The Sentinel (A. C. Clarke, 1983)

 Arthur C. Clarke. The Sentinel. (1983) Collection of short stories, including the one that sparked 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clarke provides an intro to each piece, telling about the circumstances of composition and publication. These are interesting in a tabloidy way, but add nothing to the stories. Clarke is very good at imagining technical problems and their effects. He’s careful to keep extrapolation as close to known science as possible. His characters tend to be 2.5D or flatter. Like pretty well everybody at the time, he assumes the geopolitical realities of the Cold War would continue into the relatively far future.

But his tight focus on the tale keeps us reading. He’s good at advancing plot with dialogue. His early work was published in the SciFi pulps, whose editors wanted a high narrative-to-words ratio. The resulting conciseness hides flaws that longer works would have revealed.

A good collection. Essential for the fan, and likely a pleasant diversion for anyone else.

** to ***

The Defiant Agents (Norton, 1962)

Andre Norton. The Defiant Agents. (1962) From the back-cover blurb: “Travis Fox, once the unwilling captive of the run-away spaceship Galactic Derelict, has volunteered - eagerly - for the mission to colonize Topaz....” Some kind of mind-alteration reverts the colonists to their Apache ancestry. A similar technique has reverted a rival group of Russians to their Mongol ancestry, and so we have a conflict. The Russians are also subject to vicious mind-control which makes them robot-like slaves to their (unchanged) Russian masters. The assumption that far future space travel would be dominated by the rival USA and USSR demonstrates the common argument that5 SF is about the present. The mind-altering  element recalls the Cold War fear of "brain washing".

There are also mysterious ruins left behind by previous occupants of the planet. This subplot is scanted, I think because pulp publishers wanted short books.

Norton has worked out most of the glitches in this set-up, and provides a typical mid-century pulp entertainment, weak on character and ambience, but strong on plot. It reads like a magazine serial. A pleasant entertainment for SF fans, this is an early work. Norton became one of the masters. **

Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future

Mike Higgs, compiler. Dan Dare: Operation Saturn (1989). Originally Eagle V3-47, February 1953, to V5-31, May 1954.

Granny Morgan subscribed to the Eagle for us. The cover comic on every issue was Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future. He wore a very 1950-ish uniform, he had a batman who was loveable working-class clown, and he showed proper deference to his commanding officer, a grey-mustachioed figure of probity. His sidekicks were a Yank and a Frenchman, but of course Dan the Englishman was the leader of this multi-national space force. The space ships were technically impossible. The first trip was to Venus, home of two antagonistic tribes separated by a fiery equator. All very simplistic, but it satisfied our desire for space opera.

This story begins with “black cats”, robot ships that attack and destroy inner-planet space ships. Their origin is Saturn. An evil scientist-entrepreneur offers to help the space force on their mission. He is of course a traitor who will deliver Earth to the evil emperor who wants to rule the solar system. And so on. Dare and the oppressed races who inhabit Saturn’s moons win, of course, and the would-be emperor dissolves into glittery stuff, maybe gas or maybe dust.

Rereading this story, I see what I didn’t see at the time: the jingoistic assumption that Britain would rule the space-waves, that English daring would solve all problems, that the lesser races needed the leadership of Dare, that the other powers would happily cede leadership to Britain, etc. Eagle was founded by an Anglican clergyman who wanted to counter-act the influence of Beano and other English comics, and the increasing influence of American comics. Eagle was printed on slick paper, with lots of wholesome content, such as centre-spreads illustrating and describing interesting technical achievements. Dan Dare served as the hero-model that would raise a generation of wholesome and upright English boys to wholesome and upright English manhood, ready to take their wholesome and rightful places in the post-war utopia. Or something like that.

