Review: The Skylark of Space

The Skylark of Space by E E "Doc" Smith (1928)

Chemist Richard "Dick" Seaton watches in astonishment as his experiment flies out the window and into infinity.  Before you can say "radium" Seaton realises he has discovered the secret of atomic energy and without missing a beat gets his best friend to back him in building a spaceship.  However, evil mastermind Richard "Blackie" DuQuesne is also after the secret and does all sorts of dastardly things to get a monopoly on the new power source, including kidnapping Seaton's fiancée in a spaceship of his own.

Skylark is one of the true classics of early science fiction, but "classic:" doesn't always translate into good.  This is a novel where to call the characters two-dimensional would be a compliment.  As to the plot, Smith sets up his chess pieces, gives you a good 360 degree look at them, and then sets them in motion with zero suspense or even conflict.  True, there are villains and fist clenchings and all sorts of melodramatic goings on, but none of it means anything because nothing is ever at stake.  When our heroes can effectively forget about the black-hearted Duquesne for the last half of the book, something is seriously wrong.  Instead, we get spectacles, set piece battles, and escapes that are about as engaging as watching a string of firecrackers go off.  And there are banquets.  Every time Smith's plot bogs down he has everyone march off to eat.

Worse, most everything depends  on a staggering string of coincidences.  Our heroes just happens to come across an airfleet bineg attacked by monsters never before seen in such numbers.  The fleet just happens to be that of the emperor of the planet they're visiting, who just happens to have the leader of his enemies captives, who the emperor just happens to give the Earthmen as a slave and who just happens to have a thought teaching device he just happens to have just invented.  And so on, and so on.

The only thing that keeps this going is sheer brass with Smith rolling out scientific wonder upon wonder in a parade of power fantasies.  Small wonder it was such a sensation in 1928.  It hasn't the "what the hell" bravado of Smith's later Lensman series, but it does point the way.

Review: Luminous Airplanes

Luminous Airplanes by Paul La Farge is a book that tries to answer the question of how to adapt the traditional paper and pasteboard book to the digital age. How do you take what is essentially a static collection of words and turn it into something open ended and interactive? How do you give it a new digital dimension? Mr. La Farge's answer is to turn his novel about a content manager returning to his boyhood home in the Catskills into an experiment in hypertexting or, as he prefers to call it, "immersive" text. Read More

The Crimson Ray: Conclusion

Conclusion

The Crimson Ray: Part 3

Part 3 of 4

Review: Conjure Wife

Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber (1943)

Behind every great man there is a woman–except that it often turns out that the woman is a witch.  At least, that's the premise of Fritz Leiber's 1943 supernatural thriller, Conjure Wife.  

Professor Norman Saylor has a happy life.  He has a secure position at the university where he teaches sociology, he's the favoured candidate as the new department head, he's popular with the students and he has a loving wife Tansy.  One day, in a fit of idle revelry,  he rummages through a drawer where Tansy keeps things and discovers that his rational, educated spouse has been collecting graveyard dirt and making magical charms, which she's been hiding all over the house.  Confronting Tansy, she tells him that she's been practising witchcraft for some time in order to protect him against those who meant him harm.  Wanting to prove to Tansy that this is all superstition, Norman makes her destroy all of her charms in the fireplace.  As the last charm burns, Tansy feels as if a great burden has been lifted from her, but Norman inexplicably experiences a chill.  Then the phone rings and Norman is confronted by an ex-student accusing him leading a conspiracy against him.  Within hours, Norman is facing charges of sexual misconduct, he has a gun pulled on him, and his life in general seems to be going to pot.   Worse, Norman senses that something is stalking him.  Is this coincidence and imagination or are there witches on the campus really working against him and sensing his vulnerability now that Tansy's protections have been withdrawn.

