GRAND MASTERS OF SCIENCE FICTION: HARLAN ELLISON

Ellison in middle age

This was my first and is likely to be my only encounter with the writing of Harlan Ellison. It's not as though I didn't know what I letting myself in for. Ellison's reputation as an old crank, which he wears a a badge of honor, precedes him. I have watched Dreams with Sharp Teeth, the 2008 documentary on him and actually rather enjoyed it. (It might have been very late at night) But this anthology dates from the mid-1970's, so he was at most a forty-year-old crank. Old cranks can have undeniable charm and even a sense of gravitas about them. In his forties, Ellison comes off as an overaged college student with a weighty chip on his shouler who has just discovered that the world is neither fair nor very nice and goddammit he's going to tell it like it fucking is. 

I dislike so much about this book I hardly now where to begin, although the title, the subtitle, and the jacket copy seem like a good place. (I read a book club hardback edition.) A book published today with the title Approaching Obliviion could be a screed by Glenn Beck or any number of right wing hand wringers who lament the disappearance of an America they think existed sometime sixty years ago. Hyperbole swings both ways. Ellison caps it off with a subtitle, Road Signs on the Treadmill Toward Tomorrow, a phrase that evokes a self-pitying Jeremiah. Then there is the predictably slavish praise of the promotional copy on the book's inside flaps. Apparently the New York Times once described Ellison as "relentlessly honest," a fact relentlessly repeated in almost everything you read about him. Buried on the back flap is this irrelevant and irritating nugget. "[Ellsion} created a series called Starlost and walked away from $93,000 in profits when the producers departed from his original concept." Mr. Ellison, you are a pillar of integrity. I assume he did accept payment for the episode of The Flying Nun he wrote in 1968. It actually sounds pretty good, a kinky mix that has Sister Bertrille crash-landing on a desert island and patching up the relationship between the shipwrecked lovers she finds there.  I really did read this book and can say about its eleven stories. But I have forgotten to mention one more indigestible nugget of pretension that comes before the stories themselves. Ellison titles his introduction, "Reaping the Whirlwind." Maybe I should have replaced Jeremiah with Hosea in my earlier comment. 

Fiction can be "of its day" or even dated and still be if not very compelling at least an interesting window into its time. But Ellison's diatribes and experiments with transgressive material are too easily targeting a disenfranchised readership eager to accept as radical anything that spices its politics with sex and anger. "Erotophobia" is a neither very funny nor very dirty dirty joke that could have seemed the height of sophistication for those reading the issue of Penthouse in which it first appeared. In "Knox" right-wing groups are sponsoring a race war that is dragging into its conflict people who seem incapable of resisting its violent allure. When it turns out aliens are involved, readers of the original story in Crawdaddy were no doubt nodding their heads and thinking, yeah, dude, I knew it was something like that. "Catman" is an enjoyably weird far future tale that makes little sense but ends in an act of misogynistic incest that is more puzzling that shocking.

Enough. I hated just about everything about Approaching Oblivion, and as I said up top I doubt I will be searching out more Ellison. (Although I have been told that the Dangerous Visionsanthologies are good if you skip Ellison's introductions to each story.) Strangely his book I am most drawn to is a nonfiction anthology An Edge in my Voice. This is the publisher's description.

At the beginning of the 1980's Harlan Ellison agreed to do a regular column for the LA WEEKLY on the condition that they publish whatever he wrote, without revising it or suggesting rewrites.

This is trumpeted as though the editors of LA Weekly considered Ellison on a level with Samuel Johnson or Andre Malraux. I suspect they just knew his name could shift a few papers, and those publications are always hurting for editorial staff.

GRAND MASTERS OF SCIENCE FICTION: Damon Knight

Since January, I have read a novel a month by one of the winners of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award, given by the Science Fiction Writers of America. I thought I was about time to read a novel by the man himself. (Knight won the award in 1994. He was a founder of the SFWA and the award was named for him after his death in 2002.) Although several of the Grand Masters I have read I have been reading for the first time this year, Knight is perhaps the one I knew the least about. I would be hard pressed to name any of his books. Even though I worked around used books for thirty years, I cannot picture any of his covers or remember that he ever merited a his own shelf. Somewhere along the way I picked up the fact that he wrote the short story "To Serve Man," which became a classic Twilight Zone episode. (Don't get on that ship! The book...the book...it's a cookbook!) And so I picked up A for Anything with no expectations.

Perhaps I should not have read his first novel, although I am inclined to start at the first with an author. But I have to say this is the most peculiar book I have read in some time, and not in a particularly good way. Here's what happens in the first three chapters.

