1961: Solaris (Lem, Stanislaw)

Emotional camouflage contrasts planetary revelations (4/5)
From April 19, 2010

This is the first Lem novel I've read, but I unfortunately own the movie tie-in with a smooching George Clooney plastered on the cover. Repressing the irksome rays of lust emitting from the cover, I dove into a novel which I had read to be much loved by science fiction enthusiasts. In lieu of Clooney cover, I place the more appreciable 1976 Berkley edition.

Solaris is one of those atmospheric novels which doesn't apply its readership to the mainstream. It's heavy with descriptive paragraphs and notational dialogue than it is on action sequences and spoken revelations. It's such a novel where the reader must pick up the nuances of the words and relationships to truly grasp the impact of the entire novel. If you're not sure what I mean, consider two unconnected movies and whether you can relate to them one way or another through their use of ambiance: Lost in Translation and Napoleon Dynamite. Both are sparse on dialogue but heavy on use of atmosphere to bring the reader/watcher in tune with the characters. In the same line, Solaris is a novel of nebulous activity where characters are at the mercy of the greater scheme of things.

Rear cover synopsis:
"When psychologist Kris Kelvin arrives at the planet Solaris to study the coean that covers its surface, he finds himself confronting a painful memory embodied in the physical likeness of a past lover. Kelvin learns that he is not alone in this, and that other crews examining the planet are plagued with their own repressed and newly real memories. Could it be, as Solaris scientists speculate, that the ocean may be a massive neural center creating these memories, for a reason no one can identify?"

Lem's detailed descriptions of the planetary formations of Solaris are breathtaking and imaginative but occasionally drag on with imagery which is difficult to come to terms with in explanations of shape, size or even color. His views of environmental consciousness and its effect on human manipulation is one of unique insight considering its date of release- 1961. Thereafter, a number of novels have taken a similar approach in planetary awareness and living oceans: Asimov's 1989 Nemesis and Reynolds' 2000 Revelation Space among the two. The relationship of experimentation borders on diabolical--humans bombard the ocean with x-ray beams while the same offers up so-called human-like hallucinations to the scientists. The experimental effect to the ocean remains unknown to the crew but the Solaris-to-human emotional mirage has forever changed them with the new lifelike hallucinations of once known companions.

It's quite a gripping look at how a planet struggles to understand what it is to be human while the humans themselves face their own monsters. However, the occasional chapter is full of lengthy descriptions which siphon away the rich ambiance already established. The gaze outward to the planet isn't as fulfilling as the gaze inward into the minds of Solaris and Man. The strength in the novel lies internally, where you must finger through the gradual enlightening shades of emotional camouflage (as contradictory as that may sound, Lem writes it like no other).

Though not as popular as Solaris, I've managed to find two additional copies of Lem's work at a second-hand library book sale here in Bangkok: The Cyberiad (1965) and The Star Diaries (1971). I'm eager to find more, but the second-hand shelves don't abide by my suggestions.

1967: Cryptozoic! (Aldiss, Brian)

Chronological and Psychological mind blow (4/5)
From July 12, 2011

My eighth Aldiss book to-date and I haven't been disappointed in any of his novels yet (while the collection in The Saliva Tree was great, the other two of Last Orders and The Book of Brian Aldiss left something to be desired for). Cryptozoic is pretty trippy, more so than Earthworks. But why else would you read Aldiss? He's got BIG ideas! Cryptozoic was originally titled An Age and was serialized in three parts from October to December 1967.

Rear cover synopsis:
"Mind-travel through the time-entropy barrier is the perfect recreational escape. It's expensive, sometime dangerous, but always fascinating. Edward Bush has travelled millions of years through the earth's primordial past, sketching the strangely beautiful landscapes of the Devonian and Jurassic ages. New he is searching the past for a man the dictator wants eliminated. And when he finds that man, Edward Bush will be hurtled across eons, against the flow of time. Waiting for him at world's beginning, in the violent cauldron where no life exists, is a future that mankind could never have foreseen... the utterly alien horror of time uncreated."

The word "cryptozoic" is hard to type out. Also, it's kind of hard to figure out. Near the end of the twenty-first century, time travel via the mind became a reality. The body would stay in 2093 but the mind would whiz back to the Jurassic era, Devonian era or even the Holocene epoch if you've got the talent. Prohibitively expensive, mind time travel is reserved for vacationers wanting to visit the mind-colony in the Jurassic era or ride their mind-motorcycles through the ages. More importantly, a research institute sends scientists or artists out to view and record the landscape of history, however, interaction with the environment is impossible.

