SF and Fantasy Masterworks

Walter Tevis, Mockingbird (1980) SFMW 70

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Spong) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:16:00 +0000

Robert Spofforth, 'mankind's most beautiful toy,' (p. 278) is 'the last of a hundred robots designated Make Nine, the strongest and most intelligent creatures ever made by man. He was also the only one programmed to stay alive despite his own wishes' (p. 4).
Spofforth's personality has been derived from 'a brilliant and melancholic engineer named Paisley['s] […] personality, his imagination, and his learning had all been recorded on tapes when he was forty-three, and afterwards the man was forgotten' (p. 4)

However, Spofforth 'did not really want to live. He had been cheated – horribly cheated – of a real, human life, something in him rebelled against living the life that had been thrust upon him' (p. 10)

It is difficult to review the work without disclosing its plot, namely [select text to read] Spofforth's program of social engineering to make man extinct as a species and thereby allow his machine protocols to finally let him destroy himself. Spofforth's ambitions are threatened when Mary Lou and Bentley stop taking the sedatives and drugs, which (although unknown to them at the time) also contain contraceptives, and therefore place his agenda in danger through their propagation.

Spofforth's solution is to separate the pair by jailing Bentley for the illegal act of cohabitation, and to experiment with his pseudo-humanity in the interim by taking Mary Lou away with him and installing her in his apartment as a surrogate wife, despite his sexlessness.

Paul Bentley is what passes for a university professor in the twenty-fifth century that Tevis envisages. Education has become a much-degraded and perfunctory affair in the novel as humanity has lost the ability to read. Bentley is extraordinary in that having discovered some books, rare but nevertheless unvalued artifacts, he has taught himself to read with them. Bentley now wishes to teach others to do the same, and presents himself to Spofforth, Dean of Faculties at New York University (but formerly Director of Population Control) at the beginning of the novel. However, Spofforth sets Bentley about the task of recording the dialogue in archival silent film instead.

Mary Lou Borne is an escapee from a public dormitory for children who grew up in the desert and has been on the margins of the society the novel depicts ever since.

A section towards the middle of the work narrated by Mary Lou offers some insight into her radicalisation by an old man called Simon whom she encountered and lived with for a time in the desert. Simon inculcates in her the idea, if not a full understanding of, the impact that 'the death of intellectual curiosity' has had upon humanity, and the fact that 'everybody's head is a cheap movie show' (p. 98). Spofforth in his turn also has some bitter things to say along the same lines later in the novel: 'The American Individualist, the Free Spirit. The Frontiersman. With a human face indistinguishable from that of a moron robot. And at his home or his motel he had television to keep the world away. And pills in his pocket. And the stereo. And the pictures in the magazines he looked at, with food and sex better and brighter than in life' (p. 174).

Mary Lou offers some jarring reflections on her relationships with Bentley and Spofforth, which invite the reader to consider her inner life as a character more intently than the narrative to this point has suggested that they may need to:

'Paul was pathetically serious. It's comical just to remember how his face looked when I threw the rock at the glass on the python cage, or how gravely he went about teaching me how to read. And he used to read over the first parts of this journal, when we were living at the library, and purse his lips, and frown – even at the bits I thought were funny.

Bob was hardly better. It would be silly to expect a robot to have a sense of humour, but it is still hard to take his gravity and his sensitivity. Especially when he tells me about that dream he keeps having and that he has had all of his long life. At first I was interested, but eventually I became bored with it.

I suppose that dream has much to do with my living here in this three-bedroom apartment with him. It was almost certainly the beginning of his desire to live and act like an ordinary human being of a long time ago, to try to live a life like the life of the dream's original dreamer.' (pp. 98-99)

I miss Paul. I think I loved Paul in some small way. But when I get right down to it, I don't really mind this life, this being the companion of a brown-skinned robot. What the hell, I used to live at the zoo, for Christ's sake. I'll make out.' (p. 99)

Education's aim in the novel is to shame, pacify and alienate, expressed through parroted maxims such as “when in doubt, forget it.”' (p. 22); 'quick sex is best' (p. 10), and 'alone is best.' (p. 28)

This deadening of affect and interpersonal relations is completed by the tranquilisers (sopors), joints and drugged food that are routinely ingested by the citizenry. Self-immolations by combustion are described frequently within the novel, their agents depicted as being unable to either iterate or comprehend the stunted nature of their lives, but seemingly driven by deeper urges to end their existences rather than endure the mockery of being that Spofforth's plan has imposed upon them.

A good deal of the book is narrated by Bentley in the first person in the form of a journal that Spofforth instructs him to keep during his studies. Bentey's auto-didactic program brings him to self-consciousness, and prompts him to question every aspect of the rigid social structures his world is governed by: 'I discovered the word “memorize.” And this was the definition given:”To learn by heart,” and how strange that was – heart, to learn by heart. I could not understand it all. And yet the word “heart” somehow seems right, for I know that my heart has always beaten. Always.' (p. 35). Readers also share, and are thereby invited to reflect upon the implications of, several epiphanic moments in Bentley's self-education, including his coming to understand the purpose and function of dictionaries (pp. 69-72).

During his incessant search for printed matter, Bentley encounters a text published at that point in the novel's prehistory where reading died, which is interesting to encounter in our own historic moment as digital books supersede their printed antecedents:

'I have a copy of the last book ever published by Random House, once a place of business that cause books to be printed and sold by the millions. The book is called Heavy Rape, it was published in 2189. On the flyleaf is a statement that begins: “With this novel, fifth in a series, Random House closes its editorial doors. The abolition of reading programs in the schools in the past twenty years has helped bring this about. It is with regret...” and so on.' (p. 114)

Bentley also encounters a book by Alfred Fain called The Last Autobiography wherein the author opines 'A friend of mine who works part time as the head of a publishing house says the average book finds about eighty readers. I've asked him why they don't stop publishing altogether. He says he frankly doesn't know, but that his publishing company is such a tiny division of the recreation corporation that owns it that they have probably forgotten about its existence. He doesn't know how to read himself, but he respects books because his mother had been a kind of recluse who read almost constantly, and he loved her dearly.' (pp. 117-18).

The work also envisages the impact of a future peak oil crisis within the novel's fictional world from Tevis's 1980s viewpoint 'before the Death of Oil and long before the Nuclear Battery Age […] when gasoline had become more expensive than whiskey, and most people stayed home.' (p. 173)

Subsequent to his escape from prison, Bentley takes shelter briefly in a defective factory, a 'mindless parody of productivity' (p. 168) which stands as a metaphor for the banal nature of the endless consumption of manufactured needs in a world of finite resources: 'The factory was a closed system. Nothing came in and nothing went out. It could have been making and unmaking defective toasters for centuries, for all I knew.' (p. 167)

Mockingbird begins and ends in Manhattan. This paradigmatic urban environment, read backwards from the twenty-fifth century Tevis imagines to the historical present of the work's composition around 1980, holds a totemic fascination for the author as an archetype of everything that has gone awry with human endeavour: Manhattan, where 'white men had focused their fretful intensity of power and money and yearning, pushing up buildings in hubris, in mad cockiness, filling streets with taxis and anxious people, and, finally, dying into drugs and inwardness.' (p. 277) The SF Masterworks edition's cover echoes this sentiment, with the Empire State Building which features in the work situated between the shattered remnants of two other skyscrapers, the outlines of which it is impossible not to view post-911 as representing the former World Trade Center.

Tevis lambastes organised religion through its representation as an historical curio as described by Bentley:

'I am not certain whether Holy Bible is a book of history or maintenance or poetry. It names many strange people who do not seem real […] As well as I understand it, Jesus claimed to be the son of God, the one who was supposed to have made heaven and earth. That perplexes me and makes me feel that Jesus was unreliable. Still, he seems to have known things that others did not know and was not a silly person, like those in Gone With The Wind, nor a murderously ambitious one, like the American presidents.

Whatever Jesus was, he was this thing called a 'great man'. I am not certain I like the idea of 'great men'; it makes me uncomfortable. 'Great men' often have had very bloody plans for mankind.' (pp. 140, 141-42).

The prostration of the intellect before the tyranny of monotheism is considered at greater length during Bentley's residence within the neo-fundamentalist community of Baleen he encounters towards the end of the novel, but which I will not address at length here.

Mockingbird plays with layers of symbolism in a deft and satisfying manner, for example the tableau that Mary Lou forms in the artificial python's cage at the zoo: 'she had to stand tiptoed and reach as far up as she could reach, just to catch the bottom of the fruit with her fingertips...”Why did you pick it?” I said.”I don't know,” she said. “”It seemed to be the thing to do.”' (pp. 41, 47) The scene amusingly parodies the Biblical Eve and the serpent retrospectively in the context of the narrative arc that follows and the fate the awaits Bentley prior to the text's resolution.

Tevis seems to disclose his own fondness for Kentucky's most famous export in ensuring that his protagonist is well-provided with what you would have thought to have been a near-impossible commodity, to acquire namely bourbon: 'I have a half bottle of whiskey – J.T.S. Brown Bourbon – and a pitcher of water and a glass on the table.' (p. 250)

Despite the consolations of mellowed alcohol, the melancholy air that pervades the work is encapsulated in the titular quote that reoccurs frequently in Bentley's mind after his initial exposure to it during his film studies left an enduring impression:

'Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods,' spoken by an old man to a young girl.' (p. 20)

The quote's lilting yet downbeat cast seems to colour much of Bentley's world-view, and he reaches for it frequently when unable to express himself in any other manner. 'It was my intention in beginning this to summarize what I have learned about human history and how that history appears to be coming to an end. But the prospect of trying actually to do it, after thinking about it for so long, is more than I am up to facing.' (p. 230).

The novel proposes that whilst a machine intelligence coming to consciousness may regret the fact of its own existence, humanity, although prey to the same exigencies of fate, appears better equipped to deal with its vagaries. The following exchange between Spofforth and Bentley occurs close to the end of the work, where the former's life is close to its cessation, and the latters is about to bloom fully:

'I am sick of life. I never wanted it.'
I stared at him. 'That's the name of the game. I never asked to be born either.' (p. 237)

That is not to say that Tevis, through the mouth of his protagonist, does not rue the fact that our species-being is not perhaps a little better equipped to deal with the tests to our patience that human interactions can present. In conversation with a sentient bus that he adapts for his own use, Bentley asks:

'Why are you so... so pleasant?' I said.
'We all are,' the bus said. 'All thought buses are pleasant. We were all programmed with Kind Feelings, and we like our work.'
'That's better programming than people get,' I thought, with some vehemence.
'Yes,' the bus said. 'Yes it is.' (p. 252)

It becomes evident during the course of the work that Bentley is the titular mockingbird, his solitary intelligence the song, and the edge of the woods the precipitous twilight of humanity:

'Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods,' the bus said.'
It was startling to hear that. 'You took those words from my mind?' I said.
'Yes. They are often in your mind.'
'What do they mean?'
'I don't know,' the bus said. 'But they make you feel something strongly.'
'Something sad?'
'Yes. Sad. But it is a sadness that is good for you to feel' (p. 258).

Mockingbird is beautifully structured, perfectly paced, artfully composed, and compelling in its subject matter. It is a most satisfying entry to the SF Masterworks series, and is to be commended to new readers without reservation.

Philip K. Dick, Ubik (1969) SFMW 26

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Spong) — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 04:25:00 +0000

'Runciter took a good long look at the fifty-cent pieces. He saw at once what the attendant meant; very definitely, the coins were not as they should be. Whose profile is this? he asked himself. Who’s this on all three coins? Not the right person at all.

And yet he’s familiar. I know him. And then he recognized the profile. I wonder what this means, he asked himself. Strangest thing I’ve ever seen. Most things in life eventually can be explained. But — Joe Chip on a fifty-cent piece?

It was the first Joe Chip money he had ever seen. He had an intuition, chillingly, that if he searched his pockets, and his billfold, he would find more.

This was just the beginning.'

Glen Runciter's 'prudence organisation' offers the services of psychically gifted anti-telepaths and 'pre-cogs' who foresee future events and intervene in order to influence the outcomes they have envisioned to counter the effects of telepaths employed by other businesses.

Runciter, and/or Runciter's team is/are killed having been lured off-world to Luna by business rival Ray Hollis. The novel subsequently recounts the quest of Runciter's technical lead, Joe Chip, to try to determine what has happened as the world around him appears to begin to revert to the early decades of the twentieth century.

It is impossible to determine whether the text is unfolding from the reported point of view of Runciter, or Chip, or whether they are both dead on the basis that all three positions are presented and vie for the reader's acceptance and belief. In this way, the text colludes with the indeterminate nature of the author's intentionality in disorientating the reader: "We haven’t gone anywhere. We’re where we’ve always been. But for some reason — for one of several possible reasons — reality has receded; it’s lost its underlying support and it’s ebbed back to previous forms" (Loc. 2348-50). For example, after a continuous section of chapters constituting more than half of the novel's length, the narrative shifts from Chip to Runciter's point of view with no visual signifiers such as asterisks or a section break to signify the same (Loc. 2899).

Matters are complicated by the fact that Dick wrote Ubik at the height of his addiction to prescribed amphetamines, dispensed as a treatment for depression and anxiety. Dick's world-view appears to imbue amphetamines with health-giving properties, and it makes perfect sense to him that they should be available to Glen Runciter from a vending machine (Loc. 2096-7) at the Beloved Brethren Moratorium where the book begins and ends, and where much of its reported actions may be taking place in the minds of the deceased, suspended in half-life in a cryogenic 'cold pac'.

A further layer of befuddlement is added to the novel's already complex perceptual structure in the person of Jory, a half-life teenage inhabitant of the Beloved Brethren Moratorium whose over-developed psychic abilities may be allowing him to rampage through the intelligence of other residents, influencing and possibly even consuming their minds.

Finally, there is the titular artifact Ubik itself. Each of the work's chapters begins with an advert for Ubik repackaged as some sort of consumer good, be it a foodstuff, a cosmetic or a medication. This alone invites a meta-textual reading of Ubik as a critique of the disorientating, alienating, all-pervasive nature of late capitalism. However, within the context of the narrative, Ubik is presented as something offering a (fake?) redemption, a substance that, if only Joe Chip could lay his hands on a spray can of it, Glen Runciter's messages inform him would stop further temporal regression. For the majority of the work's extent, however, Ubik remains tantalisingly out of reach for Chip, reverting from its spray form to an unusable powder or balm leaving him to 'wonder how much difference Ubik — dangled toward [him] again and again in countless different ways but always out of reach—would have made' (Loc. 2554-55).

Ubik is described in both scientific and religiose ways.

On the one hand, in a description larded with jargon seemingly for comic purposes, a spray can of Ubik is described as 'a portable negative ionizer, with a self-contained, high-voltage, low-amp unit powered by a peak-gain helium battery of 25kv. The negative ions are given a counter-clockwise spin by a radically biased acceleration chamber, which creates a centripetal tendency to them so that they cohere rather than dissipate. A negative ion field diminishes the velocity of antiprotophasons normally present in the atmosphere; as soon as their velocity falls they cease to be anti-protophasons and, under the principle of parity, no longer can unite with protophasons radiated from persons frozen in cold-pac; that is, those in half-life. The end result is that the proportion of protophasons not canceled by anti-protophasons increases, which means—for a specific time, anyhow—an increment in the net put-forth field of protophasonic activity…which the affected half-lifer experiences as greater vitality plus a lowering of the experience of low cold-pac temperatures' (Loc. 3242-48).

On the other, Ubik appears as some sort of self-aware life-force with supernatural abilities:

I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be. (Loc. 3267-69)

In summary, Ubik is a work of exceptional interest and an outstanding entry into the SF Masterworks series, offering both a rewarding reading and re-reading experience, and an archetypal example of Philip K. Dick's unique and dislocating craft.

Gregory Benford, Timescape (1980) SFMW 27

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Spong) — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 13:13:00 +0000

Gregory Benford's 1980 Nebula award-winning novel imagines what scientists of the late 1990s would do if they wished to send a message back in time to the early 1960s to warn their historic peers of the catastrophic effect that long-chain molecule pesticides have had upon the environment, and to thereby change the course of history.

Expressed in so reductive a manner, the text sounds preposterous and juvenile, but is in fact both nuanced, sophisticated and at time hugely enjoyable if the reader is prepared to suspend judgement on the absolute truth-value of the physics it contains. Benford's novel has often been praised for its hard science and plausible explanations of how tachyons could theoretically travel faster than light and, if aimed at the correct coordinates at the right time could theoretically send messages backwards or forwards in time.

