Birthday Review: The Cunning Man, by Robertson Davies

Birthday Review: The Cunning Man, by Robertson Davies

Copyright: 1994 (published in 1995 in the USA)

This was one of the very first reviews I wrote for the World Wide Web -- as I recall it was posted on one of the very first online bookstore sites. I can't even remember the name of the site just now. It had an interesting discussion forum, alas all long since gone.

I'm reposting it today because Robertson Davies was born 105 years ago.

I wrote, in December of 1995:

It was already my plan to review this book here, simply because it is the last book I finished, and it is a significant book by one of my favorite authors. However, I learned some very sad news today: Robertson Davies died December 2, so this review will take on a somewhat valedictory tone.

For me personally, the news of Davies` death is quite depressing, doubly so because now two of my three favorite non-SF writers have died within a few weeks of each other. (Kingsley Amis having died in late October.) My third favorite non-SF writer, Anthony Powell, is older than either Davies or Amis (Amis was 73, Davies 82, and I believe today is Powell`s 90th birthday. [Actually, Powell was born on 21 December 1905.])

Oh well, on to the book. Robertson Davies was a Canadian author, arguably the finest Canadian writer ever, who wrote plays and novels on generally Canadian subjects. The novels fit generally into trilogies: The Salterton Trilogy, The Deptford Trilogy, and The Cornish Trilogy, in order of composition, represent his first nine novels. All his novels, however, can be read independently (although at least The Deptford Trilogy probably reads best in order.) To say, as I have said, that his novels are "about Canada" is a laughable understatement, however. I tried to summarize the subjects which Davies covered once for a friend, thinking it would be a tidy list, and I kept going and going: Theatre, Music, Vaudeville, Toronto, Hagiography, Jungian Psychology, Art (particularly "The Old Masters"), aging, medicine, Canadian politics, war, finance, schools (both Canadian "boarding schools" and Universities), and on and on. Suffice it to say that his novels are fascinating, hypnotic, works, usually centered on an artist of some kind. Perhaps the best place to start with Davies is his first two books: Tempest-Tost and Leaven of Malice, as these are somewhat lighter in tone than his later works (though all Davies` work is full of comedy at some level.) In my opinion, his best novels are Fifth Business, the first of The Deptford Trilogy, and What`s Bred in the Bone, second book of The Cornish Trilogy.

I am going on. Pardon me, obviously Davies is an enthusiasm of mine. Anyway, his last two novels (barring a posthumous work) are Murther and Walking Spirits and The Cunning Man, which appear to be the first two parts of another loose trilogy [now generally called the (unfinished) Toronto Trilogy), although both are capable of being read completely independently. The Cunning Man is the story of Jonathan Hullah, a Toronto doctor of somewhat unusual reputation. Hullah narrates the book, and tells his own life story beginning in about 1920 in a very isolated part of Northern Ontario, and continuing through early experiences with the local doctor, and also a Native American healing-woman, boarding school, medical school, World War II, and his postwar establishment of his own rather unusual medical practice, which is treated as a court of last resort for cases other doctors have considered hopeless. The key elements of the book are Hullah`s relationships with various people, in particular his school friends Charlie Iredale and Brocky Gilmartin (the latter the father of the narrator of Murther and Walking Spirits), his English lesbian landladies, called The Ladies, and the community surrounding the Very "High Church" Anglican church of St. Aidan`s, next door to Hullah`s practice. At the heart of the story is the mystery surrounding the death of the pastor of St. Aidan`s, Father Ninian Hobbes, and the attempts of Charlie Iredale, now an Anglican priest and Fr. Hobbes` assistant, to have Hobbes declared a saint.

As usual, the main interest of the book is in the characters, and in the curious subjects which come up as a result of the story: medieval saints tales, Anglican ritual and especially Church music, acting, a somewhat psychosomatic theory of disease, church politics, some Freudian psychology, and a great deal more.

For me, this book ranks in the middle range of Davies' work, which of course still makes it highly recommended. However, my interest flagged at times, and the book failed to completely involve me in the way that Davies' very best books do. Also, the central story is less compelling than in most of Davies` books, so the interest devolves even more to the characters and the somewhat arcane knowledge and theories that Davies discusses. These are interesting indeed, but a real gripping story would be still more interesting.

