As someone somewhere else has noted, hundreds and
thousands of babies will survive because of the Supreme Court Dobbs ruling today. And that’s
wonderful news.
As a reminder, I am pro-choice:
Four choices, actually.
1) Abstinence
2) Contraception
3) Adoption
and
4) Motherhood.
That’s it. Those are the only acceptable choices I’m
willing to concede.
Great job SCOTUS.
© 1984 by Alan Dean Foster
Alan Dean Foster – ADF, for this review – has a
special place in my heart, right behind Asimov and Silverberg and adjacent to
Goulart and Wolf. Who are these names? Well, you should know Asimov and Silverberg,
SF Grandmasters, writers who first introduced wee young Hopper to science
fiction. ADF, Goulart, and Wolf filled out that introduction. I must’ve read
twenty or so of the novels of these men before I entered my teenage years.
I first learned of ADF primarily through his novelizations
of science fiction movies. For my twelfth birthday an uncle bought me Alien. Through friends and magazines and
whatnot I knew about the Ridley Scott film and was super-excited about it, but
because of my age there was no way my parents would ever allow me to see it. So
I devoured the novel. Again and again.
Other ADF novels followed. Star Wars, ostensibly written by George Lucas but actually
ghost-written by Foster, was read that summer, quickly followed by The Black Hole. The early 80s saw me
burning through Krull, Outland, and The Thing. Then a long pause until 1991, where I remember reading a
roommate’s copy of an original ADF work, Cachalot.
In 2007 I tried another ADF original, Midworld,
the review of which in a very, very early blog posting can be found here. In
2013 I read his Splinter in the Mind’s
Eye, the supposed sequel to Star Wars
before Empire took its place, and
re-read The Black Hole for nostalgia’s
sake.
Thus my pedigree with ADF.
This copy of Voyage
to the City of the Dead I picked up in a used book store on Hilton Head,
SC, while visiting my in-laws way back in August of 2015. I remember reading 5
or 10 pages of it down there and being completely overwhelmed. Could be all the
activities we were doing – swimming, kayaking, sightseeing – or it could be the
dinner parties my in-laws constantly had. Or it could be the thick alien
society we’re thrust into in the opening pages. Regardless, it felt daunting
but I sensed it to be worthwhile, perhaps thinking back on my Midworld experience. I brought it home
and put it on the shelf, where it sat for six years, and took it down to Texas
with all my other possessions in the move last year.
What a wise choice that turned out to be!
Yes, the novel’s first chapter is dense as the reader
learns to familiarize himself with the world of the Mai. An intelligent humanoid
species I envisioned as hairless apes working the great river Skar, which
splits the planet Horseye nearly in half, from equator to northern pole. The temperature’s
a moist 115 degrees, and the Mai are traders and sailors who seem to have
internalized the best and worst of capitalism as sort of their spiritual
philosophy.
Oh – I forgot! Like any worthy science fiction or
fantasy novel, there’s a map! There’s also an elevation chart! Plus a
temperature elevation chart! You see, ADF is a master at creating ecosystems.
If that’s your thing, he’s your writer. Horseye seems to have not one, not two,
but three alien races. The Mai at sea level, plying their trade upon the Skar. The
great river cuts a deep valley nearly 8,000 meters deep through the continent.
So about halfway up that are the intelligent humanoid anteaters called the Tsla
(very like Tibetan lamas in the novel), and up on the “surface,” 8 kilometers
above the Skar, are tribes of Na, very much resembling, in my humble mind, the
Bumble from Rudolf the Red Nosed Raindeer. Each has its own society, customs,
language, beliefs, and temperament.
All this is introduced to us as we follow bickering
husband-and-wife scientists Etienne and Lyra Redowl as they journey from equator
to pole to map out the new world. The journey is done in their futuristic AI
riverboat, about the only thing keeping them alive on Horseye. Since Etienne’s
a geologist and Lyra’s a sociologist, the planet and its inhabitants come to
life to us through their discoveries and interactions.
That alone would make this a worthy book to read, but
there’s more. Not one, not two, but three double-crosses, all of which the
Redowls barely escape with their lives. The last takes us up to the northernmost
source of the Skar, where a character is revealed to be Something Else than we
suspect, and the Something Else reveals something so mind-blowing that I
hesitate to reveal it here on the off chance one of the tens of people who
might read this in the next century might want to take it upon himself to read Voyage. It gave me goosebumps, which is
a fairly uncommon yet very pleasant thing to experience when reading a book.
So, of course I give it an A+. Could be the best book
I’ve read this year so far, here at the halfway point. It’s part of ADF’s “Commonwealth”
series, a series of books set in a specific universe though not necessary
sharing the same characters. (Both Midworld
and Cachalot are Commonwealth
books.) I think next time I’m at the used books store I’ll search these types
of books out. The next time the SF bug hits me again (probably by September).
