Night of Light

© 1966 by Philip Jose Farmer


All right, I’m probably going to get the finer details wrong, but it goes something like this: Boonta is the goddess of the citizens of Dante’s Joy, a planet whose star periodically enables brain waves to materialize, uh, materially. Got it? That’s the starting point.

Here’s more: every time this star irradiates in this crazy way, the culture calls it the “Night of Light.” Not everyone can handle the Night of Light, however, particularly off-worlders such as earthlings. These individuals are administered the “Sleep,” which allows you to spend the weeklong Night of Light in the slumberland. Deeply sedated slumberland. Because during the Night your innermost thoughts and desires become manifest, and, well, for some if not most of us, having your innermost thoughts and desires could tend to become a trifle bit violent.

Where does the goddess Boonta come in? Well, during these Nights of Light she somehow chooses two groups of six men to mystically impregnate her. Which group does determines which of her sons takes form: Yess, the good god, or Algul, the evil one. These beings are flesh-and-blood and can be killed; but they live on in subsequent manifestations. Farmer’s more than a little hazy on the ugly details and timelines here, but it serves well for the novel’s main story.

Carmody is a man without a conscious. An evil man, a petty thief always on the make for the big score and one who’s not afraid of a little torture, mayhem, or murder to get there. He fears nothing, he says. Indeed, he is on Dante’s Joy partly to avoid Raspold – “the galactic Sherlock Holmes – and partly to aid two priests from a futuristic Catholic Church investigating the Night of Light and Boontism. Just how and why, though, isn’t explicitly stated.

However, once the Night ensues, it’s revealed that Carmody is there to assassinate Yess, the current manifestation of Boonta’s child. Several interesting interludes lude, including manifestations of the pregnant wife Carmody murdered and our anti-hero having his finger stuck in the mouth of a statue as the two groups of six men converge on him after he’s performed his deicide.

Flash forward thirty-five years. Carmody is now himself a priest, having had a wholehearted conversion sometime soon after the incidents on Dante’s Joy. Now he’s there to prevent the assassination latest Boonta manifestation – Yess, again – of whom he is one of the six fathers.

Got it?

Though the story never really comes together as a cohesive whole, there is lots and lots and lots of interesting stuff here. I absolutely love when science fiction writers create their own religions (L. Ron Hubbard obviously exempted here). I would have liked a little more clarifications on the hows and whens and whys of the plot, but I guess that’s just Farmer being Farmer. The characters are the centerpieces, and Carmody-point-two actually greatly appealed to me. The man knows how to write suspense: there’s a he’s-bound-and-gagged-and-gonna-be-tortured-to-death scene that I couldn’t put down because I knew he’d escape, but how, man, how?!

My grade for Night of Light: solid-B, but a definite candidate for a re-read.


* * * * *

Neat stuff:


“ … I could swim through her blood, or anybody else’s, to reach my goal.”

* * * * *

“If I’m caught before I get to my own vault, I’ll have to go through the Night, willy-nilly. And once started, there’s no holding back. It’s all black and white then; you either get through or you don’t. At the end of the seventh day, you are god, corpse, or monster.”

* * * * *

Yess raised his feathery eyebrows. “Not really. It is obvious you are a disciple of Algul. It shines out from every pore of your skin, it radiates with every beat of your heart. There is evil on your breath.”

* * * * *

The pain of destroying himself was unendurable.

* * * * *

A few of the older people had painted legs, but the rest wore boswells – tights on the surface of which appeared moving pictures of the wearer at various stages of his life, and personal statistics or capsule biographies. One expensively dressed woman had boswells which portrayed in cartoons the highlights of her life.

* * * * *

“What would have happened if we had just walked across the floor at that spot?”

“Nothing especially fatal,” Tand replied. “The ceiling above that point, which looks like solid stone, is a trap door. It would open, and a great quantity of sticky jelly would drop and imprison you. At the same time, an alarm would go off in the Temple and a light on a control board, indicating the alarm location, would be illuminated. You’d be held fast until the Temple guards came to dissolve the jelly. You might not be alive; it would depend on whether the jelly happened to cover your nostrils and mouth.”

* * * * *

Abruptly he was in a gigantomachy of land monsters. These, like the thalassic things behind him, were eating or chasing each other or mating with a frenzy …

* * * * *

[Ed. – a THALASSIC GIGANTOMACHY!]