1) In a scene that could come from a 1950's sitcom, a retired bank president checks the morning mail and finds a package on the front porch. Inside is a Gismo, a machine that can, according to the accompany brochure, reproduce anything with no expenditure of energy. The man' wife and brother- and sister-in-law are all on hand. His son says, "Hey Dad, l know all about that electronics jazz." A simple experiment proves that machine works.

2) A undercover FBI agent comes to after a fight with the inventor of the gismo. He checks in with law enforcement officials and finds that the world as we know it is coming quickly to an end. One hundred gismos have been distributed at random. Since they can replicate themselves, that all it takes.

3) The inventor of the gismo, living on the lam in Southern California, meets up with a physicist friend who is excited about the invention. But within days, the first of the new warlords appears, his enslaved drivers shackled into a line up of cars. Things are looking bad.

For the next chapter we jump ahead a century or so and meet Dick Jones of Buckhill, an estate in the Poconos. Society is now composed of masters and slobs. People are squeamish about the term "slave." Buckhill functions as a well-furnished medieval duchy, only with lots of modern conveniences. Young Dick has reached his seniority and will soon be leaving for Eagles, a mountain stronghold in Colorado that is part military academy but exists, from what I gleaned from the book, as a finishing school where the scions of wealthy families learn to be truly horrible human beings. Once he arrives there he is immersed in intrigues and brutal initiation rites. We get glimpses of how savage life has become for those not lucky enough to be among the master class. There is some lightweight discussion of politics and sociology and an inevitable slave -- make that, slob -- rebellion.

But none of this is envisioned in a way that makes it particularly interesting, let alone coherent. Dick Jones is the most lackluster, idiotic protagonist I have encountered in some time, but I don't get the impression that Knight is purposively playing him for a fool. The book moves in such spurts that I never had a clear image of what mattered to any of these people. Knight's worldview is profoundly pessimistic, but the novel is not well-written enough to embody such darkness in a compelling fashion.

I assume that Knight developed into a much better writer. It also seems that he was known mostly for his short stories. A for Anything is not a gateway novel for anyone who anticipates getting deeply involved with this author.

GRAND MASTERS OF SCIENCE FICTION: ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

My Junior high school library had a copy of Starship Troopers on the shelf. I never read it. I had read some of the Heinlein juveniles, and I think I assumedTroopers was another. I had also read a paperback copy of The Puppet Masters, which was one of my first forays into genuinely adult SF and of course I loved it. But I loved monsters more than military, and so Troopersnever caught my attention although I loved that first quote, "Come one, you apes. You want to live forever?"

Soon I quit reading science fiction in general and I got the word that Heinlein was the bully pulpit for the military establishment. Boo. Hiss. So I was was surprised that the novel was not nearly so jingoistic as I expected. I think it would have defeated me, however, in seventh grade. Despite the good action and cool bugs, that middle section of officer training school would have done me in.

A couple of reviews I read emphasized that the novel should not be confused with what the reviewers obviously considered the vastly inferior Paul Verhoeven 1997 film version. These reviewers must be the true believers. I loved the movie when I first saw it and thoroughly enjoyed it watching it again after reading the novel the other day. Verhoeven passes Heinlein's text through the deconstructionsit mill. (Did Michel Foucault get a consulting credit?) I've already said the novel did not strike me as the jingoistic broadside I anticipated, but what fun to see these minor celebrities giving their severely limited all to this high-gloss parody of everything Heinlein must have held dear. There is a rumor that the actors, few of whom were the sharpest pencils in the studio box, had no idea they were being made fun of. I think that like most young actors with few credits to their names they were more interested in their paychecks than in the socio-political implications of their characters. 

Book and film should absolutely be absorbed as a single experience. Probably the book should be read first, just so you do not have to picture Casper Van Diehm in the leading role until the last possible moment.

GRAND MASTERS OF SCIENCE FICTION: FRITZ LEIBER

Fritz Leiber looking very
much the Grand Master

The universe is at war. Leiber's short novel is set, on one level, in the later part of the 20th century, but it seems that war has been going of forever. Here is how Greta Forzane, our narrator, states things.

This war is the Change War, a war of time travelers -- in fact, our private name for being in the war is being on the Big Time. Our soldiers fight by going back to change the past, or even ahead to change the future, in ways to help our side win the final victory a billion years or more from now. A long, killing business, believe me.

Greta is an entertainer at The Place, a self-enclosed environment outside space and time. Solders fresh from battle follow the change winds and arrive for medical assistance and some R&R. Picture a USO with freer alcohol and relaxed sexual attitudes. Advanced technology provides state-of-the art medical treatment and sex partners to suit every fancy. If a visiting soldier does not take to one of the on-staff entertainers, or if his alien anatomy causes complications, he can always choose from the hundreds of ghost girls kept folded into envelopes in the storage area. (It would slow things down at this point to attempt an explanation of ghost girls.)

