Tower at the Edge of Time

[One major spoiler]


We all have guilty pleasures, right?

Let’s see; how can I phrase this to ensure the proper degree of respect …

Guilty pleasures to me are often books I read as a pre-teen, books found from that wonderful and fantastic 5 x 10 foot piece of real estate known as the Science Fiction shelves in my town library. As well as other books that I did not read back then, but written by those same authors. They have a lot of common denominators. They’re slim. They’re extremely quick reads. They have funky psychedelic hard covers. If they’re paperback, they look, feel, and smell different from any other type of paperback. Probably because they’re mostly all out of print.

This will sound insulting, but it’s not meant to be. They’re like watching television. Reading Norman Mailer or Borges or Tolkien or Kipling or Lovecraft … to me, that’s like going to the theater, popcorn in hand, and being enraptured by something magical, your complete focus held on the screen, never wanting it to end. These guilty pleasures I’m talking about is like watching a good 22-minute episode of your favorite show on the tube. Am I making myself clear?

Tower at the Edge of Time, by Lin Carter, was a guilty pleasure.

It’s all too silly to go into in any depth. In a sentence, we follow a Conan-like swordsman in a distant, futuristic galaxy, forced into a quest to retrieve all the treasures of all the civilizations that ever existed, held in a fabled tower found only millions of years in the future, moments before the complete Cold Death of the universe. Whew! That’s all?

But the surprising thing is, I liked it a lot.

The characters were a little clunky, true, and the plot was perhaps a tad too much to stuff into a 135-page paperback. It’s the ideas and concepts that fascinate me. Yes, Carter violates the “show, don’t tell” rule of weaving a tale. We’re told about cultures and social mores and whatnot, all the daily frictions you’d see in a multicultural alien bazaar or cantina. He tells us about vast empires that had burst on the scene to dominate with iron fist, only to decline and fade into ash and memory. We’re even told of the protagonist’s major badassery, a lot more than we’re shown it. But that is a lot of material to cram in to what’s probably a 60,000 word novel.

Still, it was good. I thought Carter’s version of hyperspace, the “Interplenum,” was neat. There was a cage match duel, only with weapons of mental thought, that was an interesting twist. Even more cooler were the visions of the millions of future years the characters, in ethereal form, behold as they accelerate in time through to the Tower. And what our characters find at the end of their search is not gold doubloons times infinity. They find a whispering alien voice offering some sayings that you could find in the Old Testament Book of Proverbs.

His writing style is predictable: lots of juicy adjectives for colors, creating a visual feast in the mind’s eye. And everything is NOUN + “of somewhere alien-sounding.” Such as –

“I am Thane of Zha!”
“Fear the Green Lion of Zarzamathool”
“The Black Eye of Ygg”
“The fiery purple liquor of Valtomé …”

Carter was a kind of visionary, too, I suppose. The book was published in 1968, and although I am in no way proposing that he was source material for any of this, you’ll find foreshadowings of –

Jedi Luke doing battle with that big beastie while Jabba and his coterie, with Leia in chains, watch; Roland the gunslinger’s quest to find the Black Tower in Stephen King’s fantasy series; the Star Wars cantina scene; the journey through the monolith in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The writing surprised me. While there are chunks of hacky prose, and his attitude towards women is keeping them as insultingly one-dimensional as Fay Wray in King Kong, Carter tells a good story, and keeps it moving. Occasionally I’d be floored by a really neat word that I hadn’t come across before, or a turn of phrase which made me pause. I don’t know much about him other than he wrote dozens of books similar to Tower at the Edge of Time, often creating four or five-book series (ka-ching!). He was influential more as an editor and a critic, and wrote an early analysis of Tolkien’s work, long before it was fashionable to do so, which I need to find. But he was not to have a happy life; from what I understand he died relatively young, in poverty, in a town near mine in the mid-80s, after a few years painfully dealing with alcoholism and cancer.

He’s always on my list of authors to keep on the radar when I go used book hunting.

An early post on another of Carter’s works here.