course we know the real reason Wollheim paired these two novels: he thought it was cute to have one side with an "Alpha" title, and the other with a "Beta" title! (I have no doubt whatsoever that that's the case, too.)

Even saying that about Delany's latterday prominence (and noting that he is an SFWA Grand Master, and one of the field's very greatest writers), one comes away from The Ballad of Beta-2 understanding why he wasn't yet a superstar. Because this really isn't a very good book. It was with his next couple of books (Empire Star and Babel-17) that he truly hit his stride. You can certainly see in The Ballad of Beta-2 some of the stylistic quirks that mark his best work -- that is, it is undeniably a Delany story -- just a weakish one.

It fits into that fairly large subgenre of "generation ship gone wrong" tales, though that isn't clear from the start. It opens with a student, Joneny, ordered by his professor to study the "Star Folk", an obscure group of humans living around a planet called Leffer VI. Joneny reluctantly takes as his subject one of the Star Folk ballads, "The Ballad of Beta-2", and he heads to Leffer VI to try to meet the Star Folk.

He learns that the Star Folk are descendants of a group of people who left Earth in a number of generation ships -- but, as seems almost traditional by now, FTL travel was invented and the stars colonized before they ever got where they were going. A few of them limped into Leffer VI after some centuries, but they didn't want to leave their ships, so they are allowed to stay on board, maintaining their ship-based culture. A couple more ships reached Leffer VI as wrecks, and a couple more never made it.

Joneny, with the help of a mysterious young man he meets on one of the wrecked ships, finds a couple of ship's logs, and reads the tale of the passage between the stars. He quickly realizes that the mysterious lines of the "ballad of Beta-2" actually tell of real events: the "sand" mentioned in the ballad is space dust or something like that, the Beta-2 is one of the ships, the woman in the ballad is the captain of one of the ships, etc. etc. All this is a bit too programmatic perhaps but kind of interesting in its way. Where Delany lost me was his final revelation: the nature of the young he meets, and why the ships ran into such trouble.

In all fairness, it's not really a terrible story. It's just not nearly as good as Delany would be doing within months of this novel's appearance.

One cute note: the second sentence shows Delany making a remarkable prediction: he seems to refer to compact fluorescent light bulbs: "White light from the helical fixture struck the sharp bones of the professor's face."

Emil Petaja (pronounced Puh-TIE-uh, apparently -- I had always thought it Puh-TAH-huh) was a Montana-born writer of Finnish descent. He was born in 1915 and died in 2000. He became a friend of the near-legendary SF artist Hannes Bok at an early age, and lived with Bok for a time. Petaja wrote stories and poems, some Lovecraftian, and began to sell to the pulps in 1942. He wrote SF and also mysteries for about a decade, then stopped writing and worked as a photographer in San Francisco. He was lured back to the field in 1965 or so -- apparently (at least in part) by Fred Pohl, who bought stories by a number of old pulpsters (such as Robert Moore Williams, A. E. Van Vogt, Bryce Walton, and Jerome Bixby) for Galaxy, If, and Worlds of Tomorrow in the mid-60s. His first novel was published in 1965, his last in 1970. He may be best known for his cycle of four novels (a fifth remains unpublished) based on the Finnish legend cycle the Kalevala. He was the first SFWA Author Emeritus, in 1995.

Alpha Yes, Terra No! opens with a shapechanging alien from Alpha Centauri visiting Earth, in the early years of the 21st Century. (That is, about now -- it's kind of fun to read a story set in our "present" and see how different things are.) He is apparently here in defiance of his planet's rulers -- but quite why we don't know. It's clear he holds humans in something like contempt. But as he makes his way through San Francisco he does encounter some people he likes, particularly Kora, a young woman, a prostitute's daughter, who tries to help the poor and downtrodden; and Oren Starr, a folksinger of particular talent -- who himself falls for Kora immediately.

We soon learn that Kora and Oren are partially Alphan -- the result of a forbidden experiment generations before. And the alien invader is desperately trying to find "good" humans to stave off the dominant faction on Alpha Centauri who want humanity exterminated before they can get out of the Solar System. Oren and Kora are the key. So he manipulates them to go to Mars, where the evil "Big Man" who runs the Solar System behind the scenes is trying to build a starship. And from there, of course, the path leads to Alpha Centauri -- but there are pitfalls on the way, partly because of the bad guy from Alpha C trying to track them down.

The resolution, hinted at in the cover copy, is a trial of Terra, reminiscent perhaps of Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. I wasn't terribly impressed by Petaja's arguments in this section -- he allows the Alpha C bad guy to get away with too much, in particular. The resolution is not a big surprise of course, though in some ways it works better than most of the book.

On the whole, it's a bad book. The structure is silly, the characters don't make sense, there is little or no originality. And there are such howlers as one event on Mars. They are driving, when all of a sudden it gets completely dark, everything stops. Why? Phobos has just eclipsed the sun. It is explained that this happens many times a day. Well, it's true that Phobos does pass in front of the Sun many times a day -- but its disk is so small relative to the Sun's disk at Mars that it does not significantly affect the Sun's illumination.