1983: Prelude to Chaos (Llewellyn, Edward)

Concentrated background frames diluted characters (2/5)

I bought this novel because of the motorcycle on the cover; simple as that. I had never heard of Edward Llewellyn and, after reading this novel, I may never hear again of Edward Llewellyn. We wrote his first science fiction novel at the ripe age of 67 (proof that it can never be too late). After that novel, The Douglas Convolution (1979), Llewellyn wrote only five more novels, two of which were published posthumously. Most noteworthy, which is perhaps too strong of a word to use in this case, is his Douglas Convolution trilogy in includes the novel of the same name (1979), The Bright Companion (1980), and this very novel being reviewed, which acts as a prequel to the series, Prelude to Chaos (1983).

Rear cover synopsis:

“Gavin Knox was bodyguard to the President of the United States and witness to a crime which could shake civilization to its foundations.

Judith Grenfell was a neurologist who discovered a side effect of the most common pharmaceutical on the market which could cause the greatest biological disaster in human history.

Both were prisoners in the most advanced maximum-security prison ever devised.

Without their information the few survivors of biological catastrophe could dissolve in bloody civil war. They had to escape, and fast, to safeguard the survival of the human race, or leave the world barren for eternity.”

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Savvy with technology and gutsier than most, Gavin Knox holds a special status among the prisoners on a barren peninsula where the Federal Penitentiary at Jona’s Point sits imperviously. The prisoners are confined within their prison at all times; they never see the natural color of the sky, never see the horizon, and never hear of news from outside their concrete confines; Gavin, however, has the duty to adjust the radio lines on the roof, thereby allowing him to spy on the only ship perpetually near the prison.

Also with a privileged status, Judith Grenfell has access to keypass codes and freedom in the medical ward and its morgue. Also with detailed knowledge of how bodies are packaged, shipped, and disposed of, Judith only needs assistance with technology to hatch her plan of escape, which is where Gavin Know comes into the picture. Though the prisoners are always watched, their time being intimate is knowingly less watched; so with sweet nothings mumbled into each other’s ear, they concoct their plan: bypass doors, hide under a frozen stiff, easily pass the defunct scanners, emerge from their coffins while on the offshore boat, clobber a guard or two, and make off with the mini-copter to freedom…

…if only a mini-copter weren’t so inconspicuous. On a less obvious route, the duo exchange their transportation for a car, which they switch often in order to stay off the law enforcement’s radar. Their once professional trysts in the prison morph into a less formal acquaintance, their respective personal traits bolstering their low profile and dependence on one another. Spooning in cold motels, their budding relationship doesn’t go beyond emotional and technical support, but Judith’s decision to relocate to a religious enclave may change the nature of their relationship.

The enclave, one of many remote places called Settlements by the puritan practitioner’s of The Light, is home to an Amish-esque commune; rather than limit their technology to eighteenth-century standard, the Light communities limit their use of chemicals to pre-1990 level. This single decree of their religion has kept them safe from the terrible effects of Impermease, the “cheapest, safest, and most effective insecticide” (183) but in reality, the chemical built up in the human body and destroyed the female ova even before birth, thereby rendering nearly every female around the world infertile. The Believers of The Light host fertile women, all of whom they encourage to reproduce through marriage. This fixed notion of marriage drives a wedge between Gavin, who makes the suggestion to ease their place in the community, and Judith, who fiercely decries the draconian measure against her feminine freedoms.

Another chemical drug which the community shuns is Paxin, a drug which was announced to have very little side effects other than its calming stat; Judith is one of the few people who actually know the truth: Paxin acts as a primer for subconscious suggestion. Gavin, having been arrested for murder of a colleague in the Secret Service, is under the impression what he had once been under the influence of the drug, a hypothesis which is consistent with his odd impulses. Since the Settlements do not take the drug of Paxin, they live a freedom which is unknown to those in the Affluent, any city or town which is outside of the Settlement. The Believers have a very strong opinion toward the Affluent, but so too do the Affluent have opinions of those in the Settlements.

…Judith, a fine scientist, who might have been adding her brains and skill to the struggle to discover some solution to the Impermease disaster, was more worried about the health of the few hundred children in the Settlement than the sterility of millions of American girls.

I mentioned this to her once. She sighed and said, “I’ve told you already, Gavin. All their research is hopelss. The eggs in those girls were sterilized years ago. I won’t waste my time trying to bring the dead back to life. What I can do is to help the living to grow up healthy and strong, fit to build a better world.

“So America means nothing to you anymore?”

She turned to stare at me. “Oh yes it does! The new America. The America which will rise from the cesspool of the Affluence. That is what we are working for here!” (157-158)

Judith’s opinions are largely shared among the Settlements, but outside the Settlements lurks jealousy and distrust:

…Rumors listened to with excitement and passed on with eagerness for the same conscious or unconscious reasons; to raise a sense of public indignation which might later justify burning the homes and looting the property of the minority concerned. And the hatred behind the desire was fueled by more than common resentment. It was fired by the fact that the Sutton Settlement still contained fertile women. (164)

This mutual dislike boils over during one of the Settlement’s trips to town where they exchange their last load to lobster for gold bullion, a tempting mark for marauders. With Gavin’s military expertise, the crew of the gold-laden truck make their escape after shooting and maiming their way through the local’s blockade. This stunt infuriates them enough to mount a larger sortie to the Settlement’s recluse location, but the organization of Gavin’s wartime awareness easily crushes the drunken yokels. However, the very act of hostility brings in the federal agents who want to capture their women, dismantle their camp, and reeducate the men. For refuge, there is only one resort: the Federal Penitentiary at Jona’s Point, the same penitentiary which imprisoned Gavin and Judith but which may now give sanctuary to the Settlement.

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What should be a story to “safeguard the survival of the human race”, according to the book’s own synopsis, fails to gain momentum after the prison escape and devolves into a story to safeguard against small-minded religious zealots, local yokels, and big brother. This has every feel of a potboiler: perpetually tepid action, sexual tension, misogyny, murder, a car chase, shootouts, a sleazy motel, a motorcycle, and the enticement of prison sex. This would be, at best, a mediocre novel if it wasn’t for (a) the overly-detailed background story, (b) the repetition of a few words, and (c) the complaining about women.

Aside from the four-page epilogue, there are 21 chapters, nearly each one with a page or two of background to the current story. This novel is supposed to act as a prequel to the proceeding two books, but the chunky bits of background feel like textbook snippets spliced into the narrative—almost like a prequel within the prequel itself. All of the history feels force fed, none of it has an organic presence in the story.