We collected our copies. Before we came to Canada, I cut out the centre-spreads dealing with railways. I kept them for years. When the Dan Dare comics were compiled into books, my brother subscribed. This one was an extra copy that he offered to me. I was glad to have it. Rereading it triggered nostalgic memories of 11 Broad Walk, Sunday walks with our uncle and the dog, and listening to radio comedy shows with Grandpa that Granny disapproved of. The Dan Dare story is a slap-dash creation; no publisher would waste ink on it nowadays. It could have been done more carefully, with more plausible physics, fully developed characters, and aliens that were more than funny coloured humans. As it is, it was a nostalgia trip for me. **

Starlight (Bester, 1976): Classics from the Sci-Fi Golden Age.

 Alfred Bester. Starlight (1976) A combination of two previous anthologies. Bester is IMO an under-rated sci-fi author. He was a competent genre writer, and several of his sci-fi stories are classics. For example They Don’t Make Life Like They Used To, which tells of a man and a woman marooned in a city after an unexplained catastrophe that removed all other humans. She’s careful to tot up all her “purchases” at the stores. He’s anxious to find a TV repairman so that he can watch his favourite shows. Read it to find out what happens. The twist at the end is typical of Bester’s stories. He wrote for a market and did it well. I enjoyed re-reading this collection. ** to ****.

The Door To Anywhere (Pohl, 1967)

Frederik Pohl. Door To Anywhere (1967) Retitled reprint of The Tenth Galaxy Reader. Pohl’s selections are all worth reading; several have become classics of short science fiction. The 60s saw a shift from techno space opera to fictions speculating about the social and psychological effects of technical progress. Or rather, innovation; the stories generally clarify that innovation and progress are not synonyms.

Two samples: The Tunnel Under the World, in which miniature androids living in a miniature world harbour the minds and memories of real people, thus making them ideal test subjects for adverting campaigns.

An Elephant for the Prinkip, in which a spacer contracts to deliver an elephant to a collector of beasts. It’s a joke tale, but fun. The narrator ends up with are responsibility he didn’t count on. He should’ve read every word of the contract.

A good record of what sold in the 1960s sci-fi market. Recommended for any sci-fi fan. *** 

Millennium (Varley, 1983)

John Varley. Millennium. (1983) One of the best time-travel stories I’ve read. The frame is simple enough: In the far future, humans have adapted to the Earth they polluted, but those adaptations enable survival barely long enough to reproduce. Homo sapiens is dying out.

A Gate provides access to the past. It’s used to gather as many genetically strong humans as possible in order to send them off to a distant planet to start over and recreate human civilisation. The team grabs people who are about to die, thus preventing any disturbance of the time stream.

During a snatch of people from a plane about to crash, a stunner is left behind. It’s up to team leader Louise Baltimore to recover it. But Bill Smith, a smart investigator of plane crashes, notices something’s not quite right. Complications ensue.

Varley is an excellent narrator of the work of investigating plane crashes, and has invented plausible logistics of time travel and the reasons for the Project. His characterisation is good enough that we care for the people. Smith and Baltimore, the two main narrators, are both damaged by life and  circumstances, which makes their decisions and hence the results more believable.

Recommended. ***

Fred Pohl's Best (The Best of Frederik Pohl, 1975)

Frederik Pohl. The Best of Frederik Pohl (1975) Pohl wrote his first SF stories while still in high school. After a few stints as editor, he withdrew, but re-emerged some years later. The range and weirdness of his invention reminds me of Philip K. Dick, but his tone is lighter, and his satire milder than Dick’s. Pohl is interested in the effects of technological and social changes. He’s also interested in projecting current trends into the future and developing them to absurdity. He’s especially annoyed by advertising, by the relentless push to produce and consume more and more. He knows the tricks of manipulation using language, and his best stories demonstrate their effectiveness rather too well.
     Like many SF writers of the time, he tends to ignore of ecology, usually because ecology would complicate the story. “The Midas Touch” for example supposes a system of over-production and hence over-consumption. As satire on the consumer society, on the unquestioning assumption that ever-increasing production is the purpose of the economy, it’s well done. But the system would have collapsed from ecological exhaustion long before it reached the absurd levels of consumption portrayed. So Pohl ignores the ecological implications of over-consumption because he wants to make another point: That we are trapped in boxes of our own making, and so we persist in solving problems that would simply disappear if we changed our assumptions.
     The motif of unsuspected invasion by hostile aliens figures in several of the tales. Some critics have suggested this is an expression of the Cold War fear of Communist subversion. But the stories work just as well, and perhaps better, read simply as warnings that the Universe is likely a very hostile place. I enjoyed (re)-reading these stories Recommended. *** to ****

