Colin Greenland, Take Back Plenty (1990)

'I would not shake my credit in telling an improbable truth, however indisputable in itself' (Lawrence Sterne, The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759-67); Vol. 1, Chapter XI (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 53

'Here [Tabitha Jute] was now, years later, in Schiaparelli, heading for a fateful encounter which would completely and utterly change her life, my life, all our lives' (p. 10)

Colin Greenland's British SF Association and Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning Take Back Plenty reminded me of Lawrence Sterne's extraordinary magnum opus in a number of ways. The principal similarity resides in the fact that for a considerable stretch of this 482 page novel, nothing really happens.

Tabitha Jute, captain for the Kobold class freighter Alice Liddell, encounters renegade performance troupe-cum-criminal gang Contraband, and accepts a commission to take them to Plenty, and beyond. They're captured, there's a disaster, salvation of a sort for some, and that's about it, really.

Driven from her normal reserve, [Tabitha] talked more to the ship on this trip than she ever had, and not on technical or navigational questions. On this journey through the realm of virtual, her chosen companion was an imaginary one. When people, natural, human, or otherwise, become too much to bear, your best friend may be an artifact (pp. 231-2)

For me, much of the interest in Take Back Plenty lay in the chapters that punctuate the main narrative wherein Tabitha relates anecdotes from her past life to Alice. Providing a flighty contrapuntal theme to the sustained chord of the main work, the interplay between the captain and the ship's artifact proved to be more compelling to me than the narrative itself in a work which is 'digressive[...] and[...] progressive too, at the same time' (Tristram Shandy, op. cit., p. 95).

How gratifying it would be to record that before the Ugly Truth skipped back into normal space our resourceful heroines once again turned the tables on their tormentors, and effected a second cunning escape. Alas, it did not happen; and even I, with all my narrative liberty in time and space, my freedom to conjecture what shadows flit through the inviolable regions of the living mind -- even I am bound by truth. Were I to trifle with the truth in the slightest respect, albeit for our mutual pleasure at watching valour confound villainy, could I then win your trust for any other feature of this astonishing tale? (p. 418)

The conclusion of Take Back Plenty confounds the expectations such passages provoke that the novel is narrated by an omniscient authorial voice. The familiarity this device, beloved of eighteenth century novelists and those who subsequently emulated them, confers is exploded at the end of the work when the identity of the narrator is revealed in a most pleasing manner.

Take Back Plenty is an enjoyable addition to the SF Masterworks library, and is a work to be enjoyed in the page-turning tradition of the Space Opera genre it emulates (and indeed contributes to) rather than meditated over.

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Philip K. Dick, Dr. Bloodmoney (1965) SFMW 32

"I'll have a true factory in the old sense, the pre-war sense."
"'The pre-war sense,'" she echoed. "Is that good?" (loc. 3252-54)

Philip K. Dick's Dr. Bloodmoney revisits the author's habitual thematic obsessions of justifiable paranoia and the transmogrification of the illogical into the plausible and externalises, rather than internalises, them.

Written in 1963, but not published until 1965, Dr. Bloodmoney's narrative encapsulates what Frederic Jameson describes as the 'pastiche and schizophrenia' of the cultural forms of late capitalism.  The influence of the closing of Berlin's borders and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the ratification of the nuclear test ban treaty in 1963, and -- entirely appropriately, this being Philip K. Dick -- the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove (which the novel predates in everything other than title) are all contextual influences upon the work, and are echoed within it.

In the novel's historic present of the 1980s, civilisation struggles to reassert itself after having nearly been eradicated as the consequence of a defence-related nuclear accident in 1972 which has led to the destruction of the world's pre-existing infrastructural, political and economic organisation. The titular architect of the disaster, Dr. Bruno Bluthgeld ('blood money') lives on in the work, serving as a sort of totem for the failures of character that allowed the world to produce a means of 'defending' itself that if used would also destroy it.