Within the first few chapters, I noted Llewellyn’s overuse of the word affluent as a proper noun (Affluence), as a common noun (affluence), and as an adjective (affluent). I estimated I had read the word seven times, so I kept a count thereafter: 25 times, about half of which the proper noun accounts for. That seemed a bit much, but another word was idiosyncratically over used, the German loanword “verboten”, which was used four times. I suppose it’s a loanword but while everyone knows what the word means, no one actually uses it… except for Llewellyn.

Gavin Knox is a pretty macho guy. He’s so wrapped up in his militaristic self that the concept of “woman” usually involves their admiration over his manliness or their secret desire to bed him; any experience a female has outside of these boundaries is unknown territory and best left to complaining about: “She strode down the alley, her skirt swinging, her head held high. She was a stubborn, willful, crazy, arrogant bitch … Once she married me, nobody would dare to insult or threaten her” (119). That is, nobody can insult her or all women unless it’s Gavin Knox himself: “That’s the trouble with having a female partner on any mission [aside from missionary, I presume]. Single-minded and resolute in the crunch; illogical and unpredictable when out of it” (144).

On a more minor note, be it an artistic inclination or unfamiliarity with writing novels, compound the three annoyance above with Llewellyn’s affection for sentence fragments and you’ll find a novel which is aggravating to read: word repetition, sentence truncation, rants about women, and exhibitions of textbook background.

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If Prelude to Chaos is an introduction to the Douglas Convolution, count me out of the proceeding two novels. The ideas of infertility are mildly interesting, but Llewellyn doesn’t possess the vehicle to move the idea toward fruitfulness. The novel ripens too quickly in and around the prison then tapers off into a distasteful mix of bitter misogyny, stodgy background, and vapid progress.

1981: Radix (Attanasio, A. A.)

Impenetrable, undecipherable (1/5)

Purely based on the book’s well regarded status on Amazon and Goodreads, rather than a friend’s recommendation, I bought Radix some time ago. It has haunted my shelves for a good two years being ignored next to other novels I have been trepidant to start, Piers Anthony’s Macroscope (1969) and Parke Godwin’s Limbo Search (1995) among them. So, without any preconception of the plot or prose, I dived into the book… and sank up to my chin in a chaotic, putrid swamp of world-building and compound adjectives.

Inside page synopsis:

“At the end of the twentieth century, the Earth entered the Line, a beam of radiant energy from a distant black hole. In the aura of this strange power, the Earth was altered forever. Humanity distorted into a variety of forms. Reality as we know it collapsed, timeless beings incarnated themselves in human flesh, endowing it with unimaginable power.

Into this twilight age a youth was born who was destined to transform the future of mankind. At first a frightened, rebellious teenager, he was forged into a brutal warrior in a harrowing rite of passage. A wanderer for a time among a tribe of outcasts, he began to discover his humanity. At least, he was forced to turn against those who made him to unleash the godlike powers he held.”

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Dear God, where do I begin?

This is an excellent synopsis which I am unable to expand upon because, frankly, I didn’t understand a damn thing beyond page 71. I finished the book to give it an honest rating, but the reading was protracted by my inability to absorb nonsense which flowed from page to page, chapter to chapter until the very end. I could only stomach a few pages at a time, not because the prose was too rich, but because, as mentioned above, the world-building was too dense, too obscure and the writing style was… how does one put it… distracting, off-putting, perhaps bordering on indecent to the English language?

To begin with, the first section of the book, entitled “Distorts" from pages 1-122, had an unsavory yet alluring introduction to the lengthy book: a fat, unappealing man-child wreaks destruction of local gangs and local businessmen alike while he ardently tries to disown his mother, forget his father, and plant his man-seed when he feels the need. However, the section is marked by a number is inconsistencies and flip-flopping: 

(a) Sumner, first, remembers “his first journey outside McClure” (27) but later reminds himself that he “had never been outside of McClure (29); 

(b) Sumner’s scansule is inoperative because the battery was professionally taken out (21) so he drops it to the floor where the tube explodes (22) yet later he uses the scansule “for hours on end” (59) and even later comes home to see “the clear space where the scansule had shattered” (119);

(c) Nafandi leaves the Rigalu Flats at Sumner’s command (102) yet later returns on a whim (104). 

The inconsistencies, be they blatant and intentional or a sign of the author’s rush to fill the pages with world-building vocabulary, feel awkward. Beyond awkward, miles away actually, lies the author’s reoccurring unreadable writing, which is strewn with artistically inclined compound adjectives or nouns and idiosyncratic compound nouns, a similar sensation to walking on Legos spread across the tile of an endless, unlit hallway; for example, these sentences mean absolutely nothing to me: “Drift was vaguely alive, its whale-small eyes blood-burned” and “he stumble-stepped on the ice-peddled shale” (361). By then, I just wanted the entire Attanasio experience to be over with!

Only by page 258 did I realize that Attanasio was using the garbage heap of compound adjectives as a crutch to describe his pretentious fictional world, like he had to create new words for posterity’s sake or because English isn’t an expressive enough language (I’m not a barber, but I know when I get a bad haircut = I’m not a writer, but I know when get a bad book):

The man's hands on his shoulders hummed with spring-thundering, and the dark in the blue of his eyes was shimmering with something like father-love. "But look!" the breeder insisted, pointing to where the wart-knobbed, mud-green hulk of the razorjaw was running to shore. Its horn-browed eyes looked fireblind, and the long thrust of its maw glistened with many pink-skinned teeth. (258-259)

This trend continues:

That instant someone in the group twanged a box-harp, and the wiry, tremulous note pierced him. The feather-crowned yawp took the bowl from his hands, and he saw her refill it with oddly shaped blood-red leave. (322)

And doesn’t let up any time soon:

The ice and snow around the glades were heat-carved and wind-shaped into pale blue pavilions. A line of ice-glens moved up the snow-fields toward the summit, and Sumner climbed through them as though he were moving from dream to dream. (338)

The ort-lord gestured circularly, and a curve of the wall fanned into a hypnotically clear mirror. Sumner's voor-burns were gone. A sun-bossed face stared back at him, wide and flat. He was wearing a blue, loose-fitting garment, and his hair had been cut back around his ears, close to the square of his head. (370)

He glimpsed a mirror-eyed fox; then the pinecove clapped into an exploding radiance, and a long-tailed scream sirened louder than hearing. (410)

Followed by a glut of compound adjectives on page 413:

Spikes of energy cut across the sky, and above the tide of slavering beasts, raels came into view. A thousand of them circled in from the nearby hills, invisible in the darkness, lizard-frilled, tendriled and bulb-glistening in the sporadic blastlight.