Today, Conjure Wife would be classified as "urban fantasy", but that is distinctly unfair and restrictive because it was Leiber who invented the genre before it even existed.  More to the point, he did it far better than his imitators with their katana-wielding babes in leather trousers have even come close to pulling off.  Though flawed by a few clumsy exposition scenes, Leiber's novel is a truly hair raising story.  Norman's mixture of paranoia and scepticism that grows more pronounced as the menace grows closer has rarely been equalled and  the way in which Leiber poises science (of, at least symbolic logic) against witchcraft remains fresh even to this day. But what makes it truly work is the characters.  There is a real logic to the plot that derives from them.  Norman has his entire world view at stake and Tansy is willing to literally risk her soul to protect him.  Even the villains of the piece are driven by their individual motives and suffer because of them.

As much a psychological thriller as a horror story, conjure wife shows what the genre can do if given half the chance.

Flu

The Crimson Ray: Part 2

Part 2 of 4

The Crimson Ray (Part 1)

Part 1 of 4

The Cruel Sky: Conclusion

Conclusion

The Cruel Sky: Part 1

Part 1 of 2

Philip K Dick: A Day in the Afterlife

Punctuation jokes

A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves. 

It's a specialised branch of humour, but it has it's moments.  More here.

Treasury of War Poetry

Review: Lord of the Flies

Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1959)

It's the day after tomorrow and a nuclear war has broken out.  A planeload of English schoolboys being sent to safety is shot down and crashes on a deserted tropical island. No adults survive and the wreck of the plane is washed out to sea, leaving the surviving boys, none older than twelve, with nothing to survive with except two small knives and the clothes they're standing in.  However, the weather is warm and there's fruit to eat and, having elected the boy Ralph as their leader, the boys settle down to a life of tending the signal fire and hours of play like characters out of Coral Island.

Unfortunately, things don't work out that way.  Under the dire influence of the power-hungry Jack, a boy obsessed with hunting and bloodshed, the group's minimal cohesion begins to unravel.  As the weeks drag on, the boys sink further and further into chaos as Ralph and his myopic friend Piggy try desperately to keep the hope of rescue alive and the final plunge in savagery at bay.

It's not easy reviewing a book that most people have already read in school and has praise heaped on it for over half a century.  It also doesn't help that I didn't like it the first time I read it when I was not much older than the main characters or that re-reading it has only altered my opinion slightly.  I suppose it's because the boys in the novel always struck me as being incompetent and that, by extension, this was Golding's opinion of civilised man.  Selling the premise of a book is always vital and it was hard for me to accept that these boys, who were my age, knew less about woodcraft than I'd ever forgotten–and I was no Daniel Boone.  They also seemed painfully ill-disciplined and I often wondered how different the tale would have been if the plane had been carrying boy scouts.

Mind you, I'm sure that Golding was also aware of this, but his decisions clearly show that he was stacking the deck by rigging his islanders for failure.  Ralph, for all his good intentions and nascent leadership, is utterly ineffectual with no concept of human nature, Piggy is as repelling as he is level headed and intelligent, and Jack and his henchman Roger are both obviously insane from chapter one.  So is the introspective and insightful Simon, come to that, who is best described as a high-functioning schizophrenic.

Golding is also extremely proud of his symbolism, but he is never clear about what the blazes the symbols are supposed to mean; leaving the point as a rebus puzzle for the reader.  Symbolism has its place as does allegory, but you still have to get to the point.  I can hardly believe that it's that when thing go bad civilisation can go to smash.. That's far too facile.  G K Chesterton made the much stronger point that what's really interesting is the balancing act of order and how it's able to reassert itself against all odds as if... But that's getting into theology.

I have read that one parallel that Golding was trying to draw was between the final, murderous hunt and the mission of the rescuing Royal Navy warship.  If this is the case, then I find his point insulting.  Jack is an instrument of chaos and tyranny bent on destruction.  The warship is an instrument of order intended to enforce the peace and protect civilisation.  They are not parallels, but diametric opposites.