Benford's work contains a number of dramatic set pieces: the discovery of the note in the bank vault proving that messages have been received; Greg Markham's fevered dream state as he perishes in an air crash in the original timeline whilst resolving crucial equations; the fact that Kennedy survives the assassination attempt which killed him in our reality as a consequence of a student interrupting Oswald whilst fetching a journal featuring an article by Gordon Bernstein discussing his discovery of the 'spontaneous resonance effects' - Markham's transmissions from the future - and the inevitable meeting of the two protagonists in an alternate future that they have both been instrumental in constructing.

The latter conceit is that which precipitates the final sequence of occurrences depicted in the gripping last 30 pages of the novel and elevates the work above the status of being merely 'interesting but worthy'. It is as clever a re-imagining of such a hackneyed historic event as a reader is ever likely to encounter.

The novel does have its weaknesses. Beyond Bernstein in the 1960s and Markham in the 1990s, Benford and his sister-in-law Hilary Foister Benford, whom the author credits as having 'contributed significantly to the manuscript' in a special acknowledgment, have a tendency to indulge themselves in some broad but generally unconvincing characterisations in the persons of their extensive ensemble cast. The bit-part characters' contributions to the plot are slight and their antics can give the work something of a 'soap opera' feel at times. The novel could easily have lost at least a quarter of its 400 pages without impacting on its thematic development in any way. For example, whilst it's nice to meet Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse (p. 173), and read a peon of praise in honour of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (p. 213) you have to wonder what they are doing in the book.

Overall, Timescape nevertheless ranks as one of the most enjoyable entries in the SF Masterworks series, and despite the Benfords' tendency towards the linguistically gaudy (some of the laboured puns the characters are forced to opine can grate, for example) the work contains some thought-provoking, powerfully conveyed ideas:

'Behind the equations were immensities of space and dust, dead but furious matter bending to the geometric will of gravity, stars like match heads exploding in a vast night, orange sparks that lit only a thin ring of child planets. The mathematics was what made it all; the pictures that men carried inside their heads were useful but clumsy, cartoons of a world that was as subtle as silk, infinitely smooth and varied. After you had seen that, really seen it, the fact that worlds could exist within worlds, that universes could thrive within our own, was not so huge a riddle. The mathematics buoyed you' (p. 176).

'He had a sudden sense that time was here, not a relation between events, but a thing. What a specifically human comfort it was to see that time as immutable, a weight you could not escape. Believing that, a man could give up swimming against this river-run of seconds and simply drift, cease battering himself on time's flat face like an insect flapping against a blossom of light' (p. 410).

'No matter how the days moved through them, there always remained the pulse of things coming, the sense that even now there was yet still time' (p. 412).

Orion launches SF Gatweway

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Spong) — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 12:29:00 +0000

Congratulations to Gollancz's Darren Nash on the launch of the highly promising SF Gateway. I was taken with this proposition as soon as I read the following press release:

Imagine your perfect specialist bookshop; it stocks not just the highlights from your favourite authors’ careers, but every book they ever wrote and the people who run the shop have an encyclopaedic knowledge of SF. The future of Science Fiction and Fantasy e-book publishing is here. We invite you to join us.

Suddenly, owning a Kindle seems very important. I say more about why I feel such initiatives as SF Gateway are significant to the future of publishing here.

Much as purchasing another electronic device doesn't fill me with glee, I have to concede that the limitations of the battery on my current HTC phone means that reading SF Gateway titles on my Kindle Android app is not a viable option. I will therefore be adding an SF Gateway review section as soon as I've purchased a dedicated e-reader, and have read my first title from the launch list.

As long-time readers of this blog know, nothing happens quickly around here, so such developments are unlikely to take place before the end of 2011. Of course, by that time I may have decided to get an Android tablet instead - or perhaps a spare battery for my phone.
In other news that is bound to cheer readers of this blog, Gollancz have used the SF Gateway forum to announce the welcome return of the Fantasy Masterworks list. I've put in a plea that the numerical sequence and ormer fcover design are retained. If you feel the same way, please add a comment to this thread.

Lucius Shepard, Life During Wartime (1987) SFMW 66

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Spong) — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 10:44:00 +0000

Lucius Shepard's Life During Wartime(1987) conjoins the standard Apocalypse Now reading of Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness with the author's own experience of living in Latin America and use of hard drugs, whilst Scarface plays on a constant loop in the novel's background.

The story arc is an unholy mess, emerging unconvincingly from the first section ('R and R') which was originally published as 'a Nebula award-winning short story' in its own right.

One can only assume it must have been a slow year for the short form of genre fiction.

The Wikipedia entry for the novel currently provides more detail about this dreary, preening work than I am prepared to waste further time rehearsing here. Suffice to say the idea that the titular war, not to mention the totality of the global economic and political structure, are being manipulated as part of a psychically-conducted vendetta between two ancient Panamanian families is preposterous in the extreme.

In the interests of fair balance, it should be noted that when the fit takes him Shepard is capable of writing beautifully, and has the keen eye of a miniaturist: 'her blue skirt swayed like a rung bell' (p. 64); 'over the bumpy hill road in the hotel's Land Rover[...] they seemed to be pulling the night along with them' (p. 116). However, the author's ambitions appear to have exceeded his abilities over the duration of the 418 pages of this work. Perhaps Shepard's aspiration did not extend beyond writing a novel of some weight, if not of any substance. If so, he achieved his target only at the expense of some uneven characterization, a meandering, repetitive, and parchment-thin plot, and occasionally lurid prose.

If Life During Wartime must remain in your slush pile, be sure to put it at the bottom. Not only is that where it deserves to be, but the heft of this weak addition to the SF Masterworks series will provide a solid base for the books above it to rest upon.

Walter M. Miller Jr, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) SFMW V

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Spong) — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 06:20:00 +0000

'Over each city a sun appeared and was brighter than the sun of heaven, and immediately that city withered and melted as wax under the torch, and the people thereof did stop in the streets and their skins smoked and they became as fagots thrown on the coals. And when the fury of the sun had faded, the city was in flames; and a great thunder came out of the sky, like the great battering ram PIK-A-DON, to crush it utterly. Poisonous fumes fell over all the land, and the land was aglow by night with the afterfire which caused a scurf on the skin and made the hair to fall and the blood to die in the veins' (p. 198)

'From the confusion of tongues, the intermingling of the remnants of many nations, from fear, the hate was born. And the hate said: Let us stone and disembowel and burn the ones who did this thing. Let us make a holocaust of those who wrought this crime, together with their hirelings and their wise men; burning, let them perish, and all their works, their names, and even their memories. Let us destroy them all, and teach our children that the world is new, that they may know nothing of the deeds that went before. Let us make a great simplification, and then the world shall begin again.' (p. 72)

A cornerstone of the post-apocalyptic SF sub-genre, 1961 Hugo winner A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) was the only novel Walter M. Miller Jr published in his lifetime. The work emerged from short stories that Miller published separately, rewritten as the three parts of the final text: Fiat Homo ('Let there be man'), Fiax Lux ('Let there be light'), and Fiat Voluntas Tua ('Let thy will be done').

Fiat Homo is set in the 26th century some centuries after a cataclysmic nuclear war referred to as the 'Flame Deluge' subsequent to which humanity has reverted to a neo-medievalism.

Fiat Lux takes place some six centuries later in 3174 as the Earth emerges from the new Dark Ages into which it has descended and begins to experience 'a revival of learning in a dark world' (p. 174)

Fiat Voluntas Tua occurs a further six centuries in the future in 3781. Technologies have been rediscovered, and humanity teeters on the brink of self-extermination once again.

The novel is set largely within a monastic world of 'bookleggers' and memorizers, custodians of an intellectual history that the 'simpleton' survivors of the Flame Deluge sought to destroy having deemed knowledge to have been the cause of humanity's near-destruction:

'To escape the fury of the simpleton packs, such learned people as still survived fled to the sanctuary that offered itself. When Holy Church received them, she vested them in monks' robes and tried to hide them in such monasteries and convents as had survived.' (p. 73)

The titular character, a scientist before the cataclysmic events that reorient the narrative's history, seeks refuge with the Cistercians:

'Isaac Edward Leibowitz, after a fruitless search for his wife, had fled to the Cistercians[...] Father Isaac Edward Leibowitz had won permission from the Holy See to found a new community of religious[...] Its task, unannounced, and at first only vaguely defined, was to preserve human history for the great-great-great-grandchildren of the children of the simpletons who wanted it destroyed.' (p. 74)

A Canticle for Leibowitz is a brilliant but melancholy work, the relentlessly maudlin nature of which gives some insight into the depressive nature of its author, who took his own life in 1996. It is characterised by its protagonists' lengthy reflections on humanity's seeming inability to cast aside its own predilections towards self-harm, and its inability to break out of its orbiting of disaster and set a heading down a route of progressive, linear development.

'Can you believe that that brute is the lineal descendent of men who supposedly invented machines that flew, who traveled to the moon, harnessed the forces of Nature, built machines that could talk and seemed to think? Can you belive that there were such men?[...] I can't accept it. How can a great and wise civilization have destroyed itself so completely? (p.139).

Man as an 'imperfect incarnation, a dark reflection' (p. 155) of the design of the Creator that he was personally burdened with believing in echoes the title of Miller's famous 'Dark Reflection' short story and gestures towards the dejected world-view of A Canticle for Leibowitz, tempered by fleeting hope: 'Truth could be crucified; but soon, perhaps, a resurrection' (p. 156).

However, it is a burden that Miller, a convert to Catholicism after the Second World War, seems to have been both ill-equipped to bear and unwilling to reconcile himself with. For example, whilst it is ostensibly the character of Abbot Zerchi who enunciates the following passage in the novel, but they seem rather to be being mouthed by the conflicted author himself in the historical context of the late 1950s, with war behind it, war within it, and war ahead of it:

'The world's been in a habitual state of crisis for fifty years. Fifty? What am I saying? It's been in a habitual state of crisis since the beginning – but for half a century now, almost unbearable And why, for the love of God?What is the fundamental irritant, the essence of the tension? Political philosophies? Economics? Population pressure? Disparity of culture and creed? Ask a dozen experts, get a dozen answers. Now Lucifer again. Is the species congenitally insane, Brother? If we're born mad, where's the hope of Heaven? Through Faith alone? Or isn't there any? God forgive me, I don't mean that.' (p. 275)

'Are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall?[...] Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing?' (pp. 280-81).

'They had not yet seen the madness and the murder and the blotting out of reason. Then they did it, and then they saw it'. (p. 292)

Abandoning the earth in the novel's final sequence, the last monk to board to the spaceship bearing humanity away from the planet it has been such a poor steward of murmurs Sic transit mundus: 'thus passes the world' (p.338) in much the same way as Kurt Vonnegut shrugged 'so it goes' whenever his authorial eye happened to linger momentarily over the ineluctable stupidity of our species-being.

In A Canticle for Leibowitz, mankind's imbecility and incapacity to learn from the mistakes of its past as it wheels around to embrace future catastophes of its own making is personified in the figure of the omnipresent wanderer or pilgrim. A mythical figure of extraordinary age whose longevity is put down to his partaking of the milk of a mutant goat, the wanderer resembles both an Old Testament prophet, and the person of Leibowitz himself:

'And now this Francis, he meets a pilgrim – wearing what?- wearing for a kit the very burlap cloth they hooded Blessed Leibowitz with before they hanged him. And with what for a belt? A rope. What rope? Ahh, the very same -[...] By tonight, the whole novitiate is buzzing with the sweet little story that Francis met the Beatus himself out there, and that Beatus escorted our boy over to where that stuff was and told him he'd find his vocation' (pp. 52-53)

Published in the stand-alone 10 volume SF Masterworks hardback series, A Canticle for Leibowitz is a superb addition to the SF Masterworks list. It is a haunting, lyric, obsessive, and more than slightly depressing meditation - in many senses of the word - on the ways in which our lives are is lived 'in a dark sea of centuries wherein nothing seem[s] to flow' and within which 'a lifetime [is] only a brief eddy, even for the man who live[s] it.' (pp. 92-93).

'[Change] will come to pass by violence and upheaval, by flame and fury, for no changes comes calmly over the world. It will be so. We do not will it so.[...] Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power.[...] They will press the battle upon the world when their interests are threatened, and the violence which follows will last until the structure of society as it now exists is leveled to rubble, and a new society emerges. I am sorry. But that is how I see it.' (p. 228)

'We bury your dead and their reputations. We bury you. We are the centuries' (p. 259)

Walter M. Miller Jr, Dark Benediction (1951-57) SFMW #69

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Spong) — Sun, 29 May 2011 10:13:00 +0000

Best known for his Hugo Award-winning A Canticle For Leibowitz (1959), Walter M. Miller Jr also authored dozens of stunning short stories in the 1950s, 14 of which are gathered together in this highly attractive entry into the SF Masterworks series.

The tales are not of uniform quality, but the work's best pieces rank among the very finest examples of the short form in the canon of speculative fiction. Miller's mastery of the post-apocalyptic sub-genre, his struggle to make sense of religious convictions, his attractive, sparse style and the manifestation within his work of the depression it is suggested that he lived with prior to his suicide in 1966 combine to produce a complex, satisfying corpus which merits frequent revisiting.

A child's frantic combing of the future for a cure which medical science has failed to provide for him in 'The Will' (1954) is compelling and mysterious, whilst 'Anybody Else Like Me' (1952) presents meditations on evolutionary telepathy presented in the disturbing contexts of rape.

Construction worker Manue Nanti struggles to come to terms with the atrophying of his lungs in 'Crucifixus Etiam' (1953) on a Mars without faith:

'Faith needed familiar surroundings, the props of culture. Here there were only swinging picks and rumbling machinery and sloshing concrete and the clatter of tools and the wheezing of troffies. Why? For five dollars an hour and keep?' (p. 57).

A 'machine' comes to a sacrificial self-awareness in 'I, Dreamer' (1953) as it learns the truth about its origins, while 'Dumb Waiter' (1952) presents a brilliantly conceived parable about humanity's limited capacity to perceive both its salvation and destruction in the self-regulating yet vulnerable technology it develops as an engineer struggles to save a civilization his peers are intent on destroying:

'Humanity has waited a hundred thousand years before deciding to build technological civilization. If he wrecked this one completely, he might never decide to build another [...] Some men thought that the a return to the soil was desirable. Some men tried to pin their guilt on the machines, to lay their own stupidity on the head of a mechanical scapegoat and absolve themselves with dynamite. But Mitch Laskell [...] liked the purr of a pint-sized nuclear engine much better than the braying of a harnessed jackass' (p. 88).

'Conditionally Human' (1952) is one of the anthology's highlights. The protagonist sets about righting the wrongs the state's strict control of the conditions of reproduction have wrought, 'knowing that it would never be all right [...] as long as the prohibiting, the creating, the killing, the mockery, the falsification of birth, death and life continued [...] He hoped Man could fit into it somehow' (pp. 235, 265).

'Dark Benediction' (1951) provides the volume's titular inspiration and forms its conceptual centre. The story offers a stirring, thematically multi-faceted study of our primitive responses to crises, fear of difference, and qualified contextualization of unexpected and societally transformative change. 'Dark Benediction' provides the reader with an opportunity to reflect upon the fact that destiny is not ours to control, and that unstoppable external forces could radically alter what it means to be human. Our curiosity, the story suggests, could be the death of us in the face of an implacable evolutionary process over which we have no influence; humanity, the story suggests, is not a Leibnizian monad, and we should perhaps be grateful for the universe's attention, whatever the outcome.

Regardless of other stories of lesser quality that it contains, 'Dark Benediction' is an excellent entry into the SF Masterworks catalogue. Miller's perspectives on his topics are usually engaging, often challenging, and occasionally macabre in the extreme; see 'Vengeance For Nikolai' (1957), with a plot as outlandish as anything Jacobean Tragedy has to offer.

'When the machine age cracks up, you crack up, too. Because you never made yourself its master; you just let yourself be mechanically pampered' (p. 105).

'If the universe lets you live, then you're doing all right' (p. 135)

William Gibson & Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine (1990)

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Spong) — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 16:58:00 +0000

Alternate history, particularly in its Victorian 'steampunk' form, is a sub-genre of SF I favour only slightly ahead of post-apocalyptic settings. Contributing genre-defining novels to the canon is nothing new to either of the co-authors of 'The Difference Engine', with both Gibson and Sterling having shaped our understanding of 'cyberpunk'.

With authors of such pedigree, and a theme that would seem to be tailor-made to please me, why did I find The Difference Engine so unsatisfying?