The Dark Tower (C. S, Lewis)

 C. S. Lewis. The Dark Tower. Edited by Walter Hooper. (1977) A posthumous collection of miscellaneous works, some rescued from the bonfire Lewis's brother made of unpublished drafts and other papers. They demonstrate Lewis’s inventiveness, and his ability to make abstractions concrete. I did not read the (incomplete) title story past the first two or three pages, but the shorter pieces held my interest.
      It’s a pity that Lewis was unable to finish his riff on Menelaus and Helen of Troy. He posits that Helen has aged, as have Menelaus and the other Greek heroes. Trouble is, the Greek soldiers would never accept a plain(ly) middle-aged woman as a prize worth their ten years hard fighting, not to mention the deaths of their comrades. So what’s Menelaus to do? He hopes that Egyptian sorcerers can provide him with a beautiful counterfeit, but just as they call on the new Helen to appear, the manuscript breaks off. Bummer.
      Mixed recommendation of ** to ****.

Two Sci-Fi Anthologies: Pohl and Nebula Awards

 

Frederik Pohl. Day Million (1970) In his introduction, Pohl says that these tales have only two things in common: One is they were written by “myself” – I put it like that because I’m not really entirely sure that that 20-year-old who banged out It’s A Young World is much like the 50-year-old who is telling you about it now. The other is that are all “science fiction.” He goes on to puzzle over the label for the genre, noting that much “science fiction” contains no science at all. At the time he wrote, the genre was still widely dissed as adolescent trash. But many of the classics Gulliver's Travels, 1984) are in fact what we label “science fiction”. If we consider any fiction to be an extended answer to “What if?”, then all fiction is “science fiction”.
     Pohl wrote for the pulps, which means he had to write stories that sold, which means that they couldn’t be too different. Readers expect both the familiar and the new, but the new had better be a variation or extension of the familiar. Johnson said that the purpose of art is “to make the new familiar and the familiar new”. “Science fiction” is the art that specialises in that endeavour. Pohl was a master. The story he wrote when he was 20 years old still stretches the reader’s expectations. The world it describes has been set up to enable the immortal leaders of the stellar empire(s) to recover their psychological equilibrium and emotional strength.
      Any of Pohl’s tales is worth reading. *** to ****

James Blish. Nebula Award Stories Number Five (1970) The three award-winning stories, plus three add-ons, and a couple of essays about the state of science fiction in the 1960s, which I didn’t read. The stories are all worth reading. The best I think is Ursula Leguin’s Nine Lives, a meditation on what makes us individuals, via the fancy that a team of ten clones would feel and act as one. When nine of them are killed, the survivor is faced with the a life of appalling loneliness.
   Terror also figures in Silverberg’s Passengers: he posits invasion by entities that “ride” humans by taking over their brains. It’s a literal take on enthusiasm, which originally meant being inhabited by a god (en- “in” thus- “god” -(i)asm “state or condition”). Recall Shakespeare’s “As flies are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport.”
     *** to ****

Del Rey's Mortals and Monsters

 

Lester del Rey. Mortals and Monsters (1965) Del Rey was a good journeyman writer. He supplied the pulp fiction trade with reliably entertaining tales, many of which suggested deeper questions than his protagonists tangled with. The irony wasn’t lost on his readers, though: The guy who invented time-travel by stealing a time-travel machine from a museum erected in his memory gets himself trapped in an eternal loop, a whirlpool in the river of time. The reader exists outside the fictional universe and sees the loop that’s hidden from the thief.  So who or what is the observer of our universe, watching us drifting on the river of time?
     A man whose body rejects the rejuvenation treatments realises that a limited life-span has more value than an unlimited one. An autonomous robot who doesn’t understand instinct learns what it is when his team recreates a human. An alien stranded on Earth manages to persuade a human to help him get home (but it’s a tougher story than the movie ET). And many more. Pulp fiction is underrated: the authors use the expected tropes and stereotypes, but the must make their tales newer than last month’s publications, so they ask questions that can lead us into the most subtle and profound of the enigmas that puzzle us.
     A good collection. ** to ***

Aliens and Other Strangers: Dickson's The Stranger.