Life at the Place doesn't seem all that bad, although it could get a bit boring since it goes on more or less forever. But those who run the place see old friends returning from battle on a regular basis, and they stay occupied with own intrigues and affairs. They have only to wait for their maintainer, the device that keeps the Place intact outside of space and time, to start flashing its blue lights. That's the sign that the change door is about to open and new arrivals or possibly old friends will come crashing through. 

Fritz Leiber came from a theatrical family. He father, Fritz, Sr, was a successful Shakespearean actor at a time that touring companies specializing in the bard could make stars of their lead actors with national audiences. WIth his success he started his own company, and when the Depression killed the touring theater business he relocated to Hollywood and had a moderately successful career as a character actor. Although Fritz. Jr., for the sake of his education, was raised by aunts and uncles in Chicago, he knew the theatrical world and spent time in the theater and in Hollywood himself. He was fully aware of the show business connotations of The Big Time when he titled his novel, and it is a story saturated with theatricality. At times it reads as much like a play as a novel. And as a play it is a real crowd pleaser. 

Where to start? Greta describes The Place, a kind of platform surrounded by a gray void, as a stage set out of Diaghilev. Leiber's father was known for innovative, modernist settings that replaced the creaky Victorian trappings common to Shakespearean productions with the latest innovations in bare stages and quick scene changes. (He had also figured out that the latter were cheaper and easier to move around the country.) In the novel, the Change Door, through which outsiders enter, is invisible until it operates and disappears until needed again. The main set includes a bar, which gets continuous use, a piano, some furniture, and doors leading off to medical and storage facilities. Reading the novel, I could picture the stage diagram in the back of a the yellow, Samuel French editions we used in high school productions.

Leiber peoples his novels with types. This is not surprising for genre fiction, but they are distinctly theatrical stock characters. There is a wild west element to the Place, with the female entertainers brainy counterparts to saloon girls. Doc, in classic Western form, is a drunk. Sid, who runs the place, was plucked from the short time -- that's where you and I live -- during the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth. His jumbled Elizabethan dialect makes him sound somewhat like a mediocre Shakespearean actor. New people arrive, they hear him speak, and before they can ask the inevitable question he preempts them with the answer, "Yes, I knew him." 

The Change War itself is fought between the Spiders and the Snakes, intergalactic forces that sound strangely like the gangs from West Side Story.
Soldiers come from every period of earth's history and can also include furry lunar octopi from a billion years in the past and Venusian satyrs from an equally distant future. On of Greta's favorites is an ex SS officer. Anger over minutiae such as Nazism becomes beside the point when shifting patterns of power played out over millennia are involved. He is accompanied this trip by young Bruce, a British soldier from the trenches of WW I who has opted for this form of immortality over dying at Passchendaele. He is a poet of the Rupert Brooke school, and the author of verses that led Lilly, the newest entertainer at the Place, to enter the Red Cross. They are our ingenues, and Greta cannot help but comment on their corny dialogue. 

Since this is a play, there must be surprise entrances. The Change Door bursts open with little warning, and Kadrys, a Cretan warrior woman from the fourth century BC explodes onto the scene. Due to the vicissitudes of the Change War, Crete and not Greece dominates the ancient world. Her recitation of a disastrous battle she has barely escaped could come from a lost play by Aeschylus.

Leiber peppers his dialogue and exposition with theatrical phrases. Characters are accused of scene stealing, and when Bruce makes his impassioned plea for a reconsideration of war itself -- his Mark Antony moment -- Greta is aware that his is "stagewise," i.e., playing to the audience. Greta has her own moment of stage fright, and she wonders if she is writing her own private hell into the script. 

There is a plot to all this, and Leiber knows that nothing moves a plot along like a ticking bomb. He lets it play out in three distinct acts with a dennoument. At the end, the soldiers are donning the appropriate costumes for a return to ancient Egypt, where they need to plant an atomic bomb. Before they leave, they gather as a group and sing what I think is a reworded version of "The Wiffenpoof Song," although I had trouble making it scan. The point is they are real troopers to the end. Just as the entertainers who stay behind are real troupers themselves. That's one pun Leiber leaves unstated.

