1996: The Reality Dysfunction (Hamilton, Peter F.)

Delectable SF space opera with hard-to-swallow premises (3/5)

I’ve plowed through most of Hamilton’s tomes, excluding the Greg Mandel trilogy (1993-1995) and The Night’s Dawn trilogy (1997-2000). I’m not a big fan of series, so I’ve always held off reading these expansive sets of books. I haven’t heard much about the Greg Mandel series but The Night’s Dawn trilogy seems to be the stuff of legend, whispers passed about its length and depth. Considering I’ve liked everything else Hamilton has written, including the collection of Manhattan in Reverse (2011) and his most recent novel Great North Road (2012), I finally decided to procure the weighty volumes and delve into the first tome while on 2-week holiday. This turned out to be excellent timing as it ended up taking fifteen days to polish off the 1,094 pages.

One additional note, in case you weren’t already aware, is that the original US edition of The Reality Dysfunction is split into two volumes: Emergence (1997) and Expansion (1997). The later edition combines them, thankfully, into one large volume… the same volume which is featured here.

Rear cover synopsis:

“In AD 2600 the human race is finally beginning to realize its full potential. Hundreds of colonized planets scattered across the galaxy host a multitude of prosperous and wildly diverse cultures. Genetic engineering has pushed evolution far beyond nature's boundaries, defeating disease and producing extraordinary space-born creatures. Huge fleets of sentient trader starships thrive on the wealth created by the industrialization of entire star systems. And throughout inhabited space, the Confederation Navy keeps the peace. A true golden age is within our grasp.

But now something has gone catastrophically wrong. On a primitive colony planet, a renegade criminal's chance encounter with an utterly alien entity unleashes the most primal of all our fears. An extinct race which inhabited the galaxy aeons ago called it "The Reality Dysfunction." It is the nightmare that has prowled beside us since the beginning of history.”

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Joshua Calvert hopes to one day refurbish the inheritance of his father’s starship—the Lady Macbeth. His intuition for discovery proves fruitful in the decimated ruins of an xenoc (alien) orbital. The resulting dust ring, which orbits a gas giant, is picked by scavengers and the finds sold to a nearby research facility. The most significant finds are often intact leaves, trees and daily objects. When Joshua is pressed by opportunistic scavengers, he retreats in a large piece to debris only to find the mother lode: a ice-encapsulated computer core. The sale of the core allows Joshua to become a local celebrity, upgrade his ship’s systems, and even bed a few broads in the process.

One of his prized notches on his bedpost is bedding the Lord of Ruin, a title given to the bitek (organically grown) orbital’s ruler, whose bloodline is shared with the regal Saldana family, of which Alastair II is the reigning king over the Kulu Kingdom. Though part of the royal bloodline, the Lord of Ruin, Ione, and her affinity-linked (mind/message-linked) named Tranquility operate outside the sphere of influence of the royal family. Tranquility was originally established as an outpost to research the Laymil artifacts.

The facility researching the Laymil artifacts also investigates what caused the catastrophic demise of the entire massive orbital body. The leading theories include suicide and attack, but with centuries having passed since their destruction, the only source of new information will come from the data core which Joshua found. The researchers discover that stores amid the data are sets of sensory recordings, memories of the extinct xenoc race.

One of these researchers is Dr. Alkad Mzu, one of the few survivors of her homeworld’s utter destruction by antimatter by the hand of the Omuta navy. Her homeworld of Garissa is now but a memory, a memory which burns deeply with a sense of hate, revenge and justice that spans her 30-year confinement on Tranquility. Ione’s father made it his prerogative to keep Mzu within Tranquility so that she is unable to seek out that revenge with her fabled Alchemist weapon of purported unimaginable power. The weapon is hidden relic of the navy from Garissa who once wanted to strike the genocidal blow to their enemy the Omuta, who have only now started to emerge from their own 30-year quarantine. The Confederation of human worlds welcomes the genocidal brutes back into the fold of human affairs but the allegorical sins of a father are carried as a burden by the son.