The onslaught of orts staggered and broke up beneath the lash of poison-darts the raels flailed beneath them. A brute cry whined through the fury of the sky-echoes, and their distance from the orts widened.

The rock-mantled hill appeared ahead. Vapor-scabbed fire wrung the horizon to crazed colors beyond it. Rubeus was closing in. The ground flinched, and they had to stop running to stay on their feet. Then a bellowing corona blasted seeing and flung them to the ground.

The air sizzled. Even with their faces in the ripped earth, their vision was a dazed, flame-shaken halo. Colors winced apart, and with screaming slowness, sight returned.

They were sprawled at the foot of the hill. Dazzling flame-echoes crackled above them, lighting the blown-away forest with the brilliance of the sun. The raels had vanished. Several translucent corpses burned with crawling worm-fires in the field, then disappeared beneath the renewed advance of the orts.

The above moments were irksome but not debilitating; however, there were times when I cringed in utter pain, screamed out in agony, wished that I had never picked up this dreaded novel (but for an honest rating, I simply had to finish it). These times were situated in the novel where the author’s world-building vocabulary was at its densest, so dense, in my opinion, that rereading appendix for clarification would have tripled or quadrupled the time it read to understand the passage:

Thousands of darktime voors had channeled the psynergy of their lives through Dai Bodatta, feeling that they were dying into the ecstasy of Unchala. The joy had been real, but the crossing had been only a passage to a memory of Unchala. The voors' psynergy had really dispersed into the planet's kha where the acausal laws of Iz would return them to earth as the memories of future voors … Five thousand years from now, after the Iz-wind had long passed, voors would be remembered as sorcerers, witches, elves. The human form was new to them. Only now, after thirty thousand years dormant in the howlie collective unconscious, were voors humanwise enough to use the return of the Iz-wind to create godminds. If the brood created enough godminds, their psynergy would be strong enough to unify. As One Mind, they could disengage from the earthdreaming completely and flux once more with the Iz-wind that streamed through collapsed stars from cosmos to cosmos. Only a few centuries remained before Iz was too far to reach. (362-363)

Clueless reader, indecipherable verbiage or just words thrown on a page as meaningless as this review (duly noted, thank you)? The climax of tolerance was reached on page 394 after pages of frustration. I so, so wanted to give up on the remaining pages but stuck through the thick, thicker and the thickest to reach the muddied conclusion, the rank epilogue and the murky final sentence: “Everything is best” (446).

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The most enlightening thing about the novel was the amount of use my dictionary got. My Sony Reader’s New Oxford American Dictionary catalogued my vocabulary entries and, from this, I learned and unlearned a slew of useless, archaic or technical words, but also heap of useful words;  among my favorites: irenic, caliginous, coriaceous, banausic, kenspeckle, risible, tussock, splanchnic, diaphanous, squamous, theanthropic, colubrine, and fuscous.

There’s a large following of this book for some reason, though any understanding of this reason is impenetrable to me. As philosophy is often referred to as masturbation with words, I would extend this metaphor to Radix… fascinating for the author and voyeurs but a nuisance to passers-by, like myself.

2007: Rollback (Sawyer, Robert J.)

A cheese platter of pop culture and author indulgence (2/5)

In 2009, I read my first Robert J. Sawyer novel—Calculating God (2000)—which I enjoyed for its plethora of science yet panned for its stereotypes and a laundry list of annoyances: “near-millennial pop-culture references, science fiction trivia, extensive homage paid to the late Carl Sagan and facts surrounding the real Royal Ontario Museum”. Little did I know, Rollback would gather these same elements around an entirely different plot; yet, regardless of the who, what, when, where and why of the plot, the entire novel feels like a paint by numbers novel—a pushover, an easy read.

Rear cover synopsis:

“Dr. Sarah Halifax decoded the first-ever radio transmission received from aliens thirty-eight years ago. Now, a second message is received, and Sarah, not eighty-seven, may hold the key to deciphering this one, too… if she lives long enough.

A wealthy industrialist offers to pay for Sarah to have a rollback—a hugely expensive rejuvenation procedure. She accepts on the condition that Don, her husband of sixty years, gets a rollback, too. The process works for Don, making him physically twenty-five again. But in a tragic twist, the rollback fails for Sarah, leaving her in her eighties.

While Don tries to deal with his newfound youth and the suddenly vast age gap between him and his wife, Sarah heroically struggles to figure out what a signal from the stars contains before she dies.”

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It has long been thought that the first message from an alien race would be the passing of information vital to bootstrap the human race into technological perfection, to provide all of humankind’s questions with a simple yet benevolent heaven-sent answer. However, the first message was anything but.

March 1^st, 2009: Earth’s first reception of an alien message via SETI. The enormous packet of data sent from Sigma Draconis II is encoded by a decimal number system, which is gradually decoded by numerous experts around the work. The first part of the message establishes a common grammar for the second part of the message which defeats the world’s greatest minds… until Sarah Halifax stumbles upon the answer to the deciphering while playing Scrabble with her husband; the feat wins her brief worldwide fame. More importantly, the resulting information is discovered to be a survey of eighty-four question regarding morals and ethics:

A series of questions, most of which are multiple choice, laid out like a three-dimensional spreadsheet, with space for a thousand different people to provide their answers to each question. The aliens clearly want a cross section of our views, and they went to great pains to establish a vocabulary for conveying value judgments and dealing with matters of opinion, with sliding scales for precisely quantifying responses. (100)

Of the 1,206,343 anonymous responses to the questionnaire via internet, 999 are randomly selected to be sent back to the alien source with the inclusion of one additional response: that of Dr. Sarah Halifax. The 18.8 light-year distance to Sigma Draconis II means that humanity will not receive a return signal for at least another 37 years. Meanwhile, the humans go about their terrestrial lives doing terrestrial things such as playing Scrabble, watching Seinfeld and buying DVDs of old Canadian TV series.

February 2^nd, 2048: Earth’s second reception of a signal from Sigma Draconis II. Sarah Halifax, celebrating her sixtieth wedding anniversary at the ripe age of eighty-seven, is called on to decipher the message yet again. The bulk of the message is unreadable yet is confirmed to have been sent by the same aliens which sent the initial message as they used a unique identifier, a fact kept secret from everyone on Earth. Cody McGavin, the superbly wealthy business owner and financer of SETI, calls upon Sarah because he believes that the enormous distance of signaling between civilizations is not a conversation between the same civilizations, but between individuals: the one alien and the one human transceivers. To facilitate this belief, opposing Sagan’s rhetorical question “Who speaks for the Earth?” (144), McGavin offers the most sacred of gifts to Sarah: near immortality.

