Resurrected Review: The End of Eternity, by Isaac Asimov

I call some of my reviews "Resurrected Review", typically when I grab something from my old blog or SFF Net newsgroup and republish it here. This one is even more truly resurrected -- it's one of very many reviews I did for the pioneering website SF Site, which was founded by Rodger Turner and John O'Neill back in 1997. John recruited me to write reviews for the site, and he soon became -- and remains -- a very close friend. John left to found the magazine Black Gate, which survives as a first rate website. Rodger Turner maintained SF Site for quite a while, but the changing nature of the internet eventually led to its end -- it was mostly finished by 2013, and formally closed in 2018, but the site remained until very recently. Rodger died in October of 2025, and SF Site left the internet not long after. I've been saving some of the best work I did, and some of that will migrate here.

This review dates to 2000, on the occasion of the Victor Gallancz SF Collectors Edition of the novel.

Resurrected Review: The End of Eternity, by Isaac Asimov

I've long been of the slightly heterodox (though far from rare) opinion that The End of Eternity is Isaac Asimov's best novel. It benefits partly from being unconnected to his various series (though there are hints, both within this book and in some of the later books, that there could be a tenuous connection). In addition, Asimov is interested in a significant, and resonant, theme, in a way the central theme of 50s SF: the human desire for exploration, and the concomitant link between risk-taking and expansion of the human spirit. This still works now, nearly at the turn of the millennium, though inevitably the theme needs to be viewed with a touch of irony. Finally, the story is cleverly constructed, and really quite well-written in spots, within the constraints of Asimov's goals and style.

There are weaknesses, to be sure. The central love story is awkwardly handled, and the treatment of women in general is creaky, while the characterization of heroine Noÿs Lambent in particular is uneven. And as with almost any time travel story, the clever structure of the plot tends to wobble on close examination: but that is a fault endemic to the form, and, I think, excusable here. I was a bit concerned about rereading this book now, not having read it in 20 years, though I read it multiple times as a teen. Would it hold up? With the one caveat that I couldn't quite buy his portrayal of women and romance (which I think I did pretty much accept as a callow teen), I think the book holds up fine.

The End of Eternity concerns Andrew Harlan, a Technician for the organization called Eternity. As a Technician, Harlan is an expert at determining and executing the Minimum Necessary Change in a timeline to attain a desired Change in history. For the Eternals, men who live "outside Time," monitor human history from the 27th century to about the 70,000th century, trying to maintain a stable society, with reasonable prosperity. They allow some trade between centuries, but for the most part they work at eliminating worrisome trends: excessively unusual social mores, dangerous technology such as atomic weapons, and, to be sure, excessive curiosity about the nature of Eternity.

As the book opens Harlan is shown committing a crime: in exchange for concealing a minor error by a functionary of one of the Eternity bases, he arranges to have the Life Plot of a certain woman tracked through a change. For, you see, when Reality Changes, everybody changes with it. And a woman you loved might suddenly be married, or have suffered an accident, or be altered in personality.

Flashbacks then show Harlan's history: his recruitment from a somewhat conservative century, his early career as an Eternal, his interest in Primitive history (from before the invention of time travel, thus before Eternity can manipulate history). Finally he encounters the alluring Noÿs Lambent, a woman from a sexually loose century, and the stiff, inexperienced Harlan falls in love, and before long is ready to risk the very existence of Eternity to keep his woman.

Asimov resolves his story, as I've said, fairly cleverly, in the process giving us a look at the creation of Eternity, and at the Hidden Centuries so far in the future that the Eternals can't penetrate, or aren't allowed to penetrate. He makes use of time paradoxes worthy of Charles Harness, but Asimov's presentation is so deadpan and rationalistic that he almost makes them believable. And in the end, he asks whether stability and general happiness is the most worthwhile goal. His answer is the expected answer for a Campbell-nurtured writer of the 50s, but it's still the answer I'd give, with modifications. (After all, Asimov's ideal vision, as presented in this book and elaborated in his Foundation/Empire books, is of a human-dominated galaxy. In essence, he suggests, we need to get to the stars before They -- the aliens -- do. Surely it's better that we get to the stars along with Them?)

