1959: Level 7 (Roshwald, Mordecai)

Hermetic solitude 4400 feet deep is true freedom (5/5)
From May 28, 2009

Splashed across the cover of Level 7 reads, "A horrifying, prophetic document of the future - the diary of a man living 4000 feet underground in a society hell-bent on atomic self-destruction" which does the book no justice at all. Perhaps the rear cover puts the novel into a better light as it reads, "He is safe from nuclear war... safe from sunshine, blue skies, and love. His perpetual assignment is the Bomb - to stand guard ready to push the button that will turn the world into a charred ember of smoking death..." Now, while the back cover sums up the story better, it still doesn't do the book much justice.

It's not exactly poetically sculpted nor is it poorly written, rather, it's a day-to-day journal of a not-so-common man in his not-so-common job and his contemplations on earth's situation, his reflections on his subterranean society and his experiences being a push-button operator. Officer X-127, as he's know to his colleagues, friends and eventual wife paints a detailed picture of what Level 7 is, how it operates and what purpose it ultimately serves. Being 4400 feet underground in a hermetically sealed bunker and being twelve buttons away from the end of the world might make you a bit philosophical, psychotic or just plain numb. We witness the scope of these mental reflections in both X-127 himself and in the others around him.

It's a depressing read, that's true. It'll make you sympathize with all five-hundred of the Level 7 cave-dwellers, the other million or so making up the remaining six levels and even the poor populous stranded on the surface. Level 6 at 3,000 feet deep houses 2,000 military defense personnel and is just as self-sufficient at Level 7, but more prone to contamination, old age and insanity. Level 5 at 1,500 feet deep will house 20,000 elite members of society for about 200 years. Level 4 at 1,000 feet deep will hold 100,000 important people for 100 years. Level 3 is 500 feet deep and will hold 200,000 important individuals for only 25 years. The last two Levels are 100 feet and 60 feet deep and are both designed to hold one million people each but are much more susceptible to all things dangerous in a limited or total nuclear war.

There's so much detail, it's almost juicy if it weren't dryly written. For the sheer sake of exploring Roshwald's leveled world, this is a sci-fi gem.

1974: Earthwreck! (Scortia, Thomas N.)

Cavalcade of physics, death, sex, and innuendos (3/5)

Thomas N. Scortia must have been a man with a lot on his mind. He wrote two solo science fiction novels (this being one of them [1974], the other Artery of Fire [1972]) and four science fiction novels with Frank M. Robinson, who is best known for his generation ship novel The Dark Beyond the Stars (1991). The duo also penned a fictional disaster novel which some should be familiar with because it was made into a movie: the novel The Glass Inferno (1974) became The Towering Inferno (1974) with Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, and a forgettable performance by O.J. Simpson. BUT, Thomas N. Scortia is even lesser known for his patent on "Nitronium Perchlorate Propellant Composition" - which we will come to shortly.

Rear cover synopsis:
"The Americans watched from space as the earth erupted in flashes of incredible brilliance. Their probes told them all they had to know. The earth was buried under a blanket of radioactivity. No life remained. Except for them--and their Russian counterparts. Together the American and Russian space stations had enough resources to build a colony on the moon. But could they bear life imprisoned in a tiny, man-made pocket of air? There was no alternative. Or was there? A far more perilous course might, just might, ensure the survival of the human race."

As the Italian stallion Quintus Longo is launched from earth with his fantastic pilot Steinbrunner to become a member of the 150-member crew of the American orbital, ten to fifteen low-yield nuclear devices are seen bursting over the Middle East. Colonel Farrington and Comrade Colonel Voroshilov, each commanding their respective orbital, also witness the destruction on earth. The two commanders and most of the crew begin to realize that earth has been sterilized, they are the only remaining humans alive, and that "they have a responsibility to renew the race." (63)

With limited skepticism on either side, the two orbiting stations begin with plans to combine their resources with the hope of establishing a lunar colony. But to renew the human population requires women and the American orbital has only one--Dr. Svoboda, an academic type far from pulchritude. Aboard the Russian orbital, the sex ratio is even, so naturally the Americans observe that the population can not be renewed without the help of the Russians.

