May 2020

Classic Literature Book Review

 The Old Man and the Sea

For this they gave him a Pulitzer and the Nobel? For this?

Science Fiction Book Review

 The Witches of Karres

I can tell it's a fix-up novel. Also, it's mostly about weird psi powers, but the parameters and limits of the psi power is nebulous and undefined. It's no better than a poorly-defined system of magic.

Schmitz is not for me, it seems.

Science Fiction Book Review

 Planet Probability

Once again I find I'm reading a sequel to a book I've never read. Oops. This one has a lot of back-story that I think I managed to pick up along the way.

Setting: Frames and Plots
In the Thirtieth Century, mankind has developed the ultimate form of entertainment: Frames. The Frames are artificial constructed environments that correspond to real or imagined periods in history. Plot Directors fill these Frames with people and set events in motion, and the result is pure, perfect, total entertainment. The effect is made complete by memory and personality transplants into the participants, so not only are they physically present, they are mentally and psychologically a part of the world within the Frame. People live through the most exciting and exhilarating events in history--like trench warfare of World War I--jazzed up with the Plot Director's personal touches. It's amazing and wonderful and hedonistic and horrific and degrading and grisly, but nobody seems to object, so there you go. Decadent.

Backstory: Talisker and Spingarn
From what I can deduce, in the previous book a man named Spingarn traveled to the planet Talisker to do...something. Talisker is the planet where Frames were first tested and developed, but the planet has been uninhabited for ages. On Talisker, Spingarn met an Alien and got something called the Genekey, which...I don't know, but it was important for Spingarn's quest. In any event, (I think) Spingarn partially succeeded in his quest (again, I'm not sure what precisely he intended to do), but neither he nor his assistant Hawk returned from Talisker. His robot, Horace, returned with his memories wiped.

Marvell and Liz
Marvell is a Plot Director--he creates stories in the Frames. He is middle-aged, fat, and misogynistic. (He says bitch a lot.) He talks to himself out loud, and he's a coward. Marvell is a whining, whimpering, unsympathetic character.

Liz Hasell is his assistant. She is young, pretty, and accepts whatever abuse comes her way, in a way that makes me think she doesn't notice or care. Liz is boring--she does what's she's told, and she's not appreciably tougher or smarter than Marvell. Well, maybe a little smarter, but mostly because Marvell is too craven to notice facts staring him in the face.

Marvell is just starting off a new Plot he's devised when Deneb, the Director of Disaster Control, hauls Marvell and Liz to see him: there's a problem. Random probabilities in the Frames are causing Plot disasters all across known space, and the central computers at Disaster Control can scarcely keep things under control. The problem originates on Talisker. Therefore, Deneb has a special mission for Marvell and Liz: go to Talisker, find Spingarn and the Alien, and fix things.

[Deneb said:] "Spingarn faced the Alien and brought back the Genekey. When you contact the Alien, do as much as he did. That's your assignment. Contact the Alien entity and find some way of ironing out the random probabilities in the Frames."

Horace
Deneb sends Spingarn's robot Horace along with Marvell and Liz.

Does this make sense?
No, it does not. None of this makes any sense. Just go with it.

Sergeant Hawk
On Talisker, the crew run into Sergeant Hawk, Spingarn's former companion. Due to the overlaid Plot personality taking over his entire brain, Hawk thinks he's a Gunpowder Age soldier in the service of Queen Anne. He talks funny and yells insults like "cozening lying whoreson poxy Frogs" and thinks everything is a French plot. He tells Liz "cover your bubbies" so I guess he's prudish too. In any case, he's the funniest and most memorable character in the book. Spingarn is nowhere to be found.

The Alien, the Gates of Hell, and the Alien Possibility Space
Spingarn is nowhere to be found, but there's the Alien, or an Alien artifact, or possibly an Alien experiment. Sergeant Hawk calls it the Gates of Hell, and says Spingarn is inside. So the group enters. They are immediately attacked by a Tyrannosaurus Rex, which Hawk kills with a well-thrown grenade. Horace says they are in the Alien's Possibility Space. Whatever that means.

Dinosaurs, Crocodiles, Tigers, and Anthropoids
The Alien's Possibility Space is like a Frame, except the Alien has the power to transmute humans into other forms. It's used the Frames on Talisker to create habitats, and has transmuted people into creatures from various epochs in Earth's history: dinosaurs, ancient crocodiles, prehistoric tigers, anthropoid apes. The group finds Spingarn--and his woman and their twin children: they are tigers. The Alien turns Liz and Marvell into anthropoid apes, and they run off and have ape sex and ape adventures for several days or weeks. It's horrifying. While that's going on, Horace rescues the others; once outside of the Possibility Space, Spingarn and his family transmute back into humans.

