Review: Bird Isle, by Jack Vance

Review: Bird Isle (aka Isle of Peril, aka Bird Island), by Jack Vance

by Rich Horton

Bird Isle is one of the least known of all Jack Vance books. One reason is that it's not science fiction -- it's a crime novel, one of the first two he ever published (in 1957), both under different one-off pseudonyms. Bird Isle was published as Isle of Peril, by "Alan Wade", and the other 1957 crime novel was Take My Face, published  as by "Peter Held". Mystery House, at that time, was an imprint of Thomas Bouregy and Company, formerly Bouregy and Curl. As far as I can tell, Bouregy and Curl was a rather low end house, best known in SF for publishing the first book edition of Charles Harness's The Paradox Men (as Flight Into Yesterday.) (Samuel Curl got his start in publishing working with Alan Hillman, who published Vance's first book, The Dying Earth.) Mystery House had been an imprint of Arcadia House, Samuel Curl's earlier publishing venture, which Curl retained when he joined with Bouregy, and which Bouregy retained when Curl sold out to him in 1956. At any rate, I doubt Isle of Peril earned Vance much money, nor did it likely sell well. Copies of that edition are rare and go for quite high prices.

Bird Isle was reprinted under that name in an Underwood Miller edition in 1988, and then again, along with Take My Face and the 1985 crime novel Strange Notions in the Vance Integral Edition in 2002 -- this time retitled Bird Island. (Take My Face was retitled The Flesh Mask, and Strange Notions was called Strange People, Queer Notions. The VIE was prepared with Jack Vance's approval, and his preferred titles were used throughout. More recently, Spatterlight Press, run by Vance's son, has reprinted most or all of Vance's oeuvre, generally using the VIE titles (and texts) but for some reason reverting to Bird Isle in this case. (I do think Bird Isle is a better title than either of the other two.)

Well, that's a lot about the publication history. (I am generally intrigued by such details, and in this case I was very happy to discover the Spatterlight Press editions, which look nice and often have contemporary introductions (though the introductions don't seem to appear in the ebook editions.) But what about the novel? I have to say that Bird Isle is somewhat disappointing -- it's very definitely one of the weaker Vance novels. I will say that Vance's later crime novels, often published as by "John Holbrook Vance", are viewed as considerably better, and I personally am very fond of the two Sheriff Joe Bain mysteries, The Fox Valley Murders (1966) and The Pleasant Valley Murders (1967).

The novel is set on the title island, which is a short way off the coast near Monterey. There is a rather ramshackle hotel there, and a girls' finishing school, and nothing else. (The choice of the name "Bird Isle" seems partly a nod at the "birds" in the finishing school.) The owner of the hotel, realizing he needs more money to make his hotel more attractive to guests, decides to sell off the real estate he owns on the island, which is everything but the part where the school is. And quite quickly he manages to dispose of the several parcels he subdivides the island into. The buyers include Mortimer Archer, a retiree who dabbles in photography; the Ottenbrights, a lawyer and his wife; Ike McCarthy, a rough-edged Alaskan fisherman, with a plan to farm whales; and Milo Green, a young man who makes his living writing light poetry for newspapers; and Miss Pickett, headmistress of the finishing school, who buys a packet to keep the new neighbors away from her girls.

Things seem to go swimmingly for a bit, as the hotel's business picks up nicely, Milo starts building a house, and also meets Miss Pickett's very lovely niece. One of Miss Pickett's new students kicks up her traces a bit, and looking for for excitement, finds a way to make some money -- a way involving Mortimer Archer's photograpy skills, which not surprisingly are more aimed at women au naturel than at nature per se. There's an Eskimo love potion, too. And there's a rumor that the island was used by the Mob in Prohibition days, so there might be a hidden treasure ...

Much of this is potentially pretty fun. Alas, only some of it actually is. Things like the love potion are both implausible and bit distasteful. The humor is played rather too broadly, and much falls flat. The major crime aspect is a bit too obvious, and resolved a bit too easily. I think were Vance to have addressed this set of ideas a decade later, and with more time to develop the story, and more experience as well, it could have been nice enough. But as it is -- and presumably with Vance not at full motivation, given the pseudonymous nature of the book, and the presumably tiny payment -- the end result doesn't stand anywhere close to prime Jack Vance.

Review: Strange Stars, by Jason Heller

Review: Strange Stars, by Jason Heller

by Rich Horton

Strange Stars is a history of science fiction themed rock music throughout the 1970s. It is Jason Heller's thesis that, with a few outliers in the previous couple of decades, popular music (in this case specifically rock music) with themes and injury began in 1970. To be more specific, he ties it to the landing on the Moon on July 20, 1969, and to the nearly simultaneous release of David Bowie's song "Space Oddity". To some extent this choice seems personal to Heller -- he admits to being a major fan of David Bowie's work -- but I think it holds up pretty well anyway. The book then goes year by year through the decade, highlighting major and obscure bands and records with songs based in some sense on science fiction. (Heller largely excludes fantasy from his remit.

There are a few bands and artists that he follows in depth -- considering them prolific, influential, and effective in using science fiction-inspired tropes, characters, and musical styles in their music. David Bowie is one, of course -- and certainly he qualifies in spades, with such albums as Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and Diamond Dogs. Paul Kantner specifically, and his bands Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship as well, are important contributors -- most notably with Kantner's Blows Against the Empire, which was for many years the only musical work to receive a Hugo nomination for Best Dramatic Presentation. Hawkwind, of course, is treated extensively -- their entire corpus is SF-influenced, from an early album like In Search of Space forward. Their association with Michael Moorcock is highlighted, and, later in the decade, Moorcock's association with Blue Öyster Cult is also treated at length. 

The great jazz musician Sun Ra is given a lot of play, even though most of his work was instrumental, and Heller also emphasizes his influence on Afrofuturism. George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, and their interlinked bands Parliament and Funkadelic are a huge part of Heller's narrative, and their music is certainly explicitly SFnal and very influential. Kraftwerk and the entire "Krautrock" scene are an important thread, including discussion of one of my wife's favorite records, Nektar's Remember the Future. Prog Rock, of course, is featured prominently. Obviously Yes gets a lot of discussion, as well as ELP and Pink Floyd. Alan Parsons Project is briefly mentioned for I Robot. Queen is discussed -- with a lot of emphasis on Brian May's Astrophysics study. Rush, and especially 2112, is part of the story. Devo is given a major place, slightly to my surprise, but Heller demonstrated that it makes a lot of sense. About the time Star Wars comes out, Heller discusses disco -- there was more SF in disco than I, at least, ever thought. His focus is Domenico Monardo, who, as Meco, made the album Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk. Towards the end of the decade there is a discussion of Joy Division -- a band I greatly admire -- though eventually their SFnal contribution seems minor to me, perhaps because of Ian Curtis' tragically early suicide.

