Double Novel Review: Address: Centauri, by F. L. Wallace/If These Be Gods, by Algis Budrys

Double Novel Review: Address: Centauri, by F. L. Wallace/If These Be Gods, by Algis Budrys

by Rich Horton

I have a particular interest in Ace Doubles. As a result, I also take an interest in other Double Books, so plan to review at least one example of, for instance, the Belmont Double series (already done), and the Tor Double series (I have some, need to review them) and so on. This book is a new example of the concept. It's an Armchair Fiction double book -- two "novels" published together, with a cover format explicitly modeled on that of Ace Doubles from the 1950s, though the trim size is that of a smallish trade paperback. It's not quite tête-bêche -- instead of the novels published so that each is upside down relative to the other, there are arranged consecutively, but the front and back cover are each a cover for one of the two "novels". (I use "novel" in quotes because, as with Ace Doubles, many of the stories included are not full-length novels. For example, in this book, the F. L. Wallace novel is a true novel, at a bit over 80,000 words, but the Algis Budrys story is a long novelette of some 16,000 words.)

Armchair Fiction itself is an interesting project. The proprietor is Gregory J. Luce, and over the past decade and more he has reprinted a great many obscure SF stories from, mostly, the 1950s and 1960s. Some are in this Double format, some are collections, some are novels published alone. His strategy is to find works that are out of copyright, and reprint them (usually with covers taken from the original magazine or book publication.) Some of his works are still in copyright, and in these cases (as with a number of works by Robert Silverberg) he has negotiated reprint rights with the author. As such he is doing a service, in many cases bringing back to print books otherwise unavailable or only available used at exorbitant prices.

The publication process appears to involve OCR, and I admit I would have preferred more attention paid to correction of OCR errors, and I'll say that my usual strategy in digging up old stories is to find the magazines or books in which stories I want to see first appeared -- but sometimes that's hard. In this case, what I really wanted was the Algis Budrys story, which had never been reprinted until this book. The issue of Amazing in which it first appeared was a special UFO issue, complete with an essay by famous UFO n/u/t witness Kenneth Arnold, and presumably for that reason, copies of it are quite expensive. 

OK, on to the stories themselves. I'll begin with the Budrys, because Budrys is a favorite writer of mine, and because his story is rather better than F. L. Wallace's novel. As I noted, "If These be Gods" first appeared in a Special Flying Saucer Issue of Amazing Stories, for October 1957.It was the cover story, and that cover, by Ed Valigursky, is reproduced (flipped left-to-right) on this book. The story was bylined "Gordon Jaylyn". This was the only time Budrys used this name (he also had some regular pseudonyms, such as "John A. Sentry", "Ivan Janvier", and "William Scarff".)

It's a flying saucer story, and I suspect Budrys wrote it for this issue at the behest of editor Paul Fairman. But -- it's OK. It's not great, and the ending is a bit of a muddle, but it's professionally done and it pulled me in. It's set in more or less the present time of the story's appearance, on an airliner heading from New York to Los Angeles. There have been a few recent airplane crashes, so the plane is all but empty: four crewmembers and five passengers. There are only two women -- the flight attendant and an elderly lady. The passengers include an actor, a salesman with a dark secret, the older woman, a journalist, and a UFO nut, who wrote a book claiming he met aliens from Venus who preached universal love. 

There is an alert of some fast moving airborne entities over Indiana, but the pilot doesn't take it seriously -- there are false alarms all the time. But this isn't a false alarm -- these are actual flying saucers, and, purely by accident, they hit the plane. And the aliens -- who turn out to be humans, to all appearances -- feel obliged to rescue everyone on the plane. Which will be a big headache for them ... Anyway, that's the setup, and it really reads like the setup to something longer. But the ending is fiercely rushed, as if Budrys checked his word count realized Fairman told him 16,000 words and he just hit 15,000 ... The message suggested is kind of interesting, really, but it probably did need another 10,000 words or so to make it work. And, I imagine, Budrys wasn't really that interested.

Now to the novel. Floyd L. Wallace (1915-2004) was a mechanical engineer who had a writing career of about a decade -- essentially the 1950s -- writing both SF and mysteries. Some of his short fiction, most notably "Delay in Transit", "The Accidental Self", and "Big Ancestor", achieved good notice. But he stopped publishing after 1961. Address: Centauri is his only novel. It was published in 1955 by Gnome Press, and reprinted as a Galaxy Science Fiction Novel in 1958. Galaxy was Wallace's primary market, and I imagine H. L. Gold's departure from the field may have contributed to Wallace leaving as well, though it should be said his last half dozen or so stories went to a variety of other markets. The cover for this Armchair edition is a reproduction of the rather terrible Galaxy Science Fiction Novel cover, by Wallace Wood. They'd have done much better to reproduce Ed Emshwiller's cover to the Gnome Press edition, and better still, to use the Richard Powers cover of the issue of Galaxy in which the first part of the novel appeared. 

Address: Centauri is an expansion of the novella "Accidental Flight" (Galaxy, April 1952.) The novel involves both some padding to the novella, and a lot of additional action after the end of the original story. I'll say up front that it's a painful mess. The science is comically awful. The characters are implausible, and the women are both important and portrayed in weirdly sexist ways. The action in general doesn't make much sense. The prose is not terribly good. But there are some wild ideas there that just about hold the interest -- or, at any rate, hint that something better could have been made of this material.

It opens on an asteroid, called the Handicap Haven. It's home to a number of severely disabled people, mostly due to horrific accidents, though in a few cases due to mutations or genetic abnormalities. I don't think the view of disabled people in this book is remotely in line with contemporary mores, but I will say that for his time, Wallace seemed to have his heart in the right place. Anyway, the main characters include a doctor, Cameron, who seems to be trying to treat his patients decently; and four principal residents: Docchi, an armless man; Anti, a dancer who had an accident such that her whole body is a sort of cancer that keeps growing so that she must live in acid; Jordan, a legless man who is a talented mechanic; and Nona, who was born unable to communicate in any way but who seems to have spectacular scientific powers, and is also very beautiful. Later (in the expanded part) we meet a woman who is also very beautiful but cannot eat normally, and another woman who has a deficiency of male hormones so that she is becoming too feminine -- i.e. a nymphomaniac. (I said the treatment of women was sexist!)

All this is in the context of an Earth society with spectacular medical tech, such that disease is conquered and everyone is good looking. This tech is enough to allow the residents of the asteroid to survive their horrendous injuries, and also to give them greatly extended lives. But there is no way they can live on Earth, so they want to leave for the Alpha Centauri system -- except star travel has so far proven impractical.

Anyway, there's a great deal of huggermugger. Nona's fantastical skills solve the star travel problem, but now Earth wants that tech. And (in the expansion) there is a long chase to Alpha Centauri -- which, to be sure, may have residents already!

I've elided a lot, and, well, most of it is absurd. There's a central love story, which is altered in easy to notice ways in the expanded version -- I mean, even not reading the original you can see where Docchi's love interest is shifted as we head to Centauri. There's all kinds of guff about the "biocompensation" that will in the end magically "cure" all the "deficients". There are unconvincing motivations for the bad guys chasing them. It's -- it's just a frustrating book to read. It seems clear to me that Wallace wanted to write a novel, but really didn't have the handle on structure to manage it.

F. L. Wallace did some pretty decent work at shorter lengths. And I feel bad just reviewing this pretty terrible novel. So, I'll be taking a look at several of his better known shorter stories in the next week or so. Stay tuned!