The fact that humanity now seems set on working towards the reproduction of the forms that led to the moment of catastrophe make the recuperation of a positive reading of this bleakly pessimistic work difficult to construct, as characters yearn to devolve responsibility for their actions and dream of problems being 'automated out of existence' (loc. 3446-48):

Our little fragile world, Bonny thought, that we labored to build up, after the Emergency. This puny society with out tattered school books, our 'deluxe' cigarettes, our wood-burning trucks—it can't stand much punishment; it can't stand this that Bruno is doing or appears to be doing. One blow again directed at us and we will be gone; the brilliant animals will perish, all the new, odd species will disappear as suddenly as they arrived. Too bad, she thought with grief. It's unfair; Terry, the verbose dog—him, too. Maybe we were too ambitious; maybe we shouldn't have dared to try to rebuild and go on.    "I think we did pretty well, she thought, all in all. We've been alive; we've made love and drunk Gill's Five Star, taught our kids in a peculiar-windowed school building, put out News & Views, cranked up a car radio and listened daily to W. Somerset Maugham. What more could be asked of us? Christ, she thought. It isn't fair, this thing now. It isn't right at all. We have our horses to protect, our crops, our lives. . . . (loc. 3232-33)

If Dr. Bloodmoney is pregnant with anything, it is not the fecundity of parturition but rather the despair of not being able to give birth to the new. The foetal Bill is trapped within the body of his internally conjoined twin, Edie; Walt Dangerfield is trapped in orbit around the Earth, neither able to achieve escape velocity, nor return; psychokinetic phocomelus Hoppy Harrington strives to escape a body that holds more potential than any he could adopt.

Philip K. Dick's body of work is one of the cornerstones of the science fiction oeuvre, yet in a sense stands outside it. Dr. Bloodmoney is an archetypal Dick novel; conceptually perplexing, thematically dense, and richly rewarding to read and revisit, it is another excellent entry in the SF Masterworks series.

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Robert Holdstock, Mythago Wood (1984)

'Was it possible that the stories could survive that long? Tales of the glaciers, and the new forests, and the advance of human societies northwards across the marshes and the frozen hills?' (Loc. 3581-83)

Winner of the BSFA Award for Best Novel in 1984 and World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1985, Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood is the first entry in a sequence of works set in an ancient woodland that brings the myths and legends of Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Norse origin to life, as well as revisiting vignettes of medieval, seventeenth century, and even early twentieth century folk histories.

Returning to Oak Lodge, the family home on the edge of Ryhope Wood, after recuperating in southern France from wounds received towards the end of the Second World War, Stephen Huxley discovers his brother Christopher has become obsessed with breaching into the heart of the ancient forest, a mania that similarly consumed their late father during their childhood.

When Christopher fails to return from one of his lengthy excursions, Stephen sets out to discover more about the woodland realm for himself. An encounter with Guiwenneth, a mythago whom his father also had a fixation with, initiates a sequence of events that sees Christopher setting off into the forest himself in the company of Harry Keeton, a former RAF airman whose facial disfigurement was inflicted by things mystical rather than martial.

The Huxleys speculate that the mythagos are brought into being as a consequence of Ryhope Wood being within a 'ley matrix' (Loc. 555-56) that provides a 'creative field that can interact with the unconscious'. It is within the unconscious, the Huxleys propose, that mankind carries 'pre-mythagos', images 'of the idealized form of myth creature[s],' remaining 'in our collective unconscious', and 'transmitted through the generations.’ (Loc. 581-90)

The Huxleys own familial relations are interpolated within rather standing outside of the mythagos both pursue, and come to embody. Christopher records how 'the Urscumug opened its mouth to roar, and my father seemed to leer at me' ; The last I saw of my father’s mythago was its towering black form, swaying slightly as it stared into the distance, its nostrils quivering, its breathing a quiet, calm, contemplative sound. Loc. 836-7, 3775-78). It is with more of a sense of acceptance than despair that Christopher acknowledges his own transition into the mythago realm: 'I had become a part of legend myself. Christian and his brother, the Outlander and his Kin, working through roles laid down by myth, perhaps from the beginnings of time' (Loc. 3831-33).

In Mythago Wood, Robert Holdstock crafts an hypnotically plausible liminal reality that conjoins the richness of Northern myth and folklore with the tangible sense of historic events that the age and silence of ancient woodlands are still capable of evoking in those that walk them. An excellent entry in the SF Gateway library, and one that is bound to whet the reader's appetite to journey on to Lavondyss.