There are also, of course, references to a lot of less obvious figures: Mark Bolan and T-Rex, X-Ray Spex, Magma, Arthur Brown's Kingdom Come, Alex Harvey, Amon Düül, Splendor. Major artists who did only a bit of SF-influenced work include Jimi Hendrix (a known SF fan) is mentioned in the prelude about the 1960s. Elton John; Blondie; Earth, Wind and Fire; Marvin Gaye; the MC5; the Jackson Five; Brian Eno; King Crimson; Steve Miller; Neil Young; and many more get a nod. 

Heller also interleaves the way science fiction was permeating pop culture in other ways, most obviously movies, with Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind getting the most attention, plus the Bowie vehicle The Man Who Fell to Earth. The science fictional imagery on album art is discussed, include the "guitar spaceships" on the covers of Boston albums, which otherwise didn't really have SF content. Heller also namedrops a great many authors who were influences on these musical artists -- often explicitly acknowledged by the artists, sometimes assumed so by Heller: George Orwell, Robert Heinlein, Samuel R. Delany, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip José Farmer, Isaac Asimov, and more. (I had not realized that Delany's Fall of the Towers was part of the genesis of 2112!) The book includes a number of footnotes and a useful discography.

I would just have a few quibbles. Some are personal (I still have a hard time with the term Sci Fi), some are trivial (Philip José Farmer's Night of Light, a novel that Hendrix was reading around the time of composing "Purple Haze", is from 1966, not 1957, though one of the stories that became part of the novel, "The Night of Light", was published in that earlier year), some are matters of interpretation -- I think Heller occasionally reaches a bit in labeling songs science fictional. I admit I did wish that after crediting Paul Kantner for his giving credit to some of his inspirations, he'd have mentioned his failure to credit Mark Clifton after he swiped the "Hide Hide Witch" lyrics for his song "Mau Mau (Amerikon)". His knowledge of the music of the '70 is amazing and deep -- far deeper than mine -- and about the only plausible omission that comes to mind if Jackson Browne's "Before the Deluge". But none of these quibbles are at all fatal, and Strange Stars is a convincing portrayal of the growth of rock music featuring science fiction themes in the 1970s -- and I learned a lot about many artists I had no knowledge of. 

Review: Fifty-One Tales, by Lord Dunsany

Review: Fifty-One Tales, by Lord Dunsany

by Rich Horton

(This is my 1000th post at this blog!)

In Boston this past weekend I visited the Brattle Book Store, an antiquarian store a bit over a mile from the hotel. (It has an outdoor space for discounted books that was used for a scene in the film The Holdovers -- I didn't recognize it offhand but when Alexander Jablokov told me that it was obvious.) It's a very nice bookstore, three stories high, a huge selection. I came away with two things: an issue of Harper's from 1902, and this very slim book by Lord Dunsany.

I've written about Dunsany before -- so, very briefly: Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany, was born in London in 1878 but lived most of his life in his castle in Ireland -- his baronage was part of the Irish Peerage. He died in 1957. He wrote some 90 books, but is largely remembered for several books of fantasy short stories published between 1905 and 1916, for his novel The King of Elfland's Daughter, and for several books of "bar stories" told by one Joseph Jorkens. The early fantasy work has been tremendously influential, and a key strain of sword and sorcery is essentially Dunsanyesque, though one hears much less about his influence than the later influences of Tolkien, Howard, and Lovecraft. I believe Leigh Brackett in particular was working in a Dunsanyesque vein in her planetary romances. Dunsany was accomplished in many fields, in particular a brilliant player of chess. He was friends with Yeats, AE, Padraic Colum, and other prominent Irish writers. His niece Violet Pakenham, a writer herself, was the wife of the great novelist Anthony Powell and the brother of the notorious seventh Earl of Longford.

Fifty-One Tales was published in 1915 by the firm Elkin Mathews. My copy is part of the Third Edition, or "Third Thousand", no date given but I believe 1919. The frontispiece is a photograph of Dunsany in uniform (he served in the Army in the Second Boer War and the First World War, and in the English Home Guard in the Second World War) -- and the page is signed "Dunsany" -- probably a reproduction. In literary style it is of a piece with the fantasy stories he was writing at this time, but these pieces are much much shorter (and many of those stories were quite short.) They range from under 100 words to perhaps 750 words. They are largely melancholy, though occasionally rather droll, and most of them concern the scourge of modernity, the value of sincere art, the passing of humanity, and death. 

I found the book quite enjoyable, though it must be said his grumpiness and prejudice about any aspect of 20th century industry got pretty tiresome. The writing is beautiful if his style works for you, as it does for me: it is old-fashioned and ornate, and very well constructed. (I should note that his style evolved over time, and the Jorkens stories, for example, are told in a less mannered mode.) The mood is deeply melancholy for the most part, though modulated by considerable irony.

It might be best not to read too many stories at one go, though I did read it fairly quickly. Favorites include a short sequence about encounters with Death: "The Guest", about a despairing man eating a meal with a nonexistent guest (of whom he says "there is plenty for you to do in London"; "Death and Odysseus"; and "Death and the Orange". I would add to that set "Charon", in which the ferryman, after years of idleness finally conducts one more shade across the Styx, who tells him "I am the last". "A Moral Little Tale" casts a cynical eye on the censoriousness of a Puritan. "The Demagogue and the Demi-Monde" shows what happens when a strident politician and a demi-mondaine arrive at the gates of Heaven at the same time.  "How the Enemy Came to Thlünräna" tells of the defeat of the title city of wizards. "The Dream of King Karna-Vutra" is a meditation on the King's desire for his long dead wife. And "The True History of the Hare and the Tortoise" tells not just of the race between those two but of the mordant latter day result of that race.

These stories are minor Dunsany, and uneven, but at their best they do evoke a melancholy sense of deep time and of the impermanence of humanity and its works. The writing is effective, and sometimes lovely. I'd read, say, A Dreamer's Tales first -- but this is a nice work. 

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!

My 2023 essays at Black Gate

My 2023 essays at Black Gate

This post links to some of my best (in my opinion) pieces from Black Gate in 2023. In that sense it's sort of a Hugo eligibility post -- I'm eligible in one category, Best Fan Writer, but it's also intended as a summary, and in hopes people are interested in checking these out. (I should add that I think I've done some pretty cool fan writing elsewhere -- certainly at this blog, and at Journey Planet, and I had a piece in Bruce Gillespie's SF Commentary this year. Plus I had a short look at Rose Macaulay's What Not published in the Curiosities column in the November-December F&SF.)

But a lot of my best work, in my opinion, appears in Black Gate, John O'Neill's excellent online 'zine. Here's a list of some of these.

First, I contributed a piece on The Tolkien Reader to Bob Byrne's series of posts called Talking Tolkien. 

Talking Tolkien: On The Tolkien Reader;

Secondly, here's a summary of an ongoing series of essays I've been doing taking very close looks at some short fiction. The most recent two of these are from 2023, but I'm really proud of all of them.