Birthday Review: House of Meetings, by Martin Amis

Birthday Review: House of Meetings, by Martin Amis

A review by Rich Horton

Martin Amis turns 69 today. I've read most of his work -- he's been a favorite of mine since I realized that the son of another of my favorite writers (Kingsley Amis) was also a writer. So I'm resurrecting this review of his 2006 novel House of Meetings.

Martin Amis's new novel is House of Meetings. Obviously making use of some of the research associated with his previous non-fiction book, Koba the Dread, which was about Stalin, he has written a novel about a "survivor" of the Gulag. But of course the novel is in great part about the ways in which this man didn't really survive the Gulag.

The narrator is a Russian born in 1919. He is telling his story, in what seems to be a long letter, to his stepdaughter, an American girl, sometime in 2004 or so. In the present he is taking a trip back to the location of the slave labor camp in which he spent ten years from about 1946 to 1956. It becomes clear he intends to die soon, and this narrative is a confessional.

The fulcrum of the story is a love triangle, involving the narrator, his ten years younger brother Lev, and a beautiful young Jewish girl named Zoya. Just after the War (in which the narrator, in his words, raped his way across East Germany -- in company, to be sure, with the rest of the Russian Army), Zoya moved into their neighborhood in Moscow, and immediately established a reputation as a woman of little character. But a very beautiful woman. The narrator, a war hero of sorts, handsome, used to having his way with women, becomes obsessed with her, but is rejected. And ends up being sent away to a labor camp. And he is astonished to learn that his rather ugly younger brother has taken up with Zoya, and indeed married her. But then Lev too is sent to the camps -- the same camp. And the two men spend several years there -- though Lev is a pacifist, and refuses to become involved in fights against the camp bullies, or the administrators. Which leads to something of a rift between the two men -- a rift exacerbated in the narrator's mind by his jealousy. But something changes horrendously when Zoya is allowed to make a conjugal visit -- in the "House of Meetings". And when soon after that, the camp is closed and the inmates freed.

The later life of the three is also described. The narrator is fairly successful, in Russian terms, eventually emigrating to the U.S., while Lev's marriage disintegrates, and he marries another woman, and has a son, destined to die in Afghanistan. But all is leading to a final confrontation between the narrator and Zoya, and to a final revelation in a long buried letter from Lev to the narrator. All this incident is skillfully unfolded, if to be honest the final letter isn't quite the explosion we have been led to expect.

Much of the interest in the novel is in the quite compelling descriptions of life in the labor camp. Besides being a portrayal of slave camp life, and a portrayal of a ruined man, it is to some extent a pained depiction of a dying country. It is very well written. A bit less "bravura" in prosody than earlier Amis books, though still often arresting. And very moving, quite believable, quite profound. One of Martin Amis's best novels, I think.

Birthday Review: A. S. Byatt's The Biographer's Tale

Birthday Review: The Biographer's Tale, by A. S. Byatt

a review by Rich Horton

I wrote this review back in 2004, and I'm resurrecting it in honor of A. S. Byatt's birthday. She is a magnificent writer -- I'm a particular fan of Possession, and of the utterly brilliant short story "Sugar", as well as the novellas of Angels and Insects. Much of her work if fantasy, or borderline fantasy. This novel is one of her less well-known books.

The Biographer's Tale, from 2000, is one of those books A. S. Byatt seemed to produce as a break from her "Frederica Potter" series. (I suppose one shouldn't call The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and The Whistling Woman the "Potter" series -- might cause confusion!) It's an enjoyable novel, fairly short, fairly amusing, with a number of surface similarities to Possession, but a very different overall feel.

Phineas G. Nanson is a very small Englishman, a graduate student in postmodern literary theory. (I say very small -- his description of himself is not specific, but I don't think he is meant to be a "dwarf" or "midget" or whatever the correct clinical term is -- rather, a very short, slight, man, perhaps 4'9" or 4'10".) One day he decides to chuck that branch of study, and a professor suggests as an alternative a study of biography, or, specifically, the three volume biography of Sir Elmer Bole, by Scholes Destry-Scholes. This biography turns out to be indeed fascinating, and Bole himself an incredible person, a Victorian polymath, who among other things married two women, a somewhat typical Englishwoman and a Turkish woman. Nanson decides to try to do a biography of Scholes Destry-Scholes. But he runs into trouble quickly -- Scholes is long dead, or at least disappeared, he isn't even really named "Scholes Destry-Scholes", and very little is known about him.