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Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (1980)

On one level, Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker is a straightfoward, linearly-plotted tale of a young adult's experiences in a post-apocalyptic British east coast landscape subsequent to the death of his father in a work-related accident.

However, such an unadorned description does little justice to the complex, richly allusive nature of this extraordinary, peregrinating, puzzling work.

Every 1 knows about Bad Time and what come after. Bad Time 1st and bad times after. Not many come thru it a live. (p. 2)

Christian fabulation, folklore, mythology, technology, atomic theory, and popular culture intersect in Riddley Walker in complex ways which invite multiple, parallel readings of their significance.

Thematic points of origin in the text between 'the 1 Big 1 or the Spirit of God of the Littl Shyning Man or what ever' (p. 150) are indistinguishable. History and language have become muddied and muddled in the work, which is presented in the first person in phonetically-inflected language by a titular narrator through whom meaning is iterated, but also impeded:

You know some times you get a fealing you dont want to put no words to. (p. 54)

The frequently encountered (and fully documented) 'Eusa Story' is simultaneously a retelling of the tale of St. Eustance, and a referent to the USA -- presumably one of the participants in the cataclysmic atomic event (the '1 Big 1') that led to the destruction of the previous civilization from which the world of Riddley Walker emerged -- as well as a computer 'user', as fragments of the language we encounter suggest.

The' Little Shyining Man the Addom' refers to both a Christ (and perhaps also Adamic) analogue, and the splitting of the atom. The Eusa Show, enacted with puppets modelled on traditional Punch & Judy entertainments, represents aspects of the puppet show from which it has been derived but also introduces novel elements which serve as a gloss, or perhaps a satire on, or possibly even a theatrical requiem to, the lost knowledge of the past:

Eusa says, 'I dont know what Ive los I aint very qwick.' The Littl Shyning Man says, 'Wel Eusa you bes qwicken up fas then becaws there gone Good Time and here comes Trubba.'
Eusa says, 'It looks like you see Trubba all ready you aint even in 1 peace.'
The Littl Man says, 'Eusa dont you know who done thise to me dont you onow who toar me in 2? Dont you know who opent me like a chicken time back way back in the wood in the hart of the stoan?'
Eusa says, 'How cud I know that?'
The Littl Man say, 'Becaws youre the 1 as done it.'
Eusa says, 'I dint know that Ive los it clean out of memberment.' (pp. 49-50).

The prehistory of Riddley Walker is a conundrum, despite the fictive future of the work being dated with some specificity:

There's a stoan in the Power Ring stannings has the number 1997 cut in to it nor we aint  never seen no year number farther on nor that. After Bad Time dint no 1 write down no year count for a long time we dont know how long til the Mincery begun agen. Since we startit counting its come to 2347 OC  which means Our Count.'
I said, 'Dyou mean to tel me them befor us by the time they done 1997 years they had boats in the air and all them things and here we are weve done 2347 years and mor and stil slogging in the mud?' (pp. 100, 124)

Relatively early in Riddley Walker, before aspects of the novel's back story are introduced towards the end of the work, the reader is invited either to conclude that magical realist elements feature in the novel's universe, or that genetic adaptation or mutation has taken place across not only humanity, but other species:

The dogs begun running round me all in a circel roun and roun with ther littl heads up hy and ther hy sholders up. They begun running on ther hynt legs. The sky wer black the stoans gon wite the dogs gone all diffrent shyining colours and the wite stoans shyning thru them. I tryd to hol it like that but I los it wernt man a nuff right then. (p. 157)

The 'fits' that Riddley has become a focus for this theme, leaving the reader to ponder whether the titular protagonist has epilepsy, or is perhaps manifesting some sort of evolutionary effect precipitated over thousands of years by his progenitors' exposure to radiation:

I had like a mynd flash of colourt lites with clicking and bleaping it wernt like nothing I ever acturely seen nor heard only in dreams. I cud like feal the woal circel of the dead towns in me and see a line of grean lite sweaping round that circel from the senter. (p. 89)

A sense emerges during the course of the work of the possibility of the existence of a genetic-level code trigger or gene mutation: I wer programmit diffrent then from how I ben when I come in to Cambry. Coming in to Cambry my hed ben ful or words and rimes and all kynds of jumbl of yellerboy stoan thots (p. 163)

Technologies have clearly informed the language and thinking of the society from which the communities of Riddley Walker have evolved:

Like it says in Eusa 5: 'Evere thing blippin & bleapin & movin in the shiftin uv thay Nos. Sum tyms bytin sum tyms bit.' (p.101)

This is an historic figure of speech suggesting 'we made ready and got underway' rather than suggesting that there are live terminals.