It was not the authors' playful inversion of Victorian political mores. I very much enjoyed learning about the ramifications of the Time of Troubles within the work, the dissolution of 'the declining and decadent Tory blue-bloods, a class destined to be swept from power by the rising middle class and the savant meritocrats,' heralding 'the revolutionary tenor of the coming age of industry and science', sliding through 'strikes, manifestos and demonstration, to riots, martial law, massacres, open class warfare, and near total anarchy. Only the Industrial Radical Party, with their boldly rational vision of a comprehensive new order, had saved England from the abyss (pp. 140-41).

It did not reside within the language. Gibson and Sterling do a creditable job of daubing the text with splashes of cross-class Victorian patois. The strenuous efforts the authors go to in order to demonstrate their mastery of language in its re-imagined historic context are pleasurable, and plausible to both eye and ear in a way that, for example, Tim Powers' deployment of contemporary idioms within the sixteenth century Venetian setting of The Drawing of the Dark just are not, to the work's great detriment.

It was certainly not the unique steampunk flavour that the authors succeeded in imbuing the work with. The Difference Engine's steam gurneys, autocafés, National Credit plates, and nested loops of subversive code contained within the camphorated cellulose punch-card of the Modus Programme introduced into the Grand Napoleon engine, among other things, were all highly entertaining.

For me, the failings of The Difference Engine reside chiefly within its plotting. Structurally, I take no issue with the authors' roaming authorial eyes having fallen upon different characters to lead the reader through the narrative, disappearing and reappearing in turn, either in person or as ciphers. Rather, it is the novel's philosophical pay-off in the final section wherein the reader is hurriedly compelled to consider the work as a parable of the role of the 'clacking' (hacking) of derivatives of Babbage's Analytical Engine for the purposes of political intrigue and the deleterious effect the consequent development of machine intelligence has on the fate of humanity ('human faces that are borrowed masks, and lenses for a peering Eye', (p. 382)) that is so unsatisfactory.

Whilst the 75 pages that advance the plot of this intriguing SF Masterwork at the beginning and end of the novel would have made a gripping short story, the intervening 300 pages serve more as a broadly independent thriller with steampunk tendencies than they do as part of a larger, integrated whole. With the baton-changing protagonists having been pursuing Captain Swing throughout the pages of the work, the confrontation between Edward Mallory, his brothers, the secret policeman Ebenezer Fraser and the elusive agitator himself is particularly disappointing.

'Is it not strange that we mere mortals can talk about a subject – truth – that is infinitely complicated? And yet - is not a closed system the essence of the mechanical, the unthinking? And is not an open system the very definition of the organic, of life and thought? If we envision the entire System of Mathematics as a great Engine for providing theorems, then we must say, through the agency of the Modus, that such an engine lives, and could indeed prove its own life, should it develop the capacity to look upon itself The Lens for such a self-examination is of a nature not yet known to us; yet we know that it exists, for we ourselves possess it' (pp. 376-77).

Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1962) SFMW #73

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Spong) — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 01:36:00 +0000

The wall falls back into the moat.
Use no army now.
Make your commands known within your own town.
Perseverance brings humiliation.

Undeterred by the unfavourable reading of the I Ching, Frank 'Goldfish' Frink muses 'I should take my tools[...] be working, creating in my own way right up to the end, living as best I can, as actively as possible, until the wall falls back into the moat for all of us, all mankind' (pp. 54-55)
Philip K. Dick's 1962 work The Man in the High Castle is an alternate history set in a fictional world within which the Axis powers were victorious in the Second World War and the political map of the world has been redrawn accordingly.

It is a book about chance, belief, the shaping of fate and the making of history in a figurative and literal sense. The interpretation and manipulation of history is the dominant theme of the work at both a personal and a societal level.

From the former perspective, the I Ching serves to influence the decisions of the work's protagonists, Frank and Juliana Frink, who although formerly married do not encounter oneanother in the novel's time line.

From the latter, the novel-within-the-novel entitled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy by Hawthorn Abendsen, who appears in the work towards its conclusion, posits an historical outcome to the Second World War which will be more familiar to the reader and which informs the work's thrilling conclusion.

'Now one appreciates Saint Paul's incisive word choice... seen through glass darkly not a metaphor, but astute reference to optical distortion. We really do see astigmatically, in fundamental sense: our space and our time creations of our own psyche, and when these momentarily falter - like acute disturbance of middle ear' (p. 225)

The Man in the High Castle is often introduced as Dick's greatest work, and its intricate world-building, ability to create a firm sense of place within the context of the societal alterity it crafts, and the prismatic, shifting perspectives of its inner textual histories provide ample support for this assertion.

The text reveals itself in a precise and satisfying manner, akin to unfolding the geometries of a piece of crisp origami:

'One by one Hawth made the choices. Thousands of them. By means of the lines. Historic period. Subject. Characters. Plot. It took years. Hawth even asked the oracle what sort of success it would be. It told him that it would be a very great success, the first one of his career. So you were right. You must use the oracle quite a lot yourself, to have known' (p. 245)

'I'm not sure of anything,' he said.
'Believe,' Juliana said. (p. 247)

'Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find. I'm lucky.' (p. 248)

Note: The Man in the High Castle was the third entry in the 2001 hardback SF Masterworks series (first cover image above), and the seventy third entry in the numbered SF Masterworks series (second cover image; 2009). A printing error saw the volume bear the number '72'.

Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren (1974)

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Spong) — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 02:09:00 +0000

'Where is this city? Struck out of time! Where is it builded? On the brink of truth and lies' (p. 469)

Delany's Dhalgren is perhaps the literary nadir of the 1970s fashion for 'finding oneself' in a very public and self-indulgent manner. Right down to the protagonist's addiction to writing terrible, self-obsessed poetry, the myopic, preening pomposity of the work seems childish and such insights as it has to offer appear glaringly obvious to the contemporary reader 40 years after the fact. However, from a more charitable perspective the novel's preoccupations are also entirely understandable when considered within the context of its own historical moment.

Flawed though it may be, Dhalgren is also an hypnotic, transcendent meditation on the mysterious and elusive nature of what Martin Heidegger called dasein or 'Being-in-the-World'.

The urban environment within which the novel is set smoulders like a 1970s American inner city after a riot, and we discover that 'you've got to walk around in it, because there isn't anything else' (p. 225).

Upon entering the ruined, burning city of Bellona, the initially anonymous protagonist, who comes to be called Kidd before before discovering (possibly) his identity later in the work, is both anti-heroic and yet also an Everyman figure. Both 'good and bad at once' (p. 661), Kidd is paradox personified, and is described as having 'lost bits and pieces of [himself]' (p. 769). As the narrative in this experimental work shifts from the third to the first person, and even bifurcates to offer twin pathways through its final third, the reader is left to ponder the reason for his ruined hands (p. 440) and what his hallucinations signify (p. 385).

Bellona is both identical with and symbolic of the lives of the characters played out inside it. Within its confines we encounter a panoply of characters the scope and scale of which is Dickensian in aspiration, with headonists, aesthetes, thugs, scholars, prophets and those who are 'nice in a useless sort of way' (p. 260) wandering, wondering, loving and brawling through its pages. Much like its protagonist, the reader comes to understand that within this work 'if people are busy living out myths you don't like, leave them to it' (p. 24).

Delany quickly establishes the unlikely but nevertheless existing pre-conditions for the possibility of his characters to survive within this disintegrating space, with subsistence in the form of accommodation, food, and company appearing to be freely available although even the characters accept this to be an impossibility (p. 377). With the acquisition of money as a means of survival having been rendered unnecessary, the author affords his characters the liberty to focus on the rather more challenging question of what their lives mean: 'how else are we to retain the inflationary coinage and cheap paper money of sanity and solipsism? (p. 481).

Delany goes to some lengths to disorientate the reader as if to remind them that there are no truths to be found within the work, just as the lived experiences of its characters (and also its readers) are incapable of providing definitive answers to any of the questions that they may ask. Like the questing restlessness of the human spirit, Bellona is a journey rather than a destination. Wreathed in smoke and flame, its shattered urban geography morphs constantly, with distances altering, street signs changing, and time dilating (p. 327; pp. 363, 367, 414). Characters muse as to what has happened in the city (p. 371) which seems to have assumed the status of a place of pilgrimage. However, the majority of Bellona's population gives the impression of being transient, just as the protagonist himself is at the beginning of the work, and as those individuals are whom he meets when leaving the city at its conclusion in search of that which 'would be better than here' (p. 801).

Dhalgren is full of mysterious artefacts: knife-like weapons that encase the hand known as Orchids (p. 557), red eye caps (p. 555), lamps that project colourful holograms of animals and beasts of myth and legend around the person of their wearer, and the strange 'optical chains' (p. 553) worn around the body, the adorning of oneself with which seems to manifest in some way a willing enslavement to the urban environment.

One of the things that irritated me about Delany's Nova (1968) was the author's apparent inability to restrain himself from name-dropping philosophers and their tropes, seemingly for no reason other than to indicate to the reader that he had heard of the thinkers in question. Sadly, this is not a habit that the he appears to have been able to rid himself of in the intervening years, and Dhalgren too is blighted by Delany's embarrasing info-dumps (pp. 470, 531, 625 et al).

Despite its shortcomings, Dhalgren remains a rich and extraordinary addition to the SF Masterworks series. Its graphic content, looping, rambling structure and elusive nature may not be to every reader's taste, but for those who are willing to lose themselves within its bewildering topography, there is much pleasure to be found.

'Apocalypse has come and gone. We're just grubbing in the ashes' (p. 745)

Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle (1963)

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Spong) — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 10:27:00 +0000

'Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John' (p. 1). Cat's Cradle sees Kurt Vonnegut gesture towards the unreliable narrator of Melville's Moby Dick ('Call me Ishmael') and the biblical references that both texts play with. His limpid 1953 novel deluges the reader with a flood of allusive, elusive meaning from the first page, and is unquestionably a worthy entry into the SF Masterworks series.

'"New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become". Had I been a Bokononist then, that statement would have made me howl' (p. 29). Part detective story, part religious satire, part prolegomeon to the study of how humanity could be just clever enough to destroy itself, Cat's Cradle achieves a fine balance between being an anthropological exemplar and a knock-about farce. 'I agree with one Bokononist idea. I agree that all religions, including Bokononism, are nothing but lies' (p. 155).

The subject of the novel's inquiry, Felix Hoenikker, 'father of the atom bomb' (p. 92) bears more than a passing resemblance to J. Robert Oppenheimer, who famously declared himself to 'have become Death, the destroyer of worlds'. Outvying his real-world counterpart, Hoenikker's unpropitious science extends beyond experiments in nuclear fission, namely in his discovery of ice-nine, 'the gift [he] created for mankind before going to his just reward' (p. 35), that during the course of the novel turns a certain something from a 'moist green' to a 'blue-white pearl' (p. 184).

In the midst of the cataclysmic change that plays out within the work's fictional world, the author quietly insists that the reader reflect on 'the heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality, and the heartbreaking impossibility of lying about it' (p. 200): 'My God - life! Who can understand even one little minute of it? Don't try... just pretend you understand' (p. 127). The act of contemplation in itself furnishes those who meditate upon it with nothing resembling an answer, but does at least remind them of the futility, in several senses, of their remaining 'busy, busy, busy': 'Busy, busy, busy is what we Bokononists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is' (p. 46).

The attitudinal disposition Vonnegut's narrator commends to the reader for their consideration can as easily be interpreted as act of benediction and release than as a curse of nihilism and despair. Success is illusory, life is fleeting, and happiness is transitory; however, it is the latter that is to be aspired to at the expense of all else in light of the first two observations. As for everything else, let it ride: if nothing really matters it is impossible to fail in any meaningful way assuming, that is, that during the course of your existence you did not make some apocalyptic scientific discovery that will blight the planet that you are lodging upon subequent to your demise. 'And I remembered The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, which I had read in its entirety the night before. The Fourteenth Book is entitled, 'What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?'. It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period. This is it: 'Nothing'' (p. 173).

Keep busy, busy, busy.

Richard Morgan, Altered Carbon (2001)

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Spong) — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 15:59:00 +0000

A further entry in Gollancz's aesthetically pleasing and highly collectable Future Classics series of 2006, Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon is an undemanding, well-written page turner that is cinematic in its aspirations, and engaging in its narrative drive.

The work relies heavily on staging a dramatic, high-speed, three-way collision between hard-boiled detective fiction, film noir atmospherics and cyberpunk themes in order to create its impact, but it is unquestionably successful in doing precisely that.

Altered Carbon does not really merit an extended review, as its interest lies principally in the pleasure of the unfolding of its plot. Envoy Takashi Kovacs finds himself 'resleeved' in the body of disgraced former police officer and undertakes a commission investigating the apparent suicide of Laurens Bancroft, a wealthy and long-lived 'Meth' (methusela), in order to release himself from a sentence of his own.

The concept of the 'stack' that assures the continuation of the host's personality in the event of their death, the two-day stack back up scheduling, and its connection to the plot is fully explained here, and as this work is more about plot than anything else, there seems little point in rehearsing it again. However, the notion that the stack would not be backed up in real time is very much this work's Achilles' heel, and makes the idea resemble the plot-enabling device that it is.

There is nevertheless much to enjoy within the delectable covers of this edition of Altered Carbon. Kovacs is every inch the drinking, smoking (albeit reluctantly due to the cravings of his host body) and womanizing Noir anti-hero, and the work careers along at a considerable pace. Whilst the concept of the stack may be laboured, the 'sleeving' notion is compelling and Morgan plays with its alienating outcomes on the human psyche masterfully. Other elements such as the AI hotel the Hendrix (yes, that Hendrix) give the work additional colour and depth. More SF fast food than SF fine dining, Altered Carbon is an excellent example of its type: pacey, punchy SF noir.

Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood's End (1953, 1990)

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Spong) — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 15:28:00 +0000

'They would never know how lucky they had been. For a lifetime, mankind had achieved as much happiness as any race can ever know. It had been the Golden Age. But gold was also the colour of sunset, of autumn: and only Karellen's ears could catch the first wailings of the winter storms' (p. 145)

Arthur C. Clarke's 1953 text, which the author tinkered with in 1990, begins with one of the classical tropes of written and cinematic SF, namely the appearance of spaceships over Earth cities. Rather than descending into the usual tiresome sequence of 'zapping the aliens' with its attendant consequences, Childhood's End take a rather more thoughtful turn.

The work is framed by a strongly anti-theistic and anti-authoritarian stance. Karellen, the alien ambassador overseeing the Overlords' tenure on Earth says: 'science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No-one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the non-existence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now' (p. 17). The author also goes so far as to suggest that existing political arrangements are descending into entropy: 'even before the Overlords came to earth, the sovereign state was dying. They have merely hastened its end: no one can save it now – and no one should try' (p. 41)

The aliens reveal themselves after fifty years of sporadic communications and little else, and the reason for their reticence in manifesting themselves in their physical form becomes immediately apparent. The trust generated by their benevolent presence over the five intervening decades diminishes the shock of their appearance, as does their giving freely of their technologies. In so doing, the Overlords serve to create a society which 'by the standards of all earlier ages[...] was Utopia. Ignorance, disease, poverty, and fear had virtually ceased to exist. The memory of war was fading into the past' (p. 70).

With more opportunities to pursue creative endeavours, 'the general standard of culture was at a level which would once have seemed fantastic. There was no evidence that the intelligence of the human race had improved, but for the first time everyone was given the fullest opportunity of using what brain he [sic] had' (p. 115). Nevertheless, the future prospects for such a society seem brittle to those who consider them: 'among all the distractions and diversions of a planet which now seemed well on the way to becoming one vast playground, there were some who still found time to repeat an ancient and never-answered question: Where do we go from here?' (p. 117)

The disclosure of the Overlords' ultimate role within the narrative inverts the menacing threat that they originally seemed to pose, and instead makes them rather pathos-inducing figures: 'we have never been more than your guardians, doing a duty imposed upon us from – above. That duty is hard to define: perhaps you can can best think of us as midwives attending a difficult birth. We are helping to bring something new and wonderful into being[...] but we ourselves are barren' (p. 190).

Whilst it may denude the work of any sense of mystery that the first two thirds have worked reasonably hard to develop, Clarke ultimately leaves the reader in no doubt as to what happens on earth, setting out rather too baldly the events' significance from a wider galactic perspective. Because of the lack of light and shade the work exhibits in relation to its subject, saying any more about these revelations is not possible without saying too much.

Clarke's tone can be hectoring and haughty, his rhetorical gestures irritating, and his craft as a writer rather less than accomplished at times. However, as a fast-moving yarn delivering a big-concept payoff Childhood's End deserves it place within the SF Masterwork series.