Nothing is as burdensome as settling a new colony, like on the newly opened EuroChristian-ethnic world Lalonde. Emigrating from Earth, fine families gamble with their lives to have new beginnings, but wasters from Earth’s acrologies, the chaff of humanity, also tag along for hopes of a better future… or a darker non-future like Quinn Dexter hopes for. Gaining trust among the innocent villagers, Quinn establishes a separate house for the hard-working cons but Quinn is also gaining respect through fear by the other cons, who see him as a necessarily brutish leader. Quinn and his men’s brutish sexual acts of shamelessness reflect their growing infatuation with releasing the Serpent from themselves, inviting the Light Bringer into their lives.

In the early days of the universe’s formation, an intelligent race of energy being arose to sublime into the vacuum of space. Roaming the empty vacuum for the sake of study, the race of Ly-cilph visit star systems and study the interesting forms of life which are scattered among the stars. Rarely do these physical being interest the energy-patterned Ly-cilph, but some curious humans on Lalonde seem to welcome to energy, hungry for power. The resulting local influence of energy causes an unnatural rift in space-time, whereby the departed souls of mankind cross the gulf between the eternal yet painful observation and longing for physicality and that of our world.

The souls enter willing bodies in anguish. Once subsumed, the mind of the body cringes in the back of the brain while the transported soul becomes the dominant persona, and with it an incredible ability to manipulate matter and energy. White fire flies from their fingertips by their very wish, causing destruction where ever they tread. Not wasting the ability and sympathizing with the bodiless souls beyond, the possessed soon torture other people into begging for mercy, an opportunity which the sinister souls pounce upon and force themselves into the body. Their powers grow greater and more and more of them converge on the same city, manifesting historical wonders from yesteryears and forming an impenetrable red cloud which blocks out the horrible sight of the vastness of space. Happy with their corporal existence, they aim to expand the cloud, vanquish the world and transport the entire planet to a dimension where they can live in bodily form for eternity.

Meanwhile, Joshua is a captain of his own starship and proudly gallivanting about the Confederation looking for trade and tail, both of which he succeeds in snaring. His largest pull comes from collecting the hardest wood known to the Confederation, a special wood from Lalonde, and selling it to the pastoral planet named Norfolk. Norfolk is a planet constitutionally limiting their technology, so Joshua’s gamble of transporting a starship full of wood (ridiculous to many) pays off big time, earning him prime access to two things: a shipload of the Confederation’s finest alcohol called Norfolk Tears (made from a dying flower’s sap) and the young, naïve yet buxom beauty of a wealthy estate, Louise Kavanagh.

When hell breaks loose on Lalonde, the trickle of information from the budding colony eventually reaches the Confederation. Rumors are thrown around on the ground of Lalonde as much as they are across the stars, but an early solid report of the chaos cuts a new facet on the rumors: an infamous rogue Edenist who destroyed an entire habitat is found on Lalonde. Has he anything to do with the demonic possessions? If so, why did he warn secret Confederation agents about the emerging human plight of possession? And if he’s so innocent, why did he send an intense word of warning via affinity when he killed himself? One thing is for certain: “on old Earth they used to say all roads led to Rome. Here on Lalonde, all the rivers lead to Durringham” (985), but the rivers of water aren’t the only streams headed towards Durringham; heavily armed starships are headed to the planet to confront the threat with precise orbital bombardment or, if the threat warrants its usage, strategic nuclear bombs.

The Confederation, though composed of billions of humans and two xenoc species, has never been under such a threat: souls invading living human bodies; to kill the body would send two souls (one sinister, one innocent) back to the bodiless dimension. This is the crux of the problem the Confederation faces; here, there must consider:

Our empathy means never hide from what we feel … the balance is the penalty of being human: the danger of allowing yourself to feel. For this we walk a narrow path high above rocky ground. On one side we have the descent into animalism, on the other a godhead delusion. Both pulling of us, both tempting. But without these forces tugging of your psyche, stirring it into conflict, you can never love. (118)

For a more thorough, accurate plot synopsis for The Reality Dysfunction, see Wikipedia.

