Review: Victims of the Nova, by John Brunner

Review: Victims of the Nova, by John Brunner (1962, 1963, 1965, revised 1969, 1974, 1981, omnibus edition 1989)

by Rich Horton

Early John Brunner novels, I have learned, are a wonderful source of thoroughly compentent SF adventure. My experience with Brunner in my younger years was probably not atypical. I first read Stand on Zanzibar, because it was a Hugo winner, and I liked it a fair amount, respected it even more. I read another novel from his "late" period, Total Eclipse, and liked it also. I shied away from other "mature" Brunner novels, like The Shockwave Rider and The Sheep Look Up, mostly out of fear that they would be downers. 

I did read a couple shorter Brunner novels from the middle or late part of his career, The Dramaturges of Yan and The Infinitive of Go. Neither seemed all that ambitious, and I thought The Dramaturges of Yan decent and The Infinitive of Go thoroughly awful.

Then, as part of my Ace Double reading project, I encountered several early Brunner novels. I knew that he had been very prolific, and that his early work was regarded as hackwork. And so I suppose it is -- but it's extremely good hackwork. The early Brunner novels I have read have one characteristic in common -- they are fun. They do not entirely lack ambition, either -- usually they treat at least reasonably interesting issues, though often a somewhat rapidly -- one might say superficially. One of these Ace Doubles included The Repairmen of Cyclops. This book is one of three novels about the aftermath of a nova which destroyed a colony planet called Zarathustra. A number of ships escaped, but with limited supplies and no well-defined destination. Some of these ships reached habitable planets, but the survivors tended to lapse into barbarism.

In this space I have previously posted reviews of Castaways' World and The Repairmen of Cyclops. I figured it was time to post a review of Secret Agent of Terra -- and why not just assemble all three into a review of the omnibus. So here we are!

The other two novels were Castaway's World and Secret Agent of Terra. Brunner later revised them both, retitling the first Polymath and the second The Avengers of Carrig. An omnibus of all three novels (The Repairmen of Cyclops very lightly revised) was published in the UK in 1989 as Victims of the Nova.

Polymath was first published in 1963 as Castaways' World (half of an Ace Double), and the revised version under the new title in 1974 by DAW. It is set in the immediate aftermath of two ships from Zarathustra crashlanding on a planet. The viewpoint character is Lex, who turns out to have been in training to be a polymath. A polymath is an enhanced individual who serves at the point man for colonizing a new planet. Lex has many but not all of the skills a polymath would have -- what he mostly lacks is specific knowledge of this particular randomly arrived at planet. His starship crashed on the seashore. After a long winter his group has survived, outside the ship, and indeed their ship has foundered in the ocean. It is clear that they will have to make a permanent life on the planet, with limited resources. 

The other group crashed inland, and they holed up in the ship over the winter. But as spring arrives it seems they have all died. The seaside group begins to set up the rudiments of a colony. There are stresses, many centered about a promiscuous young woman named Delvia. In particular, a teenaged girl has formed a lesbian attraction to Delvia, only to be rejected when the older woman finds men available. 

Then an expedition is sent to the site of the inland starship. It turns out this group has survived, but under terrible conditions. They continue to believe that they will be able to refurbish their ship and head for another, more hospitable, world. The Captain has basically enslaved the passengers. Naturally they resent the comparative success of Lex's group -- setting up a dramatic resolution. The novel is very enjoyable, often thought-provoking though at times a bit forced -- good stuff.

The Avengers of Carrig was first published in 1962 as Secret Agent of Terra. It was also an Ace Double half. Its revision came out in 1969 from Dell (there was also a later DAW edition).

This book is set several hundred years after the Zarathustra disaster. Carrig is a major trade center on one of the Zarathustra Refugee Planets. By this time the Corps Galactia has monitors on each of the ZRPs, trying to prevent ugly incidents like a planet being enslaved by its neighbors, but otherwise letting them develop at their own pace. 

One Trader Heron comes to Carrig in time for the yearly kinghunt, in which the leading young men of Carrig hunt a dragonlike local creature, the parradile. The one who kills the parradile king becomes the ruler of the city. This year a promising young man is favored to become the first new ruler in 18 years. But a mysterious visitor has come to town with Heron. First he kills the Trader (who is of course a Corps Galactia agent), then he uses his blaster (Galactic tech) to kill the parradile and take over. 

The death of Heron leads the Corps to investigate. Young probationer Maddalena Santos, whose unpleasant attitude has nearly led to her expulsion from the Corps, gets the job, but her ship is shot down. Luckily she lands near the northern sanctuary, which turns out to be the remnants of the original Zarathustra spaceship. There she meets the young man who had been expected to kill the parradile king -- he has had to flee the new rulers of Carrig, who have forced the population to labor in uranium mines. The two eventually hatch a plot to oust the new ruler of Carrig -- in the process, of course, achieving Santos's goal of hunting down the Galactic renegades. They also learn an important secret about the parradiles that will change Carrig forever.

The ending is a bit odd and abrupt -- overdetermined would be the word I'd use. Still, it's a fun novel. Probably the least of the three ZRP novels, but still a good read.

The Repairmen of Cyclops is the third ZRP novel. It was serialized in Fantastic, January and February 1965, and published as half an Ace Double a couple of months later. DAW's reprint appeared in 1981.

The novel is set about 20 years after The Avengers of Carrig. By this time 21 ZRP planets have been discovered by the human Galactic society. Interactions with those planets are kept to a minimum, however -- it is felt that allowing them to develop on their own is preferable from the point of view of encouraging vibrant new cultures and ideas. The flipside of course is that many people, especially on the more primitive of these worlds, live perhaps unnecessary lives of poverty and misery.

Cyclops is not a ZRP, but a citizen of Cyclops was involved in the scheme to harvest nuclear material using the people of Carrig. The government of Cyclops, led by the authoritarian woman Alura Quisp, now favors a policy of encouraging Galactic intervention in the ZRPs, ostensibly to uplift their inhabitants to Galactic civilization. This novel opens with Quisp's lover hunting a wolfshark, and losing a leg in the process. He is rescued by a local fisherman, and taken to the nearest hospital, which happens to be run by the Galactic Patrol, or Corps, instead of Cyclops. The Patrol has much better facilities, and they discover that the leg the wolfshark chewed off wasn't the man's own leg.

Maddalena Santos returns, now visiting her old boss (who also appeared in The Avengers of Carrig) at the base on Cyclops. She is bored after spending 20 years not interfering on a primitive planet. So she gladly gets involved in the mystery of the anomalous leg. Also involved are her boss, and the fisherman, really a boy, who rescued the shark hunter. We quickly gather what's really going on -- lacking regeneration tech, a doctor on Cyclops has instead been repairing patients with parts taken from people kidnapped from yet another ZRP. It is up to Maddalena and the others to stop these people -- a job complicated by the aging Alura Quisp's desire for a new young body, and by her willingness to take extreme political steps to interfere with the Corps.

As with so many novels from this period (Brunner's and others), it sets up the situation rather nicely, then rushes way too swiftly to a conclusion. And like The Avengers of Carrig, the ending is perhaps "overdetermined" -- by which I mean that the good guys win very easily, and as it were in multiple ways. I still quite liked it.

I continue to find "early Brunner" great fun. I don't really want to oversell his early work -- it's often rushed, the worldbuilding is not terribly impressive, there are plenty of implausibilities. We're not talking lost classics here, nor novels that were unfairly deprived of Hugos. But almost without exception, the several pre-Stand on Zanzibar Brunner novels that I have read in the past year or so have been unpretentious, somewhat original, thoughtful, and purely enjoyable.