I just read Natives of Space by Hal Clement, which is actually a collection of three novelettes, one from 1946, one from ’43, and one from ’42.


It’s been quite a while since I’ve read, say, Eric Frank Russell’s Men, Martians, and Machines or A.E. Van Vogt’s The Voyage of the Space Beagle, but I found this maybe half a notch below what I remember those other two to be.  I seem to recall the Russell being a bit less serious, mind you, but for the adventure it was, it was just fine.

Still, this early Clement was indeed decent fun, and worth reading.  Below is the review I did at Goodreads:  
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1036418510?book_show_action=false


Natives of Space is a 1965 repackaging of three 1940s Hal Clement novelettes from, it appears by the Street and Smith copyrights, Astound Science-Fiction.

Assumption Unjustified of 1946 follows a pair of aquatic aliens who stop off on Earth to withdraw some blood--painlessly and carefully--from an unconscious Terran for use in a rejuvenation treatment. Mildly amusing attitudinal irony abounds, but the aliens' mistaken conclusion at the end is a whopper, and therefrom springs the title.

The 1943 Technical Error is one of those classic puzzle stories of the humans-must-figure-out-ancient-alien-technology variety. Here the only hope of spacemen marooned on an asteroid by the meltdown of their atomic motors is to make use of a seemingly inscrutable alien ship before their air runs out. It is good as far as it goes, but modern readers might the piece frustrating because the artifact, with its recognizable ion engines, electrical cables, and whatnot, simply isn't alienenough.

Impediment of 1942 returns to the third-person-alien point of view when telepathic moth-like creatures from a low-gravity planet must try to communicate with a human in hopes of finding on Earth the materials with which to replenish their ammunition supply so that they can return to their feudalistic, warring solar system. Clement's investigations on the biochemical nature of thought are interesting, but the notion that the human character, "like many people, involuntarily visualize[s] the written forms of the words he utter[s]" is a gimmick that seems completely divorced from reality...

So long as the reader understands that, despite its funky mid-1960s cover, Hal Clement's Natives of Space actually is a product of the simpler days of the pulp magazines circa 1942 to 1946, it can be considered a decent three- to four-star read. Rounding up a tad, I'll call it four.



24 August 2014

Some time ago at The Reading Place in Charlotte, Michigan, I picked up a nice 1963 Dell reprint of Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers—no “invasion of” in the original title, apparently.  It was a marvelous read.

I cringed whenever the main characters ventured out of each other’s sight.  I frowned at their attempted rationalizations of the unbelievable things they had seen.  I gaped when, after finally having captured a cop’s service revolver, the protagonist ends up throwing it away because he cannot carry it inconspicuously—Come on, Doc, no jackets in 1955...?  Really, though, every sidestep and piece of self-doubt made perfect sense, and it simply set us up all the better for the time when the baddies trot out the fuller explanations.

In any event, below is the review I posted at Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1034719193


Jack Finney's 1955 The Body Snatchers is an exquisitely terrifying story of alien invasion which, despite the basics of its plot having become cultural tropes in the succeeding decades, remains as suspenseful as the day it was released.

Point of view, style, and setting here work together to make the unbelievable seem completely possible. First-person narrator Dr. Miles Bennell is the perfect character to deliver this story. The small-town doctor is well-educated, of course, and as a lifelong resident, he has the good general practicioner's eye for detail and tolerant understanding of human behavior, along with an intimate knowledge of the residents, geography, and history of the city of Santa Mira, California, population 3,890. His prose is matter-of-fact, sometimes wry, sometimes mildly self-deprecating, and when he begins by "warn[ing]" us that the tale "is full of loose ends and unanswered questions" and admitting that he "can't say [he] really know[s] what happened, or why, or just how it began, how it ended, or if it has ended," we are hooked.

The 1950s small-town setting then allows Finney both a nostalgic backward look and the firm grounding in prosaic reality needed by any good story of extraterrestrial invasion. The direct-dial telephone has been put in only within the previous year, for example, and the sexual tension between the divorced young physician and his divorced high school friend Becky Driscoll, with its mixture of amiable man-of-the-world roguishness and rather touching hesitance, is a subtly rendered portrait of early postwar mores. The familiar streets of the town, the back yards and porches where Miles played as a boy, the countryside where he hunted rabbits with a .22--in the warm sunlit day, all of these belie the seemingly impossible thing, human and yet not, that he and Becky see in the nighttime basement of the grim and frightened Jack and Theodora Belicec. Yet see it they did.

