By T. J. Bass, © 1974
What a pleasure it was to read this book! This is what good, solid SF is all about. Broadly speaking, it’s this: improbably characters that seem more real than the people you sit next to in your cubicle every day; societies that have morphed over the centuries that become either a warning for ours or a promise; an epic that spans over centuries, yet still manages to tell a single, unified story; intelligences that come in all sizes, shapes, and chemistries; unexpected twists and turns that still conform with the rules the author has set up; and a life-and-death tale that grips you and doesn’t let go.
I found most of that in The Godwhale.
On the surface, the novel seems to follow to many manifestations of Larry Dever over the course of several thousand years. In a bizarre accident brought on by a combination of greed and innocence, Larry is cut in half. Thanks to his society’s medical advances, he is able to recover and get about with the aid of a robotic lower half, complete with motor skills, kidney-replicating duties, and personality. But Larry is now unable to do that one thing that all men need to do, so, depressed, he opts for suspended animation, narrowly declining a berth on a ship to the stars.
He awakes in a dystopia – its name, “the Hive” says it all – and barely escapes with his life. How he does and who he meets sets up most of the novel and conforms to the criteria in my first paragraph. A whole slew of characters – Big Har, a “tweenwaller” (lives “between the walls” ie, outside the Hive’s grasp); ARNOLD, a genetically superior warrior created from the oldest, hardiest existing DNA, Larry’s; a society of underwater dwellers who live off the stolen fruits of the Hive’s harvesting machines; a Rorqual Maru, the Godwhale itself, a cyborg plankton rake in search of mythical Man to serve again. A whole slew of secondary characters, human and machine, compliment this cast.
The novel quickly settles in to a conflict between the Hive and the Benthics, those underwater-evolved hunter-gatherers. Simply put, the Hive destroys or assimilates anything and everything non-Hive. Eventually Larry and his friends all converge onto the Rorqual and play the decisive role in the struggle. If the novel has a fault at all, it is that the outcome is a little too assured; I would have preferred to see greater pain and greater difficulties in the overcoming. Still, though, the inherent nastiness of the Hive was enough to keep the pages turning: those bastards must have it coming to them, and I wanted to see it through.
In an earlier post I suggested, not having any knowledge of T. J. Bass, that the man came from either the medical or science fields. His writing, while not authentically hard SF, certainly comes close. The man knows his subjects. The descriptions of the medical advances and treatments, which the book is full of, were downright convincing, to the point where often I’d say to myself, “Man, I gotta write like that.” Turns out Bass is a doctor with a solid background in genetics, which explains everything. Pushing 80, I don’t believe he’s currently active. In fact, after a period of short-story writing in the late 60s, The Godwhale was published in 1974 (nominated for a Nebula Award for Best Novel), as a sequel to his only other book, Half Past Human. Both that source novel as well as the short stories will be put on my list, and eagerly sought for among the old yellowing paperbacks of the various used book stores I frequent.
Grade: A.
What a pleasure it was to read this book! This is what good, solid SF is all about. Broadly speaking, it’s this: improbably characters that seem more real than the people you sit next to in your cubicle every day; societies that have morphed over the centuries that become either a warning for ours or a promise; an epic that spans over centuries, yet still manages to tell a single, unified story; intelligences that come in all sizes, shapes, and chemistries; unexpected twists and turns that still conform with the rules the author has set up; and a life-and-death tale that grips you and doesn’t let go.
I found most of that in The Godwhale.
On the surface, the novel seems to follow to many manifestations of Larry Dever over the course of several thousand years. In a bizarre accident brought on by a combination of greed and innocence, Larry is cut in half. Thanks to his society’s medical advances, he is able to recover and get about with the aid of a robotic lower half, complete with motor skills, kidney-replicating duties, and personality. But Larry is now unable to do that one thing that all men need to do, so, depressed, he opts for suspended animation, narrowly declining a berth on a ship to the stars.
He awakes in a dystopia – its name, “the Hive” says it all – and barely escapes with his life. How he does and who he meets sets up most of the novel and conforms to the criteria in my first paragraph. A whole slew of characters – Big Har, a “tweenwaller” (lives “between the walls” ie, outside the Hive’s grasp); ARNOLD, a genetically superior warrior created from the oldest, hardiest existing DNA, Larry’s; a society of underwater dwellers who live off the stolen fruits of the Hive’s harvesting machines; a Rorqual Maru, the Godwhale itself, a cyborg plankton rake in search of mythical Man to serve again. A whole slew of secondary characters, human and machine, compliment this cast.
The novel quickly settles in to a conflict between the Hive and the Benthics, those underwater-evolved hunter-gatherers. Simply put, the Hive destroys or assimilates anything and everything non-Hive. Eventually Larry and his friends all converge onto the Rorqual and play the decisive role in the struggle. If the novel has a fault at all, it is that the outcome is a little too assured; I would have preferred to see greater pain and greater difficulties in the overcoming. Still, though, the inherent nastiness of the Hive was enough to keep the pages turning: those bastards must have it coming to them, and I wanted to see it through.
In an earlier post I suggested, not having any knowledge of T. J. Bass, that the man came from either the medical or science fields. His writing, while not authentically hard SF, certainly comes close. The man knows his subjects. The descriptions of the medical advances and treatments, which the book is full of, were downright convincing, to the point where often I’d say to myself, “Man, I gotta write like that.” Turns out Bass is a doctor with a solid background in genetics, which explains everything. Pushing 80, I don’t believe he’s currently active. In fact, after a period of short-story writing in the late 60s, The Godwhale was published in 1974 (nominated for a Nebula Award for Best Novel), as a sequel to his only other book, Half Past Human. Both that source novel as well as the short stories will be put on my list, and eagerly sought for among the old yellowing paperbacks of the various used book stores I frequent.
Grade: A.
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