Upon rereading The End of Eternity I'd still call it Asimov's best novel. If his picture of an all-male Eternity (admittedly given at least nominal justification in the book) seems risible from a contemporary perspective, so does much 50s SF fail in treatment of women. So too his sex scenes and love scenes are awkward (and the book does have a sex scene, albeit a very discreet one, despite Asimov's habit of joking that he didn't write about sex until he wrote about alien sex in The Gods Themselves): but 50s SF writers were rarely allowed much practice in that area. The ideas presented in the book are still compelling: the meta-society of Eternity is nicely worked out, with many cute details, and the overarching theme is well-argued, and still merits thought. And Asimov's prose, so often denigrated, is here, as ever, well-wielded in service of his goals. It's not beautiful, but it's well-constructed, and the occasional telling line (as a character's soft sentence about a spaceport wiped out in a Change: "It had been very beautiful") really works. This is the kind of book that made me an SF fan, and it's still worth reading.

Review: The Horse Without a Head, by Paul Berna

Review: The Horse Without a Head, by Paul Berna

by Rich Horton

At an estate sale recently, whose deceased owner clearly had interesting taste, I saw a copy of The Horse Without a Head, for 50 cents (about what it cost in the first place) and it was just intriguing enough to buy. It was a Scholastic edition, so a children's book (really what we'd now call Young Adult though the primary characters are between about 10 and 13.) And the writer was French. And, as I quickly learned, the book became a Disney movie for television -- Disney's Wonderful World of Color series -- in 1963. The movie -- called The Horse Without a Head -- appears to be fairly well regarded, though it's not well known at all.

Paul Berna was the pseudonym used for his fiction by Jean-Marie-Edmond Sabran (1908-1994), a French journalist who wrote novels mostly for children. He did publish a few science fiction novels, the best known probably a diptych published in 1954 and 1955: Threshold of the Stars and Continent in the Sky. The Horse Without a Head was published in French in 1955 as Le Cheval Sans Tête, which actually does mean The Horse Without a Head. The English translation, by John Buchanan-Brown, was first titled One Hundred Million Francs in 1957, but my Scholastic edition, presumably in response to the movie, is called The Horse Without a Head. My copy is the first Scholastic edition, from 1964. It is illustrated by Jon Nielsen.

The title horse is a play horse, stretched over a sort of tricycle frame, the head of which has fallen off. A group of ten children from a grubby Paris suburb called Louvigny play with with -- riding dangerously down a steep street, heedless of traffic and pedestrians. It is shortly after the end of the Second World War, and there is evidence of the war around -- bomb craters and such. The kids are poor, but seem pretty happy, though it's clear their parents are struggling to get by. Most of the adults tolerate the kids, but the police sometimes harass them, and a couple of merchants object to the occasional upsetting of their products.

The most prominent kids are Gaby, the oldest, and the gang's leader; Fernand; and Marion, a girl of about 12 who is beloved by all the dogs in the town. Berna lightly sketches these kids in a believable way, and the portrayal of their lives and their parents is down to Earth and seems a quite honest look at working class life in postwar France. 

One day the horse crashes, and the frame is broken. Fernand's father has a friend who can fix it, and shortly after it is fixed, some suspicious characters begin to ask the children to sell it to them for a fairly exhorbitant price. But they aren't interested, and things turn more threatening. Eventually the horse is stolen. The kids complain to the police, who don't take them too seriously, and they also find another place to play -- an abandoned factory.

Meanwhile the police are complaining that they never get any action, or chance for promotion, even though there was recently a robbery of the train that runs through the town, in which 100,000,000 francs* were stolen. It seems clear that the suspicious folks hanging around are probably the criminals, and they must be looking for the the loot. Could the horse be involved somehow? And then Fernand realizes that in the junk recovered from the horse's hollow frame when it was recovered, there was a key. 

No need to detail the ending. It involves the key, of course, and some bumbling thieves, and the mildly bumbling police, and the kids' new hiding place, and Marion's dogs. It's really quite nicely done. As I said -- a believable portrayal of life in a Paris slum (for want of a nicer word), and a bunch of decent kids making their childhood special. The actual details of the crime and the way the children thwart it may not be wholly plausible, but that doesn't really matter. Worth the time.

*100,000,000 francs is stated to be worth about $200,000, which seemed awfully small to me -- but it turns out that that is about right for the exchange rate between francs and dollars around 1950.