The gift of near immortality comes in the form or a “rollback” procedure, from the Rejuvenex company, which starts “with a full-body scan, cataloging problems that would have to be corrected:  damaged joints, partially clogged arteries, and more” (58) and entails a repair to their DNA, with “trillions of somatic cells” being repaired while “lengthening the telomeres” (59). The procedure costs billions of dollars and only a few wealthy people could afford the process of restoring their body clock to the age of twenty-five or so.

With the passing of their recent sixtieth anniversary, Sarah and Don look forward to spending another sixth years of marriage together. With the procedure complete, Sarah and Don notice no immediate effects but the checkups performed by Rejuvenex’s doctors reveal that, while Don’s rollback is progressing nicely, Sarah’s own rollback hasn’t started, leaving her at the physically frail age of an octogenarian yet her mind is still sharp as a tack.

Without the buzzing susurrus of his body’s aging pains, Don’s rejuvenation unveils the cobwebbed senses of youth: vim and vigor, hope and ambition, and, most notably, the stirring juices of sexual attraction—the feeling of being attractive and attracted. Unable to squelch his new-found stallion lust with his fragile wife, Don finds ample opportunity at the university where Sarah used to work. His errand of fetching her “contact” papers allows him to contact a particularly pulchritudinous redheaded graduate student who lures him into her bed… without a sign of physical struggle or mental anguish.

Ignorant of his trysts yet slowly realizing the ramifications of his rejuvenation, doddering Sarah eventually falls and can’t get up because philandering Don isn’t there to assist her. She asks filthy rich Cody McGavin, of McGavin Robotics, for a robot assistant to help her at home while Don is dipping his wick elsewhere. Able to cook, serve, chauffer and ambulate Sarah, the robot, which they name Gunter, becomes an essential part of their family. They invest their trust in the machine which is concerned for their well-being and is always hovering around Sarah to facilitate her every whim and aid in her memory.

Meanwhile, Sarah toils at home trying to decipher the recent signal from Sigma Draconis II. Across the world, those with original copies of the transmission are correlating that data with the recent set and even amateurs are taking futile stabs at cracking the code. She thinks, perhaps, that one set of answers from the original questionnaire may unlock the transmission, but the eighty-four sets are unable to unscramble the code; attempting to unlock it with all possible variations of answers from the questionnaire would result in 2 × 10³⁹ unique answer sets, which is even beyond the capability of supercomputers in the year 2048.

Increasingly physically feeble, Sarah expends her last joules of might to decipher the code, alone in her strife at home and together with symposiums online. Revitalized with youthful vigor, Don is also gifted with age-old wisdom thereby questioning his own impetuous actions; his love for Scrabble and women one-third of his age is eclipsed by his lifelong dedication to his dear wife, Sarah.

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I have given thought about what the first, brief message from the stars would be:

Mars: “Mars needs women.”

Tau Centuri: “Hello?”

51 Pegasi: “Attachment not found.”

Vega: “Erectile dysfunction?”

Pollox: “LMAO.”

Capella: “We request The Beatles.”

Aldebaran: “This statement is false.”

Altair: “What was I gonna say?”

Popular held opinion, as mentioned in Rollback, is that aliens will bestow great knowledge to us because of their advanced capabilities and age-old benevolence, a belief once held by Carl Sagan: “Carl Sagan used to talk about us receiving an Encyclopaedia Galactica” (100). Instead of answers, the aliens of Sigma Draconis II send questions, questions of personal moral depth, all of which can be accomplished by the lengthy primer which stems from mathematics. It’s a bit beyond my mind or belief how you go from “[Question] 2+3 … [Answer] 5” (73) to “Is it acceptable to prevent pregnancy when the population is low?” or “Is it acceptable to terminate pregnancy when the population is high?” or “Is it all right for the state to execute bad people?” (101).

I can briefly suspend my belief (as a SF reader, this is rather precursory) for the message, but the reply to our answers is borderline absurd. The surprising content of the message may first be wow but the ramifications soon dissolve the initial excitement to turgid interest and finally to the novel’s epilogue with either flaccid disinterest or rigid revolt… the epilogue is pretty, pretty cheesy—barely able to stomach as a matter of opinion.

Referring to the “near-millennial pop-culture references, science fiction trivia, extensive homage paid to the late Carl Sagan and facts surrounding the real Royal Ontario Museum” mentioned in the introduction, let me outline these eccentricities and others exhibited by Sawyer in this novel, eccentricities which make the novel irksome, painful to read. All these whims coalesce into one broad category of indulgence:

(a)  The book feels cheesy, hokey or emphatically sarcastically cute. Passing whims include: the chimes of Window’s OS opening theme, visiting outdated websites (Slashdot) on said computer, remembering television shows of Canada’s past, buying DVDs of said television series, recollecting a favorite Seinfeld episode, buying VHS and DVD movies, mentioning the difference between Contact the book (1985) and Contact the movie (1997), listening to an iPod, naming a robot from a memory of Lost in Space (1965-1968), remembering watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, playing The Sims game, mentioning a fictional glass artist who has the same name as the book’s dedication: Robyn Herrington, etc.

(b) Carl Sagan is mentioned seven times (pages 30, 55, 100, 103, 106, 144, 243), which is strange because he isn’t a character in the novel. He may be one of Sarah’s influences and one-time personal colleague, but why must he be so prevalent? I don’t know why Sawyer is so obsessed with Sagan; he may have been a great scientist and intellectual, but how does one find the gall to include the man in such a mediocre novel?

(c) The gall/cheese factor is ramped up when Don says, "One of my favorite authors once said, 'Virtual reality is nothing but air guitar writ large'", which is actually a quote from Sawyer’s The Terminal Experiment (1995).

(d) Then there are a few hiccups which have no referential point and even after research, I can’t pin down the reference; for example: “Pauli's turned out to be a seafood restaurant, and even though Don loved John Masefield's poetry, he hated seafood. Ah, well; doubtless the menu would have some chicken or steak” (44). I thought maybe I had missed something or had Sawyer simply stuck this in the story to be cute… well…

@SFPotpourri Masefield wrote "Sea Fever."

— Robert J. Sawyer (@RobertJSawyer) February 9, 2014

Aha, it was another one of those “cute/clever” eccentric additions of Sawyer’s which he thinks is pretty keen to include in his novel but really adds zero value to the story… perhaps, negative value.