Bush is the man we view this pan-chronological world through... from land-walking fish, to tyrannical lizards of yesteryear and to his modern day dystopia where America has crumbled and is now under leadership after leadership of tyrannical generals. Bush is a victim of Freud's oedipus complex: he's fixated on his mother and not on the best of terms with his father. When Bush learns of his mother's passing away, he joins his father in drinking binges even though he know at his father's frail age, the hooch will eventually kill him (half of the oedipus complex). Incest is a running theme though never actually consummated. This is definitely a chronological and psychological mindblow.

All goes very well for most of the book. The second half sees Bush go through military training to become a time-assassin and things get even more weird thereafter. You've really got to hunker down and concentrate on the mind time-traveling... Bush jumps to the immediate past of his own present and stops an action which is in action during his old present (umm, anyone get that?). Further into the last half, there are some more ongoings which really challenge your grip on the English language when it comes to the NOW, the PAST, the FUTURE and FATE. It's a big idea and it's pretty hard to grasp - but if you do, it's very rewarding!

5-stars for the mindblow but subtracting 1-star here for the internal logic of Bush which goes missing in the pages. Alliances change on his side and the "other" side, he was against him and now he's for him, and why exactly was he in training? Just a bit of the book is sketchy like this, but pick it up and read it for the big ideas!

1964: The Whole Man (Brunner, John)

Very un-Brunner-like: psychology & telepathy (3/5)
From July 13, 2011

It's odd that I've read twelve other Brunner novels and yet I can't compare The Whole Man with any of them. The Whole Man is part of Brunner's bibliography but better resembles aspects of other science fiction writers. The writing style, too, feels very un-Brunner-like. I can't pin the assumption on any one part, but the prose feels more akin to an Aldiss novel.

Rear cover synopsis:
"Howson's mind could get legions to do his bidding--but not one doctor to release him from his hell that made him A Whole Man. Gerlad Howson wanted nothing more than to be like other men--to move without pain, to live without ridicule--even after he discovered hsi remarkab;e telepathic powers. But the quirk of genetic fate that had warped his body and gifted his mind had also rendered him impervious to medical science. And if, as others before him, he gave in to the dazzingly rich but deadly fantasies that allowed him to escape his torment, it would mean death or madness for anyone who tried to save him--and a human loss as great as any the world had ever known!"

Telepathy is the main theme and I can't name another Brunner book which includes this. I'm not a fan of science fiction books with telepathy or telekinesis or any of those other pseudo-sciences. Most of these plots have a poor basis, much like The Whole Man. The source of telepathy is an organ in the brain called the Funck which is composed of only one hundred cells. Gerald, our super-telepath, has an organ twenty percent larger than this (one hundred and twenty cells?). It's also not described how a telepath earns their mental powers. All it says is that it happens after twenty years of age--batta-bing, batta-boom.

Gerald comes the employment of the UN because of his skills. With this, he is trained as a curative psychologist, or a telepathist who is able to cure patient's psychoses with the deft touch of the long arm of the mind. Being the big shot he is, Gerald only takes the most severe cases, including the cases involving other telepathists. A certain psychosis which telepathists are prone to is something called catapathic grouping in which a telepath lives out a detailed mental fantasy by assimilating other minds.

If you can swallow the plot line involving a telepathic cripple with hemophilia based in Ulan Bator, then scenes of using telepathic skill and natural wit to release the hold of the catapathic grouping is a good show. One excellent scene is Gerald's involvement of a catapathic group fantasy which takes place in ancient China. The picture Brunner paints if rich and deep, but unfortunately this only takes place over the course of twelve pages... which felt climatic even though there were still sixty unclimatic pages remaining. This is where the book begins to drag.

After the climatic ancient Chinese fantasy battle of magic, dragons and tigers Gerald returns to his hometown to hang out with some friends for forty pages. Seriously un-cli-ma-tic. In the end there's an out-of-place inclusion of some multi-sensory art form. The ending did not capture any previous red-flag in the plot, any nuances which may have been picked up on, or any intensity in previous climaxes. Flat, just flat.

If you pick up DelRay edition of The Whole Man with the flowery cover art, stop after page 130 and consider he book to have a rather abrupt ending rather than reading the remaining fifty pages of tapering filler without the whiz-bang. Read it for its take on telepathy and psychology AND because it's a Brunner novel, but stay clear if its merely a causal read.

1970: The Simultaneous Man (Blum, Ralph)

Psychopharmacology and Russian Studies (3/5)

Ralph Blum has only this one sci-fi novel under his belt, but he's also published the non-genre novels The Foreigner (1961) and Old Glory and the Real-Time Freaks (1972). Since 1982 he's written some non-fiction titles about Rune magic and UFOs. Raised under the shadow of parental Hollywood fame, subjected to early LSD testing, and speaking fluent Russian, Blum obviously brings to the table a lot of experience, albeit more randomness than anything concrete.

