December 2018

Science Fiction Book Review

 Collision Course

Barrington J. Bayley has done the impossible: he has written a time travel book that I didn't dislike. Well!--at least, he's written a time travel book that I didn't dislike because of the time travel. The future society he shows is steeped in racism and white superiority and genocide, which makes much of the characters' words and actions deeply unsettling. Because of that, I found it hard to turn off my critical mind and just enjoy the story.

To Mr. Bayley's credit, the racist words and ideas only come from the characters, never from the authorial point of view. The protagonists--archaeologist Rond Heshke and scientist Leard Ascar--are less racist than the villainous Titanium Legions that rule Earth, but even they are never able to fully break from the culture of white supremacy. That's realistic, but it's also part of what makes the book so unsettling. Heshke and Ascar are good people, the ones we're presumably supposed to identify with, and even they are parroting some of the regime's propaganda about racial purity.

Chapter 1
It begins
Archeologist Rond Heshke is brought to Bupolbloc 1 for an interview with officials of the "Titanium Legions, the self-styled Guardians of Earth." The Titans wish him to explain his lack of progress. Why hasn't his archaeology research come up with evidence to support the official historical theory of alien invasion? Heshke can't tell them that the lack of progress is because the archaeological evidence shows no record of past civilization-destroying alien attacks against Earth. Disagreeing with official history would be dangerous. Heshke makes some excuses. But it's no matter. The Titans really just wanted to sound him out to make sure he's not a subversive. Apparently he passes the test. The Titans have found a honest-to-goodness alien artifact, and they want him to check it out.

Chapter 2
Space Nazis
Heshke returns to his dig site and has a conversation with his friend Blare Oblomot. They talk about the Titans. The Titans are real space Nazis. Blood and soil is their motto. They worship mother Earth and consider themselves guardians of the racial purity of True Man. To that end, the Titans have waged wars of extermination against deviant subspecies of humans. All devs have been defeated, and those few who are still alive are forced to live in isolated dev reservations. Blare Oblomot reveals that he is a member of the Panhumanic League, an illegal society dedicated to equal rights for all humans. Heshke is surprised. He isn't a fan of the Titans, but he isn't sure the Titans are totally wrong in their wars against deviant subspecies like the Urukuri, Amhraks, and the Lorenes. The devs are dangerous--"they rape our women", Heshke objects. Still, he won't betray Oblomot to the Titans.

The Titans arrive to take Heshke to see the alien artifact. Also, they arrest Oblomot. They already know all about him. Oblomot detonates a grenade rather than be taken alive and risk betraying the Panhumanic League.

Chapter 3
A novel theory of time travel
The artifact is a time machine. A scientist named Leard Ascar has managed to reserve-engineer the device, and now the Titans have their own time machine. They want Heshke to take a trip back in time to examine a curious problem: ancient ruins that seem to be aging backwards. And here is where Bayley introduces a novel theory of time travel.

Think of the universe as a four-dimensional continuum--three dimensions of space, as is our ordinary experience, and an additional dimension which we call time, extending into the infinite past and the infinite future. If we take the moving 'now' out of the picture we could just as easily call it a universe of four dimensions of space. So now we have a static four-dimensional matrix. That's basically what the universe consists of, but there's one other factor: the fleeting present moment, sweeping through the fourth dimension like a traveling wave.
...
What is this 'now'? Does anything exist outside it? For centuries the philosophical question has been whether the past and the future have any existence, or whether only the present that we experience has existence. Well, we've found the answer to that question all right: the past and the future do exist, but they have no 'now'. In effect, they have no time. No differentiation between before and after. They're both dead, as it were.
..
Consciousness can only exist in the 'now'--somehow or other it appears to be a function of it.

Chapter 4
Lost in space time
The crew travel back in time to visit the ruins, and discover that yes, they are in the past and the ruins are indeed aging backwards. On the journey back to their present time, the encounter an alien timeship. Leard Ascar makes an intuitive leap and comes to a striking conclusion: the aliens are from another 'now', a 'now' that is traveling backwards, on a collision course with their own.