Aside from the numerous eccentricities which distract the reader more than entertain the reader, the novel is a no-brainer: predictable twists and predictable characters. Including working full-time and two 8-hour periods of sleep, I finished this book in a matter of 47 hours… not because it was engrossing, captivating or intellectually stimulating, but because it read easily (more easily that A. A. Attanasio’s Radix [1981], rather). You could say, it read so easily that it was void of any engrossment, captivation or intellectual stimulation; “very readable” does not equate to “very good”.

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I guess if you want to read a quick book on a long flight and suffer indigestion from the book’s content rather than the plane’s food, this might be for you. Or, if you savor pop culture references and meaningless eccentricities, you might enjoy every other word of this novel. I’m sad I still have Sawyer’s The Hominids in my bookshelf… it might receive an early, thrusting boot from my collection if it anything like this cheese platter called Rollback.

1976: The Star Diaries (Lem, Stanislaw)

Absurdity, satire, philosophy, time-travel, blah blah blah (3/5)

I would never have guessed that the Stanislaw Lem who wrote Solaris (1961) would be the very same Stanislaw Lem who wrote The Cyberiad (1965). Picking up The Star Diaries, my expectations were as nebulous as… a gaseous nebula (?). The book’s own synopsis sounded like a mixture of themes: zany jaunts of a deranged voyager and the literary reflections of a thoughtful scholar. With no recourse, I openly agreed to the book’s adjectives: bizarre, unpredictable, frantic.

Rear cover synopsis:

“Cosmonaut, time-traveller and battered hero of The Futurological Congress, Ijon Tichy makes his triumphant return, recording a dazzling array of voyages in time and space. Caught in a time-warp, pleading a shakiy case for humanity as the intergalactic United Nations, spying ineptly on a planet whose robot inhabitants speak a grubby version of Chaucerian English, Tichy’s diaries are bizarre, unpredictable, frantic and sometime deeply disturbing.”

The reader should be aware of Michael Kadel’s Translator’s Note (274-275) which declares:

[T]he numbering of the Voyages conceals their true chronology: the Seventh appeared in 1964, the Fourteenth in 1957, the Eighteenth in 1971, the Twenty-second in 1954, and so on. Lem does not intend these adventures of Ijon Richy to be read in the order in which they were written. That order however—22, 23, 25, 11, 12, 13, 14, 7, 8, 28, 20, 21—does reflect his development as a writer. (274)

The reader should not mind the gaps in the Voyages. These Voyages either never took place (never written), never could have taken place (due to Ijon’s strange timeline), or were entirely edited out of this edition (as is the “Twenty-Sixth Voyage” [1956], “a cold war satire, which the author later discarded, more for esthetic reasons than political reasons” [275] and in which “Tichy lands in a big American city in the early 1950s - the apogeum of the Cold War” [citation]).

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The Seventh Voyage (1964, shortstory) – 5/5 – On a solo voyage “cruising in the vicinity of Betelgeuse” (1), Ijon Tichy develops a rudder problem which takes two men to fix. Unable to functionally navigate, he heads into an area of space infested with 147 temporal vortices. The future and past versions of himself seem unable to cooperate; he argues with his selves, assaults his selves, and eventually relies on his distant future selves to organize. 18 pages ------ Dysfunctionally brilliant! Serving as an introduction to the mannerisms of Ijon, the reader is exposed to the maladaptive attitudes which motivate Ijon through his career as a journeyman of the stars. With a smile plastered on your face, laud in the ill-logic of meeting temporally different versions of yourself: having the knowledge of what your future self will experience with its earlier selves, yet being so stubborn that you ignore all intuitions; having a serious dilemma ignored by your inability to cooperate with your numerous selves. One can’t help but shake one’s head and feel sorry for Ijon yet aso laugh at his bumbling conundrum.

The Eighth Voyage (1966, shortstory) – 4/5 – Ijon has the honor of representing all of mankind in its bid to become part of the United Planets; however, with the patronage of the robotic Rhohch race, this honor soon becomes an unforeseen annoyance and hazard. The delegation of the United Planets, when hearing the case for humanity, remarks upon their disdain for the Neanderthals, their craving for flesh, and their curious primordial origins. 19 pages ------ You should not be proud of who you represent, but also be impeccably prepared to defend who you represent… this is not the case of Ijon, who was thrust into the scenario with all abandon to represent humanity with an idiot as equally as bumbling as he. When the accusations begin to fly, Ijon half understands each argument and meekly agrees to each thrust of denouncement. The meeting turns ugly for Ijon, and humanity, when a long held truth is exposed that frames humanity in an unappealing light—our origins.

The Eleventh Voyage (1961, novelette) – 4/5 – Lost for decades, a ship is eventually found orbiting a planet but the computer which ran the ship had gone haywire and subsumed two databanks into its personage: psychopathology and archaic lexiology. The sad case of the planet, its robotic denizens, and its wicked/insane computer despot comes to the attention of Ijon, who personally takes the assignment with the human hating robots and psychopathic computer, all. 35 pages ------ Not many personalities can eclipse Ijon in uniqueness or absurdity, but the computer which abandoned its craft (inflicted with dichotomia profundia psychogenes electorcutiva alternans) and established its reputed robot colony takes the idiomatic cake. Suffused with random, bizarre data, the information it holds molds its colony into a strange, strange anti-wonderland of olde English and a prevalent hatred for Earth humans. Ijon mission into this very world shows the reader a craftier, more logic-oriented person aside from his normal bumbling self… but also exposes mankind’s sense of fear and ability to follow the herd.

The Twelfth Voyage (1957, shortstory) – 5/5 – Professor Tarantoga invents a dilator or retarder of time yet our eager explorer Ijon finds very little use for it until the same professor has data concerning the Gypsonians on the planet Amauropia. The device, also a time accelerator, allows Ijon to track the progressing civilization of the Gypsonians while fumbling into their mythology and religion. A broken knob has our hero scrambling for relief. 10 pages ------ Ijon has the prime opportunity to witness a civilizations fluctuation of rise and fall; instead, he predictably stumbles into the same civilization’s path of destiny, skewing its innate cultural direction with his influence. Ijon becomes honored, well respected, idolized, and immortalized before his own ineptness causes him to grown younger and younger. Scrambling for his ship, the knee-high Ijon reaches a precarious state.