At this juncture the book seems ready to become a spiraling mystery built around curious small facts, and an elusive subject. Nanson discovers some papers left at his publishers by Scholes, that appear to be sections of contemplated biographies of other famous people, real people this time: Carl Linnaeus, Francis Galton, and Henrik Ibsen. But these prove problematic as well, as much of these accounts turn out to be invented. Nanson digs deeper, and at the same time gets a job, working at a curious travel agency run by a couple of gay men. The travel agency concentrates on unusual tours, thematically linked -- which corresponds fairly well to the inventions of Scholes re his subjects. Nanson's other diggings lead him to meet two intriguing but different women: a Swedish ecologist, or more specifically a bee expert, whom he meets at a museum dedicated to Linnaeus; and a radiologist, the niece and closest surviving relative of Scholes Destry-Scholes.

The rest of the book swings to "autobiography", as the subject becomes not Bole, or Scholes, or Linnaeus, Ibsen or Galton; but rather Nanson, in particular his relationship with the two women he has met, and his difficulties and successes at his new job. It's all pretty interesting, and fun, and generally unexpected. Some of it -- much of it -- has a distinct air of unreality. Byatt is always prone to fantastical writing even in her most mainstream stories, and here she is certainly brushing against the border of realistic fiction with -- what? I guess that's part of the question -- a question naturally posed when we consider a fictional biographer with an assumed name writing about a fictional person, but also writing about "real" people, though making up stuff about them. And so on -- consider the radiologist's art pictures -- X-rays presented as art -- are these bones the real people? Or Francis Galton's composite photographs ... or Henrik Ibsen's ideas about character ... or Linnaeus' classification schemes ... in many ways this is a "light" book but it is also an obsessively intellectual book (as usual with Byatt), and a fascinating read.

A Perhaps Forgotten Mystery Novel: The Flaxborough Crab, by Colin Watson

A Perhaps Forgotten Mystery Novel: The Flaxborough Crab, by Colin Watson

a review by Rich Horton

I admit I had never heard of Colin Watson when I ran across this 1969 mystery novel at an estate sale or antique shop recently, hence the "Perhaps Forgotten" label. But on research (i.e. reading his Wikipedia entry) I see he was quite popular at that time, and that the Flaxborough books even became a TV series. So very possibly he's not forgotten at all.

Colin Watson (1920-1983) wrote 12 novels in the Flaxborough series -- Flaxborough being a provincial town based on Boston, Lincolnshire (where Watson worked as a journalist). He wrote one other novel (The Puritan) as well as a study of thrillers, Snobbery With Violence, that covers such writers as Dornford Yates, whom I have reviewed on this blog. (And, yes, "snobbery with violence" fits Yates very well.) Four of the Flaxborough novels were used in the BBC TV series Murder Most English, in about 1978. (One of these was the novel at hand, The Flaxborough Crab.) There were also BBC radio adaptations of two of the books.

The detective in the books is Inspector Walter Purbright, a rather plodding but honest fellow. Another major character is Miss Lucinda Teatime, who seems rather a conwoman, but, as a recurring character, is evidently never the true villain. She's "of a certain age", but seems concerned with her appearance and sexual availability, even though she doesn't actively engage in such activities in the book at hand -- and she's quite clever and intriguing if, well, also intriguing, in another sense.

The book opens with several scenes of women being attacked by an older man, and groped. (One of the older men portrayed, by the way, is called Mr. Grope, I am sure not unintentionally, though he isn't the villain.) The curious aspect of all this is the strange scuttling crablike way the attacker runs. So Purbright sets up a patrol, trying to catch the perp, with no results, However, a senior citizens outing, organized by Alderman Winge, leads to a shocking conclusion -- Winge tries to grope one of the women, and in making his crablike escape, falls off a cliff into the river and dies.

So -- problem solved, eh? But the inquest suggests the possible involvement of an herbal product, "Samson's Salad", which is supposed to, er, increase the vitality of older men. (This is pre-Viagra days, of course.) And Samson's Salad, Purbright learns, is sold by an outfit run by Miss Lucinda Teatime. That's not all, though -- there are competing doctors testifying at the inquest, and it appears there's another potential product involved, much more respectable, produced by a German company. Could one of these drugs/herbs be causing the unsavory activities of the Flaxborough Crab? And is there more than one Crab?

