Guardian

© 1980, by Thomas F. Monteleone

[minor spoilers]


I wrote elsewhere on this blog (I think) of a book of short stories by Thomas Monteleone that I read in college some 25 years ago. It has stuck with me all these years. Two, in particular, still send chills down my spine. Science fiction, but with a generous injection of nasty horror. The dozen or so tales revolved around the city of Chicago, how it gradually gains sentience over a couple of centuries.

Anyway, down at my really, really cool used book store that I visit once or twice a year, I came across two novels by Monteleone that I knew basically nothing about. On the basis of that lost short story work, I picked both novels up. Two weeks ago I breezed through Guardian in four days. That book cooked.

But what a strange book! And I’m not referring necessarily to the story and the characters. Almost immediately I got the sense that I was reading something like the Cliff Notes to a vanished epic tale. Later, I refined that metaphor to listening to a medley overture of a now-forgotten-to-the-ages rock opera.

What do I mean, specifically?

Guardian starts off with a dozen-page overview of a vaguely familiar world. We’re reading an excerpt from some future history, and by “future” I mean something like three or four thousand years ahead. The map shows a land resembling the coastlines of the Mediterranean. Any lands beyond the couple-hundred-mile-wide shores devolve into deadly desert wastes or smooth sheets of radioactive glass. Something terrible has happened in this world’s past, our distant future.

However, they are aware of us. Or rather, relics of us (war machines, mostly, buried in the sands). They refer to us as the “First Age.” One of the most fabled relics of the First Age are the Guardians, sentient machines tasked with defending cities. A Guardian has never been found, but long have they been rumored to still exist, hidden among the edges and outskirts of contemporaneous civilization.

In this semi-medieval Arabian-nights post-Apocalyptic world, five main characters are sketched and then fully enfleshed through action, dialogue, and stealthy exposition. I liked that, and I liked them. One character happens to be – a robot, a sentinel of sorts for the eponymous entity of the novel. Then, a little too quickly for my tastes, all the characters come together and begin The Quest.

A lot more too quickly for my tastes, the Guardian is found, in something like two months of searching. Searching an area roughly the size of northern Africa, the Middle East, and southern Europe combined, in a glorified Lincoln Navigator, with no hints or clues or aerial photography or whatnot. Nuttin’. There’s a perfunctory fight with some desert pirates, and then – they stumble upon the ziggurat that houses the Guardian.

Okay. I can forgive the novel because I think Monteleone wants to get to more meatier issues: in this case, exploring what exactly this Guardian is. Our characters become unwilling guests of this strange AI, which manifests itself as a Kindly Old Gentleman. One by one, separately, our characters are put through a series of tests – tests in the form of morality plays straight out of Greek mythology.

Interesting. Now: why? Is it really a test? If so, what type of a test? Are our character’s lives at stake? If it’s not a test, what information is Guardian trying to obtain? Is it amnesiac? Is it insane? Or is there some further, ulterior motive the reader can’t even guess at?

Suffice it to say that while I found the ending satisfying, the whole thing came to a close, again, a little too fast. Which leaves me scratching my head as I try to figger out all these science fiction writers. Monteleone has enough material here to make a 500-page epic masterpiece. He could conceivably and easily expand it to a trilogy or one of those ongoing sequelologies you see so much of in SF & Fantasy nowadays.

But it clocks in at a sveldt 182 pages, and I feel strangely somewhat dissatisfied. As a pessimistic, underutilized square-peg-in-a-round-hole, I enjoy being immersed in fascinating new worlds, and the lands of Guardian are lands I want to spend time exploring.

So, balancing out the vision with the austere sense of economy, I grade the novel a solid B.