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One of the basic premises which I glanced over in my own synopsis was the classic division of the human race into two sects: the Adamists (baseline humans) and the Edenists (genetically engineered with the telepathic affinity gene). The Edenists include not only gene-linked humans, but also their massive bitek habitats, their starships named voidhawks, and menial laborers of animal origin. The basis for Edenism comes from the affinity gene, which as mentioned above, links all Edenists together more harmoniously than the baseline Adamists: “with their communal affinity there was no hiding emotions or truth” (24).

I’ve always been skeptical about the reality of telepathy, treating it as a pseudo-science or calling it outright bunk. I find it difficult to swallow the pill Hamilton gives us: telepathy by genetics… not only that, but a telepathy which is impossible to intercept (926). Not completely outside the boundaries of physics, affinity is limited by distance. Certainly, if distance is a limitation, there some sort of signal must travel through some sort of medium—this is the essence of a transmission. I’m baffled by why it’s impossible to intercept its transmissions, as if human genes—little protein messengers—carry a mechanism which defeats the laws of the known universe.

Equally as hard to swallow is the other overarching premise: human souls exist (and are undetectable just like affinity) and reside outside of our normal space-time sphere, all in pain and all lusting for corporeal existence. Whether this is addressed in the remaining two books is unknown (now 75% of the way through The Neutronium Alchemist and something’s been hinted, but nothing solid). I don’t understand the ill intentions and evil motives of the returning dead; sure, some of them had been influenced by Quinn sadism and his lust for power and pain from the Light Bringer, but it seems like our kind human nature is vanquished once we return from the dead. However, this is not a certainty in 100% of the cases, as toward the end of The Reality Dysfunction was come across a noble spirit who assists in a rescue of children from the clutches the returning dead. Further, The Neutronium Alchemist (in at about the 75% point), sympathetic factions of the possessed arise.

One last piece of the plot annoyed me. While the Edenists’ voidhawks and the Adamists’ blackhawks can traverse space through wormholes, subjectively traveling faster than light, messages are unable to travel in a similar superluminal fashion. Crystal flecks (the standard unit of data exchange) are thereby loaded with information and send in a voidhawk or blackhawk, send across the gulf of stars to a far-off star system where they broadcast the message. For important news to travel around the entire system of the Confederation, great manpower and shiptime must be dedicated to the effort… which, conveniently, plays a part into the spread of the possessed.

Now come the uni-faceted characters: the protagonists of skirt-chasing Joshua and his skirt with a brain Ione; then the antagonist of hellbent Quinn. Aside from these prevalent characters, there’s actually a number of more interesting people who form Joshua’s entourage and some other crew members of other gallivanting ships which were left out of the already lengthy synopsis (again, see Wikipedia for that). For example, Father Horst Elwes emigrates to Lalonde because of his weak faith and when his faith is tested by the seeming resurrection of the dead, his kind god-fearing side comes to the surface. Lastly, Erick Thakrar (a Confederation Navy spy) and Captain André Duchamp (occasional smuggler) provide a great frisson which develops well into The Neutronium Alchemist.

Enough about the plot of this expansive space opera. Now, a word about consistency when using the English language; I’m sensitive to this kind of thing. For example, if you use the word “color” on one page then spell it “colour” on a different page, I’m going to notice… or if you “touchy” instead of “tetchy” then later swap their uses, I’m going to point it out. For Peter F. Hamilton, the one major inconsistency, which probably won’t mar your reading of the book if it hadn’t already been pointed out, is his use of the hyphen, which in this case is used to join words as compound nouns or adjectives (e.g. sun-dried tomatoes or sundried tomatoes, but not both). Consider:

a) “olive-green one-piece anti-projectile suit” (580) and “olive green one piece anti-projectile suits”(613)

b) “space-plane” (1091, line 4) and “spaceplane” (1091, line 6)

c) “thermodump panels” (9 and 108) while “thermo-dump” was more widely used

d) sometimes “combat wasp” is hyphenated, sometimes not as “combat-wasp”.

Even less obvious and easier to miss are some typeface issues or proofreading issue with the lowercase letter-L, the capital letter-L and the lowercase letter-I; for example:

                a) “Ione” instead of “lone” (973, line 4)

                b) “vold” instead of “void” (1031, line 11)

Lastly, the fine-toothed comb found one additional inconsistency: the full stop with the abbreviation of mister. Consider: “Mr Wallace” (1040, line 31) and “Mr. Malin” (1040, line 33) with a number of other examples on the proceeding three pages.