 

Gordon R. Dickson. The Stranger (1987) It seems our obsession with extra-terrestrial life has needed assuaging for centuries. One of the earliest fantasy fictions was written in the 1600s. The traveller used geese to fly him to the moon, where he encountered aliens. Of course, in that century Europeans encountered many new peoples. Travellers’ tales were very popular. Extending the itch for exploration stories to the Moon was I think an inevitable step, even though the technology of the time mean it was speculative fiction.
     Dickson, like most SF writers, riffs on the Alien, and does so better than most. Some are stranded on Earth, some are sought by Earthlings, some are denizens of the far future, one is a machine that manages global life (and tolerates no opposition). Like all tales about encounters with the Stranger, they tell us as much about the teller as the told. Dickson has a generally optimistic view of humankind: his protagonists usually prevail. The dangers come from human hybris, stupidity, or moral lethargy.
     The collection includes work from the 1950s to the 80s. The earliest stories can be read as expressions of the Western fear of Communist domination: the Stranger disguises appearance and intention. The later stories explore the notion of “stranger” in the widest sense: we humans are the strangest critters we know. Worth reading. ** to ****

Stories by Asimov (Buy Jupiter!)

 Isaac Asimov. Buy Jupiter (1975) A collection of mostly short-short stories, which range from shaggy-dog jokes to parables. Asimov writes a short note about each story’s genesis and publishing history, which together form a sketchy autobiography of his life from the 1940s to the 1970s. All of the stories raise or suggest deep questions. Asimov’s strengths are dialogue and the character sketch, well suited to the short story.
     The title story imagines aliens who want Jupiter as a billboard to be viewed as their starships pass by our solar system. But they aren’t as canny as Earthlings when it comes to advertising, so they don’t realise they should also ensure they have the rights to Saturn and the other outer planets. One of Asimov's repeated theses is that the outlier, the oddball, the “unsettled mind” are the creative ones that drive what little progress homo sapiens has achieved. (This thesis shapes the Foundation series.) I wouldn’t go that far: These people drive change, and change is just as likely to be regress as progress, when it’s not merely a ineffectual distraction from the orderly flow of the daily round.
     I enjoyed this book, reading most of it one evening, and finishing it the next morning. ** to ****

 Update 2021-08-15: Re-read the whole thing this past week. Discovered that I'd forgotten most of the stories, which shows that Asimov's fiction isn't especially memorable. It was clearer than ever that these short tales are more or less elaborate jokes: a slow misleading build-up, a quick delivery, and a punch-line to underscore the point. They were all funny, albeit several of them  macabre jokes. Still, I enjoyed reading them. Maybe I'll remember them better now. If, that is, I really want to. Same ratings.

Unintended consequences: Noninterference (Harry Turtledove)

 

Harry Turtledove. Noninterference (19881). The Federation Survey Service is surveying Bilbeis IV. The local ruler, a woman of remarkable character, is dying of cancer. The Terrans decide to give her “immune system amplifiers”. The Bilbeis biology is close enough to human for the drug to work, but different enough to have unforeseen consequences. Those consequences and their effects provide the bones of the plot. Turtledove adds convincing characters and sociological insights to make a well-constructed entertainment that also asks serious questions about governance, polity, bureaucracy, historical hinge points, and of course the effects of individual quirks on other people’s plans.
     Turtledove is also known for alternate histories and historical fiction. His Wiki bibliography lists an enormous number of books. This one I  rate well above average for the genre: ***

The Martians are Coming, the Martians are Coming!