GRANDMASTERS OF SCIENCE FICTION: ROBERT SILVERBERG

Silverberg about the time he
wrote The Stochastic Man

Robert Silverberg considered The Stochastic Man a valedictory offering. When he wrote the novel in the early 1970's he had already resolved to effect his second retirement from the world of science fiction. His first retirement came around 1958, the year the science fiction magazine world imploded due to over-saturation and the growing market for paperback books. Writer and editor Frederick Pohl brought Silverberg back into the sf fold in the early 1960's, encouraging him to write more thoughtful material than the pulp-influenced novels and stories he cranked out -- and Silverberg would not himself object to that characterization -- during the previous decade. But then, by the 1970's, Silverberg discovered that he was "on the wrong side of a revolution." He joined in with the new crowd of younger writers, J.G. Ballard, Thomas Disch, Samuel Delany and others, who were producing more literary and experimental fiction. ("Younger" is a relative term here. Silverberg himself was only in his thirties at this time, but he had been publishing since he was nineteen.) This period, from 1965 - 1974, is considered to be Silverberg's best, but he saw his readership drying up.

What was fun for the writers, though, turned out to be not so much fun for majority of the readers, who justifiably complained that if they wanted to read Joyce and Kafka they would go and read Joyce and Kafka. They didn't want their sf to be Joycified or Kafkaized. So they stayed away from the new fiction in droves, and by 1972 the revolution was pretty well over.

A difficult book to illustrate
but this cover is the most
far-fetched solution

Silverberg also sites the pernicious influence of Star Wars and the craze for trilogies on the popular sf market. He considered himself out of the game and simply fulfilling contractual commitments when he wrote The Stochastic Man and Shadrach in the Furnace, published in 1975 and 1976 respectively.

The Stochastic Man may not be the worst title ever given an sf novel, but forty years later it is unappealing, opaque, and dated. Silverberg gives a history and definition of the term in the opening chapter. It comes from logic and mathematics and figures in writing on computer theory. I associate it with the titles of text books and academic monographs filled with symbols and formulas I will never understand. On the practical level, it refers to using sophisticated sampling methods to gather a large enough pool of variables to proceed to an educated guess. Sexy stuff, right? In the 1970's it must have had buzzword novelty. I ran it through Google's NGram viewer that tracks a term's popularity. "Stochastic" makes a steady climb from near total obscurity in 1950 to a high point in 1990 and then, after a period of stasis, there is a decline beginning at the turn of the century. In the 1970's it was definitely on the rise. Silverberg's novel takes place in the 1990's, so when Lew Nichols defines himself as a stochastician, he is using a trendy 1970's term to describe a profession that sounds very much like what we would call a consultant, no frills attached.

The 1970's permeates Siverberg's near future narrative. New York City at the turn of the millennium is the worst case scenario of what New York in the early 1970's was becoming. With the successful Disneyfication of Times Square and the city's declining crime rates it is hard to remember that forty years ago New York City was dirty, dangerous, and nearing bankruptcy. Silverberg and his wife were both lifelong New Yorkers, but they had, like many of their friends, decamped for the West Coast by the time he wrote this novel. In Lew Nichol's New York City, Puerto Rican and Black populations stage pitched battles. Large portions of the city are too dangerous to enter, and those who can afford them travel with protective devices that ward off attackers. The nicest, newest and safest buildings are on Staten Island while the Upper East Side is livable but crumbling. All but the finest restaurants serve artificial food.

But Lew and his wife Sundara, a glamorous woman of Indian origin, live the good life. Lew's stochastic firm brings in an enviable income, as does Sundara's art gallery. (Hmm, a wealthy man whose wife runs an art gallery. Silverberg got that one right.) They attend exclusive parties where the elite mingle and choose sexual partners for later in the evening. A variety of legal drugs keep the party going.

The terrors and traumas of New York City seemed indecently remote as we stood by our long crystalline window, staring into the wintry moonbright night and seeing only our own reflections, tall fairhaired man and slender dark woman, side by side, side by side, allies against the darkness...Actually neither of us found life in the city really burdensome. As members of the affluent minority we were isolated from much of the crazy stuff...

So what is this novel actually about? Reviewers need not worry about spoilers, since a dozen pages into it Lew Nichols, as first-person narrator, has revealed most of the plot developments. Lew will become a consultant to the political campaign of the charismatic Paul Quinn, the great hope of a city and country seeking to rejuvenate itself, but who Lew describes as "potentially the most dangerous man in the world." He imagines that American voters dream of being able to withdraw the votes that as Lew is telling the story they will not place for another four or five years. And there is the enigmatic character of Martin Carvajal, a milquetoast multimillionaire who goes beyond Lew's stochastic methods and is able to literally see the future. Lew calls him a "wild card in the flow of time." Carvajal's resigned, passive nature comes from not only the fact that for him the future and history are one and the same, but he is also aware of the exact moment of his rapidly approaching violent death. He wants to bring Lew on as a pupil in seeing the future, rather than simply making educated guesses about it.