Rear cover synopsis:
"The agency specializes in surgical alterations. Government bureaucrats set about making one man's brain the receptacle for the memory of another. "Bear"--the input. "Black Bear"--the receiver. A research scientist and a convicted murdered become two men with one SHARED mind."

Andrew Horne is the Assistant Director of Research West Wing research laboratory at West Wing, where Project Beta has been running for over a decade. Horne has had his "beta" memory expressed through professional Hollywood cinematography so that it may be played back at a higher speed to a subject whose memory of self had been wiped clean. Subject 233/4 is a convicted murderer and has volunteered to be the vehicle for Horne's memory. When the wind wipe and beta memory transference are complete, Subject 233/4 will essentially become Horne.

Where past experiments have shown a rapid deterioration in the subject's physical condition, the team at West Wing hope that with Subject 233/4 the procedure has been refined. But the mental condition of Horne is thin, at best, when his conditional responses about his Korean War experience surface again and again. While in captivity, Horne was interrogated and tortured by his captors but also had the ear of a foreign man of persuasion, named Chon. Because of this Chon, Horne has been able to alter his memories of his Korean experience to make them more manageable.

When Subject 233/4 rises from his "coffin" of Horne's months worth of experience input, Horne is at the same time arrested and confined to a more luxurious cell--the entire estate of Compass Farm, just outside of Philadelphia. Horne experiences acute telepathic sensations that is "bets-self" has emitted but the flow of telepathy is limited to that narrow range of emotion and that line of communication. After nearly a year of house arrest, news comes from West Wing that Subject 233/4 has escaped... and defected to the Soviet Union. The American government allows Horne to fly to Leningrad so that he may make contact with his "beta-self."

Pulling Blum's biography from three different scant sources, it seems to be fairly complete and nearly everything is laid to bare here in The Simultaneous Man. He's noted to have studied at Harvard and includes that in this novel along with the Harvard rowing team (which I'm fairly certain he was part of). Other autobiographical elements Blum has inserted into this novel include Russian history (which he studied), Russian language (he's bilingual to an annoying extent), Hollywood names (of his parents persuasion), and his scientific forte of psychopharmacology. The novel didn't have a polymath feel to it, as Blum's range of knowledge is as scattered as it is in detail. It all comes off rather pretentiously, as if Blum includes these elements merely to show them off.

Besides the shade of pretentiousness overshadowing most of the novel, the plot unravels pretty well. Subject 233/4 (aka Black Bear) only awakens half-way through the novel, where the first half of the novel is dotted with segments of "input" from Horne to Black Bear. This input characterizes Horne at the same time as it does characterize his yet-to-emerge "beta-self." At times the medical language is off-putting and the reliance of the universal benefit of artificial pharmaceuticals (reflecting the mid-century belief the happiness can be found in a pill) is overdone. But the most repetitively annoying trait found in The Simultaneous man is Blum's long-winded insertion of random Russian words, Russian history or Russian geography onto each page:

Horne stood, suitcase in hand, in front of the Astoria Hotel, watching until the ZIM's red taillights faded from view. St. Isaak's Square matched his memory of old photograph albums: the equestrian statue of Tsar Nicholas, the park, a building of dull reddish stone that had once housed the Imperial German Embassy; and up toward the Neva, visible through the snow, the pillars and golden dome of St. Isaak's Cathedral. (134)

If Blum has a knack for anything literary, it would have to be his talent for setting the scene... at times. Sometimes he's monotonous when describing an office:

The door was open and he went inside. Through the one large window, afternoon sunlight entered to illuminate the dust. The window screen was torn. The room was unchanged: scarred Army-issue desk, two chairs, metal bookcase, security file with combination locks and drawers. There had never been a carpet. (61)

Other times it reads like an Updike nostalgia for life on the farm:

When he reached the stone wall he swung around and slipped the tractor into neutral. Crows drifted out from over the woods letting the wind lift them across the new furrows and the barn, to hover like cinders from a dead fire above his house. (108)

But mainly Blum is one of straight forward descriptions, not really putting any emotion into the scene or any flare into the personalities. The reader will mainly be engaged in trying to figure out what the whole novel is about... macroscopiclly and microscopically. Was the memory transference 100% successful and is Subject 233/4 now Andrew Horne in all but the flesh? What are Black Bear's objectives in defecting to Russia and why hasn't Horne been able to predict his behavior? But the main question the reader will have is... What will Horne find in Russia? THAT'S the one hook which will keep the reader on until the last five pages.