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It’s modern space opera; you should know what to expect: lots of transient characters, interweaving plot lines, untold pages going by without hearing from a character or two, loads of proper nouns (planets, ships, cities, etc.), and hints of things to come in a thousand pages or so within the sequel : The Neutronium Alchemist. In these regards, the beginning to the Night’s Dawn trilogy does not disappoint, but I just find it hard to enjoy a plot which heavily relies on gene-linked, physics-defying telepathy and the irrational returning souls of the dead. Having bought all three volumes of the trilogy already (with the inclusion of the third volume, The Naked God), I’m dedicated to finishing this popular trilogy.

1980: Players at the Game of People (Brunner, John)

Attack on sybarites and/or whimsical dalliance? (3/5)

In my quest to be a Brunner completist (now at twenty-five novels), I’ve had to tackle some of Brunner’s lesser known work in the 1980s. This work occurs after a five-year hiatus of novel writing between Shockwave Rider (1975) and The Infinitive of Go (1980). Are these works lesser known due to an eclipsing presence in the SF community or lesser known because of deteriorating quality? Therein lays my mission as a Brunner completist. This is my fourth foray into Brunner’s later work, another addition to his mediocrity pile.

Rear cover synopsis:

“War hero, jet-setter, gourmet—Godwin Harpinshield was all of these and more; his life was a game played among the Beautiful People whose fame, wealth and power set them above the law, and beyond the laws of nature. Because of a simple bargain that all the Beautiful People made, Godwin’s every desire was his for the asking. Seduced by luxury, Godwin never doubted his fortune, never wondered about his mysterious patrons.

Then the game turned ugly.

Suddenly, the ante was raised and the game was real. The stakes were his future, his sanity and, possibly, his very soul. All Godwin Harpinshield had to discover was: What were the rules of the game? And who—or what—were the other players?”

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Godwin works for an unseen employer, an employer who manipulates his reality as his reward. His latest task was to recruit a young woman, Gorse, from her life of prostitution and eventual destitution. To impress her, he lavishes her with fine drink, fine clothing, and an epic evening of sex but he pities her naïve youthfulness and mortal concerns; treating her finely yet with detachment, she’s led into the same mixed reality/fantasy world in which he lives, yet he’ll more than likely never see her again.

The rewards for such occasional tasks come in the form of a lavish yet closely guarded lifestyle: he drives a Lamborghini but parks in a public garage, he lives in a mansion accessed through a slum, he uses passports only once or twice, he rejuvenates and detoxes himself as needed; this secretive lifestyle also allows him to pop in and out of his friend’s bungalow in Bali or a restaurant in Hawaii.

[H]e had had ample time to think and reflect and study. He had no need to earn a living; he was occasionally obliged to invent a new ambition, but that happened seldom, and one conceived, a single ambition often lasted him for several years. (189)

One last reward is his ability to occasionally live out an impossible otherwise fantasy such as earning a George Medal for heroic efforts during World World II. The physical reward and relevant newspaper clipping is proof for his pride, but the emotional/sexual reward from a 10-year-old’s seductive kiss is more satisfactory, a lingering memory in his mind and on his lips. For successfully recruiting Grose, he is allowed another reward, a fantasy of his very wish but, prior to entering the trace-like state, he decides not chose any one scenario, a choice which sends him on a torturous sequence of punishment, imprisonment, and sadism. He awakes from his trance stupefied and uncertain, reflecting, “perhaps it had taken place at some kind of skew-wiff angle between the main line of reality and the diffuse world of simple fantasy” (119).

The unpleasant affair jilts Godwin’s waking life, a life which should be filled with riches and luxury yet has been infiltrated with the memory of pain. Then… he meets an impossible image from his WWII fantasy—the likeness of the same girl who kissed him is now following him, suspecting him of something with the police at her side. Rather than lead a life of suspicion, Godwin plies another of his special traits: the flex, an ability to manipulate people’s minds. Wiping the memory of his suspicion from the cops’ memory, Godwin leaves the blonde-haired woman untouched, yet later confronts her about his own disbelief of her existence. Shattered by the revelation, Godwin gawps at Barbara, “a handsome woman, a woman who had had the persistence—the guts, the bloody-mindedness—to struggle through a miserable life and somehow, nonetheless, create an identity, derived from nobody but herself and her own dreams” (186).