Revealing all in the first chapter of a book sets up a classic suspense structure where readers stay with the story to see how the inevitable works itself out. But Silverberg's profoundly pessimistic novel is not about keeping you on the edge of your seat. By revealing so much early on, the reader becomes, like Carvajal and increasingly like Lew, one that can only watch inexorable events unspool like the frames of a film. More or less knowing what's coming makes all the political machinations and messy personal relationships objects of detached interest rather than elements in an engaging plot. The Stochastic Man is a stylistic exercise that is likely to leave many readers cold, but I found it the most interesting though not the best Silverberg novel I have read.

And what is this obsession with knowing the future beyond the ability to choose lottery numbers and hot stocks? Carvajal's resignation and depression should clue Lew in on the fact that foreknowledge does nothing but make you a passive agent of the inevitable. But like 17th century Puritans struggling with the paradoxes of predestination and free will, Lew cannot let go of his obsession with seeing. (Silverberg italicizes the term throughout the book.) At the end of the novel -- and this would be a spoiler except it too is described in the opening chapter -- Lew has inherited Carvajal's millions and used them to set up an institute to develop the talent for second sight in as many people as possible. He still thinks this is a meaningful project. I thought he hadn't read his own book.

(Biographical information in this review comes from Silverberg's Other Spaces Other Times.)

Read my other reviews of Robert Silverberg novels on Worlds Without End

Downward to the Earth

Thorns

Up the Line

Hawksbill Station

Son of Man

The Seed of Earth

GRAND MASTERS OF SCIENCE FICTION: URSULA K. LE GUIN

Le Guin, possibly from around 1970

Rocannon's World was Ursula K. LeGuin's first published novel and is the first of her novels I have read. I've always thought that if I read Le Guin I would read The Left Hand of Darkness, since it was the big prize winner and the one everyone read back in the 1970's, during the years after it first appeared and Le Guin's reputation was on the rise. But I was not reading SF at that time, so I had only minimal interest, and, even worse, the novel always came with the dreaded recommendation, "No, even if you don't like science fiction you are going to love this book." So I never read anything and only now, with both a renewed interest in SF and a self-directed tour through those writers who have earned Grand Master Status from the Science Fiction Writers of America, am I discovering the pleasures of her prose and storytelling.

Having decided to dive in, I headed straight for Left Hand but saw that it was the fifth novel in something called The Hainish Cycle. I like to start at the beginning, and in the Le Guin omnibus edition I got from the library,Rocannon's World was a tempting ninety pages long. I didn't know until after I finished and enjoyed it that in fact there are two chronologies to the Hainish Cycle, the order written and the order in which the stories are occur. I could have started anywhere, since in some cases a millennium passes between narratives, but I still like the idea to seeing how Le Guin's writing and sense of her future world develops in the real time of her composition.

Ninety pages, but since I was reading a bargain omnibus edition they were longish pages. Rocannon is still a short novel, only 144 pages in its PB editions. But in those few pages, and in her first novel, Le Guin creates an small-scale epic, both a classic quest tale and a story that spans several generations.

On the planet Fomalhaut II, as the advanced space lords refer to the novel's locale, the culture is medieval and, unusual for all the inhabited worlds they investigate, there are multiple HILF's, HIghly Intelligent Life Forms. In the prologue, Semley, child of an ancient family wedded to the Lord of Hallam, endures the fallen estate of her family -- good name but short of wealth. In a culture where display of wealth assures rank she sets out to retrieve a magnificent jewel that has somehow left the family treasure and been traded back to the Clay People who mined it. Within the first dozen pages, Semley has left her home, recruited the aid of the charming Kirien people and journeyed to the altogether less engaging caves of the Clay People. That this journey is made on large flying cats is likely to be the first narrative hurdle for readers who like their SF harder than softer. The hints of hard SF occur when the Clay People enter the action. Grungy and unappealing as they are, they live in underground cavern's equipped with electric light and railways.

When Star Lords investigate new planets with multiple HILF's they chose a species most likely to accept the technological head starts that will prepare them to join the League of all Worlds. The Clay People have won out on Fomalhaut II. They even have a space ship, into which they bundle Semley for transport to the planet where her jewel now rests in a museum of interplanetary artifacts. There she catches the eye of Rocannon, an anthropologist employed by the League, and he easily arranges for the return of the jewel. (This was written in 1966, and I wonder when the controversies over the return of imperialist plunder from European museums began to take shape.)

Upon return to Fomalhaut II, Semley understands the consequences of her journey. In Le Guin's universe, FTL travel is only possible in unmanned spacecraft. Although Semley feels her trip has taken no more than a year, she returns to a home where her husband and mother-in-law have been dead for a decade and her children are grown. Her courageous and adventurous journey has secured her nothing more than a long, solitary life.

