And Dats' De End
Eye of Terror -Barrington J Bayley
This concludes my reading of Barrington J Bayley's novels -I've read them all. This is his franchise novel for the Warhammer 40,000 game universe. The human race lives under control of the Imperium -a religio-militaristic Inquisition type empire that spans multiple systems. With a fighting force of specially bred Space Marines, they protect the human race against the demonic forces of Chaos. In the Eye of Terror, a region of space where the rules of the universe are altered by the dark magical forces of the Chaos deities that preside there, there is somehow an unlikely alliance of these deities that threatens war against material galaxy. The Imperium prepares for battle. The second plot concerns a rogue trader and a ship navigator who enter the Eye of Terror in search of exotic treasure. They encounter seductive and terrfiying forces that challenge their sanity.
There are some complaints online from those who play this game, that he takes liberties with some aspects of the game's backstory, but I could give a rat's *** about that kind of stuff, and when don't franchise novels do that anyway. Interestingly, this is his longest novel by almost double the pages ,and he concocts a lurid, vividly imagined gumbo of dark SF flavored fantasy.The thing almost reads like the novelization of a Death Metal concept album, so all the metal heads that read SFF might want to hunt this down and give it a spin. Others might find it a little grim for exactly those reasons.I've read a proposal for a second novel somewhere online.This kind of stuff is not normally my kind of thing, but I liked this novel enough that if a followup were written, I'd buy it and read it.
***
Starship Troopers (reread) -RAH
I've been wanting to reread this for the past 2 years. So many discussions of Mil SF and SF in general here, will circle around a consideration of this novel, and I really could not comment on it in depth because I read it so long ago I really didn't remember much about it, other than I thought it was good. As usual after reading something in that context, it was almost like reading it for the first time.
This is a very interesting novel about civics and and individual's responsibility to society. A lot of people seem to get hung up about the "serving in the military in order to vote" thing (which is not exactly an accurate characterization anyway), and dismiss this novel as fascist. It can be pointed out almost immediately, that while this novel is about a miltary meritocracy, and might seem authoritarian in it's leanings,
The Moon is A Harsh Mistress, is a novel that is antithetically and rebelliously anti-authoritarian in it's focus and concerns. Serious readers of RAH will have to reconcile the two books and resist coming to an easy, self serving consideration of RAH's political thought.
Having said that, on an action/narrative level,it's interesting how the actual conflict with "the Bugs" is almost anticlimactic. The combat scenes written in the context of how a squadron would systematically sweep a target area, really could have used a little para-first person narrator descriptive writing to create a more exciting conclusion to the book but, alas, RAH does not seem capable of doing that. Still, while IMO not as good as TMIAHM, it is a fascinating novel to read and think about, and deserving of it's reputation.
****
The Seed of Evil -Barrington J Bayley
If one goes online in search of critical evaluations of Bayley's work, one will find this anthology of Bayley's short stories routinely dismissed as "not as good as
The Knights of the Limits". I find this determination of little use, as these anthologies are ultilmately arbitrary entities as presentations. Bayleys' short prose will hopefully be collected in a complete anthology where the best stories in this particular volume will not be so summarily dismissed. There is stuff here I liked as much as the stuff in KotL:
Sporting with the Chid is a story of some human hunters on an alien world who must seek aid from The Chid -a race of aliens with an advanced medical knowledge that humans are officially forbidden to contact. A sardonically gruesome little story, that definitely made me realize that the Warhammer novel was given to the right man for the job.
****
The Radius Riders which is a story of a submarine type vehicle set to explore the interior of the earth riding through solid rock using a matter displacement technology. The story explores similar thematic territory to the much touted story
Me and My Antronoscope in
The Knights of the Limits. That story, despite it's epistemolgical concerns, seemed to me to come to the same conclusion as something as old as RAH's
Orphans of the Sky. This story had for me a much more offbeat SF idea to offer, and comes to a nifty conclusion.