We pult datter and we printowt we wer roading Goodparleys show (p. 202)

Green Man myths and subsequent discoveries could be as prosaic as the discovery of the remains of a garden supply centre, but they also have a symbolic value as a signifier of rebirth and regrowth:

I had a idear of what it wer going to be when I unrapt it. I were right. It wer Greanvine. Carvit out of wood and paintit it wer may be 1/2 as big as a real face. The back of it flat and the front of it ful roundit it wer that same and very face I seen in my mynd. Them wide open grean eyes staring up at me wylst the vines and leaves growit out of his mouf (p. 165)

Granser recreates the 1 Littl 1 -- gunpowder -- using  'yellerboy stoan [sulphur] and Saul & Peter [potassium nitrate, or saltpetre] and chard coal [charcoal]' (p. 185):

He wer pounding the yellerboy stoan to a fine powder. Then he done the same with some chard coal. Done it with a boal and pounder. He had the Saul & Peter all ready that wer kirstels like salt. He took little measurs and measuring out yellerboy and chard coal and Saul & Peter. Mixing them all to gether then and me watching. It wer like the 1st time I seen a woman open for mee and I wer thinking: This is what its all about then (p. 189)

Orfing reveals that the technology humanity was in possession of prior to the apocalyptic nuclear event is still extant as colonists had already passed beyond our galaxy. This passage also suggests that the trances Riddley has experienced and the 'telling' that takes place elsewhere in the work are genetic  echoes of post-Singularity bioengineering which connected humanity together; the receptors remain, but with the collapse of the technologies that enabled them, the facilitating data is no longer being generated:

To have them boats in the air which they callit them space craf and them picters on the wind which that wer viddyo and going out beyont the sarvering gallack seas. Not jus singing it you know. Acturely going it acturely roading out thru space. Jus try to get it in your mynd try to happen it in your head o dint they trants hy you cud feal the thrus and the boost of it you know the jynt woosh of them liffing  off and to the stations. Which they jumpt 1 station to the nex you see and til they jumpt right out beyont them gallack seas. I tel you Riddley lissening to then trantsing and telling it wer all mos like being in 1 of them space craf o the yoaring and the roaling o the nertial and the navigation of it' (p. 195)

After the explosion that kills Granser reintroduces gunpowder-making, civil discord is unleashed and the existing order is overthrown. Orfing says:

It looks to me like that Fools Circel is broakin now I dont think therewl be no mor regler hevvys and any Eusa folk whatre stil a live theyre all too binsy running a roan trying to go bang. Plus a woal lot of other peopl as wel by now parbly. Fars we know there bint no mor bangs yet but we dont have the leas idear whats going to happen. Right now there aint even no Pry Mincer its what they call a care maker Mincery with regenneril guvner me from the Ram at all the forms. (p. 198)

A thread of existentialist thought runs through Riddley Walker:

Our woal life is a idear we dint think of nor we don't know what it is. What a way to live. Thats why I finely come to writing all this down. Thinking on what the idear of us myt be. Thinking on that thing whats in us lorn and loan and oansome[...] The thot come to me: EUSAS HEAD IS DREAMING US' (pp. 7, 61)

'Them peopl as jus want to hol on to what theyve got theyre afeart to chance any thing theyre afeart to move even 1 littl step forit.' (p. 125)

He said, 'I never sung no beginning becaws you wont never fynd no beginning its long gone and far pas. What ever youre after youwl never fynd the beginning of it that why youwl all ways be too late. Onlyes thing youwl ever fynd is the end of things. What ever happens itwl be what you dint want to happen. What ever dont happen thatwl be the thing you wantit. Take your choosing how you like yuowl get what you dont want. (p. 150)

If I wer a figger in a show what hand wer moving me then? I cudnt be bothert to think on that right then. Theres all ways some thingwl be moving you if it aint 1 thing its a nother you cant help that (p. 170)

A transcendent and richly rewarding entry in the SF Masterworks series, Riddley Walker is an essential read.