Jesus, where do I begin? Though I finished this book in a day and a half, it was a tumultuous journey of human apocalypse, sexual reminiscing, chemical propellant lectures, and homosexual innuendos. It's a zany, crazy, silly, odd, scatterbrained spread of material which offsets the deeper issues of noble attempts at characterization through reminiscers of personal experiences with death and sex. Yes, you have read that correctly.

If it wasn't the addition of the sympathetic characters, this novel would have fallen flat. Remind yourself that Thomas Scortia has a patent on a chemical propellant when you read his droning lectures on the subject:

"The motors were... hybrid propulsion units... combustion instability... thrust vectoring and orbital corrections... polymethylmethccrylate... enthalpy change of the oxidizer-fuel system... heat-yielding thermal processes... mass injection from the fuel..." (133)

Additional droning comes care of a vertical take-off:

"Take off acceleration was only two Gs... nitric oxide thrust vectoring stabilized... thrust of the motors stabilized at a steady twelve and a half million pounds... balanced minimum drag losses... hidden pyrotechnic gas generators pressurized... analine and inhibited red fuming nitric acid were hypergolic." (14-16)

Aside from the lectures, the areas of interest are when some of the more sympathetic characters (Longo among them) start to think of their dying families, lost loves, plague-ridden continents, nights of passion, radiation-sickened wives, and their first consensual coital encounter. The contrast is odd yet invoking, but it's not as black and white as I paint it here with words (except for the line on page 37). Some of the better sexual lines of reminiscing include: "Her figure was lush, with great breasts meant for a platoon of children" (32) and "...he touched her and she touched him in the most delicate way he had felt since his mother died." (37) and behold the pièce de résistance:

"She was a marvelously hairy woman, very much true to her French ancestry. He had persuaded her, in spite of the style, never to shave under her armpits. She had a lush growth there, and its clean perspiration odor had an exciting effect on him." (72)

I mention the book has "homosexual innuendos" simply because I was looking for them (kind of like when watching Top Gun). I know Frank M. Robinson (a co-author in many of Scortia's novels) is a gay science fiction author, but I wasn't sure of the sexual orientation of Thomas Scortia yet I'm assuming they had a bonhomous relationship. However, the innuendos proved to be true when one character shared his emotional experiences in East Germany. The character Longo used to be father of three on earth, but he has a rather wide-opening experience during his love scene with Dr. Svoboda, where they are experiencing love making in zero gravity:

"There was no place to do it but on one of the tables, hanging from the bulkhead with a row of animal cages near at hand. He found it perversely exciting, especially when the hamsters seemed to catch their excitement." (150)

Interesting.

Aside from the silliness I found upon the pages and the sympathy the occasionally oozes from the cast, Thomas Scorria isn't really a very gifted writer at all. Some of his sentences are plain terrible, especially when he's trying to heighten the mood: "Gloom invaded the ship like a tangible thing." (217) I'm also sensitive to repetition, when an author uses a word or phrase over and over again ("atomic" is Asimov's Foundation, being notable). Scortia uses "jury-rigged" exactly eleven times through this novel. Oblivious to most, but used to an annoying degree for me.

Scortia has some good ideas and a partnership with Frank M. Robinson looks promising. He also has a short story collection in Caution! Inflammable! which looks enticing. Scortia is going on my list of books to find next time I rummage through some second-hand book stores...while biting my tongue with reluctance.

1962: Purple-6 (Brinton, Henry)

The secret is loose and a spy is amongst them (3/5)
From May 18, 2011

Rear cover synopsis:
"Russian missiles were hurtling toward the coast of England; British warheads were in flight to the enemy targets. The life of mankind was ticking away second by second..."

That's pretty short and it's also inaccurate. A more fleshed out synopsis would have been something like this: Will Burley hosts a Sunday open house where his friends and acquaintances gather to discuss current events but is interrupted by a phone call, `Duty Officer, Farnden. Purple-7.' Will's eyes' glaze over, he blankly tells his wife he must go and with seven minutes of life remaining he rushes to the underground base before the single missile hits England. Soon it becomes clear that the missile was in fact a Mars launch... but the surprise is that the launch vehicle was installed with a copy of a the supposedly secret anti-missile missile circuiting diagram. Will Burley was one of two men who had access to the diagram.