Old Bestseller Review: The Feathered Serpent, by Edgar Wallace

Old Bestseller Review: The Feathered Serpent, by Edgar Wallace

by Rich Horton

Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace was born in 1875 in London. He was illegitimate, and grew up in poverty. He left school at age 12, joined the Army at 21, and acted as a war correspondent in the second Boer War. He turned to writing in 1905, beginning with stories based on his journalistic work (among other things, he investigated Belgian atrocities in the Congo.) His writing proved very successful, and he was very prolific, writing over 150 novels, and nearly a thousand short stories, as well as plays, poetry, non-fiction and screenplays. He moved to the US in 1931 to write screen plays for RKO, and he wrote the first draft of the screenplay for King Kong, but died rather suddenly in 1932. (Perhaps he could be called the "Leigh Brackett" of King Kong!)

He is not widely read now, and I had not read anything by him. But I found a copy of The Feathered Serpent at an estate sale, and figured I'd give it a try. The novel was serialized in the Weekly Telegraph in 1926 and 1927, and published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1927, with a US edition from Doubleday Doran. My copy is from Grossett and Dunlap in 1928. 

Many sources claim that the novel was later reprinted as Inspector Wade and the Feathered Serpent. This is not really true. There was a comic strip based (very loosely) on the stories of Wallace, some time after his death. They seem to have decided to unify the different stories by using the same name for the Inspector character in each story, so for The Feathered Serpent, the character Inspector Clarke (a somewhat minor character in the original book) became Inspector Wade. The comic strips seem to have been "renovelized" for republication as a Big Little Book. Three Inspector Wade books were published beginning in 1939. Inspector Wade and the Feathered Serpent came out in 1940. Based on snippets of that book I could find, the plot was radically changed from the original novel, and the book completely rewritten (in much worse style.) It seems to have been much shorter -- and after all Big Little Books were for children.

Back to the actual novel. It's fairly good fun -- no lasting masterpiece, but a nice readable novel with an interesting if implausible central mystery. The two central characters -- the "detectives" if you will -- are Peter Dewin, a reporter, and Daphne Olroyd, a young woman trying to make her way in London -- at first she is an assistant to the very wealthy Leicester Crewe, but when he decides to go overseas she gets a new job with another wealthy man, the scientist and philanthropist Geoffrey Beale. A side plot, of course, is the quickly developing relationship between Dewin and Olroyd.

The primary mystery concerns some threatening messages that some people receive featuring an illustration of a "Feathered Serpent" -- a Central American quasi-religious figure. The vulgar but popular actress Ella Creed gets one, Leicester Crewe, who seems to be perhaps her sugar daddy. And then there is a murder, of a man named Joe Farmer, who seemed to have some connection to both Creed and Crewe. There are rumors that a criminal named William Lane, thought to be dead, has been seen alive. Daphne Olroyd is briefly kidnapped at one point, while Peter Dewin keeps figuring out bits and pieces of the mystery without quite understanding it. And Geoffrey Beale's scientific knowledge -- he had been doing anthropological studies in Central America -- offers some hints. A past counterfeiting scheme, involving at least the mysterious William Lane as well as Joe Farmer, and a woman named Paula Staines, might have some bearing on things ...

The conclusion involves yet another murder, sort of an "impossible" crime, and a convoluted but reasonably interesting explanation for just what has been going on. All in all, as I said, by no means a great mystery, but not bad -- worth your time if you like classical mysteries with a soupçon of sensationalism. I don't think I'll actively seek out more of Edgar Wallace's work, but if another novel comes my way I might go ahead and read it.

Review: Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, by Ford Madox Ford

In 2022 I had a Curiosities feature in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction on Ford Madox Ford's time travel novel Ladies Whose Bright Eyes. Curiosities is a long running feature of the magazine highlighting relatively obscure science fiction and fantasy, and I've contributed several such features to F&SF. It's been a while since that issue appeared, and F&SF's website seems to have disappeared for now, so I thought I'd post about that novel here. My process for writing a Curiosities piece is to write an extensive review and cut, cut, cut -- Curiosities are limited to about 250 words. So I have reproduced the whole initial piece I wrote, with revisions based in part on improvements that resulted from the cutting process. 

Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, by Ford Madox Ford

A review by Rich Horton

Ford Madox Ford was born Joseph Leopold Ford Herman Madox Hueffer in Surrey, England, in 1873, the son of a German immigrant. His mother was the daughter of painter Ford Madox Brown, and Hueffer styled himself Ford Madox Hueffer for much of his life, and most of his earlier books were first published under that name. He legally changed his name to Ford Madox Ford in 1919 (partly in reaction to anti-German sentiment), and his later work, as well as reissues of the earlier work, was generally as by Ford Madox Ford, the name by which he is now remembered. (It is sometimes called a pseudonym, which is incorrect.) He died in 1939.

He is the author of one of my favorite novels, The Good Soldier (1915, first published as by Ford Madox Hueffer), a bleakly comic novel of a man with a “heart condition” (in more ways than one). It is widely featured on lists of the 100 best novels of the 20th Century, a laurel it surely deserves

Ford was particularly close friends (and a sometime collaborator) with Joseph Conrad (until they fell out), and was also close to the likes of Henry James, Stephen Crane, H. G. Wells, and Ezra Pound. He founded a key literary review of the Modernist period, the English Review. He fought in the First World War and suffered major injuries, from shellfire and poison gas. Later he was a founder of the Transatlantic Review, another major Modernist publication, supporting James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Jean Rhys, and Ernest Hemingway among others. Besides The Good Soldier he is best known for a quartet of novels about the War, collectively called Parade's End. His earlier Fifth Queen trilogy is also well-regarded. All in all, a major career, but scandal involving his fraught relationships with a series of wives and mistresses, and perhaps just the normal shifts in literary fashion, led to a temporary eclipse of his reputation, though it has been long since restored.

He was certainly by inclination a Modernist/realist writer, so Ladies Whose Bright Eyes stands out to some extent as having a science-fictional theme. It is the story of William Sorrell, a somewhat humbuggish publisher, who has an accident on a train while returning from a trip to the United States, where he got involved with a Mrs. Lee-Egerton. She gives him a gold cross that has been in her family for centuries as security for a loan in assistance of her rackety son … and then there is a crash.

Sorrell finds himself wandering across a plain, strangely dressed, clutching the gold cross. Before long he realizes he's in some sort of medieval situation, complete with hanged men on gibbets. He tries to convince himself that it's all a play of some sort, but eventually he arrives at a castle, and is taken in by a certain Lady Blanche, mistress of the castle while her husband is away fighting in Scotland. Sorrell soon realizes that his cross is regarded as an important relic, and it is battled over between the Lady Blanche, her rival Lady Dionissia, the betrothed wife of her husband's cousin Sir Egerton of Tamville, and the local order of nuns.

As Sorrell realizes he really does seem to be in the Middle Ages (about 1326, it seems), he hatches schemes to, Connecticut Yankee-like, use modern technology to make his way in the past. But he soon realizes that he really knows nothing valuable about how to make, say, an aeroplane. But he still finds some degree of success, mostly by accident, managing for example to subdue a group of bandits, and to improve the sanitation of the nuns' chickens. But the story turns rather more on the actions of the women, especially the combative, vain, and grasping Lady Blanche, and the rather more calm Lady Dionissia. We learn a lot about their positions and attitudes, and about everyday life in that time, and the politics of the day. All comes to a head when the two women, in the absence of their husbands, decide to joust for possession of the coveted gold cross.

This leads to a somewhat striking conclusion, as Sorrell seems to waver between two worlds, the present and the past. Is Lady Dionissia his nurse, and is he a delirious patient? Or are they both truly inhabiting the bodies of ancestors (perhaps)? Or is the time travel real? It hardly matters – Sorrell for certain is a radically changed (and improved) man; and he reaches the end valuing people and things much differently than he began.

The novel has an interesting publishing history. It first appeared in 1911, as by Ford Madox Hueffer. It was extensively revised and reissued in 1935, as by Ford Madox Ford. I've read both versions (the earlier one can be found at Project Gutenberg), and on the whole I prefer the revision. It gives us a bit more of Sorrell's personal history (and projects it a couple of decades in the future), shows us a bit more of the medieval ladies' positions, and has a better ending (including more interesting speculations and images of Sorrell's cross-time situation): Ford, revising following a terrible war and just preceding another, takes a darker view of the 20th Century, and Sorrell's hopes to be a better man, though real, are not celebrated so optimistically.