You've probably guessed the solution, in broad terms. In narrower terms, there's another death (there always is -- these detectives are terribly inefficient, always at least one more person needs to die for them to solve the case), and it's suspicious enough to lead to further investigation and the revelation of a rather involved murder method.

The whole mystery aspect of this novel is really kind of minor, and the actual murder method seems implausibly involved. But the fun is the wicked satiric portrayals of all the characters, good, bad, and merely crazy. It's nothing overwhelmingly special, but it's pretty fun, all things considered. Not a great book, but I suspect the Flaxborough Novels, as a class, will all pass the time amusingly.

Birthday Review: Chimera, by Will Shetterly

Birthday Review: Chimera, by Will Shetterly

a review by Rich Horton

On the occasion of Will Shetterly's 63rd birthday, here is a repost of my long ago review of his 2000 novel Chimera.

Will Shetterly’s novel Chimera mixes together a few fairly familiar SF themes: human/animal combinations, artificial intelligences, the issue rights for both of the above, and a somewhat balkanized (or at least decentralized) future U. S. with a Libertarian edge (viewed rather darkly, given Shetterly’s politics). The plot is taken from a familiar mystery trope (not uncommon in SF): the hard-boiled detective with a heart of gold who gets mixed up in a vulnerable woman’s problems despite himself. The end result is not bad: the book is fun reading, with very sympathetic main characters, and a fast-moving if sometimes a bit unconvincing plot. I liked this novel, but I didn’t quite love it: I felt it brushed up against some profound thematic material without really fully engaging it, and I felt that the future depicted was more an assemblage of neat bits than a fully imagined, or fully plausible, future society. Perhaps I am simply guilty of wanting to read a book the author didn’t intend to write: certainly Shetterly has delivered a good read, which at least asks the reader to think about some important themes.

The narrator is Chase Maxwell, a former member of UNSEC (apparently United Nations Security: some variety of future Peacekeeping group), who left that job after an assignment went bad. He retains one useful (and really neat!) piece of tech: an Infinite Pocket, an area of warped space attached to his arm, in which he can apparently store things of nearly arbitrary size. Including his gun, which has a similar bit of tech: a sort of “Infinite Magazine”. He’s down on his luck (naturally!) when a jaguar-human hybrid named Zoe Domingo asks him to track down her “mother”‘s murderer. (Actually, I’m not quite sure whether the “critters” of this book are “enhanced” animals, a la David Brin’s “Uplift”, or genetically engineered human/animal hybrids.) Janna Gold, the human Zoe calls her mother (she bought her out of slavery), has just been killed, apparently by berserk “copbots”. But the police department is much more likely to finger Zoe for the murder, given the prejudice against “critters”. Moreover, Zoe has a mysterious earring Janna gave her, which seems to be a piece of special tech that lots of highly placed people really want.

Max is reluctant to take the case: he doesn’t work for critters. But he’s in a bit of a bind, so he agrees to help. What follows is a nearly nonstop chase, as Max and Zoe encounter first the police, then a series of people who seem to be peripherally involved: Krista Blake, a police expert who takes a sudden shine to Max; Amos Tauber, an advocate for full rights for both “critters” and Artificial Intelligences; and Oberon Chain, the head of a high-tech company who is also an AI rights crusader. When some of these people begin to get murdered as well, the frame is in, and Max and Zoe are the designated suspects. At the same time, Max is realizing that his feelings for Zoe may be a lot deeper than is prudent for a human to have with respect to a critter.

From there we encounter a number of different aspects of this future, such as the indentured service camps that have replaced jails; and the “critter” side of town, complete with riots and reverse prejudice against “skins” (ordinary humans); plus scenes of critters “werewolfing”: suddenly going berserk and killing everybody in sight; as well as a very well put argument about the ethics of downloading human brains into computers, and vice versa, and plenty more. As I said, the plot is fast moving, and I was always interested, but at times things happen a bit conveniently for the heroes.