What if the Absolute Present isn't unique, as I had formerly assumed it to be? Perhaps there are other waves of time, separated from our own by millions of years, by millenia--or only by centuries. Perhaps there is a regular series of them, forming the nodes of a cosmic wave frequency vibrating through the universe.
...
And what if one of those other time waves was traveling in the opposite direction to our own? Not proceeding from the past into the future, as we understand time, but from the future into the past?
...
Now do you get it? These creatures aren't alien to Earth. They're Terran. They evolved here, millions of years in our future. By the same token, we are in their future. The Earth has two completely different evolutionary developments on it, separated in time and associated with separate time-streams--timestreams moving in opposite directions. And they are on a collision course.

Chapter 5
Retort City: Asians in Space
The action moves to a city floating in interstellar space, nicknamed Retort City. The city has been in space for 5000 years and is populated by Chinese people. They have rice and bamboo, and this is the first thing linking the book to our timeline. Retort City has mastered time control, using it extensively, even in things as trivial as a games. A popular game is ping-pong played on a table "divided into time-zones each of whose present moment was slightly out of phase with the others."

Chapter 6
Resistance, and War
There is an underground resistance, the Panhumanic League. Elsewhere, Limnich, leader of the Titanium League and de facto ruler of Earth, declares war on the aliens from the future.

Chapter 7
In which we discover even more racism
Heshke, Ascar, Titan-Lieutenant Gann, and the rest are rescued by men from a deviant subspecies. Heshke is not well informed about devs, but he thinks these strange people are called Shings or Chanks. They have technology far superior to anything known to the Titanium Legions. (They are from Retort City.) But Titan-Lieutenant Gann is a true believer in all the racist Titan ideology, and he ties himself in logical knots to maintain a belief in the intellectual superiority of True Man.

"They're Chinks," Gann told him. "The last group of them was supposed to have been exterminated five hundred years ago. Quite an interesting strain, as devs go. Tradition has it that their cunning was almost superhuman."

"Superhuman?" repeated Heshke wonderingly. "And yet you deny them intellectual ability?"

"It's more of an animal cleverness raised to a high degree. In devs the intellectual faculty is always perverted in some way, producing bizarre sciences and practices, yet it can involve extreme subtlety--in fact there used to be a saying: 'the fiendishly clever Chink.'"

My goodness these Titans are racist. But we see Heshke and Ascar start to break free from their cultural conditioning, at least somewhat, so that's a good sign.

Chapter 8
Time Science
Heshke and Ascar arrive at Retort City. Ascar is introduced to Shiu Kung-Chien, the resident time expert from Retort City.

Chapter 9
Time is a localized phenomenon

"The truth," said Shiu, "is that the universe at large has no time. It's not 'now' everywhere simultaneously. The universe is basically, fundamentally static, dead, indifferent. It has no past, no future, no 'now.' "

He refilled his teacup, allowing Ascar to interrupt with: "But there is time."

Shiu nodded patiently. "Localized, accidental phenomena, without overall significance. Processes of time can begin over small areas, usually associated with a planet, though not always. They consist of flows or waves of energy traveling from one point to another: small traveling waves of 'now.'

… "You can see now why time travel is comparatively easy," Shiu went on. "We merely have to detach a fragment of the traveling 'now-wave' and move it about the real static world of non-time. It comes away quite easily, because it's local energy, not part of a cosmic schema."

Shiu further opines that Earth is doomed. When the two now-waves approach each other they will cancel each other out--"the weirdest, most fantastic event, perhaps, that can happen in this universe. He lets slip that Retort City once suffered a similar event--not a head-on collision like Earth will experience, but a glancing blow, a near-collision with an entity moving obliquely through time relative to Retort City.

Chapter 10
Emissaries
Retort City wants to send help to Earth--to both the humans and the alien species. Ascar elects to stay on Retort City, but Heshke and Hueh Su-Mueng travel to Earth to warn the Titans.

Chapter 11
Racists stay racist
The Titans refuse Retort City's offer of help. The alien species refuses help as well. Both species plan to destroy all life in the other time-line, believing that this may allow them to survive. (I think both are wrong.) Su-Mueng offers to help Limnich overthrow Retort City so that the Titans can have access to Retort City's science, technology, and resources.

Chapter 12
Genocide
The Titans begin the final genocide, liquidating the dev reservations. Heshke, on the Amhrak reservation, sends Sobrie and Layella to the Retort observation ship, to relay news to Retort City. We find out finally that True Man is White Man. Not that we really needed it spelled out. Interestingly, the devs act defeated already. They just sit and take the coming genocide, hardly fighting back. Weird.