I thot: Whyd we come here? Id knowit some kynd of thing like this myt happen. Whynt we stay hoalt up? Whynt we go somers far a way? Becaws you cant stay hoalt up. Becaws there aint no far a way. Becaws where you happen is where you happen[...] Stil I wunt have no other track (p. 206, 215)

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Year-end update

As usual, I find myself apologising for the slow progress I've made in advancing this project during 2012. Posts have been infrequent and seldom as expansive as I would have liked.

As is customary at Spong Towers, matters have been exacerbated by the fact that more new books, both print and digital, have come into the house during the past twelve months than have been read. Plus ça change, and all that.

You'll probably not fall into a dead faint if I plead the usual reasons of time constraints (somewhat ironically for an avid reader of speculative fiction, I know), and the fact that my consultancy has had a good year.

Beyond this, I do have a couple of pieces of relevant news to convey.

Firstly, I started co-curating new client (and publisher of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks, of course) Orion's SF Gateway's social presences on Twitter, facebook and Pinterest in November 2012, which has been a lot of fun. Consequently, I'll be adding ebook reviews of the SF Gateway titles I buy (yes, buy) on the blog in the future. In fact, I'm reading one at the moment. I'm also hoping that if it's true that ereader users read more books than print readers, the imbalance in my buying-to-reading ratio may move in the right direction in 2013.

Secondly, I've added some code to the Blogger template in order that social buttons now appear at the bottom of each post.

Enjoy the holidays, and happy reading in the new year and beyond.

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Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates (1983) FMW 47

"One of these time gaps is just outside Kensington, five miles from the Strand, on the evening of the first of September, 1810. And unlike most gaps that close to the 1802 source, this one is four hours long."

Time travel, demonic magicians, werewolves, cross-dressing heroines, Romantic poets and Egyptian gods: The Anubis Gates is a sovereign salmagundi of some of the pillars of speculative fiction.

Laphroaig-swilling, cigar-toting literary professor for hire Brendan Doyle is commissioned by plutocrat J. Cochran Darrow to travel back to 1810 through a time gate in order to verify the identity of stoner sonneteer Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Suffice to say, things don't go according to plan.

The principal enjoyment of The Anubis Gates lies in allowing oneself to be dazzled by the pyrotechnics of the tale itself, and as such there is little purpose in rehearsing the panoply of plot twists the work provides. It is a novel of incident rather than ideas which places a premium on the pleasures of thematic divagation rather than focused rumination and as such is a far from taxing, albeit thoroughly enjoyable, read.

Winner of the 1983 Philip K. Dick Award, The Anubis Gates is an entertaining, undemanding, and fully immersive entry into the Fantasy Masterworks series.

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Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama (1972) SFMW 65

'On a billion television screens, there appeared a tiny, featureless cylinder, growing rapidly second by second. By the time it had doubled its size, no one could pretend any longer that Rama was a natural object. Its body was a cylinder so geometrically perfect that it might have been turned on a lathe - one with centres fifty kilometres apart. The two ends were quite flat, apart from some small structures at the centre of one face, and were twenty kilometres across; from a distance, when there was no sense of scale, Rama looked almost comically like an ordinary domestic boiler.' (Loc. 191-95)

In this manner, Arthur C. Clarke introduces the titular Big Dumb Object  (BDO) of his Hugo and Nebula award winning 1972 novel Rendezvous with Rama.