Finney here is a master of the night, and much of the action of the novel takes place after the comforting sun has set, in creepy basements lit by a single overhead bulb or by a dim penlight, on deserted roads where anything, anything at all, might wait in the dark beyond the headlights, in locked rooms where to sleep might mean to lose one's very self. Back and forth Finney deftly works us between the utterly shocking evidence seen firsthand at night and the sheepish uncertainty of plausible-seeming explanations in the morning. Clues are parceled out adroitly, and the protagonists' doubts, even as we wish to shake them into immediate understanding, are achingly believable. Yet eventually even these level-headed people must admit to themselves that something awful truly is going on, something inexplicable and threatening, a conspiracy that grows and grows, unseen and unsuspected by anyone but themselves.

The era of The Body Snatchers was, of course, ripe for such beautiful literary paranoia. Once the war had been won and the world apparently made safe for American ideals again, why, new threats suddenly lurked everywhere. The Berlin Blockade of 1948 brought American and Soviet armed forces to a precarious standoff in Occupied Europe, while the hugely populous former ally of China fell to Communism in 1949. Despite the testimony by General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, that it would take the Soviets twenty years to develop the atom bomb, August 1949 saw this event, and the beginning of war in Korea in June 1950 seemed to many as if it may have been a feint to draw Western forces away from a forthcoming thrust in Europe.

Yes, Cold War sparring, Red spies, agitprop, suspicion--these helped prepare readers for The Body Snatchers, and of course for Robert A. Heinlein's 1951 The Puppet Masters, but Finney's novel does not have to be approached from this mindset. The book, after all, in its writing is as matter-of-fact as a Life magazine article, and the science-fictional notion of spores drifting slowly across interstellar space, from soon-to-be-ruined world to world to world, replacing one's most trusted friends and family with emotionless doppelgangers, is chilling. The Body Snatchers remains a top-notch, scaring read.

23 August 2014

I confess that when I think of Lester Del Rey, I happen to be rather more familiar with his 1950s YA works--The Mysterious Planet, Moon of Mutiny, or Rocket Jockey, for example—than I am with his adult pieces.  I did read “Nerves” in Healy and McComas’ Adventures in Time and Space, and in the last couple of years I got around to The Eleventh Commandment and Preferred Risk, but it seems to be my teenaged readings of the juvies that have stuck with me.

And while I of course had seen the 1971 Pstalemate on the shelves as a kid, I never picked it up...until recently, that is.  Actually, I bought a copy at The Reading Place in Charlotte, MI, and then, maybe a year later, I apparently forgot I had it, so I picked up a different edition in the local library’s basement sale...  Anyway, I finally pulled one off the shelf a few days ago and read the thing—definitely worth waiting for.

Below is the review I did at Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1031264524?book_show_action=false.

Rafeeq



Lester del Rey's 1971 Pstalemate is an intriguing and nuanced tale of a man who suddenly realizes--despite his disdain for what he regards as merely a "current fad in science fiction," despite his singular lack of luck at any sort of guessing games, and despite apparent common sense--that he himself possesses psionic power.

It makes no sense to bight young mechanical engineer Harry Bronson. Or...well, does it? Occasionally, after all, Harry has flashes of inexplicable dread, or even voices seeming to call him. His complete failure at guessing Rhine cards, moreover, actually is just a little too complete, a statistical aberration no less than had he gotten them all correct. And certainly his own past is strangely shrouded, with all memories of life before age ten, and of the death of his parents, now lost to amnesia.

But telepathy exists, the unwilling Harry discovers, and even precognition, too. His own parents had set up some kind of colony or commune of believers, now disbanded, of which little is known anymore, and he begins as well to be able to sense the mental presence of others like him in sprawling New York City. Yet he senses also something he can term only "the alien entity," a force utterly unknowable and frightening, and which seems to be trying to take possession of him.

Extrasensory perception, a researcher's lifelong notes reveal, first truly manifested itself following a mutation caused by petrochemical pollution just three generations earlier. Yet although the people whom the increasingly sensitive Harry from a distance comes to recognize as fellow telepaths seem, in general, more decent than the average human being, he begins to realize that he finds only the young, never the old...for some intrinsic factor of the mutation drives all to inescapable madness. And now Harry's precognition tells him exactly how long he has: three months, and then descent into the living hell of insanity.