Chimera raises some questions that I didn’t feel were fully answered. Chief among these is “Why were the “critters” created?” I honestly don’t believe that, starting from the present day, the essentially purposeful creation of a new underclass, of that particular nature, is very likely. I also thought his future U.S. a bit unlikely, politically. But both of these reservations are really quibbles, and he does portray his future society quite interestingly. But always at the back of our mind is a desire to more fully engage the submerged issues: equal rights for “critters”, and equal rights for AIs. Those questions are raised, but mostly brushed aside, in the interests of maintaining narrative pace. Certainly a longtime SF reader cannot help thinking of Cordwainer Smith’s classic “The Ballad of Lost C’Mell”, about a “catwoman” who gives all in the pursuit of rights for the “underpeople”. But though such issues are present here, they simply don’t resonate the way they did in Smith’s great story. Nonetheless, though I may (perhaps unfairly) regard Chimera as a missed opportunity to be something really special, it’s still a fun read, with its heart in the right place.

A Little-Remembered Ace Double: The Space Willies/Six Worlds Yonder, by Eric Frank Russell

Ace Double Reviews, 12: The Space Willies, by Eric Frank Russell/Six Worlds Yonder, by Eric Frank Russell (#D-315, 1958, $0.35, reissued as #77785, 1971, $0.75)

Eric Frank Russell (1905-1978) was an English writer who worked almost exclusively for John W. Campbell. He began publishing in 1937 and made his first big splash in 1939 with Sinister Barrier in the first issue of the classic fantasy magazine Unknown. (One fannish legend, probably false, has it that Campbell founded Unknown because he wanted to publish Sinister Barrier but didn't think it would fit in Astounding.) Russell was particularly prolific during the 50s, then almost completely stopped, publishing only some 5 short stories and one novel after 1959. He was most famous for novels and stories of interaction between humans and aliens, usually with a comic slant. Sometimes buffoonish humans would come into frustrating contact with unpredictable aliens (as in "The Waitabits" in this book), sometimes a clever human or two would themselves frustrate buffoonish aliens (as in "Diabologic" and The Space Willies in this book). And sometimes the interaction would be a bit more interesting.

(Cover of The Space Willies by Ed Emshwiller)

This Ace Double backs the short novel The Space Willies, about 37,000 words long, with Six Worlds Yonder, a collection of six stories totalling some 43,000 words. All the stories in Six Worlds Yonder are from Astounding, and The Space Willies is an expansion of an Astounding novelette.

The publication history of The Space Willies and its related stories is a bit complex. It was originally a novelette, "Plus X", in the June 1956 Astounding. The Space Willies was then published in 1958 at 37,000 words. The following year, it was further expanded to a 56,000 word novel, Next of Kin. (The copyright notice in the recent Gollancz SF Collectors' Edition of Next of Kin hints at an even later revision, as it gives copyright dates of 1959 and 1964.) (The Chris Moore cover shown for that edition was actually painted for Bill Johnson's Hugo-winning story "We Will Drink a Fish Together".) It must be said that the expansion seams show -- I haven't read "Plus X", but I think I can detect which parts of the novel it must have been, and I don't think the padding added much meat.

(Cover by Chris Moore)

The story concerns John Leeming, a scout pilot for the Terran space navy. Earth and her allies are engaged in a war with the Lathians and their allies. Leeming, a rather insubordinate fellow by instinct, is given the assignment to take an experimental new super-fast one-man scout ship and fly it as far as he can towards the "rear" of the Lathian empire, in order to determine the extent of the Lathian holdings. Leeming proceeds to do so, but as the capabilities of his ship are unknown, he finds himself marooned with a decaying ship on a planet well away from the front, indeed, out of range of an ordinary ship, Terran or Lathian. He's the only human being on a strange planet, and he must find some way to elude capture and find a way back home -- and he may have to do so twice, as even if he steals one ship, it won't be able to get all the way to Earth.

Leeming proceeds to have a few adventures, but inevitably gets captured by the natives of the planet, who are not Lathians but one of their allied species. He finds himself in a prison with a number of Rigellians (allies of Terrans), but no other humans. Now his problem is doubly difficult -- but then he has an inspiration. The rest of the book (which I assume to have been the original story) tells of his clever idea and the implementation of it. I found his idea cute in conception, but implausible in execution. As with several other Russell stories that I have read, it is necessary for the hero's foils to be quite remarkably stupid. It also depends on some 50s slang being essentially current far in the future -- and ... but criticism is pointless. The book is not meant to be believable, but just to be fun to read.

Six Worlds Yonder is subtitled "Stories of First Landings on Far Planets", and that is actually a pretty good description of 4 of the 6 stories. It's a decent enough collection in pretty pure Russell mode, but I ought to mention that I had read all of the stories save one before, but I only remembered one of the stories before rereading. (To be sure, that may say more about the state of my memory than anything else.) The six stories are:

"The Waitabits" (17500 words, Astounding, July 1955) -- a Terran military team lands on a world they have been warned is unconquerable. The natives do indeed turn out to be unconquerable, but for an amusing reason. Decent enough, but I think a bit long for its substance.