***1/2
Man in Transit seems more like a Kafka/Borges type idea that his buddy Ballard would come up with. Due to changes in international policies, a man born of refugees on an airline, can never legally touch down in any given country, and he grows to adulthood as a passenger on commercial airflights, taken care of by the good will of flight crews and passengers. His unique circumstance conjures up an off kilter take on the JudeoChristian belief system.
***1/2
There really is only one bum in this collection as far as I'm concerned -Integrity, which is a take on American Western gun toting machismo individualism and reads like something you'd find in an underground comic from the 70's. A dated weasened bit of business that preaches to the choir.
The story that really stands out, is the story of the title
Seed of Evil- an almost medieval morality tale. An immortal turtle like alien named, appropriately enough, Neverdie, seeks sanctuary on a laid back future Earth. He is left alone by everyone but a doctor obsessed with Neverdie's immortality. The story is about the lengths the doctor goes to obtain the secret of immortality from Neverdie. Loved it! A bit like Robert Louis Stevenson's
The Bottle Imp. Great, great story.
*****
All in all a good collection
***1/2
A Plague of Demons -Keith Laumer
The first half of this novel is
one of the greatest SF comicbook hero styled action stories for guys ever written in the history of the universe! An incredibly exciting, often funny, first person hard boiled detective narrative about a covert government agent physically augmented to deal with an invasion of hideous dog aliens, who, unbeknownst to the human population at large, have been harvesting human brains from concocted casualties in areas of human war activity, perhaps for centuries, for their own sinister purposes.
The second half of the novel disappointingly shifts into a talking tank story that bored the snot out of me after the exhilaration of the first part (none of Laumer's Bolo Tank novels for me, I guess
) until the admittedly wild VanVogt styled conclusion.The novel has a very similar structure to
Dinosaur Beach, and in that regard is less successful, but the first half is just so
awesome, anyone looking cyborg vs. alien combat with great action scenes should pick this book up tomorrow.
***
The Best of John Russell Fearn Volume 1 - John Russell Fearn
A Brit Golden Age guy I read about in a Bayley interview that he mentioned as an early influence. Never heard of him before that. Got to give the guy credit: he's an unstoppable force of nature from all i've read about him, writing prolifically and across genre lines for years and years and years, under a multitude of pseudonyms including the one more people might be familiar with -Vargo Statten.
I think John Clute nails him when he describes him as "unpolished and imaginatively reckless", but that "his best work is vigorous and occasionally vivid". Most of the stories here are dated prune-o-reenos, with the silliest dated popular concepts of science, but a few are so far out that they are -well- something.
Mathematica and
Mathematica Plus are really fantasy, but have a giddy lunacy about them, as does
Deserted Universe. The story that had the greatest appeal to me was a little fever dream called
Wings Across the Cosmos, which is about this walnut sized turtle like alien (again with the turtles) of colossal mass, that comes crashing to earth and ends up infecting the narrator who then undergoes a transformation. Just one of those f***ed up little stories that crawls under your skin. The last story
The Circle of Life is the most giddy and silly piece of flapdoodle- Good Gosh...wotta way to end the collection...
I can only recommend this collection to people who want to know something about this prolific Golden Age figure through a nice core sample of his writing.
A little dab'll do ya.
**1/2
The Collected SF&F of Stanley G. Weinbaum Vol 1: Interplanetary Odysseys-Stanley G. Weinbaum
This guy is one of the best Golden Agers I've run across yet. His stuff despite narrative conventions of the past, has real science in it, is well written and has current appeal. I read at least half of the material collected here in
The Best of Stanley G Weinbaum a few months back, but the things that were new for me here, are of interest. Stories like
Flight on Titan and
Planet of Doubt got me thinking about his possible influence on personal fave Hal Clement.A little Googling brought up an apparent lecture about the story
Martian Odyssey that Clement gave at a Chicago Convention and confirmed the suspicion. If you start to Google some of your favs like Arthur C Clarke,+Weinbaum, don't be suprised to find them gushing about some Weinbaum work they read when they were young. This guy is the real deal!