Despite his delayed awareness of his abilities, Harry Bronson actually may be the strongest telepath still living. But he has only three months to solve the mystery of himself, lest he lose his own self, and this strange mutation prove merely an evolutionary dead end rather than a transformative quantum leap in consciousness. As Harry and his new wife, once his childhood friend and a telepath as well, race desperately for an answer, Lester Del Rey explores with subtlety and insight the very fundamentals of the human condition--growth and maturity, love and sexuality, and the nature of consciousness--and thereby gives an exciting, intriguing, sometimes touching story.

20 August 2014

When it comes to gorgeous science fiction art, Jim Burns is one of the greats, and Planet Story is a special piece of both visual and literary fun.  The satirical text by Harry Harrison is complete silly-assery, the story of a fellow by the name of Parrts, rank of Private, who has some strange aphrodisiac power that...well, you can imagine.  I first saw some of the Jim Burns illustrations in Omni magazine, probably around 1980, and of course I never forgot them.

Recently, therefore, I purchased an old copy of the oversized book itself on Amazon, and it was indeed silly and delightful.  I finished several week ago, but just now I finally got around to posting a sample of the art on my “Big Illustrated Books—Flights of Fancy” page.

Enjoy!

Rafeeq

Stanley G. Weinbaum’s A Martian Odyssey, with its title story’s colorful depiction of the strange, affably amusing, and yet ultimately enigmatic Tweel, is something that readers always hear about from the critics, historians, and fellow authors of science fiction.  Perhaps we nod, or shrug, or think Hmm...  Certainly I had never read the thing, though I have been reading SF for over 35 years and have read a boatload of references to it.


I had indeed picked up a copy in the last year or two, one with one of those distinctive semi-psychedelic covers of the early 1970s, so at last I read the book, and it was really quite good for the mid-1930s, with only one of the five stories being ho-hum.  The others were entertaining and imaginative, and, actually, the introduction by Sam Moskowitz was helpful as well.

Below is the review I did at Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1028584906.

Rafeeq


A Martian Odyssey by Stanley G. Weinbaum has some of the occasional creakiness to be expected of Golden Age science fiction--conventions of the era, really, rather than actual true authorial failures--but for its period of the mid-1930s this book of five stories does indeed show a great deal of innovative imagination, and of course quite decent storytelling as well.

The title story, the 1934 "A Martian Odyssey," is one of those original "classics" about which the SF reader always hears, such as, say, John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?" or Robert A. Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" or Isaac Asimov's "Nightfall." Having read the Weinbaum at last, I confess to considering it perhaps a half-notch below these others, but as Sam Moskowitz reminds us in his introduction, it does indeed bring some subtle and mature thinking into the pulp magazines.

On the one hand, the breezy first-person narrative with the occasional interjections from shipmates with cutesy German or French accents is not exactly James Joyce's Ulysses, and while I like otherness as much as the next fellow, the habit of ostrich-like Martian "Tweel" of jumping high in the air to land literally, cartoon-wise, head-first with his beak in the sand seems just too damned cute as well. But Weinbaum's careful and persistent depiction of the creature as being not just as intelligent and as noble as a human but even more so is well worth the read. Tweel is sometimes comic, and often inscrutable, but he is a true character rather than a cardboard cutout; his riddle may not be solved in this tale, but it suggests that the universe, even the smallish part reachable by Golden Age rocketships, contains both wonder and humbling mystery aplenty. And when the deeply affected narrator, having been saved from death a couple of times by this completely alien thing, shows that he is not simply a "native" to gawk at or look down upon, we find something very modern, worthwhile, and even touching.

The book's second story, "The Adaptive Ultimate" of 1935, has Frankensteinian overtones as a biochemist develops a serum that, presumably by benign genetic mutation, increases an organism's "adaptation" such that disease and injury can be repaired in mammals with the ease of a severed flatworm turning into two creatures. When a young woman almost dead of tuberculosis is injected, she is cured in days, but the adaptation goes farther than ever could have been imagined. The drab and almost penniless young woman becomes, very subtly, beautiful and self-assured and calculating...and uninterested in mere morals that could get in the way of her own survival. She can out-think and out-charm any man--perhaps ensnare is the better word--and because her body now can heal even knife wounds or gunshots instantaneously, she seems unstoppable as she maneuvers politicians toward another world war that somehow will leave her as, essentially, empress of the world. When reduced to these outlines, it may sound silly, but the story is really quite decent indeed.