"Tieline" (2700 words, Astounding, July 1955, under the name Duncan H. Munro for the fairly obvious reason that it appeared in the same issues as "The Waitabits") -- men sent to an isolated "lighthouse" planet inevitably go mad. How can they be kept sane? A bad story -- the setup is strained beyond belief (they go insane on 10-year hitches -- why not try shorter hitches? Pets aren't allowed -- but that is pretty much contradicted by the eventual solution. etc. etc.).

"Top Secret" (6300 words, Astounding, August 1956) -- Terran military types send messages to a remote planet via a relay system, resulting in essentially a game of "telephone", such that a routine message ends up warning of the arrival of 42 ostriches, and repeated requests for clarification just make things worse. Silly as anything, but OK as long as you don't ask for anything but silliness.

"Nothing New" (4000 words, Astounding, January 1955) -- this was the only story I hadn't previously read, and oddly enough it might be my favorite. Humans visit a friendly alien planet for the first time -- or was it really?

"Into Your Tent I'll Creep" (Astounding, September 1957) -- this time the story is from the POV of aliens visiting Earth. The humans they like just fine, but there is another species on Earth that one alien comes to fear ...

"Diabologic" (8500 words, Astounding, March 1955) -- this seems to be a fairly popular story, for example it was Andre Norton's choice for the anthology My Favorite Science Fiction Story. I guess it's OK, but it's awfully slight, and it depends on really stupid aliens, who don't understand Zeno's Paradox or the Cretan Liar Paradox. The story features a Terran scout discovering another space-going civilization, and managing to befuddle the aliens enough that they won't pose any threat to Earth.

On the whole, this is a fairly characteristic Eric Frank Russell collection, but not really his best work. Better to seek out the stories in The Great Explosion, his Hugo winner "Allamagoosa", his novelette "Dear Devil", maybe the novel Wasp.

A Mostly Forgotten Ace Double: Rocket to Limbo, by Alan E. Nourse/Echo in the Skull, by John Brunner

Ace Double Reviews, 37: Rocket to Limbo, by Alan E. Nourse/Echo in the Skull, by John Brunner (#D-385, 1959, $0.35)

Today (August 11, 2018) would have been Alan E. Nourse's 90th birthday, so I've taken the opportunity to repost this review I did some time back of his Ace Double Rocket to Limbo.

(Covers by Ed Emshwiller and Robert E. Schultz)

This 1959 Ace Double pairs a once-popular writer best known for his juveniles with a writer who became one of the towering figures in the field. At the time Alan E. Nourse was surely the "headline" writer of the pair (which is not to say he was particularly well-known), but as of now John Brunner is clearly the more important figure. Rocket to Limbo is a reprint of a 1957 novel, originally published by David McKay. (There also seems to have been a version, possibly much shorter, published in Satellite Science Fiction in 1957.) It is about 50,000 words long. Echo in the Skull is from 1959: it was published in the same year in the UK magazine Science Fantasy. (I don't know which publication came first.) It's a longish novella at some 28,000 words -- I'm not sure if the Science Fantasy text is the same as the Ace Double, but I suspect it may be. It has been reprinted as "Give Warning to the World" according to the ISFDB, but I can't find any details of that.

One point about John Brunner's Ace Double career. I had previously listed a number of especially prolific Ace Double contributors. Somehow, I managed to forget Brunner: the most prolific of them all, I believe! He wrote 24 Ace Double halves, in 21 different books. A few of these were published under the name Keith Woodcott. (He also used this pseudonym for a few short stories -- I read one just today, "Fair" in the March 1956 New Worlds, a pretty fair story, I will say.)

I enjoyed several Alan E. Nourse novels as a teenager: he was one of the first few SF writers I read (with Asimov, Clarke, Norton, and Simak). In particular I recall The Mercy Men, The Bladerunner, The Universe Between, and Raiders from the Rings. (The last two novels were based on 1951 stories in Astounding -- the curious thing is that Raiders from the Rings is not based on a Nourse story, but rather "The Mauki Chant", by Nourse's sometime collaborator J. A. Meyer.) However the novel at hand is not to my mind as good as any of those.