That took me almost as long to tell as it does Le Guin, but it sets up the story of Rocannon's establishment decades later of a base of Formalhaut II. We learn of this base only as it is destroyed, along with Rocannon's survey team and all the work they have done. The universe is in a constant state of war preparedness, but this attack seems to have been sabotage, the first signs of divisions within The League of All Planets. Rocannon, unable to communicate with his own people, learns from satellite surveys that the enemy has established a base in the still unexplored Southern Continent. He puts together his own plucky crew of various species and it is back onto the flying cats.

This is a quest adventure, that without Rocannon's, or more properly, Le Guin's eye for anthropological detail and interesting world building, would slide into adventure fantasy of a most ordinary sort. But the swiftness of her writing, the predicaments she creates for her believable multi-species characters, and also her willingness to kill off so many protagonists kept me wrapped up in a narrative that seemed much larger than its ninety pages. Before his departure, an aging Semley gives Rocannon her precious jewel, should he need it along the way. And so this absurd, medieval artifact remains as crucial to the story as the special body suit Rocannon has on hand that although it makes him appear naked allows him to survive fire and torture.

When men like Rocannon join the star service, they know they are abandoning anything resembling a normal life of family or human contact. They may age slowly and inexorably as they poke about the universe, but centuries will pass on earth. Although contacts with home can be accomplished with a device capable of instantaneous communication across 120 light years, they have volunteered to become exiles in the name of science. It's the respect Le Guin feels for their choices and the fundamental loneliness of their existence that give the novel its emotional depth. And I liked the flying cats.

Cool Flying Cat

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The Grand Masters of Science Fiction: Harry Harrison

I have not chosen well when it comes to my reading of the Grand Masters of Science Fiction. I have searched out early honorees by whom I had previously neither read nor been inclined to read anything. BIg surprise. I haven't much liked anything I've come across. Some of it I have admired and found historically interesting, but nothing have I been crazy about,

And now I've done it again with Harry Harrison. Years of working with used books made me familiar with Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat series, novels that i knew instinctively I would not find funny. I still have that instinct without ever having so much as opened one of the books, but I think such complete lack of contact with the material gives my opinion a certain purity. Then there was Make Room Make Room, a novel I never read since Charlton Heston had already told me, "Soylent Green is people!"

The Deathworld Trilogy was new to me when I looked into Harrison again. The idea is hard to beat. Here is a planet where every animal, plant. and microbe is out to destroy human life and the gravity is twice that of earth. Humans live there only because mining operations create such enormous wealth that the high mortality rate seems worth it. The novel opens with planet-hopping professional gambler Jason dinAlt receiving an offer he can't refuse. Kerk, resident of Pyrrus aka Deathworld, want dinAlt to turn a 27 million credit bankroll into three billion credits in one night of gambling. He can keep anything over the three billion. Pyrrus needs ships and weapons.

The opening chapters of Deathworld are full of tough talk and action and are really a lot of fun. dinAlt wins the money, the cassino owners want him dead, and he wants to escape with Kerk to get a look at Pyrrus for himself. Why is never really that clear.

Once the action moves to Pyrrus, things slow down. What should be some pretty funny stuff about dinAlt taking survival classes with ten-year-olds before he is allowed outside never realize their comic potential. And dinAlt, for all his wild past and swashbuckling ways, transforms into a one man NGO on Pyrrus, determined to crack the mystery of why everything on the planet is so darn mean. He does so through a series of encounters that are not particularly exciting and completely lacking the comedy of the novel's opening scenes. 

I confess I started the second novel in the trilogy but couldn't face it. It promised to be more of the same.

GRAND MASTERS OF SCIENCE FICTION: JACK VANCE

I am not by nature a fantasy reader. I am not intrigued by magic or wowed fantastic creatures; I find pseudo-medieval settings or language off putting; and, the sexism in anything written before about 1985 is awkward. So I picked up Jack Vance with low expectations, knowing that he had earned his Grand Master status with the SFWA in 1997 at the age of 81, but that much of his writing, and in particular the group of writings I had chosen, were firmly placed in the realm of fantasy rather than SF. (Full disclosure: I have read only the first two of the four books in this collection.)

That said, I realized just a few pages into the first story of The Dying Earth that here was a real storyteller. On an earth where its few inhabitants realize that their sun is dying and where magic has replaced science as the highest pursuit of mankind, Vance zips his characters from continent to continent, delights in their peccadilloes and blunders, and gleefully concocts for them personalities riddled with the baser range of human qualities. Most of them I wouldn't trust as far as I could throw them, but with the right bit of runic magic I could throw them into another universe or a million years back in time.