One of the features of Clarke's fiction is his re-orientation of aspects of human arrangements that tradition has sanctified, and the interpolation of plausible extrapolations from current research. Rendezvous with Rama is no different, with its representation of polygamy (in all combinations; Loc. 586-88) and appealing, but effectively enslaved, superchimps or 'Simps':

Their rearing and education had probably cost as much as that of the average spaceman, and they were worth it. Each weighed less than thirty kilos and consumed only half the food and oxygen of a human being, but each could replace 2.75 men for housekeeping, elementary cooking, tool-carrying and dozens of other routine jobs (Loc. 776-78)

For all this, and as its title suggests, the main interest of the work resides in Clarke's description of the BDO itself. His description of the crew of the survey vessel Endeavour's exploration of Rama's interior is striking, and often suspenseful:

And now he understood the purpose of those mysterious trenches, the Straight Valley and its five companions; they were nothing less than gigantic strip-lights. Rama had six linear suns, symmetrically ranged around its interior. From each, a broad fan of light was aimed across the central axis, to shine upon the far side of the world. (Loc. 1279-81)

However, subsequent to the appearance of the organic automata that cleanse and maintain the BDO during its journey, the text loses much of its mystery, although it retains a good deal of interest:

'What we failed to take into account was the possibility of non-biological survival. If we accept Dr Perera's very plausible theory, which certainly fits all the facts, the creatures who have been observed inside Rama did not exist until a short time ago. Their patterns, or templates, were stored in some central information bank, and when the time was ripe they were manufactured from available raw materials - presumably the metallo-organic soup of the Cylindrical Sea. Such a feat is still somewhat beyond our own ability, but does not present any theoretical problems. We know that solid state circuits, unlike living matter, can store information without loss, for indefinite periods of time. 'So Rama is now in full operating condition, serving the purpose of its builders - whoever they may be.' (Loc. 2762-68)

Ultimately, readers may be disappointed to glean little from the work that can provide them with satisfactory answers to the two questions that exercise the minds of the crew of the Endeavour: 'Who were [the Ramans] -- and what went wrong?' (Loc. 501). This may be asking the wrong questions of Rendezvous with Rama, as one senses that Clarke's purpose was to invite the reader to capture and reflect on the sense of wonder developed within his description of the BDO's geography in this excellent addition to the SF Masterworks series, and take it with them beyond their reading of the novel, and into their own lives:

The nature and the purpose of the Ramans was still utterly unknown. They had used the solar system as a refuelling stop - as a booster station - call it what you will, and had then spurned it completely, on their way to more important business. They would probably never even know that the human race existed; such monumental indifference was worse than any deliberate insult. (Loc. 3294-96)

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Jack Finney, The Body Snatchers (1955)

Parasitic alien seed pods capable of replicating organic life settle near the Californian town of Santa Mira and begin to create copies of its inhabitants. Dr. Miles Bennell becomes aware of the invasion through his patients' reports of changes in the behaviour of family members.

Jack Finney's 1955 novel The Body Snatchers lacks internal coherence.

It is never adequately explained how the initial pods manage to position themselves next to their victims, nor what happens to those Santa Mirans who are reproduced, nor, if the pods need to be cultivated in the manner the final scene suggests, how the first generation harvested themselves, nor how the pods are able to propel themselves into and through space.

Looking beyond its shortcomings, the most productive reading of Finney's work may be as a study in the undermining of mid-fifties American values. A Cold War paranoia that speaks of a coming-to-awareness of the alienation that the seeds of consumerism have propagated in American society pervades the work. The havoc that the mindless compulsion of the parasitic invaders wreaks mirrors the power of self-interested economic individualism to erode and ultimately destroy a sense of communally forged, collectively expressed shared values, and intimates that the socio-economic enemy within is far more of a danger to the continuation of social arrangements than that which any external threat may pose.

I'd grown up here; from boyhood I'd known every street, house, and path, most of the back yards, and every hill, field, and road for miles around. And now I didn't know it any more. Unchanged to the eye, what I was seeing out there now -- in my eye, and beyond that in my mind -- was something alien.