The first third off this 192-page novel is rich with cold war secretive fervor, clandestine sciences and a rustic English home life. The contrast is as inviting as it is foreboding. What ensues for the next eighty pages is much bickering between the security agent and the scientists, who both eye each other suspiciously yet instinctively know that the other is not a Russian mole. There are many snippy conversations, thrown accusations, mightier-than-thou one-liners and finger pointing. I would have liked to have seen a more calm but in-depth look into their lives, their acquaintances and their habits. Towards the end of the investigation I had three likely conclusions, each of which would have been a good ending if Brinton could have wrangled it.

But, in the end the conclusion wasn't as grand as I had hoped it would have been. When the conclusion is mentally drawn out, so too does the rest of the plot unto its' end. The heartache Burley experiences when his wife leaves him (as he's too involved with his work and she doesn't like the accusations), the strained friendship of Burley and his friend/boss C.H. (the only two suspects) and the urgent need to figure it all out to move onward with the research to save Western civilization: these three matters are the strings of he emotional violin Burley lives with.

The descriptive paragraphs are very well worded and it takes a bit of imagination to immerse yourself in Burley's life and work but all that is abruptly vaporized with preachy dialogue which is too well formed to feel life dialogue; rather it's a symposium for anti-war sentiment and pragmatism. If it weren't for the sharp, too well defined dialogue, the book would have garnered a fair 4-stars but it takes effort to immerse oneself in a world and an equally opposite amount of effort to shake oneself out of it by wordy preachers. Although, I almost feel inclined to grant it one for star for the ultimate conclusion...

Too bad Brinton never wrote anything else. This was his first and only novel.

1971: Ground Zero Man (Shaw, Bob)

One man as fulcrum between human survival or nuclear destruction (4/5)
From September 1, 2011

Ground Zero Man (alternatively titled The Peace Machine) comes from a long lineage of fiction revolving around the fear of nuclear destruction, Purple-6 (1962) and Level 7 (1959) to name just two. Ground Zero, however, takes a different spin on the same issue- yes, the fear of nuclear destruction is real... but what is you had the power to force disarmament or detention? Hutchman, our protagonist, holds that power.

A humble mathematician for a missile development company, Hutchman proverbially stumbles upon an equation which causes the excitation of neutrons in nuclear devices, which he calls "making the neutrons dance to a new tune." With this dangerous knowledge, our sheepish scientist begins to construct his device amid concerns from his employer and especially his irrationally jealous wife. Squandering his fortune on the device and his time from work, Hutchman soon sees himself as the fulcrum of a massive seesaw bent on survival or destruction. With diagrammed letters being sent out people of influence, the stage has already been set. If he can stay alive till noon on November tenth, his one decision will change the fate of mankind.

Guffaw you may at the near absurdity of the general plot, the reader can identify and empathize with the twists of fate Hutchman is dealt (his work, his wife, the police, etc). With the best intentions at heart, the ignorant world doesn't seem to understand his undying passion for justice. His plea for the disarmament of the devices is seemingly the only option besides the detention of the same devices -- an assured destruction for every country with nuclear weapons.

Shaw has a gift for language at times, which makes the reading a sheer pleasure: "...he looked downwards through angular petals of glass." (Corgi edition, page 75) or "water droplets crawled along the side-windows like frantic amoebae." (Corgi edition, page 56). His flare for the description of the minute is in contrast to his detail for some greater plot details. This is the main reason for the book being 4-stars rather than 5-stars; some events in the plot are too abrupt, jerky, hastily through in. There are a few spy elements which rise with a fortissimo but only to disappear like the tidal ebb. Red herrings to mislead the reader? It would take an additional 40 pages to the 160-page novel to dull the acuteness of the occasional sforzando.

It's my first Bob Shaw novel so perhaps this kind of thing his "his thing." He's definitely shown his skills in Ground Zero and his other novels may be of interest to me (Ragged Astronauts and The Ceres Solution among them).