Magic, as a narrative device, is usually an exercise in adolescent wish-fulfillment. Why else do ten-year-old boys ask for magic kits for their birthdays? There is plenty of that here, along with that other adolescent standby -- beautiful women in diaphanous gowns; but, Vance has a sardonic approach to the dark arts. Unlike science, magic is a closed system. Its mysteries are available only to the few and must be jealously guarded. The desire to attain greater magic makes fools of most of his characters and can cost them their lives. 

The Eyes of the Overworld is a series of stories that link together and form an entertaining picaresque novel. Our hero, Cugel, is one of Vance's finest creations. He is known as Cugel the Clever, although that epithet is certainly self-assigned. Cugel is wily and gets away with most everything he tries, but it is rare that cleverness is the quality that saves his days. Dumb luck is often on his side and his casual disregard for the lives of others comes in handy. Vance's stories are among the most lightheartedly bloodthirsty I have ever read. Individuals or entire villages can be struck down thanks to Cugel's machinations, and the mass deaths are all part of a day's work. His outrageous actions serve an egotism crystalline in its purity. In one scene, Cugel trades a princess, whose kingdom he has just ruined, to bandits. In exchange he receives directions, probably not trustworthy, to his next destination. 

One piece of magic in Vance's own possession must be a spell that spontaneously generates an endless supply of silly names for people, places, food items, and just about everything else in his far future world. I quickly tire of unpronounceable names, but Vance has a real flair for it. He reels them off in lists that it would take me days to dream up, and mine would never be as fun as Vance's. Monty Python may have learned a thing or two from this particular Grand Master.


On Worlds Without End I review Trullion by Jack Vance.

GRAND MASTERS OF SCIENCE FICTION: JACK WILLIAMSON

(The science fiction site Worlds Without End is sponsoring a challenge for members to read one novel a month by a recipient of the Damon Knight Grand Master of Science Fiction Award. You can participate or read my and many other reviews at Worlds Without End)

Jack Williamson
1908 - 2006

Newspapermen and one gorgeous, redheaded, green-eyed newspaperwoman wait on the chilly tarmac of the Clarendon airport for the chartered plane returning the Lamarck Mondrick expedition from their two your stint in Nala-Shan. (Nala-shan actually exists. It's a mountain range in Northern China between Ninxgia and inner Mongolia's Alxa League. This could be the only trace of verifiable fact Williamson brings to his novel.) Along with the press are family members of the four returning explorers, including the elderly, stately Rowena Mondrick, blind since a panther ripped out her eyes in Nigeria some years before.

Mark Barbee is there, an old friend of the explorers and now an alcoholic reporter for the Star. He introduces himself to the beautiful readhead, April Bell, novice reporter for Clarendon's rival newspaper. She carries a small snakeskin bag that holds an adorable black kitten. Don't get too attached to the kitten.

The plane lands, the much aged and visibly frightened explorers descend the ramp. They carry a heavily locked green case. The enfeebled Mondrick begins a speech, promises world-shattering revelations, then dies of asthma or a heart attack or a combination of the two, Much consternation. April Bell vanishes, but Matt Barbee has already made a date for later that night. His nose for news leads him to a dumpster near the airport terminal where he finds the snakeskin bag containing the kitten. It's been strangled by a red ribbon and it's heart punctured by an ivory pin decorated with a running wolf. It must be that same nose for news that does not make Barbee consider canceling his date.

This is the set-up for Darker Than You Think. (Oh, in case you need more clues to coming events, Rowena Mondrick drapes herself in silver jewelry and her mastiff, wearing a silver-studded collar, goes beserk when he sees April Bell.)

Williamson's novel first appeared in John W. Cambell's Astounding in 1940 as a 40,000 word serial. After WWII, the market for science fiction changed. Pulps were losing out to radio and paperbacks, but the now grown-up kids who loved sf from its pulpy origins wanted to see the stories in book form. Lloyd Arthur Eschbach founded Fantasy Press in 1946 and brought out Williamson's The Legion of Space. Respectable sales prompted Llyod to ask Williams to double the length of Darker Than You Think, and its sales equaled those of the previous novel. It's been reprinted many times. The edition I read was a Dell 1979 paperback that reproduced the original drawings by Edd Cartier, whose work, according the book's blurb, adds an extra dimension of enjoyment. Well, maybe. Certainly it adds an extra dimension of camp. My favorite is the frontispiece that features a nude woman seated on the back of a sabre-tooth tiger. She has the perky but nipple-free breasts not uncommon to illustrations of the time.