"The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye", by A. S. Byatt; and Three Thousand Years of Longing;

"The Second Inquisition" (and "My Boat"), by Joanna Russ;

"Scanners Live in Vain", by Cordwainer Smith;

"The Last Flight of Dr. Ain", by James Tiptree, Jr.;

"Winter's King", by Ursula K. Le Guin;

"It Opens the Sky", by Theodore Sturgeon;

"Winter Solstice, Camelot Station", by John M. Ford;

Three Stories by Idris Seabright;

"The Star Pit", by Samuel R. Delany;

Thirdly, I have been doing a set of looks at obscure SF from the '70s and '80s:

The Shores of Kansas, by Rob Chilson;

Alien Island, by T. L. Sherred;

Murder on Usher's Planet, by Atanielle Annyn Noel;

The Song of Phaid the Gambler, by Mick Farren;

And here are some other Black Gate posts -- a couple of obituaries (Michael Bishop, D. G. Compton, Joseph Ross), some reviews, a look at Lin Carter's Flashing Swords! anthologies, and some "retro reviews" of old magazines.

Obituary: D. G. Compton;

Obituary: Michael Bishop;

Obituary: Joseph Wrzos (Joseph Ross);

Review: Being Michael Swanwick, by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro;

Retro Review: F&SF, November 1958, May 1961;

The Flashing Swords! Original Anthologies, edited by Lin Carter;

Retro Review: Infinity, June 1956;

Retro Review: If, December 1957;

Retro Review: F&SF, June 1955;

Retro Review: Universe, September 1953; 

Review: The Dragon Waiting, by John M. Ford

Review: The Dragon Waiting, by John M. Ford

a review by Rich Horton

I read this novel back in the '90s sometime, and I liked it but I felt that I didn't quite get it. I had decided it needed a reread, and my book club put it on the schedule -- so I did reread it! I bought the audiobook, read by Gerard Doyle. I assumed I'd find my own copy to have as reference ... and I couldn't find it! So I bought a used paperback, and ended up alternating listening and reading. And, naturally, I then remembered that my own copy was a hardcover! I'd been looking in the paperbacks. So now I have two! I will add that the new edition -- my audiobook but also the recent Tor trade paper reprint -- has a very nice introduction by Scott Lynch.

John M. Ford (1957-2006) was one of the most interesting and original SF writers of his time. He first impressed me with a story called "Mandalay", in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in 1979; other great short works include "Walkaway Clause", "Fugue State", and "Erase/Record/Play". I loved his second novel, The Princes of the Air, and also Growing up Weightless. He was a first-rate poet as well -- I am particularly fond of his Arthurian poem "Winter Solstice, Camelot Station" (which I discuss in this Black Gate piece). I also liked his two Star Trek novels, The Final Reflection and How Much for Just the Planet? His works were each very different to the others, in multiple genres, doing varied things, but always beautifully written, elliptical, complex -- resembling, say, Gene Wolfe and Dorothy Dunnett, among others. At his too early death (from a heart attack, perhaps caused by complications of Type 1 diabetes) he left an unfinished novel, Aspects (finally published in 2022), which I adore -- I think it would have been recognized as one of the great works of 21st Century Fantasy had he had a chance to finish it. (I review it here.) 

Somewhat notoriously Ford's novels went out of print after his death, and it seemed impossible to get them reprinted, as his estate was in a mess. Somewhat miraculously, Isaac Butler, a journalist and new-hatched Ford enthusiast, was able to track down his heirs and untangle the issue, which was apparently largely due to his agent leaving the field approximately as he died. Thus many of his novels have been reprinted, and some more books may be in the offing. The first to be reprinted was The Dragon Waiting.

The novel opens with an historical note, in which Ford tells us that the novel is a fantastical alternative history, though attempting to use period appropriate technology, and also true historical characters of the period (especially Richard III.) There follow three chapters introducing three of the four main characters (none of whom is present in the historical record.) In the first, Hywel is a ten year old Welsh boy, who is lured by a wizard sensing his talent to both free the wizard and go off with him to learn to use his talent, despite the wizard's dire warnings. In the second, Dimitrios Ducas is a teenaged boy whose father is the governor of a Gaulish province of the Empire of Byzantium. Dimitrios comes to realize that his father has essentially been exiled, and that as his family has a potential claim to be Emperor, there is danger of worse. He also has a remarkable talent to inspire loyalty in his friends, who include the native Gauls. All this -- and his mother's ambitions -- lead to a tragic result, and further exile for Dimitrios. In the third chapter we meet Cynthia Ricci, in her early 20s, a doctor serving Lorenzo de' Medici. The maneuvering of the states of Italy, especially with regard to the prospect of Byzantine rule, ends up with Lorenzo (and Florence) at the mercy of the Duke of Milan, and Cynthia and her father (also a doctor) are entangled in the mess. (The main action of the book is set roughly at the same time as Jo Walton's excellent novel Lent, and it was interesting to see Ford's portrayals of some of the characters from Lent, especially Marsilio Ficino and Girolamo Savanarola. As I know that Jo is a fan of Ford's novels, I'm sure she was aware of these parallels.)

Ford never tells us outright (until an afterword of additional historical notes) the Jonbar point of this alternate history, but it's clear that it lies with Constantine's successor, Julian the Apostate. In this history, Julian succeeded in his goal of rejecting Christianity, and established a rule for the Byzantine Empire that no faith would be given preference. By the 15th century, the Byzantine Empire controls much of Europe, with about half of Gaul under British control, and occasional nominally independent states around and between the major powers.

The main action of the novel starts a bit later, at an inn in Northern Italy. A group of travelers have gathered, just ahead of a storm. These include Timaeus Plato, a venerable scholar, with his companion, a soldier named Hector; Charles de la Maison, a French mercenary; Gregory von Bayern, a natural scientist; Claudio Falcone, a courier; Antonio Della Robbia, a Medici banker; and a gentlewoman named Caterina Ricardi. It is soon revealed that a wizard, named Nottesignore, has been sent to the stables. The reader fairly readily guesses the identities of Timaeus Plato, Hector, and Caterina Ricardi -- who have already been introduced to us. The rest of this section involves much conversation, a couple of murders, and a key revelation -- that Gregory von Bayern is, in fact, an expert in artillery, and a vampire. After a visit to France (or the remnants thereof), and encounters with Louis XI and the Margaret of Anjou, the widow of Henry VI, and an attempt to gain possession of a document giving George, Duke of Clarence, the crown of England instead of his brother, the current king, Edward IV; the main quartet (Hywel, Dimitrios, Cynthia, and Gregory) head for England, where they will become enmeshed in efforts to manage the future of the English crown, partly (or mainly) as an attempt to forestall Byzantine influence.

I won't say much more about the plot -- perhaps I've already said too much. But it is rich and complicated, and there are many more fascinating characters to meet: Richard III, of course (though he's not yet the king); a Christian Welsh witch named Mary Setright; Anthony Woodville, brother-in-law to King Edward IV, and a man regarded as a renaissance man, England's perfect knight; numerous other intriguers, including for example John Morton, rumored to be a wizard (and the originator of "Morton's Fork" in our history); and of course Edward's young sons, the famous "Princes in the Tower". There is lots of action -- battles, daring rescues, desperate treks. There is lots of magic -- wizardly spells, a remarkable dragon, alchemy. There are acts of wrenching heroism, and of dreadful treachery, and some that might be both at once. The resolution is powerful and moving. 

