Book Review: Maske: Thaery

Book Review: 'Maske: Thaery' by Jack Vance

5 / 5 Stars

 

'Maske: Thaery' (216 pp.) was published in hardcover in 1976. This Berkley Books paperback was issued in September, 1977, with cover art by Ken Barr. 

It has been some time since I last had read a Vance novel, so the initial twenty-five or so pages of 'Maske' were slow going as I tried to reacquaint myself with Vance's idiosyncratic prose style:

 

Jubal borrowed Trewe's old ercycle and rode thirty miles up the side of Eirse Mountain, through forests of stunted ebane and tall thin thyrse, across stony glades and dark dells, and finally arrived at Vaidro's antique house: a rambling, tall-roofed structure of dark wood. Vaidro, a somber man, compact and economical of movement, came out to meet Jubal and conducted him to a shaded terrace. They sat in wicker easy chairs, and a Djan maid brought a silver tray with a carafe of wine and a dish of biscuits. Vaidro leaned back in his chair with a goblet of wine and studied Jubal through half-closed eyes. "Yallow has changed you, more than I might have expected."

 

Eventually I settled into familiarity with Vance's prose and its flourishing collections of invented nouns and unusual adjectives. It does help that Vance keeps his plot straightforward, as if in compensation for the ornate prose. 

 

Thaery is the foremost nation on planet Maske, and our protagonist, Jubal Droad, is at a disadvantage, being born a Glint, a member of the lumpen proletariat, a class looked down upon by the native-born residents of Thaery. Nonetheless, Jubal is determined to be more than a simple laborer, and makes his way to the Thaery capital city, Wysrod, hoping to leverage a family connection into a position with the patrician Nai the Hever. 

 

Nai is one of the five leaders of Thaery. While outwardly he is of elitist and dismissive bearing, internally, Nai is troubled by the maneuverings of one Ramus Ymph, a nobleman with considerable political ambition. Nai suspects that Ramus is involved with offworld polities, to the detriment of Maske. 

 

Seeing Jubal's rough and ready bearing as something of an asset, Nai assigns him a billet in Department Three, the Sanitary and Hygiene Office. Jubal is chagrined at the idea of spending his working life inspecting taverns and inns for cleanliness. But it turns out that the Office actually is a front for the Thaery intelligence service. And adventure, intrigue, and danger await Jubal Droad !

 

'Maske: Thaery' is a Five Star novel from Vance. At heart it's an adventure novel, with a fast-moving plot propelled by sharp little episodes of violence. The people and cultures depicted in the book all have a quirky originality that demonstrates Vance's imaginative approach to world-building. 

 

The novel's central theme, of the ambitious, 'Outsider' young man who contests with a close-minded, self-perpetuating establishment, is one that occurs frequently in Vance's works. Jubal Early is the counterpart of Sklar Hast from 'The Blue World,' Ghyl Tarvok from 'Emphyrio,' and Gastel Etzwane from the 'Durdane' series. 

 

As with those novels, in 'Maske' the denouement does bring with it a long-awaited confrontation between our hero and the adversary (or adversaries), and is satisfying without being predictable. 

 

Summing up, 'Maske' shows that Vance, a veteran author in 1976, was able to frame a work that accepted the aesthetic of the New Wave era, while staying true to his own ideas of how science fiction should be composed and written. Fans of Vance, and the New Wave era, will want to have this book in their collection.

National Lampoon June 1974

National Lampoon

June 1974

June, 1974, and as we sit down with our latest issue of the National Lampoon, on the FM radio's 'Top 40' format, we're listening to Paul McCartney and Wings, at number one with 'Band on the Run.' Also in the top five are Ray Stevens with his novelty song, 'The Streak,' soul hits from the Stylistics and the Jackson 5, and Gordon Lightfoot's mean breakup song, 'Sundown.'

 

 

 

On the back cover of the Lampoon we have an advertisement for an LP from the late rock guitarist Rick Derringer (1947 - 2025).

The June issue is the 'Food Issue,' and while most of the contents are mediocre, standing out for its crudity is Tony Hendra's piece, 'The Joys of Wife-Tasting.' Crudity, that was the Lampoon !
 

 

 

 

 

 

We get a satirical, some might say offensive, treatment of George Washington Carver, courtesy of Doug Kenney and artist Joe Orlando.

 

 

 

 

 

The 'Foto Funnies' delivers a double-dose of 'double D' entertainment (snigger) !

 

We've got our usual assortment of black-and-white comics in the back pages of the issue. Printed on newsprint, and in low-res, they are a bit difficult to make out, despite tinkering with the scanner settings.....

 

 

 

 

That's what you got for your 85 cents, 51 years ago...........

Book Review: Nightmare Age

Book Review: 'Nightmare Age' edited by Frederik Pohl

2 / 5 Stars

 

'Nightmare Age' (312 pp.) was published by Ballantine Books in October, 1970, and features evocative cover art by Peter Schaumann. 