Rocket to Limbo opens with a scene of Earth's first star ship, the Argonaut, blasting off en route to Alpha Centauri. It is a generation ship -- its primitive engines are expected to take as much as a century to reach the nearest star. Quickly we cut to the main action, some 350 years later. The faster-than-light Koenig drive as been in use for a few centuries, and the Earth has a burgeoning colony population. However, the Argonaut is not found at Alpha Centauri, nor at any other planet. Lars Heldrigsson (I thought I was in a Poul Anderson novel for a second after reading that name!) is a young man preparing for his first journey for the Colonial Service, under the command of legendary explorer Walter Fox.

Lars soon learns that what he thought was to be a routine trip to Vega will be something else entirely. The ship's launch is made under unusual security. And Lars's roommate, his former classmate Peter Brigham, a bitter young man, tells him of a mysterious cargo that seems to be illegal nuclear weapons. They are swiftly told the reason for the unusual procedures: another Colonial Service ship, investigating a newly discovered planet, disappeared after making planetfall. Their job is to investigate this mysterious disappearance.

Walter Fox, it turns out, has a bug in his brain about intelligent aliens. It seems humans have encountered no sign of them, but Fox is sure they must exist, and he wants first contact to be peaceful. But other people are afraid of the aliens, including many of the crew, some of whom plan a mutiny, charging that they have been illegally shanghaied to this secret mission, instead of the expected Vega milk run. Peter Brigham has other motives -- he blames Walter Fox for his father's death on a previous exploration mission. Lars, of course, is a loyalist, and he eventually turns Peter to the good side of the Force.

No prizes (after the opening scene of the book) for guessing what the divided crew actually finds on the strange planet. And no prizes for guessing that Lars and Peter, after a harsh struggle with the elements and with another mutiny, have a key role to play when they encounter strange beings in a strange city. And, finally, no prizes for guessing that Walter Fox's dream of discovering intelligent aliens comes into play as well.

I was rather disappointed by this novel. For one thing, it's put together rather carelessly. There are a number of quite unnecessary niggling inconsistencies (such as how far the Argonaut eventually seems to have travelled, or what sort of planet the mysterious planet is in terms of indigenous life). And the ending is an annoying attempt at transcendentalism via psi hogwash.

I enjoyed Echo in the Skull somewhat more. It's an extraordinarily fast-moving story, partly because it covers a very short time period -- perhaps twelve hours. Long enough to save the world with a love story thrown in. It's gripping and sets up an interesting mystery which is resolved acceptably. There are some short-cuts -- the hero jumps to some correct conclusions implausibly swiftly, for instance. It's not great work but it's good old-fashioned fun.

The story opens with Sally Ercott hungover and in despair. She is broke, filthy, living in a rundown flat, and at the brink of letting her landlord sell her as a prostitute in lieu of rent. She has vague memories of a much more comfortable life, but no specifics -- and more terrifyingly, she does have occasional very specific memories of other, much stranger, lives. These memories involve things like human sacrifice to a huge alien being, and barbarian invaders, and suchlike.

Then she is nearly run over by a young man, who insists on taking her to his house to at the very least clean up and get herself a good meal. Sally's landlord and his wife are depicted as furious at this development -- is their only motivation that of driving her to sufficient degradation to agree to "go on the street"? Or is something more sinister going on? The man who picks up Sally is named Nick Jenkins (it's probably only a coincidence that that is the same name as the narrator of one of the most important (and one of the best, and perhaps my favorite) English novels of the 20th Century: Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time).  Nick is an inventor, and a man with an open mind, and he promises to treat whatever strange stories Sally tells with respect. And when Sally tells him of her unusual memories of other lives, he asks her to draw scenes from them -- which elicits the information that the barbarian invaders from one scene had four arms; and that in another memory Sally's skin was scaled.

Nick arranges for a Doctor to treat Sally. Meanwhile the sinister landlord couple have tracked Nick down, and they are attempting to kidnap Sally back. Fortunately, another resident of Sally's rooming house has also become suspicious of the landlord and landlady. The conclusion moves rapidly, with Sally in deadly peril, even as she and Nick have figured out (perhaps too rapidly, as I suggested) just what's going on. But between Sally's new found confidence, and the help of Nick, the doctor, the other resident, and some reasonably intelligent policemen, all comes out OK.