Note: Childhood's End was the sixth entry in the 2001 hardback SF Masterworks series (first cover image above), and the third entry in the unnumbered SF Masterworks series (second cover image; 2010).

A change of pace

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Spong) — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 14:22:00 +0000

Welcome back, and thanks for staying with me during the hiatus since my last post.

This blog has been in existence since 2005, and by rights I should have finished this project by now. However, I seldom find myself at liberty to compose the long-form reviews that this site has characteristically offered in the past. I am still finding time to read, as I hope you are, which is a good thing, but my appetite to move on to the next work has been diminished by the feeling that I should sit down and write a review first. This means I am reading less, yet not writing more, which is a far from ideal state of affairs.

The relaunch of the SF Masterworks imprint as an unnumbered series is now merely adding to the pressure. I have therefore decided to change the approach I take to the composition of reviews. From hereon in, I shall be offering short-form reviews which are impressionistic rather than exhaustive in their approach. If I find myself with the time to write additional content in the future, then I will do so. However, this blog was intended to be a spur to my reading rather than an obstacle to it, so whilst the critic in me undertakes this reorientation only reluctantly, I appreciate - sat here in front of my bookshelves as I am - that I need to pick up the pace if I am going to make any appreciable headway with the series.

I also hope to make this site rather less of the resolutely stolid 'web 1.0' vehicle that it is, and hope to add more social elements. To that end, thank you for your continuing support and interest in this project, and do please reach out with any comments or observations you may have.

Hal Clement, Mission of Gravity (1954) SFMW #62

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Spong) — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 05:05:00 +0000

Mesklin, upon which the entirety of the narrative of Hal Clement's 1954 entry to the SF Masterworks series takes place, is a planet remarkable for its methane-saturated atmosphere and high gravity, which increases from its lowest point of 'a hundred and ninety or so[...] to four hundred, and then to six, and then further' (p. 154).

In appearance, the planet resembles 'a pie plate with a slight bulge in the centre', with 'a polar diameter of less than twenty thousand miles compared to an equitorial one of some forty-eight thousand' (pp. 158-59).

Mesklin's natives are 'powerful little monsters' (p. 155) that look 'more like a caterpillar than anything else' (p. 43), 'red and black' in colour (p. 30) with 'dozens of suckerlike feet' (p. 28), and 'hearts in each of [their] body segments'. (p. 23)

Equipped with numerous pairs of pincers, cylindrical in shape, 'a foot and a half long and two inches in diameter' (p. 44), the Mesklinites '“walk” by rippling forward caterpillar style' (p.175).

The novel begins with a pact between Barlennan, captain of the Mesklin trader ship the Bree, and a scientific survey team from a future Earth having already been forged. Central to the denoument of the novel, the reason why the Mesklinites agree to help the visitors from Earth turns out to be have been expressed with deliberate ambiguity by the author rather than signifying an absence of a credible motive on the part of the former: 'that strange being had persuaded him to remain for the winter, and had somehow done it without promising any protection to ship or crew' (p. 6).

The visitors from Earth are referred to by the Mesklinites as 'Flyers', a concept which the aliens have to have explained to them as a consequence of their understandable aversion to losing contact with the ground 'in an environment where a fall of six inches was usually fatally destructive even to the incredibly tough Mesklinite organism' (p. 23).

The 'grave' mission of the novel's title refers to the survey team's attempt to overcome a barrier to their ambition 'to learn more about gravity[...] than anyone since Einstein' from the poles of Mesklin with their 'most terrific surface gravity of any spot in the Universe so far accessible' to them (pp. 48, 51). The help of the Mesklinites is enlisted by the scientists in order to attempt the recovery of a 'grounded research rocket, which had landed under remote control near Mesklin's south pole and had failed to take off after presumably recording its data' (p. 48).

The Mesklinites' treacherous intentions are well sign-posted from early on in the work: '"But what sort of devices were on board this rocket?” Barlennan asked. He regretted the question almost in the same instant; the Flyer might wonder at such specific curiosity, and come to suspect the captain's true intentions' (p. 52). Barlennan's aspirations are easily discerned, but Clement feels it necessary to cue up the last third of the work with as plain an exposition of the captain's motives as you could wish to encounter: 'I think you know by now what I'm really hoping to get out of this trip; I want to learn everything I possibly can of the Flyers' science. That's why I want to get to that rocket of theirs near the Center; [they] said that it contained much of the most advanced scientific equipment they have. When we have that, there won't be a pirate afloat or ashore who'll be able to touch the Bree, and we'll have paid our last port dues' (p. 133).

Barlennan explains his deception within the contexts of the universal attraction of the pursuit of knowledge, and the fact that the survey team overlooked the possibility that the natives of Mesklin may be just interested in outcomes of their research as the scientists themselves are: 'You had told me how badly you needed the knowledge; none of you appeared to think that I might want the same thing' (p. 196). At the end of the work, the Mesklinites' scientific aspirations do indeed take flight.

Set on a planet with a name like Mesklin, a reader approaching this novel for the first time may expect Clement's imaginary world to manifest hallucinatory qualities. For this reader at least, this was very much not the case. The unrelentingly linear plot of Mission of Gravity, with its here-comes-the-next-one chain of encounters with rock-rollers, river-dwellers and glider-makers does not make for a compelling speculative fiction narrative: 'From my point of view, this trip has been rather dull so far; the few encounters we have had have all terminated very tamely' (p. 151).

Swap the methane oceans for the high seas and the Mesklin landscape for a polar one, and you have an adventure novel with with some theoretical physics lashed on to it, which to all intents and purposes is what Mission of Gravity resembles. I'm not even sure I'm going to call talking caterpillars 'science fiction'. Or perhaps that's where the mescaline comes in after all?

Michael Moorcock, The History of the Runestaff (1967-69, rev. 1977, rev. 1992) FMW #36

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Spong) — Mon, 31 May 2010 16:17:00 +0000

First there was the Red Amulet, its ruddy light staining their faces as if with blood. This was Hawkmoon's strength, giving its owner more than natural energy. Then there were the crystal rings of Mygan which could transport those who wore them through the dimensions. These were their passports back to their own space and time. Beside the rings was the scabbarded Sword of the Dawn. In this lay Hawkmoon's army [Legion of the Dawn]. And finally, wrapped in a length of cloth, there was the Runestaff, Hawkmoon's standard and his hope. Count Brass cleared his throat. “Even with all these powerful objects can we defeat an empire as great as Granbretan?” (p. 591).

Published in 2003, the 36th entry in the Fantasy Masterworks series reprints the 1992 edition of the third volume in the Tale of the Eternal Champion series, a '14 volume set of omnibuses that present a considerable number of Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion novels and stories in a 'recommended reading order'.

The Mutiverse.org summary linked to above tells only part of the story, as each of the four volumes in the Hawkmoon tetralogy ('The Jewel in the Skull', 'The Mad God's Amulet', 'The Sword of the Dawn', and 'The Runestaff') originally written in the late 1960s had already undergone revisions in 1977: '[The Tale of the Eternal Champion] was originally published by Millennium/Orion in hardcover and trade paperback editions between 1992 and 1993, and then in mass-market paperback editions between 1995 and 1998. The series was jointly edited by Moorcock and John Davey, and presented Moorcock with an opportunity to make a number of revisions to the texts to give a more uniform feel to the Tale. Each omnibus also contained a new Introduction by Moorcock', which is included in this Fantasy Masterworks edition. A further trilogy featuring Hawkmoon entitled 'Count Brass' (comprising 'Count Brass', 'The Champion of Garathorn' and 'The Quest for Tanelorn') was published as the fourteenth and final volume in the 1992-93 cycle.

Despite such an assiduous editorial history, no-one appears to have picked up on the fact that Moorcock's co-dedicatee, 'my friend Mr Ian Kilminster' (sic; p. iii), doesn't spell his name the way the author does. No matter, although as a big fan of Motörhead as well as Moorcock's oeuvre, the persistence of the typo grates somewhat. To the point:

The sequence is set in a future earth, at least 1,000 years from the present. There are hints that the setting is a post-apocalyptic nuclear one: 'the 'ancient people of [Count Brass's] Kamarg [the French Camargue] who were preserved by Fate from the blight of the Tragic Millennium[...] whose ancestors were saved by the fierce mistral that cleansed the skies of the poisons that brought others death and malformation [who] give thanks[...] for the coming of the Life Wind' (pp. 24-25)

During the Tragic Millennium, 'the world collapsed into various degrees of ruin' (p. 37) and 'desolation', and 'nothing has lived there but malformed creatures since' (p. 383). The protagonist's chaotic associate, the appositely named Huillam D'Averc has cause for concern that the maladies of the Tragic Millennium, which we recognize as radiation sickness, endure: “There could be poison air – the air that makes your flesh crumple from your face, that causes vomiting and death...”. To this observation, Hawkmoon replies “The poison air does not exist any more, D'Averc, and you know it. It only lasts for a while and then disappears. Surely there has been no poison air here for centuries'. (p. 406)

If the air of taint that hangs over the geography of the West in these novels can be seen to reflect in some way the author's own jaundiced views of the continent, then his metaphorical description of the temperament of his own countrymen is no more sympathetic. From Normandia to Ukrania, the land mass is in thrall to the decadent and cruel Granbretanians: 'their cruelty is without precedent. They are insane. Their souls are sick with a love for all that is evil, and a hatred for all that is noble'. (p. 21).

However, Moorcock's critique of Granbretan is more than a side-swipe at late '60s Britain. It also serves as a commentary upon imperialism and war overall. The Vietnam war was at its height when the sequence were originally composed between 1967-69, and their dehumanizing affect hangs like a pall over the works: 'For this was the great power of the Lords of the Dark Empire, that they valued nothing on all the Earth, no human quality, nothing within or without themselves. The spreading of conquest and desolation, of terror and torment, was their staple entertainment, a means of employing their hours until their spans of life were ended. For them, warfare was merely the most satisfactory way of easing their ennui...' (p. 344)

Subsequent to his being taken prisoner in defence of his home city, the protagonist Dorian Hawkmoon von Köln is adapted by his captor, Baron Meliadus of Kroiden, Grand Constable of the Order of the Wolf, First Chieftain of the Amies under[...] great King-Emperor Huon' (p. 31): 'He lifted a hand to his forehead and felt with a shock something there that had not been there before. It was hard and smooth. It was part of him. He shuddered' (p. 67). The Black Jewel is capable of destroying the implantee's mind, and acts as surety to bind Hawkmoon to the desire of Meliadus to abduct Count Brass's daughter Yisselda from her ancestral home in the Kamarg, the last bastion of resistance against Granbretan.

As with all of the Eternal Champion novels, there are forces at work outside the main narrative that are shaping its outcomes. This episode is merely one connection in a train of events that has already been set in motion by the mysterious artefact that gives the final work in the tetralogy its title. Many destinies are woven together 'to do the Runestaff's work which was begun when Meliadus swore upon the Runestaff his great oath of vengeance against the inhabitants of Castle Brass and thus set the pattern of events' (p. 423). The Runestaff is a implacable totem of chaos as well as peace, signifying balance, binding all who swear upon it: 'Again [Meliadus] had sworn by the Runestaff, as on that fateful morn two years before. And his action had set in motion a new pattern of history. His second oath had strengthened that pattern, whether it favoured Meliadus or Hawkmoon, and hardened all their destinies a little more strongly' (p. 331).

Whilst the four novels ostensibly chronicle the struggle of the Kamarg alliance to repel and ultimately overthrow the might of Granbretan, in truth the 'justice' which the Runestaff metes out favours the maintenance of universal balance over an exceptionally long period of time rather than the advancing of the aims and aspirations of those who call upon it in the short term. This is difficult for the protagonists to discern as the devastating manifestation of the Runestaff's power sees the appearance of the latter mask the facticity of the former:'"By the Runestaff, we need aid!" [cried Hawkmoon]. Suddenly a strange electric sensation ran through his body and he gasped, recognizing what was happening to him, realizing that he had unconsciously invoked the Runestaff. The Red Amulet, [an aspect of the Runestaff] which now glowed at his neck, spreading red light on the armour of his enemies, was now transmitting power into his body[...] Then Hawkmoon was everywhere, a whirling bringer of death' (p. 321). Hawkmoon may come to 'resent the feeling of being the puppet of some supernatural agency', but there is little he can do about it (p. 529).

Every aspect of the Eternal Champion seems to manifest a predeliction to opine at some point that his desires are simple and to express resentment at the role fate has cast for him, and Hawkmoon is no exception: 'All I seek is a little love, a little peace, and to be revenged upon those who have ravaged my homeland. Yet here I am, on a continent thousands of miles away from where I desire to be, off to seek another legendary object – and reluctantly. Perhaps we shall all understand these matters in time'. (p. 497)

Such understanding as there is to be found in the sequence resides in the fact that the concept of 'justice' is a relative one. To the observation 'you fought well and you fought for justice', Hawkmoon replies: 'Justice? Is there such a thing?' Orland Fank, a servant and aspect of the Runestaff, replies: 'it can be manufactured in small quantities[...] but we have to work hard, fight well and use great wisdom to produce just a tiny amount[...] Justice is not the Law, it is not Order, as human beings normally speak of it; it is not Equilibrium, the Correction of the Balance'. However, as Hawkmoon concludes, 'the world is still wild. The justice Fank spoke of has hardly been manufactured at all. We must try to make a little more'. (p. 646)

John Sladek, The Complete Roderick (1980, 1983) SFMW #45

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Spong) — Mon, 03 May 2010 13:09:00 +0000

"Of all kinds of satire, there is none so entertaining and universally improving, as that which is introduced, as it were, occasionally in the course of an interesting story, which brings every incident home to life; and, by representing familiar scenes in an uncommon and amusing point of view, invests them with all the graces of novelty, while nature is appealed to in every particular."

So begins the Preface to Tobias Smollett's debut novel, Roderick Random (1748). Titular similarities aside, John Sladek's Roderick, or the Education of a Young Machine (1980) and Roderick at Random, or Further Education of a Young Machine (1983), collected in this entry in the SF Masterworks series as The Complete Roderick, bear many similarities to the eighteenth century novel's form. The structure of the work is episodic, with a panoply of robustly picaresque characters populating its 609 pages and driving the colourful life of its 'Candide-like protagonist' (Clute and Nichols, ESF, p. 1114) forward.

There are no shortage of playful homages to the eighteenth century novel's experimental forms, and some of the typographical jouissance the reader encounters in The Complete Roderick serves to confirm at least one oft-cited similarity between Sladek and Kurt Vonnegut. We get to read the University of Minnetonka Special Emergency Finance Committee Voting Record Part 189077 (p. 73), see what the decision tree that Roderick sketches in school looks like (p. 161), can study the solution that the robot mails to to the publishers of the murder mystery paperback Die Die Your Lordship (p. 339), review Roderick's mapping of the story of Abraham and Isaac as a flowchart (pp. 248-50), puzzle over Ma's (who turns out to be Pa, p. 312) mirror writing (p. 294), and consider the truth tables with which he simulates (with the help of a partner) the mental processes corresponding to sexual experience as the puzzling mind-body barrier that the sexual act in part is (p. 378).

The fact that the titles in their current form were intended to be concluded by a third volume that never appeared gives some intimation that the works as presented may have been considered to be less than wholly successful by their author. Sladek seems to take as much delight in satirizing the dull, drugged, repetitious nature of the exhaustive comparisons of the effects of prescription drugs and tendency to list things endlessly that characters indulge in as he does in the endeavours of his protagonist to find his way through his world, which perhaps goes some way towards explaining why the final entry to the trilogy was never forthcoming. Sladek may simply have lost interest in his robotic creation, and those readers that manage to finish the work in this two-volume form might be able to see why.

The reader comes to feel that the work is less about the coming-to-consciousness of a robot than it is about the reader's coming-to-consciousness of the dehumanizing, robotic nature of contemporary life. The novels are set in a present that seems adjacent to our own, but slightly more desensitized: a little more hopped up, even more suffused with corrosive advertising, and prone to iterating litany-like lists as passive viewers rather than active interpreters: "we've traded away our reality. We have no past, no future, no minds, no souls" (p. 445).