Chapter 13
Oblique Entity
Hueh Su-Mueng's treachery enables Titans to get aboard Retort City, and there's a whole lot of fighting. It's back and forth. During the battle, Ascar contacts the Oblique Entity. The entity can't save Earth, but it does manage to save some people: it splits the time-stream, sending the dev reservations into an alternate time-stream. The devs--and only the devs--will be safe from the coming collision of time-waves.

Chapter 14
War
The dev reservations are suddenly barren and empty, but that revelation doesn't change the Titans' resolve. The continue with their futile war against the aliens from the future.

Christian Book Review

 Hostage to the Devil: The Possession and Exorcism of Five Living Americans

Martin is both candid and coy. When the possessed speak, Malachi faithfully reproduces their obscenities, crude outbursts, and their vulgarity--and they do have vulgar, foul things to say. This is not a book for the squeamish. But on the next page, when recounting the actions of the subjects, he suddenly becomes coy and speaks of their sins in circumlocutions, euphemisms, and vague hints.

Martin also has a conversation with another priest where they discuss sex. It's bizarre, over-the-top, theologically ludicrous. To hear them talk one would think sex is a kind of powerful magic, or perhaps a piece of God himself. Maybe asking the clergy to take lifelong vows of celibacy was unwise.

Martin doesn't waste time showing example of demon oppression or demonization. The five examples he recounts are cases of full-on complete possession. The demon takes over.

The biggest problem I see is that Martin sets this up as a cosmic duel, the exorcist against the demon. It's a personal struggle and it relies on the exorcist's efforts, the strength of his will, the purity of his character, his wisdom and his doggedness and his unwillingness to retreat or give up. Nobody can help the exorcist--once he begins an exorcism, he must complete it himself. It may take hours, but more likely days or weeks. If he loses concentration, gets sidetracked, or slips up for even a moment, he loses. The demon can win. If he fails to drive out the demon--or even if he does--the epic confrontation can wound his soul. Most of the exorcists Martin introduces eventually die from the after-effects of the exorcisms they perform.

Oh, sure, Martin gives lip service to God in all this. It's God's power that allows the exorcist to drive out the demon. But fundamentally, this is (according to how Martin presents it) a confrontation between a man (the exorcist) and a demon. It's heroic, epic, titanic. A spiritual duel. A heavenly contest of wills. The exorcist risks his life and his very soul. How very poetic.

Poetic--but biblical?

Not from what I read. There's too much of man in Martin's depiction of exorcism. Not enough God.

But Father Malachi Martin has a way with words. This is the only book I've ever read that scared me enough that I quit. I didn't finish it.

Children's Fiction Book Review

 The Secret of the Indian

Omri-tastic!

Science Fiction Book Review

 Black Man's Burden

A bunch of educated liberal black Americans cruise around North Africa using all manner of subversive propaganda to spur the people out of their primitive and petty tribal ways and into a modern future. Perhaps a united Africa will soon be a world superpower to rival the Western and Soviet blocs.

Homer Crawford works in Africa with the funding of the Reunited Nations. He figures the tribesmen are still too primitive and wary of outside ideas (because of colonialism and such) so whenever he introduces Western ideas he ascribes them to a fictional African leader named El Hassan.

But do the Africans themselves want this? Can a bunch of black Americans funded by the Reunited Nations and operating from a paternalistic Western worldview actually know better than Africans themselves what Africa needs?

Of course they can! Homer Crawfords throws off his allegience to the powers that fund him--goodbye Reunited Nations--and takes up the mantle of the savior Hero of Africa. He becomes El Hassan for real.

Maybe this story was better received in 1961 when it was serialized in Astounding, but in 2018 I found it tiresome and outdated.

Link: Black Man's Burden [gutenberg.org]

Adventure Fiction Book Review

 Tarzan and the Tarzan Twins with Jad-bal-ja the Golden Lion

The further adventures of the Tarzan twins
This book for young readers starts where The Tarzan Twins ends. Tarzan has rescued Dick and Doc from the Bagalla cannibals. The boys are safe with Tarzan at his African estate, but their time in the jungle has awakened a hunger in them, a hunger for the primeval jungle.

"There is a fascination about it that I cannot explain," replied Dick. "I am afraid of the jungle and yet I want to go back into it."