Spingarn and Marvell confront the Alien
None of this makes any sense. But just roll with it, because it gets weirder. Spingarn re-enters the Possibility Space to rescue Marvell and Liz. Poor dumb Sergeant Hawk bombs the Possibility Space with a barrel of gunpowder. Everything--Alien, Spingarn, Marvell, and Liz--turns into a swirl of disembodied energy and howling thoughts.

It's Marvell--lately of being-an-anthropoid-ape fame--who figures everything out. The Alien comes from a different Universe, and wants to get back home. But it has lost its knowledge about itself and its own origin, so it can't return. Therefore, in an attempt to learn and understand life in this universe, the Alien set up the Frames to study life from Earth. Because it doesn't have perfect information about Earth's history, the Alien has supplemented its experiments with guesses and extrapolations. Hence, a Possibility Space.

Marvell tells the Alien to experiment on itself. Just as it set up the Frames to explore the evolutionary ladder of Earth, the Alien should explore the possibilities and probabilities of its own evolution. When it understands itself, it can find a way home to its own universe.

The Alien does as Marvell suggests. It experiments. It learns. It leaves Talisker and returns to its own universe. All the people in the Frames--the Possibility Space--transmute back into people. The end.

Oof.
Are we done now? We're done. This book makes no sense. The characters are bizarre--Marvell is craven, Liz is ill-used by the author. Spingarn comes into the story about halfway through and clumsily replaces Marvell and Liz as the main character. Horace the robot is a magic authorial plot device--he is constrained by his programming from interfering except when the author needs him to get the others out of a tight spot, and his memory is wiped except when the author needs him to remember something to supply a timely infodump. The only fun character is Sergeant Hawk, and that's only because he's a big joke.

I'm sorry, but this one isn't a winner. It's got its moments, but overall the plot is a mess, the storytelling is disjointed, and the characters are not well used.

Science Fiction Book Review

 The Counterfeit Man and other science fiction stories

Not his best work, but I did particularly enjoy An Ounce of Cure and The Meeting of the Board. Also OK were The Link and The Canvas Bag.

The Counterfeit Man
On the return trip from the first mission to Ganymede, Dr. Crawford realizes the crew has been infiltrated. One crew member has been replaced by a shapeshifting alien from Ganymede. By a clever ruse, Dr. Crawford identifies the culprit. He ratchets up the stress and anxiety of the crew, and the counterfeit man is the only one who doesn't get indigestion. It seems the alien was able to duplicate the outer form but not all the inner workings of the human body.

In a twist, it turns out Dr. Crawford knows that there were two counterfeit men aboard the spaceship. The second counterfeit man is Captain Jaffe. But when Crawford goes to confront him, the alien kills Crawford and takes his form.

The Canvas Bag
Joe Baker, a drifter, finds a nice girl--Jeannie--and decides to settle down and make a life with her. However, when he proposes, she questions him about his past. He can't remember exactly when he started drifting, but as he starts to think back, he realizes he's been drifting for a hundred and fifty years. He's under a spell and cannot stop being on the move. He tries to stay for the girl, but he can't--so she comes with him.

An Ounce of Cure
James Wheatley's toe has been hurting, so he sees his doctor. The doctor sends him to a specialist, who passes him off to another specialist. Each specialist focuses on his own area of expertise but nobody is willing to listen to the patient and fix the poor man's toe. (This reminds me much of my wife's experience with specialists, who each diagnosed her with something, tried to treat her, and then lost interest when their cure or treatment didn't fix her problems.) In the end, the man goes to see a witch doctor.

The Dark Door
Harry Scott thinks that he's being hunted by not-men--beings that looks like men, but are not men. Beings that move in the fourth dimension. Dr. Webber and Dr. Manellli at the Hoffman Center think he's on to something, and figuring out what Harry Scott knows--or thinks he knows--might explain the rise in psychiatric disorders that is becoming an epidemic. So they push. But it's a trap. The whole thing is a lure for the not-men to capture Dr. Webber. I think. This story actually got pretty unclear toward the end, so I'm uncertain whether the not-men actually existed, or maybe this was all in Dr. Webber's head, and I don't know what, precisely, Dr. Manelli's role in all this was. Not a satisfactory story.

The Meeting of the Board
The employees of Robling Titanium Corporation have taken control of the company by buying up the stock, and their appointed board chairman has run the company into the ground by cutting the R&D budget to pay for shareholder dividends. So Walter Towne, a company Vice-President, convinces the rest of the management to go on strike. With management off the job, work grinds to a halt. Eventually the shareholders--that is, the employees--fire the Chairman of the Board and agree to let the management run the company properly.