April Bell is a witch, part of the Old Breed that Mondrick wants to eliminate from the earth. Barbee, it turns out, is a shapeshifter himself. I thought is was cheating to have them turn invisible when they took animal form, but it is necessary to make the plot work. Because Williamson wanted to write science fiction and not occult fantasy, he provides some anthropological background for this demon breed and some fanciful physics for why they can walk through walls. This theory is put forth at length several times in dialogue that bears no hint of realistic human speech. 

Williamson lists this among his favorite books because it embodied much of what he learned about himself in psychoanalysis. He had been selling erractically to the pulps for years, but in 1936 he hit a wall. (He was 28.) He had been reading about psychiatry and wrote Ives Hendricks , the author of Facts and Theories of Psychoanalysis about coming to Boston from New Mexico for treatment. Hendricks suggested the Menninger Clinic in Topeka and Karl Menniger agreed to see him on April 13. With enough money to live frugally in Topeka, even paying the five dollars an hour for treatment, Williamson stayed. He was under the treatment of Dr. Charles W. Tidd, until two years kater when money ran out and he and his doctor agreed there was nowhere further to go at the time.

In Darker Than You Think Topeka becomes Clarendon. Glennhaven is an enormous and very active psychiatric hospital where Barbee makes a brief stay. There is too much plot to keep him there for any length of time. What Williamson learned with Dr. Tidd at the Menninger was to let go of some of his inner conflicts and accept parts of himself he had attempted to keep rigidly separated. How this works out for Barbee in the novel some readers found shocking.

Darker Than You Think is enjoyable but dated and creaky. Here is a clue to how you might enjoy it more. Imagine it as a black and white movie from RKO studios in the 1940's, produced by Val Lewton and directed by Jacques Tourneur. That is if you want to emphasize the moodier aspects. For a crisper image turn the project over to Robert Wise. 

Cool French cover to
Darker Than You Think

(All the biographical information in this review comes from Williamson's memoirs, Wonder's Child.)

GRAND MASTERS OF SCIENCE FICTION: A. E. VAN VOGT

(The sf website Worlds Without End is encouraging members to read and review a book by one of the Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Masters each month for the year 2012. Participate or read other reviews here)

Count Alfred Korsybski

Science fiction writer A. E. van Vogt liked big ideas. In the 1950's he became head of fellow sf writer L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics Institute, the secular precursor to the Church of Scientology. When Hubbard's institute failed within a year, van Vogt and his wife formed their own institute and kept it going for the entire decade. 

Earlier, the big idea that captivated van Vogt was the Gerneral Semantics program of the Polish count Alfred Korzybski, a program defined in the count's 800 page self - published book Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics.(1933). This was a grand system intended to make people think more clearly, reach better decisions, and create a better world. Much of General Semantics seems like common sense, but the insistence on its "science" is shaky and always prompted as many detractors as followers. Van Vogt was enthusiastically among the latter. Martin Gardner is among those who dismiss the enterprise as "pseudo-science," but there is a still an Institute of General Semantics in Chicago. Of course there is also an International Center of Theosophy, and London is home to the Swedenborg Foundation. Sorry to sound dismissive but I am. 

True Believer van Vogt used Kozybski's ideas as the underlying philosophy of his breakthrough novel The World of Null A and two sequels, one of which has only been published in France. (Van Vogt, while not as popular as Jerry Lewis, is highly regarded in France.) The story originally appeared serialized in 1945 in Astounding Stories and was published, in hardback and to general acclaim, in 1948. Van Vogt revised the novel again and wrote a new introduction in 1980. 

"Null A" is shorthand for non-Aristotelian, and in his 1980 introduction van Vogt lays out how integral Korsybki's ideas are to the novel. I will have to take his word for it. The novel reads like a dated sf adventure story involving an intergalactic plot to take over the Sol System. Our hero, Gilbert Gosseyn has lost his identity but is somehow central to the saving the earth. Clunky prose does nothing to help the storytelling. In his introduction, van Vogt makes a statement that is either poorly phrased or breathtaking in its hubris: 

I cannot at the moment recall a novel written prior to Null-A that had a deeper meaning than that which showed on the surface. 

A. E. van Vogt earned Grand Master status from the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1996, but his reputation has always had significant detractors. Damon Knight wrote a blistering evaluation of van Vogt in the 1950's that some say finished his career. Other writers, like Harlan Ellison and Philip K. Dick, write about how significant van Vogt was to the own, early immersion in science fiction. Perhaps today van Vogt is of "historical interest only," but I will not make so sweeping a judgment based on this one book. I am certain he earned his Grand Master status, but I am not tempted to delve deeper into his work.