But most of all there is character. Cynthia's agony over her acts of violence, in violation of her oath as a doctor. Hywel's battles with letting his wizardly powers consume him -- apparently always a danger for wizards. Dimitrios' attempts to find a man to whom to be truly loyal. And Gregory's agonized struggle with his vampiric needs. I am no fan of vampire novels, on the whole, but I rank two as truly worthy: George R. R. Martin's Fevre Dream, and this novel. 

It is very well written, not simply on the prose level, though that is excellent, but on the emotional level. Line after line hits exactly right -- tears our hearts out or exalts us. "That's why she must go with Hywel: there are better quests than war." "Her eyes hurt, as if she were crying, but any tears would be lost in the rain. Lost the silver owl and gained an ugly blob of lead -- an alchemical miracle." "We forget that anyone who can curse can bless." "Once I have learned properly to hate, Uncle, then will I truly be King?" "There was no explaining to them the taste of their blood in his mouth." "We are what the world makes us. And half the world is Byzantium, and the other half looks East in wonder."

I will add one more note -- this rereading was immensely helped by referring to the Draco Concordans, a fan-produced concordance to the novel, mainly the work of Andrew Plotkin, with contributions by several other people. It does a great job clarifying the timeline, explaining both the real and alternative historical elements, and highlighting some of Ford's little jokes. (I found a couple that the Concordans missed -- the apparent nod to Roy Batty's death speech from Blade Runner (which appeared as Ford was writing the novel) and a nod to Mae West's autobiography Goodness Had Nothing to do With It.)

Review: Pnin, by Vladimir Nabokov

Review: Pnin, by Vladimir Nabokov

by Rich Horton

I'm not sure I need to say much about Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) in introduction. He's one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century -- this doesn't seem remotely in dispute. And he can claim that both in English and in Russian. His lack of a Nobel Prize is a scandal only matched, I think, by the lack of one for Jorgé Luis Borges.  

Pnin was his fourth novel written in English (not counting Laughter in the Dark, the much-revised translation he did of Camera Obscura) but the third of those to be published in the US, due to the difficulties Nabokov faced getting Lolita into print. Lolita was finished in 1953 or early 1954, and Nabokov began writing the sections of Pnin in January 1954. Some of the chapters of Pnin were published in the New Yorker, though the final novel is significantly revised. It appeared in 1957, and was quite successful -- finally resolving Nabokov's finances. (Lolita appeared in 1958 in the US, though a somewhat corrupt version had been published in France in 1955.) I read Pnin and loved it decades ago, and this is an overdue reread.

Timofey Pnin is a teacher of Russian at Waindell College. We meet him on the way to deliver a lecture at a women's club. Alas, he has gotten on the wrong train -- and when he realizes this his attempts to get back on course also go wrong, and he loses his lecture notes. Things work out, more or less, but we know our man by now: an often clumsy person, not entirely fluent in English, probably a true expert in Russian literature but so focussed on his own obsessions that he is treated more as a figure of fun than a serious scholar.

The chapters continue, detailing Pnin's adventures in his classes, his difficulty finding satisfying housing, his struggles keeping his teaching position amid a certain amount of academic politics. There is a weekend at a house in the country, with a number of other Russian emigrés.  We also learn something of his history -- his youth in Russia, his escape to Europe and then to the US, and especially his marriage, to the psychiatrist Liza Bogolepov. He is divorced as the novel opens, and we learn that Liza has remarried, and has had a child, who Pnin is willing to accept as his own. Indeed, Pnin truly does act as a father to the boy, who by the end of the novel is an adult, and an artist of real promise.

Pnin is very funny -- Timofey's troubles are mostly quite comic to everyone but him (and sometimes to him.) But behind the comedy there is real pain (the name Pnin is purposely only one letter away from pain.) At the heart of the book, I think, is Pnin's relationship with the wholly unworthy Liza, even though it takes up a relatively small proportion of the pages. Also critical is the identity of the narrator -- who intrudes only rarely until the final chapter. Then he comes front and center, and certain allusions -- to the Russian writer Sirin, to another emigré named Vladimir Vladimirovich who is an expert on butterflies -- are suddenly not cute references but critical to the story. I won't detail what we learn -- but by the end this is not so much a comic novel as a wrenching tragedy with comic overtones. Needless to say, it's also gloriously written. It's one of the most moving novels I know, it is one of my favorites of that sometimes tired genre, the academic novel; and it is sometimes my favorite of Nabokov's novels. 

Ace Double Reviews, 57: The Million Year Hunt, by Kenneth Bulmer/Ships to the Stars, by Fritz Leiber

After a long hiatus, I've decide to resurrect another of my old Ace Double reviews. 

Ace Double Reviews, 57: The Million Year Hunt, by Kenneth Bulmer/Ships to the Stars, by Fritz Leiber (#F-285, 1964, $0.40)

by Rich Horton

[covers by Ed Emshwiller and Jack Gaughan]

This Ace Double backs a fixup novel by Kenneth Bulmer with a story collection by the great Fritz Leiber. The Million Year Hunt is about 47,000 words long. The stories in Ships to the Stars come to just over 40,000 words.

Some years back I read a number of issues of the British magazine Science Fiction Adventures. In one of them (#26, from 1962) I read a story by "Nelson Sherwood" called "Scarlet Denial". It was quite clear that that story must have had a sequel, and possibly a prequel. It turns out that it did have a sequel, which appeared in #28, called "Scarlet Dawn". "Nelson Sherwood" was a pseudonym for Kenneth Bulmer, a very prolific British author whom I have discussed previously in these reviews. When I asked, elsewhere, if a book version of the two Scarlet stories existed, the late Ian Covell answered (eventually ) that they had become the Ace Double The Million Year Hunt. I decided to look up that book, and I didn't have to look far! It turns out I had it already -- doubtless I bought it with the Leiber collection on the reverse side in mind.

As far as I can tell, the book The Million Year Hunt includes "Scarlet Denial" unchanged. I don't have a copy of "Scarlet Dawn", but I assume it too is unchanged, and that the novel is a simple concatenation of the two stories.

I'll quote my review of "Scarlet Denial": This particular story is set in a colonized galaxy. The colony planets are garrisoned by Galactic Guardsmen, or Gee-Gees, much resented. The story opens with a young man named Arthur Ross Carson playing a practical joke (a hotfoot) on a Guardsman. Unfortunately, at about the same time the local governor is assassinated, and even more unfortunately, it is not Carson but his girlfriend who is suspected of playing the joke as a diversion in aid of the assassin. Carson confesses to try to get his girlfriend off, but before the administrative wheels grind sufficiently, she has been tortured to death by another organization, the Statque, which is charged with maintaining the "Status Quo" in the Galaxy. Understandably enough, Carson goes a bit crazy, and runs away, in the process stumbling at random through a matter transmitter to another planet.