All in all a very appealing writer. I got all these collected works volumes from Leonaur press, and I look forward to woofing them down in the coming year. I feel another personal hero in the making.
***1/2
Counter-Clock World -Phillip K Dick
Every year I try to squeeze in one of the last remaining PKD novels that I haven't read ,and this is this years. Notorious for it's illogically selective appllication of the notion of time reversal, it's actually one of the more focused narratives in the third tier of his novels.There is a reverse time effect going on. People are reanimated in their graves, food is expelled, cigaretttes are unsmoked. People continue to regress and then are taken into the nearest womb.Sounds like the kind of stuff that if you gave it to a non SF reader, they'd throw it back in your face, spine first, right?
The story concerns a typical Dick schlub -Sebastian Hermes who after coming from the grave himself, now runs a sort of funeral home in reverse called a Vitarium. They unearth the reanimated departed and are legally and financially involved with their reintegration into society. Upon a routine unearthing, Sebastian notices that a significant religious figure, Anarch Peak, a sort of Martin Luther King/Malcom X is buried nearby, and due to his post rebirthing telepathic sensitivities he knows that this gentlemen is about to be reborn. Resurrecting this figure gets him involved in a political struggle between a Nation of Islam type organization(with robots!), representatives from the Vatican, and "The Library"- an organization seemingly beyond legal jurisdiction that is involved in the eradication of written and printed materials due to the time reverse phenomena .
Quotes from St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Boethius abound. Dick's wives make their usual appearances; Anne Dick is the ferocious BOW Library villainess Ann Fisher, and his forth wife is Sebastian's timid wife Lotta Hermes. To be honest, Dicks's attitudes towards women, and his addled headed aphorisms concerning them, distance him from me at this point in my life. Still, despite how truly wonked out all of the above sounds, it almost works. That's Phil Dick for you. But this novel is certainly not for the uninitiated,
and a little bit of a downer for me to read at the Holidays, thankyou. I still haven't made up my mind whether I liked it. But he's got me thinking-clever, manipulative sucker that he is.
***
Venus on the Half-Shell-Kilgore Trout (
but really, Phillip Jose Farmer)
Finally got around to reading this. For those who don't know Kilgore Trout is the fictional scifi writer who appears and whose work is often cited in Kurt Vonnegut's novels. Phillip Jose Farmer got permission to write a novel as if he really existed, and here it is. More info can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_on_the_Half-Shell
Some funny stuff,some effective satiric punch, more inventive than I would have expected. As a pastiche of Vonnegut's writing, it only succeeds in the most periperal of ways: he has a scifi writer cited in this book -Johnathan Swift Somers the 3rd, and there are moments of doggeral verse and bawdy song lyrics. But the satiric tone is less Swift and moreVoltaire, and not enough Twain, which is where Vonnegut get's his satiric tone from. Still there are moments that make it worth reading. At about page 160 it gets a little wearying, but picks up for the end, but I really think it should have been more like 150 -175 pages as opposed 204.
The real punchline is this:
somewhere in the middle I started to think "you know this is very similar to
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, to the point where it's obvious someone is copying someone.
Well...Hitchhikers Guide,was first broadcast in 1978.
This was written in 1974.
*
With best Jerry Seinfeld sneer voice, as if he's talking to Newman*
So, Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy...not even original as a parody...a rip off of Venus on the Half-Shell...I might have known...
*** for Venus. HGTTG a book I never loved, is now down to
no stars.
EDIT: I had forgotten about this even thread though I was in on aspects of the conversation. I'm not the only one who thinks Hitch Hiker's Guide is a ripoff of this novel -maledoro says roughly the same thing:
http://www.sffworld.com/forums/showthread.php?p=403839&highlight=guide#post403839
And if you don't believe it, just sit down and read it when it comes back out in print in February:
http://www.amazon.com/Venus-Half-Sh...bs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1198946584&sr=1-2
