Book Review: The Water of Thought

 

© 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!