Even the under-achieving, unambitious, unquestioning nature of the sphere of human activity that Roderick is exposed to seems disappointing to him compared to the tawdry banalities of the television programmes that have served to shape his perceptions as an under-stimulated and largely ignored machine consciousness. Stolen by a family of hucksters, partially disabled and sold into service as Rodini Robot ('palmist, tarot reader, seer, scryer, mystic, clairvoyant', p. 138), Roderick finds that:

Television had never prepared him for [his customers'] stories of loneliness, horror, guilt, confusion, sickness, dread. Almost none of his visitors came close to televised truth: here were no pop stars, kindly country doctors, top fashion designers, executives with drink problems, zany flight attendants, sneering crooks, tough but fair cops, devoted night-nurses, cynical reporters, hell-for-leather marines, dedicated scientists, big-hearted B-girls, ageing actors, cute orphans, smart lawyers - none of the ordinary decent network folks he'd come to know and almost like (p. 140)

The novels have a propensity towards self-referentiality that find their fullest expression in the relationship that Roderick develops with Father Warren of the church school that he attends who, like most of the other characters in the work, seems incapable (in keeping with the novel's thematic interest in comprehension per se) of recognizing the robot for what he is, or for getting his name right: "I, Robot by Isaac Asimov. Tried that yet? Here, take it along" (p. 224). The naive but logical and incisive questions that Roderick asks of Father Warren unbalance the latter's sanity to the point where he begins to pick stigmata in his hands, and Sladek introduces some interesting perspectives on programming, religiosity, and autonomy. Religion is given a thorough working over by Sladek through the Roderick titles, perhaps to most amusing effect in the description of the costume that Ma, the robot's surrogate mother, creates for his nativity play to the horror of the audience (p. 243).

Whilst it is never spelled out quite so synoptically, the books have a proclivity for obsessing over what we might call the 'autonomy of automata', most notably in a sequence on pp. 327-28 that iterates historical studies of the 'revenge of the common man upon the common object' when automatons have suffered at the hands of their creators or been otherwise abused. Sladek's parallel representation of the impulse-oriented nature of the behaviour of the characters he has created invites the reader to extrapolate from these passages in order to consider the lack of will that the human-as-consumer manifests in failing to resist the tyranny of the object over the subject - the possession's possession of the possessor: "we must smash the machines inside us, smash the idea of the machine" (p. 489). "If you think machines are trouble, just look at the dumb bastards running them" (p. 491). "Everyone's[...] so obsessed with our machine world they think we have to be machines to fit into it"" (p. 555).

A cleverly allusive work that makes playful reference to everything from the Andrex puppy adverts (p. 393) to Conrad's Heart of Darkness (p. 571), The Complete Roderick is a likeable but neither especially engaging nor particularly profound entry to the SF Masterworks series which may be recommended if not for its plot, style or ideas then for its not taking itself too seriously: 'the world was beginning to resemble something in a satirical science-fiction novel of no great quality' (p. 401); 'left, right and centre, it's all a great big nothing!!!' (p. 399).

Michael Moorcock, Corum (1972) FMW #30

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Spong) — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 19:27:00 +0000

Despite being spread over three slim novels, the plot that drives this trilogy of novels featuring Corum, a maimed incarnation of Michael Moorcock's enduring Multiverse protagonist, the Eternal Champion, is relatively straightforward.

Prince Corum Jhaelen Irsei of the Vadhagh leaves the Castle Erorn at the bidding of his father, Prince Khlonskey in search of news of the welfare of the rest of his race in order that the latter may pass into the Chamber of Vapours and die by his own hand in the full knowledge of the fate of his race.

Corum has travelled but a little way on his quest before encountering a Mabden horde making haste towards his hereditary home, little knowing that they have already destroyed the majority of his race and are set upon razing his family pile and the inhabitants thereof in a similar manner.

Corum is captured byone of the Pony Tribes' leaders, Glandyth-a-Krae and tortured and maimed (losing his left hand and right eye) prior to being saved by an aspect of Lord Arkyn, Lord of Law. At this point, the focus of the narrative broadens and the motive force behind the Mabden's destructive campaign is revealed as being the manifestation of a realignment of the balance of Law and Chaos within the Fifteen Planes as the latter begins to best the former.

Furnished with the arcane powers of the Hand of Kwll and Eye of Rhynn allowing him to summon emissaries from other planes, Corum is tasked with overthrowing Arioch, the Prince of the Swords, Xiombard, the Queen of the Swords, and finally Mabelode, the King of the Swords.

For this reader, however, the Corum trilogy's core is philosophical rather than narrative. In a very real sense, Corum - and by extension, the figure of the Eternal Champion of which he is but a single facet - are bit players in a much larger narrative that takes place outside of the contexts of the novel as the universe's gods struggle with oneanother 'offstage', an enduring contest in which they are little more than pawns, or as Xiombard puts it "we must use mortals for ends we cannot ourselves achieve". (p. 266)

The purity of Corum's quest to avenge his family and race - seldom a pure motive - is debased in his own mind by the acts that he is compelled to undertake, and the innocents slain by the godly appendages that have been grafted on to him by his patron: "Too many crimes have been committed so that that vengeance might be won! Too many unfortunates have suffered frightful fates! Will the Vadhagh name be recalled with love - or muttered in hatred?" (p. 128).

Furthermore, the agents of Chaos seem less demonic, and their motives less abhorrent, When Corum encounters them in person. He is struck by the fact that Arioch, for example, appears to bear "no malice towards the Vadhagh. He cared for them no more no less than he cared for the Mabden parasites feeding off his body. He was merely wiping his palette clean of old colours as a painter will before he begins a fresh canvas. All the agony and misery he and his had suffered was on behalf of the whim of a careless god who only occasionally turned his attentions to the world that he had been given to rule". (p. 133). This is a perception that the Chaos gods themselves are only too quick to support: 'Arioch spoke reasonably to Corum in a low, hypnotic voice. "You see, friend Corum, these Fifteen Planes were stagnating. What did you Vadhagh and the rest do? Nothing. You hardly moved from your cities and your castles. Nature gave birth to poppies and daisies. The Lords of Law made sure that all was properly ordered. Nothing was happening at all. We have brought so much more to your world, my brother Mabelode and my sister Xiombarg."' (p. 134)

Standing apart from the forces of both Law and Chaos is the Nameless Force (p. 265), possibly a supreme being of some order who has set the forces of a Cosmic Balance in sway, and yet who seems to have no control over it - or perhaps no desire to control it. It is a moot point whether the contemplation of balance and the consquences of its disruption denude the series of suspense, or augment it. I tend to favour the latter as a function of the struggle of the protagonists rather than the mechanical pre-ordained destinies of the elect, but it is far from taxing to construct a reading wherein the former is encapsulated by the latter.

One of the irresistable charms of Moorcock's Multiverse is the pleasure that the reader may take from encoutering aspects of the Eternal Champion and his Companion in novel in new settings and combinations. The metrosexual dandy Jerry Cornelius, for example, is plays a major role in the sequence as the equally fastidious Jhary-a-Conel, first appearing in the second work in the trilogy, The Queen of the Swords. As Jhary explains to a bemused Corum, who has no knowledge of his other aspects in this incarnation, "sometimes we are the same creature - or, at least, aspects of the same creature[...] I have been called Timeras and Shalenak. Sometimes I am the hero, but more often than not I am the companion to a hero". (p. 160). Elric and Erekosë also appear in the work, ultimately combining with Corum to form a fascinating gestalt entity, although through their shared histories Corum is forced to acknowledge the possibility that 'it was his fate to experience an eternity of battle, of death, of misery' (p. 312), 'the fate of the Eternal Champion' (p. 331). In conference with Elric, Corum concludes near the end of the work that "we are both doomed to play a role in constant struggle between the Lords of the Higher Worlds - and we shall never understand why that struggle takes place, why it is eternal. We fight, we suffer agonies of mind and soul, but we are never sure that our suffering is worthwhile" (p. 356)

Such revelations can, perhaps unsurprisingly, provoke somewhat morose outbursts within the sequence's protagonists. Lady Jane Pentallyon, appearing late in the trilogy in a decidely Earth-like setting (contemporary crusading is mentioned at one point, p. 334) declaims "the more one discovers the less point there seems in life at all" (p. 338)

However, the conclusion of the trilogy is more redemptive than that which precedes it may have led the reader to predict it would be. Reclaiming his hand, the god Kwll tosses off the observation "do you know that you dream of these gods - that you are stronger than they - that when you are fearful, why then you bring fearsome gods upon yourselves? Is this not evident to you?" (p. 379). It may also be more realistic that we might have expected; Jhary observes: "there are many legends which say the past was perfect or that the future will be perfect. I have seen many pasts and may futures. None of them were perfect" (p. 386)

"Do not despair entirely of this world... New gods can always be created" (p. 393)

Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974) SFMW #46

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Spong) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:56:00 +0000

He could feel within his brain the powerful six-determined constituents moving already into focus. I am not like other men, he told himself. I will get out of this, whatever it is. Somehow. (p. 25)

Jason Taverner is a 'six', 'sixth in a line of DNA reconstruction systems' (p. 118), one of four living examples of a eugenic experiment (p. 117), 'an elite group, bred out of aristocratic prior circles to set and maintain the mores of the world, who had in practice drizzled off into nothingness because they could not stand one another' (p. 120). A light entertainment TV show host and recording artist of repute, Taverner awakes subsequent to having been attacked to find himself in a decrepit hotel room with $5,000 dollars in his pocket and no identity. Neither his ID cards, nor his personal history, nor his professional standing remain as he remembers them. Indeed, the very details of his birth appear to have been effaced from the public records.

'Am I being paid back for something I did? he asked himself. Something I don't know about or remember? But nobody pays back, he reflected. I learned that a long time ago: you're not paid back for the bad you do nor the good you do. It all comes out uneven in the end. Haven't I learned that by now, if I've learned anything?' (pp. 65-66).

A heavily-scrutinsed police state 'rules... society', a 'legacy of the [student-led] Second Civil War... from pigs to pols. In one easy jump' (p. 180). The operations of the ideological state apparatus that forms the novel's setting sees Taverner come to the attention of Police General Felix Buckman, who is perplexed by his subject's non-status and concludes that he 'must wait for him to figure it out... and be there with him, either physically or electronically, when it happens' (p. 126). Buckman and his sister Alys maintain an incestuous relationship that has produced a son. Alys proves to be central to the novel's denouement, and her first encounter with Taverner begins to tie together the protagonist's previous reality with his currently existing one (p. 132):

"Alys, you know about me; you know who I am. Why doesn't anybody else know?"
"Because they've never been there" (p. 136)

Subsequent to a disorientating, drug-fuelled crisis with a startling and apparently incomprehensible conclusion at the Buckman's apartment, Taverner flees and encounters the potter Mary Ann Dominic with whom he seeks sanctuary in a restaurant fitted out with a jukebox that contains his latest hit record. With his reality 'leaking back' (p. 159), Taverner is haunted by the thought that his entire career is a 'retroactive hallucination' and that he 'only exist[s] so long as [he] take[s] the drug' that Alys gave him:

Maybe I am only one of a great number of people leading synthetic lives of popularity, money, power by means of a capsule. While actually living, meanwhile, in bug-infested, ratty old hotel rooms. On skid row. Derelicts, nobodies. Amounting to zero. But, meanwhile, dreaming (p. 160)

As Taverner succumbs to the strain of disparate realities coalescing in his person and gives himself up to Buckman, so the author appears to step forward in order to give voice to an inner monologue that sounds very little like the voice of the protagonist as we have come to discern it:

Fucking dope, he thought. You can always tell when it hits you but never when it unhits, if it ever does. It impairs you forever or you think so; you can't be sure. Maybe it never leaves. And they say, Hey man, your brain's burned out, and you say, Maybe so. You can't be sure, and you can't not be sure. And all because you dropped a cap, or one cap too many that somebody said, Hey, this'll get you off (p. 157).

The work's title comes from the author's depiction of Felix Buckman's meditations whilst listening to recordings of John Dowland's 'Lachrimae Antiquae Pavan' which he describes as 'the first piece[...] of abstract music'. Why the book is not consequently called Flow My Tears, The Policeman Thought I have yet to fathom (p. 96).

Chapter 11, a philosophical reckoning in the middle of the work, constitutes its thematic and physical centre. Taverner's pursuit of his identity takes him to the Las Vegas apartment of a former lover, Ruth Rae, who also fails to remember him. Taverner and Rae, who has a succession of failed relationships behind her, rehearse their necessarily (in view of the former's predicament) different perspectives on love, life and loss: 'you call them up on the phone one day and say, "This is Jason," and they say "Who?" and then you know you've had it. They don't know who the hell you are. So I guess they never did know you; you never had them in the first place' (p. 103).

The ambiguities that the novel has built upon are promptly exploded by the author in the twenty-seventh chapter (pp. 183-98) wherein an over-reaching concept is over-explained in a manner unusual for Philip K. Dick.

By the mid-1970s, whilst his literary powers may arguably have already peaked, Dick was approaching the height of his personal psychoses. With the author as Taverner ('I don't want to be hunted any more'), and Buckman as a representative of the state authorities Dick believed to be pursuing him ('To live is to be hunted' (p. 188)), the author/protagonist-policeman/state stuctures 'play roles' and 'occupy positions' (p. 191) on the way to the conclusion that 'the real, ultimate truth is that despite your fame and your great public following, you are expendable... and I am not. That is the difference between the two of us. Therefore you must go, and I remain' (p. 192). Which is which is, of course, a matter of indeterminacy: a state of textual and topical ambivalence which is a function of the the thematic forces that Dick has set in play, but which elude his grasp and exceed the limits of authorial perception.

Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said is a quick, entertaining read, but it my opinion does not merit inclusion in the SF Masterworks series, which is heavily over-represented with Philip K. Dick's work.

'We'll show them; we'll make them believe' (p. 163)

Clark Ashton Smith, The Emperor of Dreams (2002) FMW #26

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Spong) — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 17:33:00 +0000

Entitled The Emperor of Dreams, Fantasy Masterworks 26 compiles forty-four of Clark Ashton Smith’s (1893-1961) short stories, book-ended by a short essay of Smith’s entitled ‘On Fantasy’ together with his poem ‘Song of the Necromancer’, and an excellent concluding afterword by Stephen Jones. A much-vaunted friend and contemporary of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, Smith attained a contemporary cult following through the publication of his short prose in pulp titles such as Weird Tales. His rich, decadent writing has continued to seduce admirers of speculative fiction since he abandoned its composition in the mid-1930s.

I read this Fantasy Masterworks collection intermittently over the space of six months or so. The cumulative effects of Smith’s obsessive repetition of certain tropes (omnipotent, deranged necromancers; exotic near-eastern locales; unknown terrain within familiar locales; the mastering of protagonists' volition, and their subsequent unwilling actions) have a certain narcotic quality. They’re too potent to consume in excess over a short period of time; too addictive to leave aside indefinitely.

Despite its brevity, Smith’s short essay ‘On Fantasy’ provides some interesting pointers as to the author’s outlook both on life and his creative undertakings: ‘People who cannot endure anything with a tinge or trope of fantasy, should confine their reading to the census-returns’ (pp. 1-2); ‘Truth is what we desire it to be, and the facts of life are a masquerade in which we imagine that we have indentified the masquers.’ (p. 2)

Previously unencountered, unfamiliar zones within otherwise well-known areas are something of an obsession in Smith's work. His characters frequently find themselves within ‘a clueless maze of unreality, of deception and dubiety, where nothing [is] normal or familiar or legitimate.’ (p. 93). Similarly, readers quickly learn not to be surprised when a protagonist declaims ‘somehow, in that deceptive fog, I managed to lose my way, to miss the mile-post that would have given me my direction to the town where I had planned to spend the ensuing night.’ (p. 110).

Characters are frequent symbolically as well as topographically disorientated: “I must find my kingdom[...] I am lost in darkness, amid uncouth things, and how I have wandered here I can not remember.” (p. 320); ‘At last he found the switch; but the illumination that responded was somehow dim and insufficient.’ (p. 375).

In a similar vein, I couldn’t help but smile when one of Smith’s first-person narrators contemplates undertaking an experiment I myself conduct on a nightly basis: ‘Perhaps, if I had plenty of high-proof Scotch and Bourbon, I could walk out of this particular time-plexus into something quite different.’ (p. 538)

There is more than a mere gloss of antipathy to worldly wealth in Smith’s writing, possibly precipitated by his own precarious financial circumstances (which are well-detailed in Jones’ afterword), or perhaps engendered by an overarching belief in the futility of the pursuit of money in light of the eternity of nothingness that awaits outaide his imaginary environs, and beyond his and his readers’ lives.

The gory end appointed to the prosperous victims of the Ghorii is a case in point: ‘They and their drivers were buried from sight by the ravenous monsters, who began to devour them immediately. Boxes of jewels and bales of rich fabrics were torn open in the melee, jasper and onyx idols were strewn ignominiously in the dust, pearls and rubies, unheeded, lay weltering in puddled blood; for these things were of no value to the Ghorii.’ (p. 285).