That's kind of a dark beginning, eh? On the other planet, which turns out to be unsuitable for human life, Carson manages to become host to an ancient alien intelligence. With this intelligence's help, he is able to escape. The alien, named for some reason Sandoz, wishes Carson to help him find his lover, lost for thousands of years. Carson wishes to find and kill the Statque agent who killed HIS girlfriend. These wishes, by sheer luck, turn out to be fairly consistent with each other -- and Carson/Sandoz end up on an important planet -- where they learn that Carson has a rather different, implausible, destiny. The story ends with a certain amount of growing up by Carson, and the suggestion of a possible sequel.

I have no idea what the title means, by the way. At any rate, this is a fairly minor effort. The best part by far is the character of Sandoz, who is pretty funny at times.

"Scarlet Dawn" continues the Carson/Sandoz story. Carson follows the human who has ended up hosting Sandoz's lover to another planet. Sadly, it turns out that this host is a brain-damaged, and dying, child. It is Sandoz's wish, not surprisingly, that Carson marry his lover's host -- but the current host is unacceptable.

Carson is still in love with his murdered girlfriend. But on this new planet, he finds himself pursued by a woman who reminds him unaccountably of that girlfriend -- only better. But he is also still pursued by the evil Statque. It turns out, natch, that there is a reason he fell in love with his original girlfriend, and an even better reason he prefers this new girl. All tied into his ultimate destiny, hinted at in "Scarlet Denial". But before that can be resolved, he must deal with the Statque ...

The sequel is a lesser work, a more or less competent and by-the-numbers resolution of the plot elements left hanging from the first half, but not really as interesting.

Ships to the Stars collects six Leiber stories, dating from 1950 through 1962. None of them qualify as major Leiber, but they are decent work, as one would certainly expect. I'll treat them one by one.

"Dr. Kometevsky's Day" (Galaxy, February 1952) 7200 words

This is a Velikovskian story (the Dr. Kometevsky of the title is transparently Velikovsky). At some time in the future, the members of a group marriage are among those who realize, against their will, that the planets are of a sudden acting like "Dr. Kometevsky" predicted -- beginning with the disappearance of Phobos and Deimos. The explanation is not quite what Velikovsky might have predicted (and the story as a whole is profoundly skeptical of Velikovsky). It's interesting enough, but not special -- more interesting, perhaps, is the look at the dynamics of a group marriage.

"The Big Trek" (F&SF, October 1957) 1700 words

A curious little piece, almost a precursor of the New Wave. The viewpoint character becomes part of a multi-species "trek" across what seems to be a devastated Earth -- the moral being the value of continued exploration of space as opposed to stagnation on Earth and the concomitant destruction of Earth.

"The Enchanted Forest" (Astounding, October 1950) 7400 words

A curious story about a far future man who conceives of himself as a "Wild One" in a regimented society. He has escaped, carrying the "seed" of his fellow Wild Ones, and he ends up on a mysterious planet, encountering what seem to be the same people again and again, in a sort of medieval milieu. The explanation is satisfactorily SFnal, but not terribly interesting.

"Deadly Moon" (Fantastic, November 1960) 10300 words 

Perhaps this story could be described as "Fortean". A psychiatrist is treating the daughter of an astronomer. She has been dreaming of a "spider" in the Moon, while her husband, an astronaut, flies one of the first ships around the moon. Natch, her supposedly mad fears turn out to be real ...

"The Snowbank Orbit" (If, September 1962) 5900 words

The Solar System is under attack by inscrutable aliens, and a ship that was intended by be a Sun explorer is suddenly an unlikely warship, drifting near Uranus. The captain's desperate maneuver around the big cold planet ends up revealing something of the true and somewhat surprising nature of the aliens. A Leiber attempt at something of a hard SF story that didn't come off for me.

"The Ship Sails at Midnight" (Fantastic Adventures, September 1950) 8200 words

This story struck me as almost a Sturgeon pastiche, but if written in 1950 it predated most of the stories one would describe as characteristically "Sturgeonesque". A group of four somewhat Bohemian young people encounter a mysterious and beautiful woman, shortly after some UFO reports. She inspires them to think differently than they have, to become truly original rather than tiredly retreading fashionable ideas. The narrator falls in love with her and she with him. But is she really human? And what happens when her fellows finally return? And can humans really free themselves from their natures?

I think this easily the best story in this book, and as I said, very Sturgeonesque.

Old Bestseller Review: Dangerous Ages, by Rose Macaulay

Old Bestseller Review: Dangerous Ages, by Rose Macaulay

a review by Rich Horton

Rose Macaulay (full name Emilie Rose Macaulay) was born in 1881. She was educated at Oxford, and turned to writing after leaving school. She wrote perhaps 20 novels, three volumes of poetry, and a good deal of nonfiction, including several memoirs. Her most famous novel by far was her last, The Towers of Trebizond. She was a Christian, of the Anglo-Catholic strain, and always struggled to reconcile her attraction to mystical Christianity with her other beliefs, and especially with her long term relationship with Gerald O'Donovan, a former Jesuit priest -- the two never married. She was named a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1957, not long before her death at the age of 77. Of her novels, The Towers of Trebizond has remained popular since its publication, but her other novels have not gotten as much attention, though more recently some of them have been reprinted, some by Virago, others (including Dangerous Ages) by the British Library. What Not, from 1918, is science fiction, and I will be reading it soon! (My copy of Dangerous Ages was a lucky find at an estate sale, a possible US first, from Boni and Liveright, no dust jacket but otherwise in probably Very Good- condition.)

Dangerous Ages appeared as Rose Macaulay turned 40. It was also just after the Great War, a time of great transition in England (and of course in all the warring countries) -- driven in part by a certain despair at the collapse of the pre-War balance of power, and relative peace, in part by mourning over lost lives, in part by an apparent feeling (shown most prominently perhaps in The Waste Land) of a failure of "civilization". This novel opens on the 43rd birthday of Neville Blendish. Neville is the wife of Rodney Blendish, a Labour politician. She is deciding to return to the medical studies she abandoned upon marriage. Now her two children, Kay and Gerda*, have grown to adulthood, so she feels she has time again, and she feels the need for an independent role now that her primary role as the children's mother is past. She doesn't want to become like her mother, Emily, who is in this novel always called Mrs. Hilary. Mrs. Hilary never did feel independent of her husband -- and when he died young she began to diminish. Neville wants to avoid a fate like her mother's -- though Mrs. Hilary is rather a stupid person, while Neville is quite intelligent -- perhaps that will be enough for her.

At this point I confess I thought the story was to be entirely about Neville, but instead it shifts and keeps shifting. It is instead a story about several generations of women in the Hilary/Blendish family: Mrs. Hilary; her mother-in-law, only called Grandmama; her daughters Neville, Nan, and Pamela; her daughter-in-law Rosalind; and her granddaughter Gerda. (There is another daughter-in-law, the wife of Mrs. Hilary's eldest son Jim, but she doesn't come into the story.) The book takes place over about a year, and we see all these women, interacting with each other, with the men in their lives (or the woman in her life in the case of practical Pamela, who is clearly a Lesbian, though, as with much fiction of this era, this is never openly acknowledged.) The novel is not a very plotty novel, though much of the action is driven by Nan's decision to finally marry her long-time lover Barry Briscoe, only to have him fall in love with Gerda after he misinterprets Nan's brief avoidance of him to make sure she's made up her mind as a rejection. 