The lighted circle of pavement below me, the familiar front porches, and the dark mass of houses and town beyond them -- were fearful. Now they were menacing, all these familiar things and faces; the town had changed or was changing into something very terrible, and was after me. It wanted me, too, and I knew it. (Loc. 1349-51; 1351-53)

Bennell and his handful of unadapted associates seem powerless to act against the alien agency, and incapable of formulating a plan to resist them:

We were[...] overwhelmed, not knowing what else to do, how to fight back, or against what. Something impossibly terrible, yet utterly real, was menacing us in a way beyond our comprehension or abilities; and we fled. (Loc. 1497-98)

"Miles, when did all this happen?" Becky gestured to indicate the length of the semi-deserted street behind and ahead of us. "A little at a time," I said, and shrugged. "We're just realizing it now; the town's dying." (Loc. 1677-80)

Unlike film adaptations of the work, Finney chose to give The Body Snatchers a redemptive, and deeply unconvincing, ending. However, the lasting impression that this uneven yet highly readable entry to the SF Masterworks series makes on this reader is that societies that are prepared to allow themselves to be dominated by forces intrinsically hostile to the collective good come to regard elements of their own genus as outsiders.

"You look shocked, actually sick, and yet what has the human race done except spread over this planet till it swarms the globe two billion strong? What have you done with this very continent but expand till you fill it?" (Loc. 2516-18) 

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Algis Budrys, Rogue Moon (1960)

Rogue Moon relates the attempts of a team of scientists to tame an alien artifact discovered on the moon in order that its secrets may be studied: an 'obsidian hulk, toppling perpetually, perpetually re-erecting itself, shifting in place, looming over the bunker[...] reflecting the light of the stars, now dead black and lusterless.' (Loc. 2319-20).

However, the artifact proves itself adept at killing those who enter it, and a strategy is therefore developed whereby facsimiles of explorers are beamed to the moon (leaving their original selves alive on Earth) in order that they may progress incrementally through its maze-like interior before the duplicate is killed. The physiological strain and psychological impact of the transmission has the unfortunate effect of sending the subject insane, and the search is on for 'a different kind of man to send. A man who won't go insane when he feels himself die' (loc. 114):

The matter transmitter analyzes the structure of whatever is presented to its scanners. It converts that analysis into a signal, which describes the exact atomic structure of the scanned object. The signal is transmitted to a receiver. And, at the receiver, the signal is fed into a resolving stage. There the scanned atomic structure is duplicated from a local supply of atoms -- half a ton of rock will do, and to spare. In other words, what the matter transmitter will do is to tear you down and then send a message to a receiver telling it how to put you together again. 

"The process is painless and, as far as your consciousness is concerned, instantaneous. It takes place at the speed of light, and neither the electrochemical impulses which transmit messages along your nerves and between your brain cells, nor the individual particles constituting your atoms, nor the atoms in their individual movements, travel at quite that rate. 

"Before you could possibly be conscious of pain or dissolution, and before your atomic structure could have time to drift out of alignment, it will seem to you as if you've stood still and the universe has moved. You'll suddenly be in the receiver, as though something omnipotent had moved its hand, and the electrical impulse that was a thought racing between your brain cells will complete its journey so smoothly that you will have real difficulty, for a moment, in realizing that you have moved at all. (Loc. 859-69).

That section of the work that takes place on the moon is both linguistically and conceptually among the finest work in science fiction that you're likely to encounter. However, the novel's denoument constitutes a scant ten percent of its extent, and much of the rest is taken up with tedious sub-soap opera theatricals concerning the triangular relationship between Dr. Edward Hawks, the research scientist leading the project, the explorer Al Barker, and the vampish artist Claire.

A brief and largely unsatisfactory entry to the SF Masterworks series.

You have to decide how much of yourself can be changed before you consider yourself dead. (Loc. 978-79)

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Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) FMW 49

I picked this off the virtual shelf (although I also have the print copy) after the recent death of Ray Bradbury as a way of honouring the passing of an influential and much-loved author whose works I am not as conversant with as I would like to be.

Something Wicked This Way Comes describes the encounter of adolescents Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade with the mysterious Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show, an eerie circus sideshow that arrives in the middle of the night by railroad.

On discovering the dark purposes of the troupe's visitation, Halloway and Nightshade do what they can to stave off its threat to their own persons as well others prior to embroiling Halloway's father Charles in events.

Stylistically, I found the work uneven. Bradbury seems to lurch between the most chokingly florid prose and undeniably majestic passages that are startling and arresting in equal measure.