The Golden Lion
Tarzan introduces the boys to Jad-bal-ja the Golden Lion. Then he takes them into the jungle for some nice, safe fun. With Tarzan and Jad-bal-ja to protect them there will be no danger.

Dick and Doc were safe under the protection of the famous ape-man and while they were looking forward to many interesting experiences, they were sure that from now on they would be perfectly safe and that never again would they be in such distressing danger as that from which they had just escaped.

Not likely!

Tarzan abandons two young boys in the jungle
Jad-bal-ja senses something wrong, so Tarzan leaves the boys with the lion and swings off to investigate. While he's gone, a titanic storm rocks the jungle. Dick and Doc climb trees and ride out the storm. They survive. When the weather clears, Jad-bal-ja is gone and they are alone. Convinced that not even Tarzan could survive that hurricane, the boys try to find their own way back to the Greystoke estate. They are hopelessly lost.

Frightful priests of The Flaming God
Twenty priests of The Flaming God have been forced out of Opar and they are traversing the jungle looking for a site to build a new temple. These brutish and frightful sun worshippers have kidnapped a little white girl. They have named her Kla and intend her to be their high priestess. She will make sacrifices to The Flaming God on their behalf.

An aside
Opar is one of Burroughs's fantastic lost civilizations, said to be a lost colony of Atlantis. So although within the story the Oparians live in Africa, they are not native Africans. They are the descendents of Atlanteans, inbred and interbred with apes until only a glimmer of their humanity remains.

Meanwhile
Meanwhile, the boys have trouble finding food in the jungle, but that problem is tabled when they stumble across the priests of The Flaming God. The boys stay concealed and follow the twenty brutes to see if they can rescue the kidnapped girl.

As they moved back into the forest above the trail taken by the frightful twenty they put behind them all thought of their own safety and welfare, sacrificing their own chances for rescue in the interest of a total stranger; but that was because, being what they were, they could not have done otherwise.

Many generations of brave men lay behind them, men to whom duty meant more than comfort or safety or even life. These two boys did not think of the thing that they were doing as a brave, self-sacrificing, courageous thing to do. They only thought of it as something that they must do, as each had been reared among people in whom it is almost a hereditary conviction that a man is the natural protector of women and the weak. In their veins coursed the sort of blood that sent the women and the children to the life boats of the Titanic while the men remained on the deck until the great ship took its final dive into the icy waters of the Atlantic.

Oparian plots!
Gulm is the leader of the band of outcast Oparians priests, which pleases Gulm very much, but pleases others quite a bit less. Ulp is afraid Gulm will sacrifice him to The Flaming God. He figures if there's no high priestess, there can be no sacrifice. So during the night while all are asleep, Ulp takes Kla outside the encampment, intending that a prowling lion should devour her.

Rescued
Dick and Doc whisk the girl up into a tree just as the lion pounces. Her name is Gretchen. Her father is a missionary and she grew up around the jungle, so she's able to help them locate food. The party is still hopelessly lost, however.

Recaptured
The sun worshipers recapture Dick and Gretchen. Doc is still at large. Gulm hurries the party along: as soon as they reach the site of the new temple, he will have Kla sacrifice Dick to The Flaming God. Doc harries the party, killing several with well-placed arrows.

Rescued
But time runs out. The priests arrive at the site of the new temple. The altar is built, the moment of sacrifice has arrived. Jad-bal-ja finds Doc, and together they rush towards the altar. The sun worshippers scatter and Jad-bal-ja kills Gulm. Tarzan arrives. He orders the remaining sun worshippers to return to Opar and serve La. They sullenly agree.

Gretchen is reunited with her father, the missionary Doctor Karl von Harben. It's a happy ending all around.

Surprisingly not racist
The Tarzan Twins was fairly bursting with casual and explicit racism, so it was surprising to read this book and find almost no racism at all. Most of that is because this story, set entirely in Africa, contains zero African characters. Doc is American, Dick and Tarzan are English, Gretchen and Doctor Karl von Harben are (presumably) German, the priests of The Flaming God are Oparians/Atlantean, and Jad-bal-ja is a lion.

Actually, to be completely fair, Doctor Karl von Harben does have a group of Africans with him in his search for Gretchen. One is even named--Natando--but they don't figure into the story.

Link: Tarzan and the Tarzan Twins with Jad-bal-ja the Golden Lion [gutenberg.net.au]