© 1963 by Marion Zimmer Bradley
OK, deep breath. Many weird feelings with this one.
First, the good.
This is my third time through The Colors of Space. The first time I read it must have been in the
late 70s, during my own personal Golden Age of Science Fiction (age 12), if not
a year or two earlier. I discovered it mysteriously on a shelf in my
grandparent’s basement, and only later did I figure it must have belonged to my
uncle, only eight years older than me. In short order I read it, and while a
lot of it sailed over my head, some scattered trivia in the novel and some
rudimentary SF tropes stayed with me for decades.
For example, one of the aliens in the story is named
Ringg. Ringg. With two g’s at the end. I vividly remembered it over the years,
long after I forgot the book’s title and authoress. Another plot point that
stuck with me was my first introduction to color blindness. Our hero undergoes
substantial plastic surgery to disguise himself among the bad aliens, who
cannot see color. Then, during a seemingly harmless conversation, he mentions
that a certain star is “green.” He catches himself and realizes no one else has
caught on to his mistake. At least, he thinks so, and the tension of
uncertainty ratchets up.
So I read it and it sailed away down the river of
forgetfulness, save for those two items.
About fifteen years ago, curious and nostalgic, I did
some web searching one afternoon using the key words “Ringg” and “color blind”
and, after numerous dead ends, landed upon the correct title. Ah! Time for a
re-read! Soon the postman brought the The
Colors of Space to my mailbox and I immediately commenced its re-read.
This happened the year before I started this blog, so I
did not review here in these electronic pages. I don’t remember much feeling
one way or the other, except that I enjoyed it. Some scenes in the beginning
and middle had a déjà vu feel to them, but of the ending it was as if I had undergone
a Lharian brain wipe (what our aliens do to you after you’ve traveled with them
between the stars).
Finally, about two months ago, I scored it in a local
bookstore as a reward for a stressful yet productive month of labor. After
reading a lot of military history and epics this spring, I decided to run
through a bunch of my SF paperbacks, and this was #3 on my list. I read it, for
the third time in my life, in four days.
And I loved it! To me, this is the quintessential
Golden Age science fiction story. Every young fan of SF needs to read this
story. It ranks right up there with all of Asimov and Heinlein’s “juveniles.”
The
Colors of Space is a concise, compact tale of a young man
avenging his father and giving mankind the “gift” of travel between the stars. Our
hero, young Bart Steel, is waiting for his dad at a Lhari spaceport. The Lhari
are a race of alien traders who alone know the secret of interstellar travel.
Turns out Bart’s dad has been killed by the Lhari, and a stranger impersonating
Bart’s father tells the young man he must finish his father’s quest: transform
himself into a Lhari, learn the secret – it has something to do with an “eighth
color” – and share it with his human masters. Bart follows through, but soon
learns that the Lhari may be more “human” than they present and the humans are
more “monsters” than they realize.
A fast paced tale to satisfy any youngling with an
interest in science, fiction, and science fiction. Some tense scenes, some
action scenes, and a satisfying conclusion where the real bad guys get it and
everyone ends up happy.
So, naturally, I grade this an A+. Glad I re-read it
that third time. Took me back to happy place in my childhood.
So why all the rumbling about weird feelings at the
beginning of this post?
Well, it has to do with something that happened
between my second and third reading of this book. Something I found out:
Marion Zimmer Bradley’s daughter came forward and
stated that she had been abused by her mother between the ages of 3 and 12. Her
father, too, was involved and had sexually abused other children, of which her
mother knew about. I believed he was convicted and may have spent time in
prison towards the end of his life, in 1993. Bradley herself got her reward in
1999.
In addition to the child sexual abuse, Bradley was a
hardcore feminist and extremely pro other perversions I will not go into in
this blog. She is probably most famous for her Mists of Avalon series, a feminist and pro other perversion take on
the Arthurian mythos. Fortunately, by the time my daughters were old enough to
read fantasy books on this level, I was aware of this woman’s deviancies, and I
was able to steer them away from these books.
For the past two or three years, I have been an
ardent anti-“Cancel Culture” man. But now I faced a dilemma before I picked up Colors of Space a third time. Do I re-read
a beloved work when the author’s disgusting personal life is pubic knowledge?
(At least, for those in the know.)
I was troubled, and really did give much thought to
whether I should read the book. Though I’d only be devoting three or four hours
to read it, it still would be three or four hours of my life I’d never get
back. And I am a firm believer in the GIGO application to the mind, body, and
soul – Garbage In, Garbage Out. Would I want this woman infecting my life with
her nastiness?
Hmmm.
