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.