Circus
A clever short story, one of those circular stories about a traveler from a parallel world who is trying to get his story heard, so he tells it to a writer, who starts writing the story you've just been reading. Not a terribly original idea, but competently written.

My Friend Bobby
Jimmy is five and his best friend Bobby is five. Bobby is a dog. Jimmy can hear thoughts, which terrifies his mother, so his mother treats him cruelly. This eventually precipitates a violent confrontation between Jimmy and his parents, and Bobby attacks Jimmy's parents to protect him. They abandon Jimmy.

The Link
On an idyllic jungle planet, a peaceful society of artists prepares to flee when they spot the approaching Hunters. For millennia the Hunters have been chasing them, and always they flee, from planet to planet, sometimes staying for a few thousand years, sometimes a few hundred, but always the Hunters find them, and always they flee.

This time, two citizens decide to stay behind, hoping to speak to the Hunters and see if maybe they've changed in the millennia since the two races last met.

The Hunters have not changed. They are as cruel and destructive as always. The two make beautiful music for the Hunters, who respond by torturing them. But the seed has been planted--the link has been forged. Through the music, something beautiful and good has been awakened in the Hunters, and someday--although perhaps eons hence--the two races will find a common ground.

Image of the Gods
The colonists on Baron IV eke out a living--just barely--with help from the indigenous Dusties. The colonists don't know why the Dusties help them, but without them, the people would have perished long ago. When a ship arrives from Earth informing the Baron IV colony that their quota is being raised, and that failure to increase their shipments of good to Earth will earn them destruction, the colonists decide to fight back. The Dusties join the fight--and later, take the colonists away from their town to live in the hill caves--where the colonists see that the Dusties have created altars and statues--they worship humans like gods. (At least I think that's the point of the story.)

The Expert Touch
Chris Taber wants to quit. But he's the most important participant in the research program at the Hoffman Center, so Dr. Palmer uses some slick reverse psychology--the expert touch--to convince him to stay and participate. The final experiment is excruciatingly painful for Taber, but he makes the breakthrough. He sees, He understands. Eagerly, Palmer asks him to reveal the knowledge. But Chris Taber understands a little too much. He knows how Palmer manipulated him, so he refuses to divulge the hard-earned information. (What, precisely, this crucial bit of information is, well, that's not the point of the story. It has something to do with Nourse's bugaboo, the origin of psi-powers and insanity, I think.)

Second Sight
Amy Ballantine is a subject in a research project to study her psi abilities. She's got enormous psi powers, but the twist ending is that due to her psi faculties, she never developed her other senses: she's deaf and blind.

Science Fiction Book Review

 The Ship from Atlantis

A sequel
Right off, I noticed this is a sequel to a story I haven't read. As far as I can piece together, a Roman centurion named Ventidius Varro was stationed in Britain during Arthurian times. He and Merlin set off for America and established a little empire there. Now, a generation later, Ventidius is sending his son Gwalchmai back across the sea to bring news to Rome about the new world.

Gwalchmai
Gwalchmai was born in America and has never seen Rome--and he never will. His ship falls into trouble. Somewhere in the Florida keys carnivorous fish people attack Gwalchmai's ship. Gwalchmai repels them with Merlin's magic, but in the process kills his entire crew as well as the fish people. Sickened and delirious, Gwalchmai drifts in and out of consciousness as his ship drifts out to sea.

The Fall of Atlantis
Adrift and becalmed in the Sargasso Sea, Gwalchmai abandons his ship and boards another vessel he finds drifting nearby. The strange metal ship is the Vimana. On board he finds and awakens Corenice, a woman made of a living metal called orichalcum.

Corenice recounts the history of the rise and fall of Atlantis, how Atlantis battled with alien invaders, how they dug into the bowels of the earth and released ancient evil beings to repel the invaders, and how this led to their own downfall. She explains that she transferred her consciousness into the artificial body of living metal just as Atlantis was flooded and destroyed, and has been drifting for thousands of years, waiting to be discovered and reawakened. Now with Gwalchmai's help, Corenice wishes to seek out and destroy the final remnant of a long-lost Atlantean penal colony. As long as this Atlantean penal colony remains, it is possible they may once again dig into the depths of the earth and release the ancient destructive horrors that dwell within the earth.