Characters and races we encounter elsewhere in the collection who express as interest in the pursuit of financial gain are neither well-regarded nor likely to be granted a felicitous destiny by their creator: ‘This people, it seemed, were most regrettably materialistic and had long ceased to offer sacrifice and prayer to the gods; though they spoke of them with a sort of distant respect and no actual blasphemy’ (p. 80).

Stephen Jones traces Smith’s relationship with H.P. Lovecraft adroitly in his afterword, and the influence of the latter upon the former is easy to detect: ‘I have continual need of modern crowds, of glaring lights, of laughter and clangour and tumult to reassure me; and always I am afraid that such things are only an insubstantial barrier; that behind them lies the realm of ancient horror and immemorial malignity of which I have had this one abominable glimpse. And always it seems to me that the veil will dissolve at any moment, and leave me face to face with an ultimate Fear.’ (p. 89)

‘Thin is the veil betwixt man and the godless deep. The skies are haunted by that which it were madness to know; and strange abominations pass evermore between earth and moon and athwart the galaxies. Unnamable things have come to us in alien horror and will come again. And the evil of the stars is not as the evil of Earth.’ (p. 181)

‘The formula, at frequent intervals, was cadenced with fatal names of lethal gods; and in it were told the secret appellations of the black god of time, and the Nothingness that abides beyond time.’ (p. 280)

‘There came to him the ineffably horrifying sensation of passing beyond his proper self, beyond all that he knew as legitimate and verifiable.’ (p. 518)

A certain dark eroticism pervades Smith’s work, showing him to have been the inheritor of the continental tradition of decadence embodied in the likes of Baudelaire and Huymans: ‘Those that were fairest, whom the plague and the worm had not ravaged overmuch, they took for their lemans and made to serve their necrophilic lusts.’ (p. 132)

Smith’s desciption of the lascivious ‘half-human fiend’ (p. 397) Ujuk is viscerally graphic: ‘His teeth clashed audibly, his eyes glowed in their pouches like beads of red-hot metal, as he withdrew from his position over the girl and loomed monstrously erect before her amid the ruins of the chamber.’ (p. 401)

Towards the end of the anthology, we encounter a mage intent on cultivating human members on vegetable matter: ‘consumately, and with never failing success, the magician had joined [various parts and members of human beings] to the half-vegetable, half-animate stocks on which they lived and grew thereafter[…] there were other graftings, too obscene or repellent for narration.’ (p. 441)

Smith’s libidinal musings are not without a certain moribund humour: ‘Thinking of the mountainous female they had seen, Morghi was prone to remember his sacerdotal vows of celibacy and Eibon was eager to take similar vows upon himself without delay’ (p. 82); ‘Whenever he paused to recover his breath, Eibon would say to him: ‘Think of the national mother,’ and Morghi would climb the next acclivity like an agile but somewhat asthmatic mountain-sheep’. (p. 84)

‘They have christened me in their own tongue The-One-who-cannot-be-cooked.’ (p. 540)

Stephen Jones’s valuable afterword, ‘The Lost Worlds of Klarkash-Ton,’ is a valuable setting for the jewel-like writings preceding it ‘“I am far happier when I can create everything in a story – including the milieu,” Smith wrote to Lovecraft in 1930. “I haven’t enough love for, or interest in, real places to invest them with the atmosphere that I achieve in something purely imaginative.” Amongst the fantastic locales Smith created were the pre-historic continent of Hyperborea; the super-civilization of Atlantis, also known as Poseidonis, and the alien worlds of Xicarph and Mars. However, his most successful imaginary regions were Zothique – the last inhabited continent on Earth, where sorcery and demonism prevail again as in ancient days – and the vampire-haunted medieval province of Averoigne.’ (pp. 562-63)

‘In a 1930 letter to Lovecraft, Smith likened his prose to “a verbal black magic, in the achievement of which I make use of prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-colour, counterpoint, and other stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation.”’ (p. 565)

‘Decline in the family finances resulted in Smith taking a number of menial jobs such as well-digger, fruit-picker and packer, wood-chopper, typist, cement-mixer, gardener, hard-rock miner, mucker and windlasser, to support himself. “Though his verse may occasionally sound as if Smith lived in an ivory tower,” explained [August] Derleth, “this is far indeed from the facts.”’ (p. 568)

A work which both invites and repays rereading, The Emperor of Dreams is an excellent addition to the Fantasy Masterworks series.

Daniel Keyes, Flowers For Algernon (1966) SFMW #25

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Spong) — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 09:53:00 +0000

“Who’s to say that my light is better than your darkness? Who’s to say death is better than your darkness? Who am I to say?” (p. 175)

A 1960 Hugo-winning short story that was later expanded into a Nebula-winning novel in 1966, the first-person narrative of Daniel Keyes’ work in its long form begins with Charlie Gordon (IQ: 68) reflecting to the best of his current abilities on the possibility that the procedure to be performed on him may reconnect him with his family. The reasons as to why he is no longer in contact with them are unclear at this stage, but powerfully described later in the work: ‘I dint see my mother or father or my littel sister Norma for a long long long time. Maybe their ded to. Dr. Strauss askd me where they use to live. I think in brooklin. He sed they will see if maybe they can find them[…] If the operashun works and I get smart maybe Ill be abel to find my mom and dad and sister and show them. Boy woud they be serprised to see me smart just like them and my sister’ (pp. 4, 9)

The first signs of Charlie’s improved cognitive abilities manifest themselves within the confines of his workplace, a bakery: ‘I worked the dough-mixer and everybody was surprised epeshully Frank Reilly. Fanny Birden got exited because she said it took Oliver 2 years to learn how to mix the dough right and he went to bakers school. Bernie Bate who helps on the mashine said I did it faster then Oliver did and better. Nobody laffed. When Gimpy came back and Fanny told him he got sore at me for working on the mixer.’ (p. 25)

Throughout the work, Keyes considers the emotional strain of Charlie’s development from within and without. External observers such as Dr. Strauss, one the project’s co-ordinators advise him that “The more intelligent you become the more problems you’ll have, Charlie. Your intellectual growth is going to outstrip your emotional growth. And I think you’ll find that as you progress, there will be many things you’ll want to talk to me about. I just want you to remember that this is the place for you to come when you need help.” (p. 33)

The treatment Keyes envisages being capable of augmenting cognitive development combines psychosurgery, enzyme injections and psychosomatic programming (p. 48), and Charlie’s scholarly development is rapid: ‘My studies are going well. The university library is my second home now. They’ve had to get me a private room because it takes me only a second to absorb the printed page, and curious students invariably gather around me as I flip through my books.’ (p. 68)

Disappointment awaits him, however, in his discovery that the average academic’s cordon of knowledge is extremely narrow. He quizzes an economics professor on the political implications of economic policies adopted by the American government between the 1918 and 1939: ‘He listened quietly, staring off into space, and I assumed he was collecting his thoughts for an answer, but a few minutes later he cleared his throat and shook his head. That, he explained apologetically, was outside his field of specialization[…] The same thing happened when I tried to discuss Chaucer with an American literature specialist, questioned an Orientalist about the Trobriand Islanders, and tried to focus on the problems of automation-caused unemployment with a social psychologist who specialized in public opinion polls on adolescent behaviour. They would always find excuses to slip away, afraid to reveal the narrowness of their knowledge.’ (pp. 68, 69). Similarly, Charlie finds it ‘terrifying’ (p. 104) to hear academics confess to ignorance of vistas of their own disciplines, let alone those that lay outside them, and is soon led to conclude that even his own mentors are ‘Frauds[…] They had pretended to be geniuses. But they were just ordinary men, working blindly, pretending to be able to bring light into the darkness. Why is it that everyone lies? No-one I know is what he appears to be.’ (p. 105)

Keyes, who clearly has a rather jaundiced view of the academic life, has his protagonist proclaim himself to have ‘learned that intelligence alone doesn’t mean a damned thing. Here in your university, intelligence, education, knowledge have all become great idols. But I know now there’s one thing you’ve all overlooked: intelligence and education that hasn’t been tempered with human affection isn’t worth a damn.” (p. 173)

Things also take a rapid turn for the worse at the bakery as Charlie's IQ burgeons: ‘And so it went[...] It had been all right as long as they could laugh at me and appear clever at my expense, but now they were feeling inferior to the moron. I began to see that by my astonishing growth I hade made them shrink and emphasized their inadequacies. I had betrayed them, and they hated me for it.’ (p. 74).

Algernon’s capabilities quickly develop to the point where Strauss feels the need to remind him that if he is to communicate effectively, he must pitch his discourse at a level his academic audience can understand: ‘Strauss again brought up my need to speak and write simply and directly so that people will understand me. He reminds me that language is sometimes a barrier instead of a pathway. Ironic to find myself on the other side of the intellectual fence.’ (p. 79)

Charlie liberates Algernon, the mouse upon which his treatment was successfully conducted (or so it appeared) in animal trials, at a dinner held to mark the success of the experiment: ‘“Come on,” I said, “We’ll get out of here together.” He let me pick him up and put him into my jacket pocket. “Stay in there quietly until I tell you.”[…] “I’ll just get my things packed,” I said, “And we’ll take off – just you and me – a couple of man-made geniuses on the run.”’ (pp. 114, 115)

After some prevarication, Charlie decides to visit his father, now estranged from his mother, who is running a barber’s shop. Not surprisingly, his parent does not recognize him: ‘How could I tell him? What was I supposed to say? Here, look at me, I’m Charlie, the son you wrote off the books? Not that I blame you for it, but here I am, all fixed up better than ever. Test me. Ask me questions. I speak twenty languages, living and dead; I’m a mathematical whiz, and I’m writing a piano concerto that will make them remember me after I’m gone. How could I tell him? How absurd I was sitting in his shop, waiting for him to pat me on the head and say “Good boy”. I wanted his approval, the old glow of satisfaction that came to his face when I learned to tie my own shoelaces and button my sweater. I had come here for that look in his face, but I knew I wouldn’t get it.’ (p.131)

There still moments of calm at the centre of the novel where Charlie can both look back at what he was and forward to what he may become, although the rising fear of a reciprocal decline in his powers cannot be quelled: ‘I have often reread my early progress reports and seen the illiteracy, the childish naïveté, the mind of low intelligence peering from a dark room, through the keyhole, at the dazzling light outside. In my dreams and memories I’ve seen Charlie smiling happily and uncertainly about what people around him are saying. Even in my dullness I knew I was inferior. Other people had something I lacked – something denied me. In my mental blindness, I had believed it was somehow connected with the ability to read and write, and I was sure that if I could get those skills I would have intelligence too[…] That’s the problem, of course. I don’t know how much time I have. A month? A year? The rest of my life? That depends what I find out about the psychophysical side-effects of the experiment.’ (pp. 139, 146)

It is difficult to state with precision when Charlie’s decline commences as Keyes draws the reader into his protagonist’s attempt to explain to himself what the grey areas that begin to encroach on the margins of his consciousness may signify. On the one hand, he senses himself to be ‘on the edge of it. I sense it. They all think I’m killing myself at this pace, but what they don’t understand is that I’m living at a peak of clarity and beauty I never knew existed. Every part of me is attuned to the work. I soak it up into my pores during the day and at night – in the moments before I pass off into sleep – ideas explode into my head like fireworks. There is no greater joy than the burst of solution to a problem’. (p. 167) On the other (as is this, perhaps, where the regression begins?), he wishes to convince himself that he has ‘gone as far as [he] can on a conscious level, and now its down to those mysterious operations below the level of awareness.’ (p. 168)

Either way, however, he is aware of the fact that his experience has, for a time at least, allowed him to rise above those ‘souls withered from the beginning, and doomed to stare into the time and space of every day[…] Whatever happens to me, I will have lived a thousand normal lives by what I might add to others not yet born.’ (pp. 160-61, 167)

The decline of Charlie’s powers is rapid. The decline of his self-study into the ‘Algernon-Gordon Effect’ concludes emphatically that ‘ARTIFICIALLY-INDUCED INTELLIGENCE DETERIORATES AT A RATE OF TIME DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL TO THE QUANTITY OF THE INCREASE.’ (p. 177)

‘Algernon died two days ago[…] Dissection shows that my predictions were right. Compared to the normal brain, Algernon’s had decreased in weight and there was a general smoothing out of the cerebral convolutions as well a deepening and broadening of brain fissures.’ (pp. 179-180)

‘I put Algernon’s body into a small metal container and took him home with me. I wasn’t going to let them dump him into the incinerator. It’s foolish and sentimental, but last last night I buried him in the back yard. I wept as a put a bunch of wild flowers on the grave.’ (p. 180)

‘October 3 - Downhill. Thoughts of suicide to stop it all now while I am in control and aware of the world around me. But then I think of Charlie waiting at the window. His life is not mine to throw away. I’ve just borrowed it for a while, and now I’m being asked to return it.’ (pp. 193-94).

The power of Daniel Keyes’ best-known work resides in its ability to provoke the reader to consider how their own cognitive abilities shape their view of the world. Do we perceive everything that we are capable of perceiving? Are we even capable of ascertaining what we may be missing? Would it be possible to connect with that which seems to elude us if we could better ourselves? And if we could, what imperceptible potentialities may reside beyond, receding into an infinite realm of experience, denied to us in stages? Are our own powers waxing or waning? Are we any more or any less ourselves, or our lives of more or less value as a consequence?

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed (1974) SFMW #16

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Spong) — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 09:49:00 +0000

“I have something they want,” he said. “An idea. A scientific theory. I came here from Anarres because I thought that here I could do the work and publish it. I didn’t understand that here an idea is the property of the State. I don’t work for a State. I can’t take the money and the things they give me. I want to get out. But I can’t go home. So I came here.” (pp. 242-43)

The physicist Shevek flees his native Anarres, an independent planet settled by former citizens of Urras, in order to continue his work on the ‘theory of the General Field in temporal physics’ (p. 283) having elicited little interest in his endeavours on his isolationist home planet: “I must explain to you why I have come to you, and why I came to this world also. I came for the idea. For the sake of the idea. To learn, to teach, to share in the idea. On Anarres, you see, we have cut ourselves off. We don’t talk with other people, the rest of humanity. I could not finish my work there. And if I had been able to finish it, they did not want it, they saw no use in it. So I came here.” (p. 284). In contrast, Shevek is enthusiastically received on Urras as consequence of the fact that it is anticipated that he will make a significant scientific breakthrough whilst residing there, and that the Urrasti will subsequently be able to capitalize upon it: ‘if you provide the theory, the unification of Sequency and Simultaneity in a general field theory of time, then we’ll design the ships. And arrive on Terra, or Hain, or the next galaxy, in the instant we leave Urras!’ (pp. 73-74).

After long periods of inactivity and distraction, Shevek does finally make significant progress with his work. Rather bravely, considering the suspension of disbelief required in the reader, Le Guin chooses to describe the physicist's moment of revelation, wisely choosing to focus on his self-observed response to the discovery: ‘the fundamental unity of the Sequency and Simultaneity points of view became plain; the concept of interval served to connect the static and the dynamic aspects of the universe[…] The moment was gone; he saw it going. He did not try to hold on to it. He knew he was part of it, not it of him. He was in its keeping’ (pp. 231-32).

