2 / 5 Stars
John Boyd (the pseudonym of Boyd Bradfield Upchurch, 1919 - 2013) authored a number of science fiction novels during the late 60s and early 70s, including The Last Starship from Earth (1968), The Rakehells of Heaven (1969), The Organ Bank Farm (1970), and Barnard's Planet (1975), among others.
'The Gorgon Festival' first was published in hardcover in May 1972. This Bantam Books paperback (184 pp) was published in November 1974 and features a striking cover illustration by Fred Pfeiffer.
The novel is set in California in the early 70s. Alexander Ward is a middle-aged biochemist at Stanford University who discovers a simple formula with radical implications: bathing in the formula can instantaneously reverse the aging process, and return the bather to the physical and mental state of his or her twenties.
Ward barely has time to ponder the import of this discovery when the elderly Ruth Gordon, his scientific mentor and the object of his boyhood erotic fantasies, steeps herself in the formula and finds herself transformed into a beautiful young woman.
Gordon promptly goes underground in the Mecca for Youth, Los Angeles. Ward finds himself compelled to follow her.
But as Ward investigates the 'freak' hangouts of downtown L.A., he rapidly discovers that he has all the street smarts of a middle-aged man from a sheltered background.......which is to say, no street smarts at all. And his naivety is going to bring with it a price........
I found 'The Gorgon Festival' to be disappointing. Its sci-fi theme is perfunctory, serving as a plot device by which the author can satirize the swingin' Southern California lifestyles of the burgeoning Sexual Revolution, as well as the desire by so many of the middle-aged men of that era to somehow regain their youth in time to enjoy the lubricious bounty of the Counterculture seething outside their well-maintained suburban homes.
The novel is too overwritten to be a very effective satire (Alexander Ward frequently indulges in monologues containing allusions to Shakespeare, Olde English Poets, and Greek philosophers), and some of its efforts - such as having Ward disguise himself as a 'Negro' for a period of time in order to acquire Soul and Hipness- are quite awkward by modern-day standards.
The novel does slightly redeem the effort I put into reading it with a surprisingly violent segment in its closing chapter, but I finished thinking that 'The Gorgon Festival' tried to do too much at once and wound up doing nothing very well. This is a 70s sci-fi novel that can be skipped.
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