Wisdom came from my youngest daughter, age 13. I had
spoken about this with my wife and oldest, too, but Patch came up with the
elegant solution. “Dad,” she said, “does she write about child abuse in her
novel?”
“No.”
“Then it’s okay to read it.”
That made sense to me. We talked over some other
possible examples. It’s okay to cancel OJ Simpson because he wrote a book about
murdering his wife, which he actually did (and another innocent person). It’s
not okay to cancel Pete Tchaikovsky because his countrymen invaded a bordering
nation unprovoked 130 years after his death. Or something like that. Or more
specifically, you shouldn’t cancel The Colors
of Space because of Bradley’s deviancies, but it’s okay to cancel The Mists of Avalon.
I dunno. It’s not an airtight hard-and-fast ironclad
rule, but it allowed me to read this childhood classic guilt free. YMMV.
© 1981 by Fred Saberhagen (novel-length treatment of a story © 1965)
The
Water of Thought was the second book in my current, half-dozen
“return to the old yellow SF paperback” reading run. It sat on my shelves a
relatively short time, a little over a year-and-a-half, meaning it was probably
the last book I purchased before I learned of our family relocation to Texas.
Not that there’s any meaning in that.
Anyway, like most of my paperback SF selections, it
was a sleek, swift read. Finished the 240-page novel in four days. I found that
once reading it I couldn’t put it down, but once I put it down, I didn’t feel
an incredible urge to pick it up again. Hmm. A weird relationship thus
developed between me and Water of Thought.
But I knew I’d finish it. First, it was too short to drop. Second, my interest
was piqued: I wanted to figure out what, exactly, this Water of Thought was.
Our story takes place on Kappa, a jungle planet with a
small contingent of human colonists living in a dome. Or a compound. Or a domed
compound. Not sure. But Kappa does have indigenous life, and that life can be
dangerous. Not the least are humanoid tribesman slightly lower on the
evolutionary scale than our colonists, as well as tribal hominids with the
intelligence of super smart gorillas with rudimentary language, who in turn
are, in large numbers, enslaved by the humanoid tribesman.
Got that?
We begin with rugged planeteer Boris Brazil lounging
on some well-deserved R&R with his lady friend, Brenda. Planeteers are kind
of like professional planet settlers, jacks-of-all-trade, who come in, help
domesticate a large chunk of a world, then move on to the next world. I liked
this, and I liked Boris’s single-mindedness.
He’s called back to the compound when one of the
anthropologists, Eddie Jones, goes rogue. Seems that the scientist was last
seen speaking with some tribal witch doctors, drank something, killed one of
the tribesmen, then disappeared in a suit. A suit which is basically a fully
armed and armored robotic second skin. Oh, and it turns out a year earlier
another anthropologist, Magnuson, had gone missing without a trace.
Care to guess what was in that bottle?
Yep. The Water of Thought.
Boris and Brenda, a helicopter pilot, take off in
pursuit. And thus the action begins.
I enjoyed it. Eddie ambushes Boris and Brenda, and
forces Boris to drink the Water. Now, to Eddie, the effect is to turn the man
into a raving addict who will do anything to get his fix of this liquid. To
Boris, it makes his will completely subservient to Eddie. Brenda in hiding, the
two men march off to find the source of the Water. Magnuson is found, set up as
sort of a benevolent Colonel Kurtz. The Water made him into a megalomaniac who
thinks he can manipulate evolution, and wants to bring enlightenment to the enslaved
hominids. There are more pursuits, a tribal initiation part test part trial, an
effort to set up an illegal “water” smuggling ring, murder, deception, and
betrayal.
Now, that’s all good. It was a nice tale that kept the
pages turning. But the main thing I wanted to know was what exactly this Water
is, and why it does to humans what it does. Several more drink it in the novel –
one becomes dictatorially evil, another is enflamed with lust, and third chucks
morality to wallow in greed. Does the water bring out our lowest, basic
instincts? If so, why does Boris simply lose his self-will? This was a major
thorn in my, er, brain when reading the book. Does it bring out our strongest
desire then? Or our most recent desire?
What the Water actually is revealed to be, is very,
very clever. A little gross, but clever. Though the book is four decades old, I
won’t spoil it. It had a very scientific edge to it, something like Hal Clement
would write though this is more soft science than he is wont to expound. Come
to think of it, the book had a very Silverbergian feel to it – as in Robert
Silverberg. It felt like a long-lost Silverberg novel, with Kappa’s highly
dangerous and occasionally creepy ecosphere. Though pleasantly surprised at the
Water’s “source,” the effects it had on others still didn’t make sense to me.
But maybe I misread a sentence somewhere. I dunno.