Structurally, the novel is disappointing. For me, the plot lacks interest and development and Bradbury relies on careering from set piece to set piece in order to retain such engagement as the work is able to muster. Personally, I found this tedious in the extreme.

Thematically, the struggle between an under-defined evil and a less-than-convincing goodness lacks interest, the depiction of adolescence is strained, and the delineation of the father-child relationship too oblique.

Consequently, more than once I felt I was left 'holding a book but reading the empty spaces' (loc. 487-77). However, Something Wicked This Way Comes does deliver some wonderful passages between the breathless and underwhelming plot devices, and is an acceptable late entry in the numbered run of the Fantasy Masterworks series.

For these beings, fall is the ever normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gusts they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, and surely cloud all clear-run waters. The spider-web hears them, trembles - breaks. Such are the autumn people. Beware of them. (loc. 2892-96)

Life in the end seemed a prank of such size you could only stand off at this end of the corridor to note its meaningless length and its quite unnecessary height, a mountain built to such ridiculous immensities you were dwarfed in its shadow and mocking of its pomp. (loc. 3436-38)

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Christopher Priest, The Prestige (1995)

'Already, without once writing a falsehood, I have started the deception that is my life. The lie is contained in these words, even in the very first of them. It is the fabric of everything that follows, yet nowhere will it be apparent.' (loc. 537-39)

Christopher Priest's brilliant 1995 novel contains a vertigo-inducing number of duplicities, doubles, and doubts. A dense yet eminently readable piece of literary science fiction, The Prestige is a satisfying and compelling novel which is told twice through the mouths of its duelling (in every sense of the word) protagonists within a narrative frame that connects the past and present of the work deftly.

In a tour de force of literary legerdemain, plot elements are revealed gradually from different sources to much the same effect as the physical acts of prestidigitation described in the book that facilitate the delivery of 'the prestige, [...] the product of magic' (loc. 990):

First, he said, the magical effect would be increased if the illusion could be viewed from all angles. Secondly, if it could not, and a small segment of the audience had to glimpse the secret, it did not matter! If five hundred people are baffled, he said, it was of no importance that five others should see the secret. (loc. 842-45)

The Prestige is an exceptional and highly recommended entry in the SF Masterworks series.

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Janet Russ, The Female Man (1975; 1970)

I approached Joanna Russ's The Female Man with some trepidation.

I had hoped that the reputation the work has earned as a cornerstone of feminist science fiction since its publication in 1975 (written 1970) would find expression in a subtlety of argument that transcended the bludgeon and bluster of the politics of gender of forty years ago.

Sadly, it does not.

Let's be clear about this. If we are asking 'does this work have an historic significance?' then the answer in my opinion is yes, it does. However, if we are asking 'does this novel have any merit as a work of science fiction, and is it still worth reading?' then I would have to answer 'a scant amount', and 'frankly, no' respectively.

Although incoherently presented, the four fictive worlds which overlap in The Female Man through the persons of Joanna, Jeannine, Janet and Jael invite productive reflection on the part of the reader with regard to their relation to the author, whom they may be interpreted as being facets of. Whilst such a reading effectively elevates Russ to the status of an Everywoman figure, which was doubtless not her intention, the trope allows for the consideration of possible futures and alternate histories of the female subject which are thoughtful and engaging.

However, it is easy for the reader to be sympathetic to the novel's concepts when considering them outside of the textual contexts within which they are presented. The Female Man wavers stylistically between the hectoring, the overwrought, the juvenile, and the unreadable. When the narrator observes 'This is the lecture. If you don't like it, you can skip to the next chapter' (loc. 466) I suspect that I could not have been the only reader to have concluded that not just the chapter in question but rather the entire novel reads like a testy diatribe against The Evil That Men Do and were left 'numb, numb with boredom' (loc. 2610-11) while struggling through it.

The Female Man is a curio you may wish to dip into for any number of reasons, but it really isn't something you need to take the time to read or study, and is a dubious addition to the SF Masterworks series.

Do not get glum when you are no longer understood, little book. Do not curse your fate. Do not reach up from readers' laps and punch the readers' noses. Rejoice, little book! For on that day, we will be free. (Lo. 3154-56)

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