The women are all beautifully and honestly depicted. Mrs. Hilary is, as noted, rather stupid, and also rather prejudiced. She hates modern novels but also hates to have it known she doesn't read much. She hates psycho-analysis but then is driven to take it up when she realizes she's depressed. And she has little idea how to treat her children, though she fairly sincerely loves them. Grandmama, a fairly minor character, is a sensible and knowing woman, thoroughly a creature of the late Victorian era, and mostly just ready to die whenever her time comes. Neville -- to me the most sympathetic character (along with Nan) struggles with her new studies, loves Rodney but in some ways doesn't fully respect him, does her best to help her children while letting them make their mistakes. Pamela is, as noted, solidly practical, and she has only a minor role in the novel (and her partner even less), though she gets the last word. Rosalind is truly an actively nasty person, a gossip, serially unfaithful to her husband Gilbert, vulgar, always ready to hurt her family members, and also an unintellectual woman who takes up fad after fad (including psycho-analysis.) Gerda is young and pretty and enthusiastic, a poet but not a very good one, an eager but not necessarily effective worker. And Nan -- Nan -- in her 30s, with a reputation of going from man to man, a novelist (a modern one!), often sarcastic, never sure of herself enough to commit ... she's the one I rooted for. 

As I suggested, the novel is to some degree plotless (but in a good, readable, way) -- but in the end coalesces around the arc of Nan and Gerda vying for Barry's affections. This involves Gerda working for Barry for a while, and then a vacation for Nan and Gerda and Barry and Kay, in which inevitably the athletic Nan goads the frailer Gerda into a sort of competition -- with of course a shocking ending that only hurts Nan's chances -- followed by Nan running off to Rome where another man is fleeing his wife ... it would all be melodramatic but in fact the narration -- at times sardonic, at time humorous, at times sympathetic -- never gives off that feel. 

The "Dangerous Ages" of the title are really any age -- at least for women -- though the quote in the book is directed at Nan's age. But the book is interested in all the women, and it is deeply feminist without being quite overtly so. But for all the book's women -- even the foolish Mrs. Hilary or the foul Rosalind -- their culturally defined roles are a burden. And they battle it -- Grandmama with her resignation, Mrs. Hilary with her fads and depression, Neville most explicitly, with her desire for an independent life (without ever wanting to leave Rodney), Nan with her cynicism and her pain, Rosalind with her sleeping around and her nastiness, and Gerda with her optimism about social change, and her hesitation at the idea of marriage. Perhaps only Pamela -- in some ways the most "modern" of all, living with a woman, making her own living -- has escaped her milieu's strictures. I hope I'm not making the novel seem ponderous or tendentious -- it is not that at all -- told with a light touch, ever interesting, its characters well portrayed, their fates revealed honestly. It is not perhaps a great novel, but it's a very good one, and a book that deserves attention now, a century and a bit after it was published.

(*The names of the Blendish children, of course, are the same names as the children in Hans Christian Anderson's classic tale "The Snow Queen", but I confess I don't see a real parallel between them and Anderson's characters. Perhaps the only meaning is to suggest something about how Neville and Rodney chose to name their children.)

Review: Aliens From Space and Lost Race of Mars, by Robert Silverberg

Review: Aliens From Space and Lost Race of Mars, by Robert Silverberg      

by Rich Horton

I continue my journey through the early novels of Robert Silverberg. These are both first contact novels, though otherwise they don't resemble each other much. (Though they both feature important characters who are Professors at Columbia, which was Silverberg's university.) Aliens from Space was published in 1958 by Avalon, as by "David Osborne", and has never been reprinted. It's definitely an adult novel, though a slim one at some 40,000 words. Lost Race of Mars was published in 1960 by John C. Winston. Between 1952 and 1962 Winston published many SF books aimed at younger readers -- the "Winston Juveniles", but this doesn't seem to be officially one of those. The Winston Science Fiction books were numbered -- there were 35 in all. Lost Race of Mars isn't labeled as one of those -- probably because it is aimed at an even younger audience, it's more of a middle grade book, and quite short at about 20,000 words. In 1964 it was reprinted by Scholastic in paperback, and was reissued many times. Both editions were illustrated by Leonard Kessler.

I mentioned that Aliens From Space was never reprinted. There is an ebook edition from Gateway/Orion, but that is only available in the UK. I ordered it through Interlibrary Loan, however; and I also tracked down an audio edition, part of a series produced by Blackstone called Galaxy Trilogy -- four volumes, each with three novels, all of them from the same period, mostly the 1950s, and most quite obscure. I listened to the audio version and as it finished, the library called -- they had my book! Which does help in writing the review! 

It's 1989. Jeff Brewster is a Professor of Sociopsychology at Columbia (which was Silverberg's university.) One day he gets a call from a certain Colonel Chasin, from UN Security. He is needed in Washington immediately. Jeff complies, of course, even while wondering what they want with a mere 32 year old assistant professor ... As the title has already hinted, Jeff quickly learns that a spaceship has landed, with three aliens, from a very advanced species. The UN has decided to set up a multinational negotiating team, and Jeff has been tabbed due to his theories about communication. 

I'll stop here to fill in the world situation. After Sputnik in 1957 (presumably when the book was being written) humans reached the Moon in 1959, Mars in 1968, and Venus in 1970. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1965, and the world is largely at peace, though the US and Russia remain the superpowers, and don't entirely trust each other. Also, in 1989, a really fancy lunch cost five dollars. But, hey, we can make all the fun we want of the missed predictions of SF in any era -- ours will do just as poorly, I'm sure!

Brewster learns that the aliens seem to have previously visited both Venus and Mars, based on artifacts -- with writing -- found there. But that was centuries or millennia ago -- not they are here. They are called Morotans, and they propose an alliance of friendship -- and they offer immense technical and scientific knowledge in exchange for the right to build a base in Antarctica, and an agreement to be their allies against the maximally evil (because reptilian, natch!) M/e/r/s/e/i/a/n/s Zugloorans. Brewster's academic understanding of nuances of communication, however, leads him to suspect the Morotans are a bit too eager for an alliance: but can the Earth risk defying them? He has an ally in the Russian scientist Pirogov, and a foe in the blustery American Senator Morris ... and then a Zuglooran ship lands in Russia, and quickly makes a similar offer to Earth.

The general shape of the resolution is fairly obvious, but it's also fairly honest and decent, so I wasn't disappointed. That said, the novel is really pretty minor work. Even though it's quite short, it still feels padded -- things like careful description of Brewster's morning routine at the opening, or of meals later on, are clearly there to get to the 40,000 words or so that make it saleable as a novel. There are other bits that are sheer cliché, such as the notion, often seen in SF, that humanity's short lifespan compared to certain aliens (those in this book live hundreds of years) will prove an advantage -- so, here, the aliens are shocked that the world they visited a few thousand years ago which had barely started living in cities now has space travel. There is really only one female character with any lines -- Brewster's wife Mari -- and she is really a cipher and a rather overtypical '50s wife. It's easy to see why Silverberg has not chosen to reprint this book, and it is not something I really recommend you hunt down, but, for all that, I enjoyed the quick read. Silverberg, from the very beginning, had that knack. 