Frederik Pohl. The Day the Martians Came (1988) So the first fully staffed expedition to Mars accidentally discovers Martians, who live underground in tunnels that their ancestors must have built. That’s the first chapter in a series of tales that show how humans, well, Americans mostly, react to the news. Everyone is out for a buck or some other advantage. The Martians look somewhat like seals with more leg-like flippers. They like to huddle together and enjoy each other’s company. Apart from eating, that's all they do, really.
     Excerpts from magazines, scientific papers, Congressional records, media interviews, etc punctuate the narrative and display the official reactions. All the narrative threads come together in the final chapter, in which Pohl dispenses some poetic justice, just so’s we won’t totally depressed by his satiric insights into our weaknesses and vices.
     A nicely done satire. Pohl has a good eye and ear for the self-delusions that underpin most of the damage we inflict on ourselves and each other. ***

Another Dickson anthology: Ancient, My Enemy

Gordon R. Dickson. Ancient, My Enemy (1974) Another selection by Dickson. The title story tells of conflict between an intelligent alien species and the human colonisers. The planet suffers terrible day to night temperature changes, the aliens are cannibals (because there’s very little plant life), and have a culture of individual violence. This does not end well.
    The other tales are mostly ones I’ve read either in their original magazine publication or in later anthologies. Rereading them was a treat. This collection is essential for a Dickson fan, and a good intro for anyone else. Dickson’s aliens are better imagined than most, although (like any SF writer) he creates then by pushing some human traits to extremes. He’s less reliable as a builder of planets. Their climates and ecosystems are always some part of Earth’s climate and ecology spread over a whole globe, which doesn’t make sense. Nevertheless, his stories are satisfying. *** to ****
This will be last Dickson review for a while.

Two more by Dickson

Gordon R. Dickson. Beginnings (1988) Another Dickson selection. Reprints several much-anthologised stories, eg, “Danger – Human!” and  “Idiot Solvant”. Includes “Soldier, Ask Not”, one of the early Dorsai tales, and still one of the best meditations on the role of the soldier. Worth picking up if you find a copy. I found this one on a remainder rack, paid $4.95, worth the price. *** to ****

Gordon R. Dickson. Wolfling. (1969) Jim Keil is inserted into the decadent Empire’s heart by means of a bullfight staged to entertain the High-born visiting Alpha Centauri 4. He advances step by step into the Emperor’s favour, and prevents an assassination attempt by the Emperor’s cousin. He must defend himself against the would-be assassin, and wins (of course). Returned to Earth, he stands trial for treason, because the authorities fear his actions will draw the wrath of the Empire. He survives that final ordeal, too (of course). And he gets the girl (of course).

    One of Dickson’s early attempts at painting Earth and Earthlings as exceptional. He succeeds, not only because he develops plausible implications of his premises, but because of his above average ability to create characters that drive the story. True, the characters here are stereotypes, but in their context they seem to be more. Creating that illusion well enough that we accept it while the story unfolds is all that’s required, and Dickson delivers.
    Oh yeah, “wolfling” is the High-borns’ name for him, since he comes from an uncivilised world. ***

Strange talents, useful quirks: Dickson's Mutants

Gordon Dickson. Mutants (1970) A collection chosen by Dickson himself. It includes the classic “Warrior”, reprinted by Dickson in at least one other collection, and  anthologised several times elsewhere. Dorsai Commandant Ian Graeme comes to New York to seek justice for 32 men under his command who were led into unacceptable danger by their officer. The story draws a distinction between the merely military man and the man of war, or warrior.
     Another classic, “Danger – Human!”, explains both why humans have managed at least three times to build Galaxy-dominating empires, yet have failed to make them last.  Some aliens kidnap Timothy Parker,  a man from Vermont, alter his physiology and psychology to prevent death and madness, and keep him in a triply-secured cage to find out what makes humans tick. He gets out, steals a spaceship, and heads for home, where its technology will no doubt be used for a fourth excursion into interstellar space and the building of a rapacious empire.
     Dickson writes thematic stories, fables or parables really. But he has a knack for meshing character and plot so well that the didactic purposes rarely interfere with the believability of his tales. He sets his stories in several different futures, carefully imagined and plausible. He writes well, exemplifying Strunk and White’s advice to avoid adjectives and the passive voice. I’ve never been disappointed in one of his stories. Recommended. *** to ****