1967: The Mind Parasites (Wilson, Colin)

Intellectual manifesto in sci-fi disguise (3/5)

Colin Wilson is largely a non-fiction writer, penning books about mysticism, philosophy, and crime. Some elements of the uninspired, dry academic-type, non-fiction writing finds itself in the science fiction piece, The Mind Parasites. The sheer amount of pseudo-science, wild logic ending at wild conclusions, and very dated science makes some of the book hard to read. The reader has to suspend not only belief, but also suspend knowledge that Wilson wrote this book on reflection of his own believes on the matter... so it's a fictional book enshrouded by Wilson's pedantic tenacity.

Rear cover synopsis (Bantam, 1968):
"Power... that took one man to track its direction from the signs left by history... that has enslaved mankind from the beginning... that holds humanity from its birthright of total consciousness... that keeps each of us penned in a private prison of fear... that demands our extinction rather than surrender. What human dares defy the terrible power of The Mind Parasites."

Gilbert Austin is on-site at an excavation of some ruins which lay buried two miles under the Turkish soil. Prior to this, his fellow intellectual friend Karel had committed an unsuspecting suicide and left a seemingly rambling document about aliens plaguing the minds of humankind. Austin begins to find a truth in this and senses the malevolent forces of the mind-dwelling aliens himself. He then confides in another archaeologist/historian, Reich, who also experiences the demons in the depth. Together, they combine psycho-kinetic forces to battle with the beings while recruiting only the most intelligent, open-minded people on earth to train. Steadily amounting to nearly thirty people, who have trained to descend into their cerebral nebula, the Mind Parasites attack the weakest of the newly trained and kill them off one by one. It becomes obvious to Austin and Reich that an more subtle, reclusive, and thoughtful approach to the defeat of the Mind Parasites must be taken.

It's an excellent premise which is bolstered by the unique format of having no chapters at all in the 181 pages of the nearly pure narrative. The first ten pages is a solid transcription of a fictional tape recorded by the same Gilbert Austin and the remaining 170 pages are supplements from his autobiographical notes. This sort of "found footage" documentation in a novel is an interesting way to present a story, but it's typically laden with idiosyncratic spieling and impertinent details... much as the case of the first sixth of this novel: it's a pompously narrative, lengthy history of Egyptian, Hittian, Mayan, and Greek civilizations.

Beyond this first sixth, lays the remaining five-sixths, which is rich (in one sense) with detail, speculation, and extrapolation. As mentioned above, this novel is infused with Wilson's own speculation upon why mankind has morally declined and artistically failed since the year 1780 (when the Mind Parasites first clutched at humanity's collective cranium). It's nearly a diatribe because Wilson seems to be scolding humanity for being lazy minded, as if Wilson sees himself as an intellectual elite (this is further confirmed towards the end of the novel when it seems like Wilson is aiming for his "superiorly intellectual characters to government the world in a sort of technocracy). And it's also nearly a manifesto, although not political, calling on people to "awaken" to their internal senses.

Gilbert Wilson, amid the rambling passages and more-than-I-care-for details, actually does has a gift for constructing sentences which are imbued with his sense of greatness he's trying to write about: "The body is a mere wall between two infinities. Space extends to infinity outwards; the mind stretches to infinity inwards." (38) Some passages read like meditative epiphanies, others like quantitative analysis. Keep in mind that The Mind Parasites is a science fiction novel by a non-fiction author... whereby I whinge.

By 1967, a large collection of excellent science fiction had already existed (Brunner, van Vogt, James White, Alidss, and Anderson among my favorites); The Mind Parasite had to compete with other 1967 sci-fi novels including John Brunner's Born under Mars, Brian Alidss' Cryptozoic!, and Kenneth Bulmer's Behold the Stars. While the speculation in The Mind Parasites was the main draw, the speculative science portions of the book are irksome: rocket plane, neutron dater, electro-comparison machine, moon rocket, and cosmic ray gun. Then there are the words which must have been inspired by Asmimov's atomic-heavy Foundation: atomic blaster, atom gun, atomic missile, atomic war, and atomic pistol (no peaceful uses of the atomic washing machine are to be found).

There are scientific errors abound regrading the moon, Venus, and Mercury but the trespasses are forgivable given the publication date. If you suspend your knowledge of science and stomach a hearty portion of an author's diatribe/manifesto in a science fiction context, then you'll find The Mind Parasites to be a unique read. As for more fictional Colin Wilson novels, I'll be taking my chances with other authors lining my bookshelves. The Mind Parasites is a keeper, but with much reservation about reading it again any time soon.