 

This anthology was packaged as an effort to capture the zeitgeist of Eco-catastrophe that was, in 1970, highly topical in science fiction. However, the entries in the anthology all were previously published, some as long ago as 1951, so 'Nightmare Age' lacks the currency that an all-original anthology would have had. 

 

In his Forward, editor Pohl remarks that he sees the anthology as a chance to demonstrate possible 'nightmare' scenarios for an Earth that neglects to address mounting problems with pollution and overpopulation. The stories assembled in 'Nightmare' thus are monitory, rather than predictive, and Pohl considers this the true value of science fiction.

 

Taking into consideration that the anthology includes two stories by Pohl, as well as two each from C. M. Kornbluth and Fritz Leiber, and (inevitably) a contribution from Heinlein, it's basically a recycling of dated material from 'Pohl and Friends.'

 

If you've read any post- WW2 sci-fi, then you likely are familiar with these much-anthologized entries: Kornbluth's 'The Marching Morons' (1951), Leiber's 'X Marks the Pedwalk' (1963), and Pohl's 'The Census Takers' (1955) and 'The Midas Plague' (1954). The latter novelette, in particular, is a profoundly boring, profoundly labored effort at satirizing American consumerism.

 

Heinlein's 'The Year of the Jackpot' (1952) features a statistician whose analyses confirm that the End of the World is approaching; he meets up with a swell dame named Meade. They prepare for the end with jokes and affection. By 50s sci-fi standards this is a decent enough story, although the protagonist has the nickname 'Potty.'

 

Of the other entries in the anthology, 'Calculated Risk' (1962), by Christopher Anvil, about a a chemical additive that can convert barren soils into productive soils, is a cleverly composed tale about unexpected consequences. 'Station HR972' (1966), by Kenneth Bulmer, has an interesting premise about future throughways as a medevac enterprise, but is crippled by stilted prose: for the first time in my life, I enountered the adverb 'blockily' (as in, "All the time the driver sat blockily in the rest area...").

 

'New Apples in the Garden' (1963), by Kris Neville, is another of the standout entries in the anthology. It's a treatment of the contest between increasing complexity and the likelihood of increasing entropy, as things get too complicated to maintain.

 

Another Kornbluth contribution, 'The Luckiest Man in Denv' (1952), posits a future USA where 'Denv' (i.e., Denver) wages war against 'Ellay' (i.e., Los Angeles) using nuclear warheads. The premise is interesting, but the execution poor. 'A Bad Day for Sales' (1953), by Leiber, tries to say something profoundly cynical about consumerism, but comes across as a perfunctory, minimal-effort piece.

 

Clifford Simak's 'Day of Truce' (1962) posits a near-future USA where the suburbs have become a depopulated wasteland, save for outposts manned by homeowners determined to resists the depredations of juvenile delinquents. It's a great premise, but Simak does little with it. 

 

Eco-Catastrophe, by Paul Ehrlich, is the only 'modern' entry; it first saw print in Ramparts magazine in 1969. It's an effective 'what if' about a near-future world gripped by overpopulation, pollution, and famine. Ehrlich has the world saved by none other than Teddy Kennedy ?! A plot point that means this story has not aged very well. Still and all, this is another of the better tales included in this anthology.

 

The verdict ? The entries by Anvil, Neville, and Ehrlich are not enough to prevent me from giving 'Nightmare Age' a mediocre Rating of Two Stars. This warmed-over reissue of Eco-Catastrophe fiction from the Atomic Age just doesn't offer much to the interested reader........ 

Book Review: Hitler Victorious

May is 'Third Reich Triumphant' Month at the PorPor Books Blog

Book Review: 'Hitler Victorious' edited by Gregory Benford and Martin H. Greenberg

3 / 5 Stars

'Hitler Victorious' (278 pp.) was published as a hardcover by Garland Publishing in 1986. Some of the contents previously were published, while others were commissioned especially for the anthology.

In his Preface, Benford alludes to Einstein's concept of the gedanken, or 'thought experiment,' and its history in both general and sci-fi literature as a vehicle for asking 'what if.' 

Norman Spinrad, in his Introduction, examines the allure the idea of a victorious Third Reich has on science fiction writers. As far as Spinrad is concerned, there is something decidedly psychosexual to it all (?!):

Thus the forthrightly phallic Nazi salute, the tight black uniforms of the SS, the silver death's heads,the twin lightning bolts, the barbarian torchlit splendor, the stirring martial music, the 'SS Werewolf Division,' the whole obsessive and twisted Satanism of the Nazi symbol systems, as the supermen in their chrome-and-black S & M gear thrust their right arms erect and, with their assholes tight and fire gleaming in their eyes, march off to bugger the world.

Well...........! Who woulda thunk it ?! Anyways, below are my capsule summaries of the contents:

Two Dooms, by C. M. Kornbluth (1958): it's May, 1945, and in New Mexico, physicist Edward Royland is laboring on the Manhattan Project. He decides to partake in a 'sacred plant' ceremony in the hut of the Indian shaman Nahataspe, and blacks out. When he wakes up, Royland is 150 years in the future, in an America divided in two, shared between Imperial Japan and the Nazis.