As a resolution to his investigations seems to draw nearer, Shevek becomes more disillusioned with Urrasti life, and comes to distrust his hosts’ motives for sheltering him: “what they want[…] is the instantaneous transferal of matter across space. Transilience. Space travel […] without traversal of space or lapse of time. They may arrive at it yet; not from my equations, I think.” (p. 283)

Shevek’s disenchantment is largely a result of the time he has had to study the disparities between the harsh life on the desert world of Anarres and the easy existence enjoyed by the ruling classes of the verdant world of Urras. The people of Anarres are ‘members of a community, not elements of a collectivity, they were not moved by mass feeling; there were as many emotions as there were people. And they did not expect commands to be arbitrary, so they had no practice in disobeying them’. (p. 7). Acknowledging the tenets of the physicist Odo, the founder of Anarresti society, that ‘power inheres in a centre’ (p. 50), the desert-dwellers ‘keep free’ by practicing their social, economic and political arrangements anarchistically. On Urras, Shevek soon comes to understand that ‘the lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe’ (p. 70), and comes to question every element of the order of the things on the world on which he finds himself a guest: ‘they told Shevek with pride that the competition for scholarships to Ieu Eun was stiffer every year, proving the essential democracy of the institution. He said, “You put another lock on the door and call it democracy.”’ (p. 108)

The physicist can make little sense of the capitalist structure he is suddenly immersed in: [Shevek] ‘tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream’ (p. 109), and is physically and morally shocked the by waste of resources and human endeavour in the plethora of goods that are available to buy, characterizing the shops as containing ‘acres of luxuries, acres of excrement’ (p. 110). In contrast to the citizenry of Urras, Shevek reflects that on Anarres 'our men and women are free, possessing nothing they are free. And you the possessors are possessed. You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes – the wall, the wall!' (p. 190)

Finally, Shevek comes to realize that he too is nothing more than a commodity whilst he remains on Urras: ‘You are aware, then, that you’ve been bought?[…] Call it co-opted, if you like. Listen. No matter how intelligent a man is he can’t see what he doesn’t know how to see. How can you understand your situation, here, in a capitalist economy, a plutocratic-oligarchic State? How can you see it, coming from your little commune of starving idealists up there in the sky?’ (p. 113)

The physicist’s slow recognition of the alien economic conditions constraining him stands in stark contradistinction to the secondary motive that brought Shevek to Urras: ‘I want my people to come out of exile[…] I want solidarity, human solidarity. I want free exchange between Urras and Anarres. I worked for it as I could on Anarres, now I work for it as I can on Urras.’ (p. 116). He nevertheless manages to find satisfaction in the research in itself: ‘Work is done for the work’s sake. It is the lasting pleasure of life. The private conscience knows that’ (p. 125). It should not be concluded from Shevek’s comment that work on has an individualistic rather than a communitarian bias conceptually: ‘To assert, by his talent, the rights of any citizen in any society: the right to work, to be maintained while working, and to share the product with all who wanted it. [These are] the rights of an Odonian and of a human being.’ (p. 228)

Indirectly, the narrative gradually discloses the fact that Shevek’s concerns have a basis in fact, and also infer that the protagonist has something of a mythical-prophetical association within the world-view of the inhabitants of Urras. A government offician, Pae, collects Shevek, who is insensible as a consequence of the consumption of an excess of alcohol to which he is unaccustomed, from a party thrown by his sister Pae, to whom Shevek fled having bolted from the university compound. ‘I don’t care what he sees. We don’t want him seen. Have you been reading the birdseed papers? Or the broadsheets that were circulating last week in Old Town, about the ‘Fore-Runner’? The myth – the one who comes before the Millennium – “A stranger, an outcast, an exile, bearing in empty hands the time to come”. They quoted that. The rabble are in one of their damned apocalyptic moods. Looking for a figurehead. A catalyst. Talking about a general strike. They’ll never learn. They need a lesson all the same. Damn rebellious cattle, send ‘em to fight [the imperalist wars on] Thu, it’s the only good we’ll ever get from them’ (p. 192). This is not a view shared by the Urrasti population in its entirety, however, as Shevek discovers on becoming embroiled in an uprising in the planet: “Do you know that when people want to wish each other luck, they say, ‘May you get reborn on Anarres!’” (p. 243)

It emerges that the Urrasti political underground admire Anarres as ‘an experiment in non-authoritarian communism that […] has survived for a hundred and seventy years’ (p. 282). At a council meeting, one of the Urrasti revolutionaries recounts some of the teaching of the founding mother of Anarres society, Odo: ‘“For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead Kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of deserving, of the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think”. They were of course Odo’s words from the Prison Letters, but spoken in the weak, hoarse voice they made a strange effect, as if the man were working them out word by word himself.’ (p. 295).

It is difficult to read this passage and not think of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, and similarly many passages in the text evoke the spirit of Leon Trotsky’s concept of permanent revolution: ‘We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society founded upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution. “The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin”. We can’t stop here. We must go on. We must take the risks’ (p. 296); 'There is nothing on Urras that we Anarresti need! We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right. We took nothing. Because there is nothing here but States and their weapons, the rich and their lies, and the poor and their misery. There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter in, and fear of loss, and the wish for power.’ (p. 285)

Finally, there is an enviromentalist parable to be discerned within The Dispossessed. Whilst the planet Anarres features a good deal of desert terrain as a consequence of its evolution, the planet Earth, which exists within the novel’s conceptual universe, has become a desert due to the activity of its inhabitants, with drastic consequences in terms of the political structure that has to be adopted in order to ensure species survival, and a concordant restriction of the liberties afforded to the individual. It is interesting to consider this outcome, and specifically the ways in which the assumption of choices which appear in the short term to promulgate the expression of individual identity but which over a longer period of time can serve to constrain the freedom of the individual disastrously, in parallel with the analysis of disparate forms of politico-economic forms found elsewhere in the work. 'My world, my Earth, is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and gobbled and fought until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite, nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first. There are no forests left on my Earth. The air is grey, the sky is grey, it is always hot. It is habitable, it is still habitable – but not as [Urras] is. This is a living world, a harmony. Mine is a discord. You Odonians chose a desert; we Terrans made a desert[...] We had saved what could be saved, and made a kind of life in the ruins, on Terra, in the only way it could be done: by total centralization. Total control over the use of every acre of land, every scrap of metal, every ounce of fuel. Total rationing, birth control, euthanasia, universal conscription into the labour force. The absolute regimentation of each life towards the goal of racial survival.' (pp. 286-87)

Regardless of the whether the reader happens to agree with the sentiments they contain – and this reader indubitably does concur with them - the somewhat mechanical political theorizing within the The Dispossessed serves to imbue long tracts of the work with all of the pliability characteristic of a rainforest hardwood: ‘With the myth of the State out of the way, the real mutuality and reciprocity of society and individual become clear[…] The Odonian society was conceived as a permanent revolution, and revolution begins in the thinking mind.’ (p. 274)

Indigestible passages such as this may serve to diminish the impact of the work as a theoretical treatise for me, but they appear to have enthused legions of academics to study the work in granular detail (see below). The Dispossessed has inspired a considerable amount of scholarly secondary literature and commentary from a number of disciplines. There is a noteworthy share of philosophy tucked away in the text. Early on in the work, we encounter one of Zeno’s paradoxes (‘Achilles and the tortoise’) ‘“Why can’t it reach the tree?” said a girl of ten. “Because it always has to go half of the way that’s left to go,” said Shevek’ [as a child] (p. 27). Heraclitus puts in an appearance too: ‘You shall not go down twice to the same river’ (p. 48)

The Dispossessed contains a number of observations based on simple humanist considerations, and these are for me some of the highlights of the novel. ‘There are souls, [Shevek] thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus’ (p. 154). Also: ‘“If you can see a thing whole […] it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… but close up a world’s all dust and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance – interval. The way to see how beautiful earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is to see it from the vantage point of death”’ (p. 158). ‘Fulfilment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal[…]It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell’ (p. 275); “It isn’t changing around from place to place that keep you lively. It’s getting time on your side. Working with it, not against it” (p. 256); ‘If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home’. (p. 275); ‘The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts’ (p. 276). Finally, and with a reference to E.M. Forster, perhaps: ‘To [Shevek], a thinking man’s job was not to deny one reality at the expense of the other, but to include and to connect. It was not an easy job’ (p. 235)

Le Guin has some rather laboured things to say about gender and sexuality. Not only is Urras the crucible of capitalism’s evils, we also learn, perhaps with some weariness, that it is unashamedly misogynistic. There are, for example, no female scientists: ‘[Women] can’t do the maths; no head for abstract thought. You know how it is, what women call thinking is done with the uterus! Of course, there’s always a few exceptions, God-awful brainy women with vaginal atrophy[…] I’ve always said[…] that girl technicians properly handled could take a good deal of the load off the men in any laboratory situation. They’re actually defter and quicker than men at repetitive tasks, and more docile.’ (pp. 63-64)

The human sentiment iterated and sifted over in The Dispossessed is somewhat moving and struck a chord with me, especially when it interfaces with the novel’s philosophical leanings. The author’s musings on the nature of relationships and fidelity are touching: ‘We came, [Shevek’s life-partner,] Takver thought, from a great distance to each other. We have always done so. Over great distances, over years, over abysses of chance. It is because he comes from so far away that nothing can separate us. Nothing, no distances, no years, can be greater than the distance that’s already between us, the distance of our sex, the difference of our beings, our minds; that gap, that abyss that we bridge with a look, with a touch, with a word, the easiest thing in the world. Look how far away he is, asleep. Look how far away he is, he always is. But he comes back, he comes back, he comes back…’ (p. 265). ‘Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it.’ (p. 276)

Reading the text some thirty-five years after its composition, there is an intriguingly contemporary social media reading of The Dispossessed to be discerned: ‘Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it’ (p. 26) On his arrival on Urras, Shevek’s is of the opinion that ‘To deny is not to achieve. The Odonians who left Urras had been wrong, wrong in their desperate courage, to deny their history, to forego the possibility of return. The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile’ (p. 76). 'The strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical. You see, we have neither prey nor enemy, on Anarres. We have only one another. There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness.' (p. 183) Regidly in keeping with these ideas, Le Guin portrays the Anarresti as socially bisexual: ‘Shevek was pretty definitely heterosexual and Bedap pretty definitely homosexual; the pleasure of it would be mostly for Bedap. Shevek was perfectly willing, however, to reconfirm the old friendship’ (p. 144)

'My people were right, and I was wrong, in this: we cannot come to you. You will not let us. You do not believe in change, in evolution. You would destroy us rather than admit our reality – rather than admit that there is hope! We cannot come to you. We can only wait for you to come to us' (p. 288); 'Men cannot leap the great gaps, but ideas can.' (p. 283)

Ursula Le Guin’s ambitious, Nebula-winning meditation on political, social, economic and personal arrangements is most commonly referred to as The Dispossessed, with its frank subtitle (‘An Ambiguous Utopia’) seldom being acknowledged. That the implied theoretical value to the reader of this much-discussed work should be so starkly undermined by its author prior to their even having begun to read it explodes for me the idea that Le Guin was seriously interested in presenting a compelling fictive account of alternative social structures. However, this has not stopped professional literary critics and exponents of the soft sciences championing their interpretations of the work’s various themes in support of disparate theoretical agendas. I remain unconvinced by the work’s utopian elements, and ambivalent about its ambiguities. It is nevertheless an engaging addition to the SF Masterworks library.

Philip K. Dick, A Maze Of Death (1970) SFMW #57

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Spong) — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:13:00 +0000

When marine biologists Seth and Mary Morley volunteer for a new post on the frontier world Delmak-O, they arrive to find a leaderless group of twelve other colonists with no idea as to what they are doing there. The situation is made worse by the malfunction of the satellite that is supposed to detail them as to the purpose of their assignment.

Then the colonists begin to die.

The fact that the chapter summaries in the prefatory matter of A Maze of Death bear no resemblance whatsoever to the events depicted in the book is hint enough that nothing will prove to be as it first appears in the next 180 pages.

All of Philip K. Dick's works have an eerie way of making you think they have been written with you in mind, which is both unsettling and yet also entirely in keeping with throb of paranoia that pulsates at the heart of almost all of his novels in some way. Hence, on the day I read A Maze of Death I had bought the ingredients to make a lamb curry (p. 24), and had taken delivery of a bottle of Seagrams whisky (p. 31) only a day or two before.

Dick's trademark ‘justifed paranoia’ suffuses the work. As usual, the author hints that there is a something outside the text that is trying to get into it: 'They’re experimenting with us, [Seth Morley] thought wildly. That’s what this is: an experiment. Maybe there never were any instructions on the satellite’s tape. Maybe it was all planned’ (p. 50). The characters share an uncomfortable sense that they are under observation, in much the same as Dick appears to have envisaged his readership pontificating over the factual basis of his relationship with the thematic concerns of his oeuvre: ‘He did not like the mixture of artificial life forms with the real ones; the mixing together of them made him sense the whole landscape as false… as if, he thought, those hills in the background, and that great plateau to the right are a painted backdrop. As if all this, and ourselves, and the settlement – are all contained in a geodetic dome. And above us Treaton’s research men, like entirely deformed scientists of pulp fiction, are peering down at us as we walk, tiny-creature-wise, along our humble way’. (p. 101)

A Maze of Death returns to another of what we might call 'Dick’s ticks', namely the structure and function of religious belief. On this occasion, Dick begins by positing that a god exists and that prayer is effective if ‘electronically transmitted through the network of god-worlds so that all Manifestations are reached’ (p. 52). Not surprisingly, this is not a hypothesis that the extraordinary conclusion of the work can necessarily affirm, but it does makes for a fascinating frame-within-a-frame through which to view the text. From the author’s foreword: ‘The theology in this novel is not an analogue of any known religion. It stems from an attempt by William Sarill and myself to develop an abstract, logical system of religious thought, based on the arbitrary postulate that god exists’ (p. 3). The visible manifestation of the power of faith is a reality in this novel: ‘I can understand there being widespread atheism in previous eras, when religion was based on faith in things unseen... but now it’s not unseen, as Specktowsky indicated’ (p. 88)

The core text in the colonist’s religion is Specktowskty’s How I Rose From the Dead in My Spare Time and So Can You (p. 9), which reconstructs the christian trinity in the form of the Mentufacturer, the Intercessor, and the Walker-on-Earth, opposing the death-urge personified in the Form Destroyer: ‘The thing about the Mentufacturer[…] is that he can renew everything. He can abort the decay process by replacing the decaying object with a new one, one whose form is perfect. And then that decays. The Form Destroyer gets hold of it – and presently the Mentufacturer replaces that[…] But I can’t do that. I decay and the Form Destroyer has me. And it will get only worse’ (pp. 10-11)

The vertiginous final chapters wherein the mystery of the shared tattoo, ‘Persus 9’ (p. 168), is revealed and the narrative is shown to have been part of another sequence of events altogether reveal the events that preceded it to have been ‘a comforting web[…] in particular the postulate that god existed’ (p. 181). However, when Seth Morley says ‘I wish to God[…] that there really was an Intercessor’ (p. 184), he should have been careful what he asked for. The reader is left to their own devices to try to make sense of what is happening as perceptions clash and fictive realities overlap in the work’s concluding pages.

If A Maze of Death has a theme, it could be said to be that in making a life for oneself among the ruins of our shortcomings (namely, our susceptibility to failure, our destiny to decay, and our universal ignorance), the ability to retain a sense of perspective is everything.

Whilst I am entranced by the idea that one should be motivated to walk away from a life that you have made for yourself on the basis that ‘the cheese is terrible here’ (p. 14), there are bleaker themes to muse upon. When the colonists are forced to consider their isolation on Delmak-O they concede that ‘we have one vast fear, and that is this: there is no purpose to us being here, and we’ll never be able to leave’ (p. 31)

Each of the colonists characterises a different shortcoming, and there is a little of the author - and also the reader - in all of them: ‘The thing we have in common is that we’re failures. Take Tallchief. Couldn’t you tell he’s a wino? And Susie – all she can think about is sexual conquests. I can make a guess about you, too. You’re overweight; obviously you eat too much[...] Babble is a hyochondriac. Betty Jo Berm is a compulsive pill-taker: her life is in those little plastic bottles. That kid, Tony Dunkelwelt; he lives for his mystical insights, his schizophrenic trances[…] Maggie, here,’ he gestured toward her. ‘She lives in an illusory world of prayer and fasting, doing service to a diety which isn’t interested in her.’ To Maggie he said, ‘Have you ever seen the Intercessor, Maggie?’ (p. 79)

The destructive work of the Form Destroyer also stalks the novel: ‘Maybe they were alright before they got here, and something here made them change. If that is so, it will change us, too[…]. Eventually.’ (p. 40) Accompanying this observation is a tangible fear of neither understanding how, nor even being aware of, such changes, and realizing that only those who observe you will notice. Except they too are changing in turn, and the processes of decay are perpetual and reciprocal.

It is also difficult not to become aware of the novel’s insistent reminders that humanity has reached a point in its evolution where it is not only wilfully ignorant, but also quite content to be so: ‘Each of you seems to be living in his own private world. Without regard for anyone else. It’s as if[…] all you want, each of you, is to be left alone’ (p. 76). ‘We live in a world created and manufactured from the results of the work of millions of men, most of them dead, virtually none of them given any credit[…] It wouldn’t matter[…] if this whole colony, everybody in it, died. None of us contribute anything. We’re nothing more than parasites, feeding off the galaxy’ (pp. 80-81).