The Thirteenth Voyage (1957, shortstory) – 5/5 – An individual known as Master Oh is renowned for his wisdom and knack for resolving social issues on a planetary scale. Ijon endeavors to meet the myth but, on the way to Fatamiasma, is held by the state of the Free Aquatica of Pinta who blindly follow their king’s decreed of aquatic evolution. Once free of those bonds, Ijon is then held prisoner by Free Angelica of Panta, a uniform yet interesting place. 19 pages ------ While Ijon is banally unique, Master Oh is exultingly unique and his presence would only be tainted by the bumbling likes of Ijon. Ijon’s ham-fisted extrasolar jaunting lands him, first, on Pinta which is at a mental battle with itself, straining between accepting the obvious and accepting a hierarchical edict: the man-made floods are an indicator of our future aquatic destiny. Then, the scenario on the monotonous planet Panta shucks off Ijon’s ignorance in favor of his philosophical side, debating individuality with personal function in society.

The Fourteenth Voyage (1957, novelette) – 3/5 – Ijon has wanderlust but his ship’s brain, cracking jokes the whole way to Enteropia, drives him a bit batty prior to his entry to the planet; unfortunately, he only brought along the encyclopedia for Enteroptica. Without his referential reassurance, Ijon has no concrete ideas about the planet’s machets, squamps, whackers, the obligatory body doubles or the most important cultural item—the prevalent yet unspeakable scrupt. 23 pages ------ A victim of his own ignorance and suffering a bout of accidental ignorance, Ijon attempts to explore the habits and customs of the people inhabiting Enteropia but lacks any direction on what each culturally important item actually is. Haphazardly, he involves himself in a series of extravagant feats and perplexing dead-ends; some experiences prove worthy of the trip, yet others grate his sense of comfort and logic.

The Twentieth Voyage (1971, novelette) – 4/5 – Ijon is contacted by this future 27^th century self so that he may accept a position which regulates the past. The position, General Director of the Project, heads the vast temporal organization known as the Teleotelechronistic Historical Engineering to Optimize the Hyperputerized Implementation of Paleological Programming and Interplanetary Planning (THEOHIPPIP). When accepted the world’s social, evolutional, and solar troubles plague him. 41 pages ------ Another one of those chronologically counter-intuitive experiences of Ijon; his future self needs to convince to take a post from which his future self comes from. Eventually succumbing to inevitability, Ijon then gets to work making the past more uniform, only to find his entire more as inept as he is, thereby wreaking havoc  across time and space, the result of which we see ourselves today.

The Twenty-First Voyage (1971, novella) – 2/5 – The Laws of Trash, of Noise, and of Spots apply to all civilizations except that which inhabits the planet Cichotica, which, of course, Ijon simply must visit. Initially confronting a field of flesh furniture, Ijon is kidnapped by an underground enclave of monastic robots. With the robots, Ijon learns the lengthy history, through oral and written traditions, of the planet’s clash of science and religion. 54 pages ------ A quirky start to the story is dragged to a sluggish crawl when the story is bridled and reined in by a heavy dose of detailed world history, ecclesiastical preponderances, and philosophical meanderings. While the intellectual foray is mentally stimulating, the protracted exposure is somnolent, being in great contrast with the playful and intriguing mix of the previous seven stories.

The Twenty-Second Voyage (1954, shortstory) – 4/5 – Recalling mementos at his museum of memories, Ijon relives the tale of his penknife. The sun of Erysipelas has 1,480 bodies orbiting its vicinity, two hundred of which have the generic name of “Satelline”; on one of these orbiting bodies Ijon has lost his favorite penknife and he still himself to find the pub in which he left it, but instead is entertained by a Dominican monk. 11 pages ------ Absent-minded and driven by unseen internal forces, Ijon is, again, the bedazzled oaf among the stars, this time on a quest for an emotionally-attached personal trinket—a penknife. At the end of the story, which follows an odd direction, is a interesting and poignant tale of sacrifice and martyrdom which follows another tale of sheepishly believing what students are taught. The translator, Michael Kandel, admits that “the last few pages” (275) of the story to be omitted but doesn’t specify why the story is truncated as it is (but research suggests it may have been too controversial to the over-sensitive Americans of the “Bible Belt”, in regards to blindly digesting what has been taught versus critically appraising what has been taught, as per the morale of “The Twenty-Second Voyage”).

The Twenty-Third Voyage (1954, shortstory) – 3/5 – The planet of Erpeya is renowned for its small size, a fact which is interesting enough to send Ijon on yet another heedless voyage. Most interesting to Ijon, the Whd of Erpeya atomize themselves to ashes during their sleep time or any time of wait or boredom. He’s not eager to try the atomization but he soon becomes a fan of the process and abuses its convenience. 6 pages ------ Leading idol lives is the sin of the Whd; idle time spent in a pile of atomized ash rather than being lost in a book, absorbed in conversation or amazed at the world around them. Clearly, this idle lifestyle, the epitome of a labor saving device to the extreme, can be addictive and contagious, as Ijon finds out. I know a number of people like the Whd—they exclusively watch TV as a form of “entertainment” and their personality reflects the dull glow of the same television set.

The Twenty-Fifth Voyage (1954, shortstory) – 3/5 – The planet of Tairia exists amid the “primordial chaos and danger” (237) of its solar system’s innumerable rocky elements; not only are the tiny missiles hazardous to passing ships, but a recent attack by a creature has raised further concern. A friend of Ijon was attacked by, what scientists deem to be, potatoes. The declaration is so preposterous that philosophers gather to debate what “is” is and scientists are eager for a live sample. 17 pages ------ This story follows a ragtag series of inanity from potatoes stalking the asteroid belts to an olfactory symphony to an alien race which to have sexes. While each part is interesting, entertaining or captivating, I haven’t been able to link it all together into coherence, thus the 3 or 5 rating. Let me know if your whack at it is more successful.

The Twenty-Eighth Voyage (1966, shortstory) – 3/5 – Ijon, alone in his spaceship in deep space, recollects about his family name, his ancestors and his birth. With plans to jettison the document, he records the family line from Anonymus, who fathered eighteen children and held a number of rather odd jobs, to the star captain named Cosimo Tichy, with his ship hold full of family members cum generation ship and an unnamed boy stuffed in a drawer. 20 pages ------ Ijon’s eccentric personality, idiosyncratic whims and moments of complete stupidity may come from his inbred gene line while aboard his father’s ship. This allegation is inferred, I could be wrong as another reviewer has said that perhaps either Ijon himself or his father was an imaginary figure, insanity stemming from prolonged, isolated space travel, much as Ijon is used to but not yet accustomed to.

1991: The Unwound Way (Adams, Bill & Brooks, Cecil)

Ingrained with mythology, allegory and author indulgence (3/5)

Cover: Richard Hescox (1991)

Taking a look at my 553-book database and using a few analysis tools, some interesting things arise: originally, when I started reading SF in 2007, my focus was on late-80s/early-90s science fiction with authors like Greg Bear, Iain M. Banks, William Gibson, and Kim Stanley Robinson; now, the most represented years in my collection are 1968 and 1974, both years with 20 books in my collection. This is in part to my interest in John Brunner’s work but also because I’m more willing to dabble in forgotten paperbacks and take the chance of discovering a classic with the risk of stumbling upon some stinkers.