"The Lotus Eaters" of 1935, which follows the Venusian honeymoon/exploring expedition of a female biologist and a male engineer, is even more dated in terms of planetology and xenobiology than is "A Martian Odyssey," but its creatures are just fine for the era, and the writing is arguably better than that of the title story, too. Again Weinbaum brings in new and unusual, even unsettling, ideas. If a newly discovered yet infinitely weary and almost extinct colony of Venusian plants, for example, is shown to be far superior to humans in intelligence and knowledge...well, how does this affect the mindset of the hairless ape of Sol III as it clambers via rocketship from its own jungles into those other worlds? There is something grandly melancholy in the dying-off of this weird species of semi-mobile plants that have no individuality, no drive, no will for survival, but which, termed godlike by the deeply sobered explorers, know more than ever can be communicated to the newcomers, let alone explained.

"Proteus Island," first published in 1936, returns to the genetic interests of "The Adaptive Ultimate" when a zoologist exploring an isolated Australasian island finds that since the last mariner's visit of just a couple of decades earlier, evolution seems to have run completely and unbelievably wild: of all the strange plants and animals, not a single one is like another--no species has more than one member. Again there is a "girl," and again there is an attraction the protagonist tries to resist, but here the girl ends up being more the solution than the problem. The scientist's high-handed attitude toward his Maori boatmen grates even for the 1930s, but the puzzle is indeed fascinating, and it is solved, at least given the science of the era, fairly believably.

And about the book's final chapter, "The Brink of Infinity" from 1936...really, it is a comparative throwaway, a piece about a mathematician abducted by a crazed chemist who, by using what is basically a "What number am I thinking of?" game, gets back at the profession whose member crippled him with a miscalculation. Now, that is a pulp story. It is not actually even science fiction either, nor would it necessarily be out of place in the mimeographed newsletter of some old high school math club.

Notwithstanding the dully echoing kerplunk of its last story, Stanley G. Weinbaum's A Martian Odyssey remains an interesting four-star read for anyone exploring the Golden Age origins of the mutants, the extraterrestrial landscapes, and the remote and inexplicable alien intelligences that have come down through countless 1950s movies, now-familiar Star Trekepisodes, and on into the futures of the present.


16 August 2014

I was waiting for what seemed like forever for a copy of Anthony Boucher’s Rocket to the Morgue to arrive.  I don’t really know much at all about mysteries or detective stories, and I haven’t even read Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes in a good quarter century or more, though I do happen to be very fond of the Jeremy Brett portrayal from the ’80s and ’90s.  I had heard, however, that Robert Heinlein was one of the murder suspects, so I figured it would be at least passably interesting.  Well, that old 1967 paperback reprint came at last, and it was indeed an exceedingly fun read.

Below, therefore, is the review I did at Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1022796955.

Rafeeq



Anthony Boucher's Rocket to the Morgue is an ingenious mystery and also a particular delight to anyone interested in the "pulp" era of science fiction.

The novel opens in prewar Los Angeles with Lieutenant Terrance Marshall, amiable family man and homicide detective, feeding the baby and answering his wife's question of "Anything interesting happen today?" Nothing interesting, of course--just a ho-hum corpse dead of low-caliber lead poisoning in a flophouse...only the murderer has not bothered to take the $300 of 1941 cash from the room, while the dead man's jacket holds an oddly distinctive rosary and the telephone number to a "[v]eddy veddy swank" apartment hotel. While Marshall's mystery-minded friend, Sister Ursula, looks into the singular religious artifact, the Lieutenant's investigation of the apartment hotel leads by complete happenstance to the plump, pretentious Hilary Foulkes, heir to his very famous father's literary estate, and a man thoroughly disliked by several science fiction writers. Now, Foulkes just happens to have had a couple of odd close calls recently--a falling brick, then a box of poisoned chocolates--and during Marshall's interview there arrives a package that ticks loudly, so...

Well, as one can see, pleasant tangles and red herrings abound. There are professional jealousies and monopolistic squeezings, a glamorous Mrs. Foulkes with little love lost, a brother-in-law who is next in line as literary executor of the lucrative "Dr. Derringer" series, a deferential cousin/typist, and a classic locked room mystery. For amusement we have sentences of the droll "She crossed her legs (she knew they were good) and leaned forward (she knew they were good too)" variety, a promotion-seeking flatfoot from Pasadena, installments of an exquisitely awful space opera being hacked out at a penny a word, and the wry wit and wisdom of the Manana Literary Society.