Vengeance
So together, Gwalchmai and Corenice locate the ancient Atlantean penal colony. Those living there have forgotten their true history, that they are descended from criminals and the demon-possessed. They imagine themselves to be noble. But in truth, they are cruel, sadistic, and wish nothing more than to recharge their ancient depleted Atlantean weapons and use them to conquer the earth.

Also, they are digging a mineshaft into the bowels of the earth, to release the ancient destructive horrors that dwell within.

So Gwalchmai, Corenice, and her ship Vimana destroy the ancient penal colony. The earth is saved. The end.

My verdict
I found parts of the story interesting, but overall not great. I did enjoy that H. Warner Munn used the word reck without -less. Nice.

Then he rose to his feet, skirted the pool, moving forward not recking where he trod, bemused with beauty. Something crunched and splintered dryly beneath his moccasined feet and looking down with no great surprise, for everything here was strange, he saw that he trod in a tangle of human bones.

Fantasy Book Review

 The Magic of Oz

Mixed Feelings
I have mixed feelings about this Oz book. It's not bad per se. Some of my favorite characters return: the Glass Cat and Ruggedo the Nome King. But overall the adventures didn't capture my imagination, and there's very little here to recommend.

Kiki Aru and Ruggedo
On top of Mount Munch in a far-off corner of Munchkin land, a boy named Kiki Aru discovers a secret word that gives him the power of transformations. He falls in with old Ruggedo, the deposed Nome king, and together they decide to conquer Oz and enslave the people. Kiki Aru doesn't trust Ruggedo, so he keeps the secret word to himself. Their plan is to enlist the help of the beasts of the forests of Oz: with the beasts as their army, they'll overthrow Ozma. Then Kiki Aru will use his magic word to transform all the beasts into people, and they will inhabit Oz. Finally, Kiki Aru will turn the people of Oz into beasts and send them to live in the forests.

Several problems occur to me: first, will the beasts wish to become people and live in houses? Second, why would Kiki Aru need the beasts for his army? He could just do the transformations right off. Third, why bother switching the beast and the people? If Kiki Aru and the Nome King wish to rule Oz, they'll have to keep the citizens in line somehow, and why should the beasts-become-men be any more likely to serve and obey them than the people of Oz? Fourth--ugh, that's enough. Let's just accept the story on its own terms and keep going.

Ozma's Birthday
In a barely connected plot line, everybody is wracking their brains trying to figure out what sort of birthday present to get for Ozma, given that she's a fairy princess and the ruler of Oz who already has every conceivable luxury. Dorothy decides to make her a surprise cake filled with tiny trained monkey acrobats, and asks the Wizard to help her locate and train some monkeys. Trot decides to procure an especially beautiful Magic Flower that the Glass Cat has told her about, and she enlists Cap'n Bill and the Glass Cat to help her.

Li-Mon-Eags
Meanwhile, Kiki Aru transforms himself and Ruggedo into creatures with heads of a lion, bodies of monkeys, and the wings of an eagle. In this form they greet the beasts of the forest and attempt to convince them to join their scheme to overthrow Ozma. The beasts are reluctant. So Kiki Aru seeks to convince them by a demonstration of his magic. He uses the magic word to transform various beasts into other forms. About then the Wizard of Oz and Dorothy arrive, and feeling threatened, Kiki Aru transforms them as well. But later, the Wizard overhears the secret word, so he is able to turn the tables: he restores everyone's forms, and turns Kiki Aru and Ruggedo into nuts.

Stuck
Meanwhile, Trot and Cap'n Bill are in trouble. They tried to get the Magic Flower, but when they approached it, they found their feet stuck to the ground. An enchantment has caused them to grow roots and as such, they're unable to move. The Glass Cat, not being made of meat, is immune and goes for help. She returns with the Wizard and Dorothy. The Wizard uses the magic word of transformation to turn Trot and Cap'n Bill into bumble bees, enabling them to fly to safety, then he transforms them into their proper shapes.

The Water of Oblivion
Back in the Emerald City, Ozma's birthday party goes off in fine fashion. But there's still the trouble of what to do with Kiki Aru and Ruggedo. The solution: transform them back into their own shapes, and trick them into drinking from the Forbidden Fountain. The Water of Oblivion from the fountain will wipe their memories and restore them to a state of innocence. They'll be unable to cause trouble ever again.

It was at this point that my son piped up and mentioned that this is the second time Rugeddo has drunk the Water of Oblivion and had his memory wiped. (How did he regain his identity after the first time. I can't precisely remember. I think it's because the first time, Ozma let him go back to the Nome Kingdom where he fell back into his old ways.) Ruggedo should always check before drinking anything, my son says, because it might be Water of Oblivion. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.