I'll consider Lost Race of Mars here just for convenience. I really am not, at my age, the audience for this book -- and I probably wasn't except at about age 10, when I discovered Silverberg's other Scholastic book, Revolt on Alpha C. (And even that book seems pitched a a slightly older age group than this one.) In this book, Dr. Chambers, a Professor of Biology at Columbia University (again!), gets permission to take his family to Mars to study the local flora and fauna. Alas, he won't be able to study the Old Martians, as they have surely gone extinct! Jim and Sally are 12 and 11, and they and their mother will accompany Dr. Chambers. When they get to the small colony of Mars, they find that they are greatly resented by the other members of the colony, because they are only going to be there for a year. But things improve when they fortuitously get to adopt a Mars kitten -- a new discovery. And then Jim and Sally hatch a foolish scheme to help their father -- convinced that there is more to see in the Old Martian ruins -- perhaps even Old Martians! -- they steal a Mars rover and go looking around ... with no success, until a dust storm kicks up, and they get lost, and their Mars kitten escapes and runs to a cave ... complete with, you'll never guess, Old Martians (who only allow themselves to be discovered because the kids are in danger and they seem to have treated the kitten well.) You can see where this is going ...

As I said, I'm not really the audience for this book. I might have loved it in 1970 when I was 10. Nowadays it's truly negligible -- for one thing, the didactic elements (sneaking in scientific facts (as of 1960) about Mars, mainly) are both out of date, and not really that interesting anyway. The plot is implausible and too rapidly developed (and even at that, it doesn't really get going until over halfway through the book.) This is one for completists only. But, hey, it is what it is, and it was adequate, I suppose, for its time, though I don't really think this age group was Silverberg's strength. (I do remember some of his books for older teens, such as Time of the Great Freeze and The Gate of Worlds, with great affection based on my reading at 12 or so.) 

Review: Sometime, Never, by William Golding, John Wyndham, and Mervyn Peake

Review: Sometime, Never, by William Golding, John Wyndham, and Mervyn Peake       

by Rich Horton

In my recent survey of potential Hugo winners and nominees from the 1950s I realized that this book was a major gap in my reading. It includes three original novellas, by major British writers. Of these three only John Wyndham (1903-1969) was part of the SF genre, and had a good deal of visibility to the general public -- books like The Day of the Triffids had been bestsellers. (His full real name was John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, and he used all of his names in various permuatations as pseudonyms, but it was John Wyndham that had the most success.) Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) was an artist and novelist, best known for the Gormenghast Trilogy, an eccentric fantasy masterpiece. And William Golding (1911-1993), of course, was most famous for Lord of the Flies, but wrote other SF-adjacent work such as Pincher Martin and The Inheritors. He won the Nobel Prize in 1983. 

In a sense Sometime, Never is a precursor to the many three novella original anthologies that appeared in the 1970s and 1980s. No editor is credited. It's quite a remarkable book, though, and it seems to have sold very well, as it had numerous reprints in its Ballantine paperback edition. Its first edition, in 1956, was a UK hardcover from Eyre and Spottiswoode. Ballantine published simultaneous hardcover and paperback editions in the US in 1957. 

The three stories are "Envoy Extraordinary" (about 22,000 words), "Consider Her Ways" (about 25,000 words), and "Boy in Darkness" (about 23,000 words.)

The opening story is William Golding's "Envoy Extraordinary". This is set in the Roman Empire. The old Emperor and his bastard son Mamillius agree to see a petitioner. This man, Phanocles, is accompanied by his sister. He has offerings for the Emperor, created based on his brilliant scientific insights. But it is only his sister Euphrosyne's beauty that interests Mamillius, who calls her the Tenth Wonder of the World -- a term Phanocles would apply to his steam engine, his pressure cooker, or his cannon. But Mamillius' infatuation with Euphrosyne is enough to allow the indulgent but skeptical Emperor to support a trial. Things are complicated, however, by the Emperor's legitimate son, Posthumus, who is impatient to take the throne, and jealous of his father's apparent preference for his bastard son. Once Posthumus hears rumors of a fantastic new ship, he makes his move ... with terrible consequences for many ... This is a darkly satirical story, and slyly funny. The message is an old one: scientific and engineering advancements must wait for a society ready for them. A simple message in its way, but well conveyed, and supported by Golding's portrayal of the Emperor and his variously foolish sons; and by the cynical Emperor's treatment of Phanocles and his sister -- not cruel but opportunistic.

Wyndham's "Consider Her Ways" opens with the narrator waking to a thoroughly confusing situation -- surely an hallucination. She is in a grotesquely huge body, recovering from what she soon learns was a pregnancy, resulting in four daughters. Her nurses are tiny women, who call her a Mother, and they are perturbed by her confusion, and her evident belief that this is not real -- it must be a dream of some sort. She is taken to a home -- on the way she sees nothing but women, of various body types. Over time her memory returns -- she knows her real name, Jane Waterleigh, and knows that her husband Donald has been killed in a plane crash. But what is this hallucination? Finally her case brings her to the attention of an older woman, an historian, who explains the situation -- this is the future, after an engineered plague which killed all males. The surviving women managed to preserve society, partly by creating several "castes", based on ant society: Mothers (or Queens), Workers, etc. Jane remembers that she had agreed to experiment with a new drug, hoping it would help her depression over the death of her husband. Instead, her mind was cast out of time into that of Mother Orchis. Her interlocutor, the historian, explains how superior their society is -- largely because there are no men to control -- to own -- women. Jane resists, but her arguments seem weak. (That said, the future society as portrayed seems -- to present day eyes, at least -- quite awful; and no woman, I would think, would sign up for the role of Mother in this society.) It's a pretty decent, again rather satirical, exploration of an idea, but I have to say I think it might have been more convincing if written by a woman -- partly because I suspect this future society would have been more interesting and would have portrayed a more convincing woman only future.

Finally, "Boy in Darkness" is fairly clearly a pendant to Peake's Gormenghast series, and the title Boy is surely Titus Groan, the protagonist of that series. Here, the Boy (who is occasionally called Titus) rebels against the constant ceremony of life in the castle, especially on this day, when he turns 14. At the end he escapes, and makes his way to the countryside, and a river, and a terrifying encounter with two odd creatures -- a Goat and an Hyena. These are both in thrall to a certain Lamb -- and we gather that the Lamb somehow has the power to turn humans into his idea of their essential animal nature. The Goat and Hyena have been searching for a long time for another human to offer to their lord, the Lamb -- and the Boy is at last a possibility. But the two are also sworn enemies, and the Boy is able to use that enmity to resist the peril he faces in his encounter with the Lamb. It's a very strange story, very dreamlike, but really quite impressive. Dark, yes, and weird in the best way. 