Gobsmacked perhaps by her simple human ability to rise from nothing to become a something, Godwin looks inwardly at himself and what he has achieved:

“Did I create that? Did I earn that? Did I invent or conceive it or design it?”

And felt the chilling knowledge overtake him:

Of course not. I simply accepted it when it was given.

Who have I been all these years? And, worse yet: What have I been?  (190)

His subjective reality shattered and his fantasies flattening, Godwin must look through his past to the time when he accepted his mixed fate, a deal which threatens his life and the life of another close to him and close to Barbara; it seems their fates are sealed.

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The above quote from page 190 summarizes one of the overarching themes of the book. One possible theme for this novel could be a shot at rich sybarites who bide their time dabbling in dalliances: women, cars, parties, restaurants and fantasy. These sybarites spend time and spend money but actually create nothing for themselves, much like Godwin doesn’t create his fantasies or even his fate. The novel looks at his coming to realize that his luxurious lifestyle is tainted with a underlying evil.

I’m torn between liking this novel and disliking it, so I’m stuck in the middle. The idea that there are people living on the fringe of our reality who experience their every last desire is enticing, but there are portions of the book which focus too heavily on describing the blurred line between Godwin’s fantasies and realities. The dialogue is a tiresomely echo of outlandish ideas proposed by the characters with very little actual fact-finding. The reader isn’t grounded to many of the concepts which Brunner has written into the plot. I guess you could say that the reader discovers the mysteries of Godwin’s abilities as Godwin himself discovers the inaccuracies and fallacies of his “work”.

However, I do enjoy the discovery; my own infantile conceptions of the newly introduced ideas slowly solidify, an general idea of the direction of Brunner’s young plot. There’s not too much spelled out for the reader—this where a lot of science fiction gets tedious, bogged down with data, stats and facts. Brunner keeps the reader engaged, but the dialogue of discovery—the ping pong postulations—has very little return and cements nothing. The conclusion doesn’t offer any solid evidence of who Godwin “works” for; their identity is vague, the reader’s suspicions carrying its own weight through the conclusion. This is where, at the end, I felt everything was perhaps too vague.

Brunner isn’t often a poetic writer, aside from his obvious wealth of poetry, which has been collected in books such as The Book of John Brunner (1976) and A Hastily Thrown Together Bit of Zork (1974). But many of his novels are written straight-forwardly, attention invested in the originality of the plot (or sometimes on the dollar return from an easy sell) or probing a subject to a great degree (or stumbling over himself in the process). Brunner is also an author who indulges in a few pet topics: spies, hypnotism and telepathy; in this regard, he can be an indulgent author but only to the point of favoring pet topics… he isn’t one to drop cutesy references, go off on a political tangent or fixate on sex.

Saying that, Players at the Games of People feels like an oddly indulgent novel by Brunner, a novel in which he flows poetically at times but also fixates on a specific type of sexual relations (mainly, direct clitoral stimulation); compare: “[H]e fretted ceaselessly as though he were an oyster doubtful about the advantages of being parent to a pearl” (144) and ”He recalled her capacity for orgasm. It has been impressive” (135).

One last oddity, merely a curiosity, about Players at the Games of People is its format. The 219-page novel is divided into 39 unnumbered chapters, nineteen of those pages blank due to pagination (the separation between the end of a chapter and the next so that each chapter begins on the same side—all on odd pages of all of even pages). This results in a choppy read as the chapters are rarely continuous. Aside from Stand on Zanzibar (1968) and The Sheep Look Up (1972), all my other Brunner novels have numbered chapters.

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Players at the Games of People is a Brunner curiosity. I don’t see it having much importance in his bibliography, but it does offer the Brunner fan a chance to follow his lead, look into his mind, and chase his indulgences. Interesting… but not essential to anyone other than the Brunner completist, like myself.

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.