So, now when I do buy a book from the late-80s/early-90s, it’s for the sake of nostalgia and filling a gap in my library which hasn’t seen any new life breathed into its already stellar repertoire; however, I always hesitate. The unknown novel The Unwound Way, with an uninviting cover by two unknown authors was, obviously, an impulse buy. It is not a regrettable decision, but my time definitely could have been spent more wisely on one of my other 154 unread novels.

According to the “About the Authors” page, Bill Adams had written mystery fiction under the name T. M. Adams and, with some interweb research, wrote some short stories in the same genre in the 1970s and 1980s. Cecil Brooks lived in Pennsylvania and his written work seemed to have been nil until 1991 when he co-authored The Unwound Way and its 1994 sequel The End of Fame. I reckon either the sales or feedback about the novel (only one review published in Locus, #369 October 1991) weren’t forthcoming because nothing else has been written by these two fellows since 1994… which is a shame because the talent is there, just not the delivery.

Rear cover synopsis:

“ALL THE WORLDS A STAGE

Evan Larkspur dreamed of greater glory than his play writing could ever bring him. But his newfound career as officer on a star-survey mission ended in disaster almost as soon as it had begun. And when he returned home, the only survivor of a freak accident that had flung his ship out of known space, the found that a century had passed—and though Larkspur the playwright was now famous, Larkspur the explorer was a wanted man.

Buried in his memory was the fate of his ship; hidden on his person was the star—access data that would have been worth several fortunes—if it were not scrambled beyond repair. The repressive First Column government coveted the data and would not hesitate to strip Larkspur’s mind in an attempt to decipher it.

There was nothing a deceased playwright or a vanished explorer could do against the Column. And so Larkspur fled to the fringe worlds, hiding his identity, intent only on survival—until, on an obscure planet called Newcount Two, he discovered a powerful legacy he never knew he had…”

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During his university years, Larkspur was involved in three things: girls, writing plays, and the brotherhood of Kalanists. While his plays never found popularity, his frolicking was intermittent and successful and his association with the Kalanists brought his peace of mind; ‘twas a time of self-discovery and relative freedom under the First Column government. However, life wasn’t challenging enough and simply being known as a failed playwright didn’t win any hearts, so the young Larkspur enlisted in the Navy was sped off to the stars with something less than wanderlust.

The mission to map the stars was interrupted by a disaster onboard; all indications pointed towards  manmade sabotage and awakening the officers from cryogenic sleep had mixed results of insanity and dissociative catatonia. Larkspur was one man who awoke with his mind intact and he quickly drew to a position of leader, one who must confront the disaster, the perpetrator and find a solution for the ship stuck in the dimensions between space and time. His steady hand doesn’t salvage the ship or save the crew, rather he is shifted further along his world’s timeline into a future he hardly recognizes… yet the world recognizes him—not his face, but his accomplishments.

Unwilling to enter the limelight, Larkspur assumes an alias while maintaining a series of menial jobs shuttling around the sphere of human affairs. His spell of innocuous existence is broken when Senator Condé hires him for a mission of pure subterfuge, an action fit for the repressed flamboyant actor in the playwright. His mission, with promised protection from the influential Senator, calls for him to jaunt off to Newcount Two, a small uninhabited Earth-like planet, for the purpose of securing an archeological dig site which greatly interests the Senator. Reportedly holding ancient artifacts of a giant bipedal race, two sections of the dig site, something like a barrow, are to be secretively cordoned off and the rest of the dig to go ahead as planned; the motley crew, a group of experienced amateurs rather than expert professionals, is composed of one dashing lass, “an eccentric oldster, an academic know-it-all, a shirttail boy and his ineffectual father, a monk, a mystic warrior, and a misanthropic redhead” (46).

Acting as “His Excellency, Alun Parker, Sub-Commissioner for Non-Human Artifacts” (29) representing the Column, Larkspur adopts the officious manner which his roles exudes, yet additional, more natural mannerisms creep into his persona which cause some of the site workers to silently question his role—surely, not all officers are well-read in theater, Kanalism, piloting, and philosophy. Regardless, his pristinely pleated uniform convinces even the strongest minds at camp, but this doesn’t stop an interloper from attempting murder. Larkspur’s quick reflexes as a pilot save his life, the life of the little vixen named Ariel, and the evidence onboard the sabotaged flitter. His suspicions piqued yet vaguely directed, Larkspur steeps in wanton ire.

When the furtive Larkspur returns to camp, the dig crew have revived one of their most important machinations for the dig and, in hasty attempt to test it, activate a physical switch which drains the lake near their camp. From the draining waters of alkalized lake rises a human artifact, a “broad circular shaft” (83) capped with a white dome and dripping sticky effluvia. Mesmerized by the unreal sight in contrast to the drab life at the archeological dig, the ragtag crew speed off by foot toward the towering phallic monolith, which they scale, frolic upon, and ultimately descend into without casting a word of discovery or warning to anyone… no one at all.

Descending into the depths of the planet, they assume they assume they are alone. They naively destroy the control circuits, spend some time gaping in awe at the human figures in the subterranean park and its extremely vast range, and translate the tale of twenty-five generation of humanity which found the planet, which was already in an artificial state due to a long gone alien race with fantastic technological prowess. Coming to some sense, they decide to ascend back to the crown of the wet ashen pillar in the middle of the drained lake, but at the elevator they are met by the Iron Brotherhood, a labor union of contract killers. It turns out that Senator Condé’s secret barrow of artifacts is, in fact, this very subterranean world and his insurance on the plot is guarded by his cronies. Larkspur feels himself instantly become immaterial, expendable.

In a bid to escape the predation of rifle shots and crossbow quarrels, Larkspur heads his subservient team into a graveyard’s crypt which is the sole entrance into Hellway. The Hellway is hundreds of kilometers long build by the Elitists and terminates at the north pole where they hope to exit and call for help. Originally built as a culturally inspired obstacle course for the prior human tenants’ rite of age, the numerous obstacles chosen for each player was chosen by the world’s computer system. Over the last few hundred years, however, the system and the world have deteriorated to the point of being even more deadly they it was before. Angered by the viciousness of the Elitists, some of Larkspur’s ragtag team damn the Elitists’ inhumanity and damn their own misfortune.