Review: Two Obscure Early Novels by Robert Silverberg

 Review: Two Obscure Early Novels by Robert Silverberg

by Rich Horton

I mentioned recently that I am very close to having read all of Robert Silverberg's early novels -- that is, the novels before his remarkable transformation, early in the 1960s, from a skilled but rather shallow, and very prolific, writer to a quite powerful and interesting writer (still prolific but less so than before.) There are two novels that are either unavailable (in the US) or too expensive used for my blood. These are Aliens from Space and Invisible Barriers. I had an idea for an end run around this problem -- Silverberg very often published shorter versions of his novels as novellas in the many magazines of the period. I found a couple of novellas cited as progenitors for these books. So, I went ahead and got copies of the novellas. These are "We, the Marauders" (Science Fiction Quarterly, February 1958) and "And the Walls Came Tumbling Down" (If, December 1957.) I fairly quickly figured out (and Silverberg confirmed) that "We, the Marauders" is a short version of yet another novel: Invaders From Earth, first published as half of an Ace Double in 1958. Naturally, I bought that full novel as well.

In this review, then, I consider "And the Walls Came Tumbling Down", "We, the Marauders", and the novel Invaders From Space. Aliens from Space will have to wait for later, as will the full version of Invisible Barriers. (For those who wonder, the other early Silverberg novels I am missing are the very slight juvenile (really a middle grade book) Lost Race of Mars; another 1958 Ace Double, Lest We Forget Thee, Earth, that is a fixup of three novellas from Science Fiction Adventures, and which was reprinted a decade or so ago by Paizo Press as The Chalice of Death; and the 1964 novel Regan's Planet. I have copies of all those, and I have an audio version of Aliens From Space.

So -- first "And the Walls Came Tumbling Down". This novella (some 25,000 words long) is about John Amory, a successful television director in the year 2021 -- almost now! But he's a dissatisfied man -- the scenarios he directs are always heavily rewritten, with the object of pleasing the advertisers and suppressing any knowledge of places outside the US. For there are "Walls", as the novella has it; or "Invisible Barriers", as the novel's title puts it, between the countries of the world. Originally this was sold as a means of preserving peace. 

Amory, with several of his friends, including some of the better writers in his circle, regularly attends parties at which smuggled foreign films are shown, and this night there is another. He attends and enjoys the film, amateurish as it is -- but suddenly he falls unconscious. Evidently he was drugged! When he wakes, he is in the presence of a very strange looking being. evidently an alien -- who puts a curious proposition to him: the aliens are visiting Earth to make copies of the great art humans have produced. This seems odd but interesting -- but by chance Amory sees a piece of paper that reveals the aliens' true goal -- the cultural harvest is simply prelude to eliminating humans. Amory is shocked, but almost resigned. Do humans really deserve to survive? But he realizes -- a unified Earth, instead of the enforced isolationist Earth of the "invisible barriers", might be able to resist the aliens, and also could throw off the censorship regime that reinforces the "barriers". But how to do this? The plan -- necessarily accomplished while seeming to cooperate with the aliens -- is to sneak some anti-isolationist messages into his TV shows. This can't last long -- but maybe he can reveal the presence and motives of the aliens before he's caught ...

The story continues as Amory develops his next program. But things don't go quite as he hopes -- and there is, in the end, a shocking twist, that probably won't surprised most readers. Still -- it's an effective enough story, readable throughout, with a decent message. That said, I think the story is about the right length -- or even a bit too long. I don't know how Silverberg padded it for the book version; but I don't quite see how that would have improved it.

"We, the Marauders" came next in my reading. (I read this in a 1965 reprint, from Belmont Books, an edition combined with a James Blish novella, "Giants in the Earth", as A Pair from Space.) And I quickly realized it had some parallels with "And the Walls Came Tumbling Down". The first story is about a TV director, whose productions are essentially propaganda; and slanted to please the sponsors. "We, the Marauders" is about an advertising man, Tom Kennedy, who creates campaigns that are similarly propaganda, to please his clients. Also, "And the Walls Came Tumbling Down" is about aliens coming to Earth, and using their cultural campaign to excuse their eventual invasion. We soon learn that "We, the Marauders" is about humans visiting Ganymede, realizing that the natives resent their presence, and using an advertising campaign to convince Earth that the Ganymedeans are dangerous and need to be exterminated.

Tom Kennedy is in his 30s, rising in the firm of Steward and Dinoli. One day he is summoned to a top level meeting -- it seems the company's newest client is the corporation exploring Ganymede. They have learned that the Ganymedeans don't like humans, and certainly won't let them mine the valuable radioactives. Steward and Dinoli are charged with creating a campaign that will convince Earth people that a war is justified ... and it is Tom who has the key idea: invent a fake human colony on Ganymede, and eventually show the Ganymedeans slaughtering the (nonexistent) colony residents. The client is delighted, and the campaign goes into motion. But Kennedy's wife is appalled, as is one of Kennedy's deputies ...

Eventually Kennedy is sent to Ganymede, to gather some convincing local color. (I have to say this plot device doesn't convince.) While there, Kennedy, already a little uneasy because of his wife's resistance, illegally learns some of the Ganymedean language, and after meeting some of them, realizes what they are really like, and has a crisis of conscience. He manages to get one of the Corporation's staff to help him, and brings the Ganymedeans some arms ... but is inevitably arrested and sent back to Earth. The resolution involves an unconvincing escape, and an even more unconvincing return to New York, where he steals some damning documents, and manages to arrange a dramatic reveal at a UN meeting. In the end, he realizes the only right future for him is on Ganymede ...

As hinted, a pretty implausible story in many ways, but pretty effective in its way, with a resolutely anti-colonial message. I learned that the novel version, Invaders from Earth, is significantly longer (Silverberg states that he wrote that version originally, and cut it by some 10,000 words for the magazine, though by my estimate the novel is maybe 52,000 words, as against about 38,000 for the magazine version. He cannot remember at this date how much editorial suggestions from Science Fiction Quarterly's editor, Robert A. W. Lowndes, affected the shape and plot of the novella. He does credit Lowdes for the title "We, the Marauders".) I decided I needed to compare them.

To my surprise, the novel's changes are quite radical, and actually a significant improvement. (One change is the name of the main character: Ted Kennedy, instead of Tom. I realized that the change from Ted to Tom was actually made for the 1965 reprint of "We, the Marauders", and I assumed (and Silverberg confirmed) it was due to the newly prominent politician named Ted Kennedy.) Some are just a paragraph here and there -- a bit more fully developed, and more cynical, presentation of the life of the Kennedys -- such as the need to eat real meat, not synthetics, and also a slightly more finished indication of stresses in their marriage. But about halfway into the novel, the plot changes a good deal. Kennedy's involvement with the Ganymedeans is more complete, and they teach him their philosophy of life, which serves to change his views. He doesn't give them arms -- they wouldn't use them. His actions on the return to Earth are less implausible -- he's in more danger, his escapes, though still a bit of a stretch, are less absurd. And the final confrontation is better handled. The resolution of his personal issues is perhaps a bit too pat -- I think I believed his wife's character more in the novella than the novel -- and I won't say this is a particularly great novel. But it's not bad. And it is interesting to look at the way Silverberg rewrote the novel. The message of the two stories, I should add, is pretty much the same.