Seven Fables about War: 7 Conquests (Poul Anderson)

Poul Anderson. 7 Conquests (1970) Anderson had a rather bleak view of human nature: War, chicanery, criminal intent and a propensity to violence are inbred in our species. This collection’s seven parables about the nature of war explore his thesis that war is species-specific behaviour. Or at any rate inevitable once our species achieved a city-based social system.
     The first tale, “Kings Who Die” meditates on Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces. In “Cold Victory”, the contested thesis is that individuals cannot guide the course of history, that the great currents of social change merely carry them along. The story shows that the two propositions are compatible. It also mourns the tragedy of a family caught on opposite sides. “Inside Straight” posits an extreme version of the Libertarian fantasy of absolute individual freedom and responsibility, presented as a society in which almost every transaction is a wager. It’s contrasted with a rigidly authoritarian society, whose representative misreads the absence of centralised control as military weakness.
     A good collection. ** to ***

An Andre Norton anthology

     The Book of Andre Norton (1975) In hardback, The Worlds of Andre Norton. A good collection: five short stories; an essay by Norton about reading and writing fantasy; a critical analysis of her writing by Brooks; a bibliography, compiled by Jakusz-Hewitt; and two “novelettes”, better described as longish short stories. A good introduction to Norton’s work and reputation, and recommended for that reason alone.
     So how does Norton’s work look now? She wrote most of it the 1950s to 1970s, a time when SF expanded beyond its existing boundaries of fantasy, wowser technology, and swashbuckling adventure. The mostly male writers dabbled in everything from careful extrapolations of current technology, to adaptations of older genres, to sociological speculation, to future and alternative histories. It was the Golden Age because the writers showed SF, redubbed “speculative fiction”, was a mode rather than a genre, and like any mode could be used for any genre and any literary purpose.
     Norton preferred fantasy, and (as Brooks remarks) doesn’t like hard science and machine technology. But she has no qualms imagining energy-beam weapons. She likes magic and mind-talk, and alliances between humans and other animals. She uses the old mythologies to tell stories of ethical quandaries.
     There’s a strong romantic streak in her writing, with handsome and chivalrous warrior heroes and beautiful strong and wise women to match with them after the usual interference from fate, or evil or merely stupid humans. The short stories are better focussed than the longer pieces, which often have the feel of role-playing games, with one damn thing after another preventing the hero and heroine from reaching their goal. They are entertainment very much of their time. SF then catered to the taste for adventure stories in which the reader could identify with the hero. Nowadays, SF is more likely to engage one’s political indignation and confirm one’s curmudgeonly despair over the human race’s follies.
     Recommended for any Norton fan, and for anyone who wants a taste of what at 50 or 60 years old is already ancient literature. ** to ***

Humans rule, except when they don't: A Fred Pohl collection

Frederik Pohl. The Abominable Earthman (1963) Collection of some of Pohl’s early pieces. The title story tells about a sociopathic but genial ne’er-do-well who inadvertently becomes humankind’s saviour when he discovers how to control the insectoid invaders (from a planet trailing Sirius) by offering them regular hits of CO2, which for them is an addictive and mind-addling drug.
     Several of the other stories have an equally shaggy-dog denouement, e.g. Punch, which warns us to beware of aliens bearing gifts. This genre was very popular at the time, and Pohl’s work is better than most, I think because he takes his serious themes seriously, even in his comic writing. He uses SF to explore what it means to be human. Like Ambrose Bierce, he “sees things as they are, not as they are supposed to be.” Which makes him a cynic, but an entertaining one. In his longer, more ambitious works (like the novella, Whatever Counts, included here) he tends to portentousness.
    Still, he’s one the best writers of the era, and any of his books is worth reading. ** to ****.