The ritualistic Hellway initiation for the coming of age isn’t as plainly trialing as the group first thought; rather, even the start of the maze is fraught with confusion and danger; the Hellway was “living poetry, an epic series of ‘objective correlatives’ for official Elitist virtues” (218), but even the most basic of mazes was laden with perplexing solutions, some which injured the trespassers and some which killed the errant. Belittled, Larkspur reflects, “This big phony stage set has reduced us to characters in a plya” (181). Allied lives are lost yet end-result expectations fizz with hope; meanwhile the Iron Brotherhood, in their own brutish and ham-fisted way, make their way toward the pole end of Hellway where a seemingly final aerial race to the finish to hosted between two intermixed teams of Larkspur’s ragtag team and the assassins.

Now leading with his wisdom and by example, confidence still grows among the dwindling crew; however, Larkspur is still plying his grand subterfuge in the equally as grand theatre of the absurd known as Hellway. He doubts his vaporous relationships with some members yet invests even his heart in a coital alliance. With the maze coming to an obvious terminus, his guise of Column importance cannot continue when official inspection nudges into the planet’s extraordinary matters. Larkspur may think his deception ends with the maze, but an even greater challenge awaits him on the planet’s surface—the real world, with problems of galactic importance.

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Internally consistent, meticulously plotted, and burbling with subsurface Greek allegories, it’s too bad that most of the novel (onwards from page 130 to the final page 339) is steeped in a bitter brew of references to Greek mythology, a subject which I’ve never been interested in; therefore, any allegories which refer to these same allegories are utterly lost on me. I know the name—Daedalus, Icarus, Minotaur, etc.—but nothing more than the skim of their mythological fame; again, any deeper subcutaneous references to the mythologies fall in a vacuous area of my brain.

The numerous references began to irritate me, so I did something which I’ve never done before: I contacted the author. Prior to entry in the vast length of Hellway, everyone went through a mirror maze, then they went through three other trials (mazes), with a final maze at the end. Even with my limited knowledge of Greek mythology, I felt a tacit connection to something deeper in those same mythologies. So, rather than bone up on the wealth of Greek mythology, I opted to contact Cecil Brooks; I wrote, “The book is obviously influenced by Greek mythology, similar to Samuel R. Delany's Einstein Intersection (1967) …. could you enlighten me on the significance of the number of tests which Larkspur had to endure” (January 8, 2014). The reply thus read, “Perhaps if you finish reading our book, you’ll find that questions relevant to the text are answered in the text” (January 9, 2014).

So, the book, according to one of the co-authors, is self-evident. I’ve waited ten days to do this

http://www.wikipedia.org

review in order to throw more brain power at this spectral self-evidence; perhaps I thought about it too much, but the attempts to grasp at straws here doesn’t change my opinion of the book’s 3-star rating. That I can apply my thoughts to the analysis, I must spoil the party a bit by giving details about the mazes. In my attempt to apply as much ancient Greek relevance, I hit upon the classical Greek elements of fire, earth, water and air:

(1) The mirror maze: light, represented by fire, tricks the mind with illusions, reflections, and mirages—this misguidance could be consciously caused by the viewer based on emission theory, which postulated that the eye emitted light rather than accept it. As with the passage of light through the ether, passage through the mirrored maze takes time. The senses of patience and touch are required to navigate the subtle, deceptive and infuriating maze.

(2) The moth swarm: represented by fire and air, the moths seem to be an inane addition to the landscape of Hellway until the waft of a predatory pheromone; the harmless airy moths then attack with fire, paralyzing and dissolving the victim where they stand. As air acts as a vehicle for fire’s growth, so too do the moths offer a vehicle for progress, yet in a much more literal sense.

(3) The eel balloon: represented by air and water, eels are aqueous by inferred nature, they are dominate in their domain on Hellway as no other life form vies for supremacy of its waterways, yet the Hellway also has a mysterious side. During the eels’ the breeding cycle, a swarm is motivated to fill some of its brethren with hydrogen; thence they float to their spawning grounds, but while aloft they are out of their element and open to exploitation.

(4) The ivy-walled passages: represented by water and earth, the denizens of the rocky crawlspace are translucent globs of locomotion feeding on the verdant ivy which lines the passages; they affect what is needed while allowing non-vital elements, such as a person, safe passage through its doughy entity. The earth (of Newcount Two) and its stone are strong, unyielding to man’s passage yet fragile to time and kind to its smallest creatures, which Man is not. As time had lapsed in Hellway, certain passages decline in functionality and regress to the torments of fire, which casts a red light of warning.

(5) The aerial race: in the obvious median of air but bowing to the elements of earth and fire due to the trial’s purpose of propulsion; each team collects gold rings (earth) suspended by stony stalactites while being propelled by the constant power of fire on their backs.  In the lithesome yet innocent ether of air, earth can be a firm foundation for confidence while fire can drive passion, coerce inhuman feats.

Perhaps I thought too much about it… but then again, I also found a number of homosexual innuendos (as with the white pillar in the lake). A playwright joins the navy? That’s a good start. If a book is self-evident, as the author suggests, any theme which I think reinforces itself is, in fact, a solid case for an overarching theme. Regardless of my insight, I doubt very much that either the elements of the innuendos were part of the intended spread.

Lastly, I must mention one thing: an unusual gem of a sex scene which had me guffaw aloud; it started nicely and ended in a mood-shattering bomb of hilarity:

I reached for her waist where she stood and drew her close, my lips pressed, in that position, against her pale, taut belly. I could feel a distant tom-tom heartbeat, hers or mine, and tasted lightly salted girlflesh. There was a brief moment of civil war--north or south? (247)

I like the invented word “girlflesh” but it feels a bit sexist, devaluing a woman to mere skin. If I remember one part of this book in twenty years’ time, it will be the little civil war prior to Larkspur’s own “little death”.

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I can appreciate The Unwound Way for its prodding allegories on my mythologically-deaf mind. I can also appreciate the interconnectedness, finesse, and overall control of the novel. Yet, the recurring trials in Hellway feel like, as I mentioned to Mr. Brooks in my email, an “author's unbridled eagerness for expressing a wealth of imagination” (January 8, 2014), much akin to Jack L. Chalker’s Midnight at the Well of Souls (1977).

With 154 unread novels on my shelves, I don’t think the sequel The End of Fame (1994) will grace the walnut crannies. In the end, Larkspur is an interesting character with a strange history and in even stranger circumstances; unfortunately, it doesn’t make for a particularly illuminating read perhaps, again, because of my allergy to mythology. For those with a mythology fetish, however, I would highly recommend this!