There are numerous false starts and dead ends on the path to enlightenment within A Maze of Death, most notably in the form of the tench, which appears to be a ‘great globular mass of protoplasmic slush’ (pp. 171-72), but isn’t. The tench answers questions in a circular manner redolent of the I Ching: ‘I’m asking, “Why are we alive?”’ [Maggie Walsh] placed the paper before the tench and waited. The answer, when they had obtained it, read: ‘To be in the fullness of possession, and at the height of power’. (p. 127)

Ultimately, the author suggests that if we are prepared, or perhaps capable, of appreciating it for what it really is, there may be a redemptive spark within us that could be fanned into life: ‘Something to save us,[…] something to doom us. It – the equation of everything – could go either way’ (p. 89)

In the last instance, an assessment of A Maze of Death is a question of perspective: what you see, and what you want to see; what you accept and understand, and what you are trying to efface from memory and turn your thoughts away from. You will accept assistance in propagating the former’s illusory states of being until a time comes, as it does for Seth Morley in the penultimate chapter, when you realize you have to make a change. Assuming it ever arrives, the much-desired change may be neither what you expected, nor what you hoped for. Sometimes, it may even be a logical impossibility (‘But we invented you!’ (p. 187)), but that will not stop it happening. Beyond it, however, will be something else: the kernel of change to come.

As if perceived through distorting mirrors, the ways in which the thematic and narrative perspectives of A Maze of Death will be elongated in the stunning final two chapters of the work break out into the novel around half way through, although you do not realize this when reading it for the first time:‘You know, Specktowsky speaks about us as being “prisoners of our own preconceptions and expectations. And that one of the conditions of the Curse is to remain mired in the quasi-reality of those proclivities. Without ever seeing reality as it actually is’ (p. 102)

Bleak, confusing, and seductive, A Maze of Death is a fine entry in the SF Masterworks series and one of Philip K. Dick's most satisfying novels.

‘I am outside and isolated. But in a sense all of us are’ (p. 126)

Robert Silverberg, Dying Inside (1972) SFMW #59

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Spong) — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 16:18:00 +0000

‘Living we fret, dying we live. I’ll keep that in mind[…] until I die again’ (p. 199)

David Sellig is a fractious, self-indulgent, emotionally needy middle aged man who has squandered such talent as he has and exists by writing term papers for NYU undergraduates.

He can also read minds.

His gift, however, is abandoning him in incipient middle age, and the novel focuses on the sense of desolation, loss and missed opportunity that will be familiar to all those who have left the first flush of youthful optimism behind them and reflect in their quieter moments on what they could have achieved, if only: ‘I am able to pick up isolated blurts and squeaks of discrete selfhood: a fierce jab of desire, a squawk of hatred, a pang of regret, a sudden purposeful inner mumbling, rising from the murky orchestral smear of a Mahler symphony[…] When one knows that something is dying inside one, one learns not to put much trust in the random vitalities of the fleeting moment. Today the power is strong yet tomorrow I may hear nothing but distant tantalizing murmurs’ (pp. 3-4).

‘There are people with doctorates who are fifteen years younger than I am. Isn’t that a killer?’ (p. 54)

The novel is arresting in several regards, but perhaps its most unusual element is Silverberg’s insistence on reproducing some of Sellig’s term papers in full. The entirety of the fourth chapter, for example, is given over to the recitation of ‘Paul F. Bruno, Comp Lit 18, Prof. Schmitz, October 15, 1976: The Novels of Kafka’ (p. 16). This, together with the novel’s overly-elaborate references to a host of poets, novelist, playwrights, scientists, philosophers, artists and composers in its scant 199 pages speaks perhaps of the neuroses of a novelist uncomfortable with his success as a genre author and attempting to demonstrate the validity of his credentials as a writer with loftier ambitions. I would prefer to read this in the more playful manner that Silverberg’s novels have a tendency to invite, however, and interpret this scholarly overegging as a critical double-bluff on the author’s part which nestles neatly within the purview of his protagonist’s somewhat juvenile obsessions.

Silverberg is never anything but singular and interesting when he focuses on sex, and Dying Inside is no exception. He remembers sex with Toni whom he considers to be archetypal of women in general. As they come, Selling considers, they ‘are islands, alone in the void of space, aware only of their bodies and perhaps of that intrusive rigid rod against which they thrust, When pleasure takes them it is a curiously impersonal phenomenon, no matter how titanic its impact’. (p. 31) The sexual curiosity that forms part of the narrative drive of The Book of Skulls also features in Dying Inside, and Silverberg’s skirting around homosexuality in this novel is equally fascinating (pp. 94-95 et al), although I will have more to say on this subject in a forthcoming review of the former title.

Among the more startling insights that Silverberg allows his protagonist to share with the reader within the narrative world he constructs is the assertion that ‘the mind may think in Spanish or Basque or Hungarian or Finnish, but the soul thinks in a languageless language accessible to any prying sneaking freak who comes along to peer at its mysteries’ (p. 15), as well as a journey into the mind of a bee (p. 63) and the revelation that a seemingly dour farmer is an ecstatic mystic (p. 65). Sellig’s insight into the mind of the politician is mercifully veiled, although whatever we may choose to speculate the outcome was, it is evident that it was far from a positive one: ‘why should I vote? I will not vote. I do not vote. I am not plugged in. I am not part of the circuit. Voting is for them[…] I looked into [Richard Nixon’s] mind, and what I found in there I will not tell you, except to say that it was more or less what I should have expected to find. And since that day I have had nothing to do with politics or politicians’ (p. 131)

If Sellig’s situation has a tragic core, it is that he lacks the strength of character to revel in the unique advantages that his gift has endowed him with. As his powers wane, he is left to reflect on what could have been rather than to pick over the treasure house of memory that he should have been accrued from his experiences. He is instead left to rue the missed opportunities and the chances passed over on the basis that he never felt that he either wholly owned nor was in control of his telepathic abilities, which as a consequence became a burden to him rather than a benefit: ‘I always thought of the gift as something apart from myself, something intrusive’ (p. 55)

There were good times, early on: ‘mortals are born into a vale of tears and they get their kicks wherever they can. Some, seeking pleasure, are compelled to turn to sex, drugs, booze, television, movies, pinochle, the stock market, the racetrack, the roulette wheel, whips and chains, collecting first editions, Caribbean cruises, Chinese snuff bottles, Anglo-Saxon poetry, rubber garments, professional football games, whatever. Not him, not the accursed David Selig. All he had to do was sit quietly with his apparatus wide open and drink in the thought-waves drifting on the telepathic breeze. With the greatest of ease he lived a hundred vicarious lives. He heaped his treasurehouse with the plunder of a thousand souls. Ecstasy. Of course, the ecstatic part was all quite some time ago’ (pp. 60-61). ‘It was like that all the time in those early years: an endless trip, a gaudy voyage. But powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies.’ (p. 67)

As Sellig’s gift begins to fade by degrees, the progressive decline in his abilities is so slight that for years he barely notices their having diminished at all: ‘the power had not begun detectibly to dim until he was well along in his thirties, but it obviously must have been fading by easy stages all through his manhood, dwindling so gradually that he remained unaware of the cumulative loss’ (p. 61).

One of the most enduring and poignant elements of the text, which surely every reader must identify with to some extent, is that once the apogee of potential has been passed (assuming that one believes that this is indeed the case, but in a physiological sense this is of course irrefutable: death is coming for us all) there are only two options: to be paralysed by regret, or to accept that there are opportunities to be enjoyed and rewards to be garnered at every stage in one's life if one can only appreciate the fact. All that one needs to do is to be able to sense their existence, and act upon the felicities of circumstance that either thrust them in our way, or that we are lucky enough to be able to craft for ourselves.

This dichotomy is personified on the one hand by the lugubrious dejection of Sellig, and on the other by the hardy optimism of Tom Nyquist. Sellig is not the only person in this narrative world to be gifted with telepathy: ‘there are others[…] you’re the third, fourth, fifth I’ve met since I came to the States[…] It isn’t important. What’s important is living your own life’ (pp. 90-91). Similarly, not all the telepaths within this narrative appear to be crippled by their powers in the way that the protagonist is. Far from it, in fact: “Nyquist used his gift as simply and naturally as he did his eyes or legs, for his own advantage, without apologies and without guilt.” (p. 88). Equally, Nyquist refuses to engage with Sellig’s assertion that their abilities make them more susceptible to metaphysical angst: for him, it is quite simply a gift to use and enjoy, as by extension are all of faculties. When Sellig asks Nyquist “are you in pain?” he replies “who isn’t in pain?” (p. 74); when Selling insists that ‘the gift tips the spirit[…] It darkens the soul’, Nyquist refutes him by saying ‘yours, maybe, not mine’ (p. 168)

If the reader learns anything from Sellig’s decline, it is that whilst ‘wise men [may] at their end know dark is right,’ there is no cause to stultify what life we have by succumbing to darkness prematurely: ‘You have been present today at an historic event[…] The perishing of a remarkable extrasensory power. Leaving behind this mortal husk of mine. Alas.[…] At any moment, I know, it’s bound to come rushing in on me, crushing me, shattering me; I’ll weep, I’ll scream, I’ll bang my head against walls. But for now I’m surprisingly cool. An oddly posthumous feeling, as of having outlived myself. And a feeling of relief: the suspense is over, the process has completed itself, the dying is done, and I’ve survived it. Of course I don’t expect this mood to last.’ (pp. 146-7)

‘There’s David Selig, they must be thinking. How careless he was! What a poor custodian of his gift! He messed up and let it all slip away from him, the dope. I feel guilt for causing them this disappointment. Yet I don’t feel as guilty as I thought I might. On some ultimate level I just don’t give a damn at all. This is what I am, I tell myself. This is what I now shall be. If you don’t like it, tough crap. Try to accept me. If you can’t do that, just ignore me.’ (p. 189)

Jack Vance, Emphyrio (1969) SFMW #19

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Spong) — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 07:02:00 +0000

"But why have you performed such evil, on folk who have done you no harm? Why? Why? Why?"

"'Why?'" Ghyl cried out. "To achieve! To make capital of my life, to stamp my imprint upon the cosmos! Is it right that I should be born, live and die with no more effect than a blade of grass[...]"

Fanton gave a bitter laugh. "Are you better than I? I live and die with equal inconsequence. Who will remember either of us?"

"You are you and I am I," said Ghyl Tarvoke. "I am dissatisfied". (p. 12)

Ghyl Tarvoke carves decorative wooden panels in his father Amiante's workshop in the city of Ambroy on the planet Halma. The finished artifacts are sold to the wood-carvers' guild in return for coupons which are redeemed for goods and services. Outside of this system of distribution and exchange are the noncuperatives or 'noncups,' 'nonrecipients of welfare benefits, reputedly all Chaoticists, anarchists, thieves, swindlers, whoremongers' (p. 21). The Tarvokes' work, along with that of the rest of the wood-carvers and all the other guilds, is shipped off-world: "in the far worlds, to say 'a piece from Ambroy' is to say 'a jewel of perfection'" (p. 26). Life passes slowly for the craftsmen; "it is best to produce gay designs. Happiness is fugitive; dissatisfaction and boredom are real" (p. 42)

The tradespeople of Halma are in this manner provided for, but the Lords of Halma live elegantly at their expense:

"It happened perhaps fifteen hundred years ago. There were wars[...] wars without number. The last war[...] resulted in the destruction of the city. Ambroy was devastated; the towers were destroyed; the folk lived like savages. The lords arrived in space-ships and set all in order. They generated power, started the water, built transit tubes, reopened the sewers, organized imports and exports. For this they asked and were conceded one percent [of the value of everything produced and sold on the planet]. When they rebuilt the space-port they were conceded an additional eighteen hundredths [of a] percent, and so it has remained" (p. 49). It is implied in the text that for all their wealth, the Lords also succumb to ennui: "You don't think the life of the lords is all Gade wine and star-travel, do you? A good many of them find time hanging heavy on their hands" (p. 75)

Halma society is strictly ordered and its citizens are exhorted to adhere to the precepts of Finuka (p. 67). Worship and observance is largely signified by ritual leaping: 'The Guide Leaper explained the Elemental Pattern[...]: "the pattern, of course, is symbolic; nonetheless it provides an infinite range of real relevancies. By now you know the various tablets: the virtues and vices, the blasphemies and devotions which are represented. The sincere confirm their orthodoxy by leaping the traditional patterns, moving from symbol to symbol, avoiding vices, endorsing virtues. Even the aged and infirm endeavour to leap several patterns a day" (p. 66).

Amiante, and later Ghyl, are absorbed by the vaguely-known story of the legendary Halma hero Emphyrio, who died a martyr's death trying to broker peace with alien invaders. Ghyl marries his admiration for this classical hero with a desire to change living and working conditions in the novel's contemporary present: "life here is futility. We'll live and die, and realize no glimmer of truth. There's something terribly wrong here in Ambroy. Do you realize this?" (p. 105). In acknowledgment of this, he finds himself in the middle of a scheme "to [facilitate] the election of Emphyrio as mayor" (p. 87).

When this enterprise collapses, still dreaming of independence and liberation, Ghyl colludes with friends and noncups to hijack one of the Lords' space vehicle and kidnap the owners, conjoining his desire to explore the universe with an equally strong yearning to resolve the mystery of the conclusion of the Emphyrio legend by finding the legendary Historian: "I'd like to take the space-yacht, if only to find the Historian, who knows the entire history of the human race" (p. 127)

Betrayed and subsequently abandoned by his fellow pirates, Ghyl finds himself thrown together with the very Lords he had been attempting to hold to ransom near the city of Daillie on Maastricht, fifth planet of the star Capella (p. 141). Detaching himself from the Lords he now finds himself protecting on the basis that he expects them to denounce him when they reach civilization, Ghyl travels on to Daillie alone. On Granvia, a street packed with luxury goods dealers, Ghyl is taken aback to discover a reproduction of one of his father Amiante's screens, 'REMEMBER ME'. The original, he is told, is considered priceless on Maastricht, and "hangs in the Museum of Glory" (p. 159). After due consideration, with the help of the Maastricht traders he befriends Ghyl decides to attempt to break the trade cartel his home planet is kept in poverty by.

Daringly returning to Halma, Ghyl discovers that the craft guilds are unwilling to enter into any sort of trade agreement with him: "once we introduce innovation, we destroy equilibrium. Impossible!" (p. 167). On the discovers of his true identity, and having barely escaped execution for piracy and irregulationary behaviour, Ghyl breaks into the wood-carvers guild and 'forges' shipping documents using the official seal, thereby facilitating the export of a full load of firsts and acmes from the guild's bonded warehouse. The carved panels are sold on Earth, where "the great fortunes, the ancient palaces;[...] the money of connoisseurs" is still to be found (p. 178). Splitting the proceeds philanthropically between the guild, his fellow traders and himself, Ghyl achieves financial independence.

After a sojourn traveling around Earth, where 'everywhere[...] lay the weight of history' (p. 180), Ghyl turns his attention to the Historical Institute in London in order to satisfy his curiosity as to the mystery surrounding the legend of Emphyrio which Amiante possessed only a printed (and illegal) fragment of: "I have known half the legend since my childhood. I promised myself that if I ever were able to learn the rest, I would do so" (p. 185).

Towards the end of his travels, Ghyl encounters once again 'Framtree's Original Peripatetic Entercationers', a troupe of living marionettes owned by the puppeteer Holkerwoyd. Ghyl previously encountered Holkerwoyd early in the novel having attended a performance by the travelling troupe with his father whilst still a child (p. 13), during which he also sees the novel's fleeting lordly love-interest, Shanne, for the first time. He questions Holkerwoyd as to why the death of the puppet that enacted the legend of Emphyrio years previously was real rather than feigned.

Holkerwoyd replies that "the puppets are not useful forever. They become aware of the world, they begin to feel real. Then they are spoiled and must be destroyed before they infect the troupe[...] Would you like to see Emphyrio once more? I have a puppet who is becoming perverse. I have warned and scolded but I continually find him looking across the footlights to the audience" (p. 183). As Ghyl turns to leave, Holkerwoyd arrestingly imagines what will happen after his death: "The years come fast. Some morning they'll find me lying stark [sic], with the puppets climbing over me, peering into my mouth, tweaking my ears" (p. 183).

Ghyl does finally learn how the legend ends, and also becomes privy to some surprising facts about his father's dual life (p. 188), but on returning to Halma the ramifications of the legend's basis in fact and the way that it continues to influence the planet's destiny unfold fascinatingly to provide a meditative conclusion after the frantic planet-hopping in the last quarter of the work.

The tropes of social and economic control, directed action and puppetry that are richly woven through the novel afford Emphyrio a semantic density which is further augmented by the denouement's revelations. Perfectly paced, with a meditative start that builds to a climax of inter-galactic mystery solving, Emphyrio is a rich and rewarding novel.

'Emphyrio died imploring the dark ones to the ways of man, and that they should curb their begotten monsters. They refuted him; they hung him to the wall on a nail. But the monsters, at first insensate, were now, through truth, of all folk the easiest. If there be here lesson or moral, it lies beyond the competence of him who inscribes this record.' (p. 186)

"The deception must be ended; there must be restitution." (p. 204)