The armored body suits worn and the tricks and ruses
to get one’s enemies out of a suit I liked a lot. The villains were somewhat
one-dimensional, but got well-deserved satisfying comeuppances. Relationships
were refreshingly traditional, no doubt due to the source material being
written before 1965. And I absolutely loved the cringe-worthy names: Boris
Brazil, his lady friend Brenda, her friend Jane, Eddie Jones, Morton, Magnuson,
and Peter “Mayor Pete” Kaleta.
The
Water of Thought had a surprisingly touching scene in the
final chapter. How the death of a secondary character affected me! Killed by
mistake, without justification, without public knowledge of what this character
did for Boris. No one to know of its sacrifice … but there were hints in the
final pages that justice would be served.
In the couple hundred SF books I’ve read, I’ve only
read one other Saberhagen book, After the
Fact, a time travel tale of saving President Lincoln from John Wilkes Booth.
For some reason I always confuse him with Harry Turtledove, another author of
whom I’ve only read one work Worldwar: In
the Balance. (Turtledove’s book is an alternate history of World War II,
where aliens invade earth sometime in 1943. That series deserves more
exploration.)
I awarded an additional half-star because the book
contains – pictures! 32 black-and-white drawings of action scenes from the
novel. Only other paperbacks in which I saw something similar were Andre Norton’s
Voorloper and Philip Jose Farmer’s
Tarzan-ish Flight to Opar. Must’ve
been a late 70s / early 80s thing, these illustrations in sci fi paperbacks.
Grade: B+
Brenda dropping from a helicopter!
© 1973 by Andrew J. Offutt
This slim, 151-page SF paperback is the first in my current
detour in the “Quick Reads Long in the On-Deck Circle.” After War and Peace and a bunch of military
tomes on Napoleon and Richard Sharpe, I listed about a half-dozen of these
quickies for a side trip into nostalgia, reading mileage, and to get my science
fiction chops back. It was a pleasant read over six days, but I could’ve put it
away in half that time save for my daughter’s graduation and relatives flying
in and partying and dining out.
A short synopsis in honor of the novel’s shortness:
For nineteen years Earth has been locked in a brutal
territorial war with the Azulians. A space cruiser returning from the front
with refugees, casualties, and traumatized soldiers is hit by enemy fire and
all hands must abandon ship in three-man lifepods. One such pod containing
three burnt-out soldiers lands on the remote planet of Bor, whose civilization
is roughly akin to the Amish in late 19th-century America.
Rinegar is fifty-ish, a telepath, who spied with his
wife among the Azulians. She was caught and tortured to death and now he’s a hollow
shell of his former self. The other two are Bernie, a thirty-something man who
has the ability to telepath short distances, and Cory, a teen girl who has
powers of telekinesis, both also suffering war fatigue. These are our heroes.
To make a living on Bor they become carnies. Yep, that’s
right. They join a traveling circus, using their abilities to gain fame and
fortune, to ferret out corruption and cheating among the fair, and to win over
the carnival’s owner. A year or two goes by and they have achieved near fame on
the planet as they await rescue that may or may not come.
Had I read this at age 11 or 12, I’d have eaten it up.
Loved it. It was amusing to read as an adult of a somewhat mature age, but it
did hearken a bit back at those feelings of wonder, of “falling into a story,” I
had all those decades ago. Ray Bradbury could’ve turned this into an instant
classic.
Then, quite suddenly, an Azulian ship lands on Bor.
Soon the hostile aliens begin abducting Borean youths
to be shipped off planet as slave labor. Our three protagonists are faced with
a dilemma: give up fame, fortune, and comfort, or re-join the war effort and
put an end to this pre-invasion of the Enemy.
All in all, I would have given it a solid B. It might
have been an A if I read it as a kid, but judging on the plot, the characters,
and giving credit that this gentle throwback of a novel actually pulled me in,
I give it a solid B. It would have been a B+ though, if not for the shocking,
abrupt, and surprising death of one of our main characters in the last two
pages! Perhaps Offutt was trying to bring some grit to the story. I dunno. Felt
out of place to me, so I had no choice but to sadly put that “+” back in the
writing desk drawer.
I don’t know much about Offutt. I could’ve sworn I’d
read at least one of his books before, which is probably why I picked it up in
the first place. But in reality I confused him with Chad Oliver, whose novel Shadows in the Sun I read eleven years
ago. Offutt has somewhat of a checkered past, in that in addition to an SF bibliography
of about twenty novels in the ’70s and ’80s, he also authored “at least 420
pornographic / erotic works under seventeen different pen names”, if Wikipedia is
to be trusted (no pun intended). He also penned a trio of Conan stories in his
travels.
All that aside, The
Galactic Rejects felt a bit like an overlong short story, but one that I
enjoyed nevertheless. It would be interesting had Offutt did the expanded
universe to this book, as is done so much nowadays, as my curiosotiy had been
piqued by the Earthling-Azulian War.