Boucher's depiction of this real-life group of California fantasy and science fiction writers, with its scarcely disguised members such as Robert A. Heinlein and others, is a particular joy. Each of these fellers, of course, has a perfectly acceptable reason for not necessarily relishing the continued corporeal existence of the vain and penny-pinching Hilary Foulkes, but it is the combination of pontificating about the history, future, and meaning of speculative fiction, plus numerous in-jokes, that make them doubly worthwhile. Austin Carter, for example, the Heinlein character, is suave and talkative and completely unflappable; when he says to Lieutenant Marshall something that it seems only the attempted murderer could have known, he then shrugs to the sputtering man, "'I believe I am supposed at this point to light a cigaret nonchalantly? Very well, I hereby do so.' The flame of the match was steady in his hand." This is hard not to adore.

Even if one were not already familiar with the lovable cranks of the quirky real-world Manana Literary Society--and I confess to knowing exceedingly little about anyone except Heinlein--all of these factors add up to a very enjoyable five-star mystery from the pulp era of science fiction. In addition to the occasional wisecracks and the literary history and the in-jokes, there really is a mystery here, and its unexpected solving is definitely worth the wait.

10 August 2014

When I finally scored a copy of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit last week, I also picked up, from the very same twirly-rack, a nice old 1961 copy of The Ugly American by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick—the latter of whom was co-author of Fail-Safe, by the way.  Anyhoo, this was a real ‘50s find, something that could have been improved only by bumping it up to a trifecta had there also been a copy of, say, Grace Metalious‘ Peyton Place, which there unfortunately was not...

Lederer and Burdick were, in their geopolitical context, a solid 5-star read, so I did a review on Goodreads
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1016746356, copy-pasted below.

Rafeeq



The Ugly American by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick is lifelike and rich, a sometimes wry and ironic panorama of the mid-1950s ideological and military front lines of the Cold War drawn, we are informed in the Epilogue, often almost directly from the authors' own experiences in Southeast Asia. Though it thus is fictionalized, the book--I would not quite call it a novel, really, as the characters are so disparate, and only a few of them turn up here and there throughout--reads with the veracity of a diary or a journalistic account. Sometimes the events and characters portrayed are cringe-worthy in the extreme, but we know very well that such arrogance, such blindness, such bombastic buffoonery were far from uncommon; indeed, the Epilogue explains, point by point, exactly how close certain little anecdotes are to the truth.

The back cover of my 1961 Fawcett Crest edition of the book asks, in boldface type, "Is President Kennedy's 'PEACE CORPS' The answer to the problem raised by this book?" Perhaps so. Certainly the colonial French and the American diplomats who didn't bother learning the language or culture of the region did not seem to do much to keep the dominoes from toppling. While Lederer and Burdick do not appear to have noticed the long-term damage done by United States support of any ol' dictator so long as he was anti-Communist, and by shenanigans such as the U.S.-orchestrated coups in places such as Iran and Guatemala, they on the other hand probably do not exaggerate the dirty tricks and the viciousness of the other side.

It would have been interesting to explore a little more deeply exactly what, aside from legitimate anti-colonial sentiment and ginned-up anti-Western propaganda, motivated the average Communist guerrilla. Perhaps, though, this is a bit much to ask of a piece published so soon after the fall of besieged Dien Bien Phu, when it urgently appeared that with the right kind of effort, shoring up Indochina would prevent the fall of further nations all the way back to Africa. The authors do, however, at least show with care the motivations of a disparate host of well-meaning and motivated characters on this side of the Bamboo Curtain, whether religious or military men or idealistic rather than opportunistic diplomats, trying their best to help free peoples live as they themselves choose. Could these amiable folks willing to live in the boondocks, eat the food, learn the language, and share and communicate instead of impose from above really make a difference? Very possibly, at least when measure by goodwill on the ground rather than by the speeches in the national capital; with luck, they at least can help offset the damage of the stuffed shirts and the fools.

Lederer and Burdick's vivid snapshot from the height of East-West sparring, when the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, the Berlin Blockade, the fall of China, and the bloody Korean War were threats seen in contemporary headlines rather than mere chapters in a history textbook, is politically dated, of course. The places the authors wrote about, the seemingly clear-cut ideologies, the pressing national issues--such things now have been settled decades ago. Nevertheless, The Ugly American reminds us, long after the brushfire conflicts of the Cold War have burned out, of the fundamental human values of courage, respect, and friendship, whose worth certainly does not diminish.

4 August 2014