This novelette apparently was a posthumously published draft, and while it has some striking imagery and some intriguing extrapolations, it suffers from Kornbluth's overly wordy prose style, and his insistence on larding said prose with all sorts of cutesy wordsmithings designed to let us know what a clever fellow he, Kornbluth, is.........

The Fall of Frenchy Steiner, by Hilary Bailey (1964): it's 1955, and the UK has been conquered by the Third Reich. The first-person narrator, Sebastian, is a folk singer in a shabby bar; a disheveled young woman named Frenchy likes to come by every now and and then, and sing accompaniment. When Frenchy gets in a spot of trouble, against his better judgment, Sebastian decides to help her. 

This is one of the better entries in the anthology. Bailey's depiction of a Britain under Nazi subjugation has a memorably bleak quality. The second half of the novelette goes off in an unexpected, but imaginative, direction, with an ending that features notes of dark humor.

Through Road No Wither, by Greg Bear (1985): two Nazis enjoying the Reich victorious in 1979, make a fateful detour while traveling on a dark and foggy night in France. It's a little too opaque to be very rewarding.

Weihnachtsabend, by Keith Roberts (1972): the title is 'Christmas Eve' in German. In a 1960s UK subservient to Nazi Germany, a bureaucrat named Mainwaring, on holiday in a country estate, confronts the true reality of the Reich. 

Over the decades I've become familiar with Roberts's inferential style of writing, where the attention is placed more on atmosphere, setting, and characterization, while plot developments are alluded to in an elliptical manner. So I found this story rewarding, if needing more attention than I usually am wont to give.

Thor Meets Captain America (1986), by David Brin: it's 1962, and the Allies are losing the war against the Reich. A desperate commando mission is undertaken, its goal to strike a decisive blow against the Nazis. And Loki, the trickster god, is along for the ride ?! Of all the stories in 'Hitler Victorious,' this one comes closest to displaying the wacky energy of the modern-day 'Wolfenstein' franchise of video games.

Moon of Ice (1986), by Brad Lineweaver: it's April, 1965, and Joseph Goebbels is in a retrospective mood. The Third Reich is triumphant in Europe, but the recent passing of Adolf Hitler signals the end of the era. And the rise of a resistance......

This novelette starts off on an interesting enough note, but at its halfway point, transitions into pulp / comic book escapades involving super mutants, mad scientists, conspiracies, genetic engineering, etc. It's too contrived to be effective.

Reichs-Peace (1986), by Sheila Finch: it's the 1980s and a young woman named Greta learns that she is very, very important to the Reich and its continued rule. This novelette seeks to humanize some of those Germans who flourished during Hitler's regime.

Never Meet Again (1957), by Algis Budrys: it's April, 1958, and Europe is ruled by the Third Reich. Professor Klempfer is pondering a way to escape to another reality.....maybe one where the Nazis lost ?

Do Ye Hear the Children Weeping ? (1986), by Howard Goldsmith: a young American couple rent a house in Munich. A house with a very troubling background. This is more of a horror story than science fiction.

Enemy Transmissions (1986), by Tom Shippey: in a 1985 UK under the rule of the Third Reich, Richard Grenville is recruited for some very unusual experiments involving dreams, and messages from alternate realities. 

Valhalla (1986), by Gregory Benford: it's April, 1945, and in the Fuhrerbunker, in the ruins of Berlin, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun are preparing to commit suicide. Suddenly, a strange blue glow appears inside the bunker........

Summing up, 'Hitler Victorious' comes away with a Three-Star Rating. At the time of its commission, the pool of stories that could qualify as tales of a triumphant Third Reich was small and necessarily placed some constraints on the editors. 

At the same time, however, the fact that the bulk of the entries in this anthology were written in 1986 suggests that the editors could have, but didn't, look to solicit more contributions from the cyberpunks. I have to believe that (apart from Greg Bear) Gibson, Sterling, Shirley, Dozois, and Swanwick could have done better with the theme than most of contemporary contributors. In that regard, 'Hitler Victorious' represents something of a missed opportunity in the catalog of 1980s sci-fi anthologies........

Sea of Destiny from Bizarre Adventures No. 32

Sea of Destiny
by Alan Zelenetz (story) and John Bolton (art)
Bizarre Adventures (Marvel / Curtis) No. 32, August 1982

August, 1982. On MTV, the latest video from Eddie Money, 'I Think I'm In Love', is in heavy rotation.

The latest issue of Bizarre Adventures has been on the stands for a month. The magazine is on its last legs; more and more of its content consists of mediocre comics, probably a reflection of the fatigue of editor Dennis O'Neil. 

Issue 32 is advertised as a 'God' issue that focuses its attention on the phenomenon of deities. Most of the strips in this issue ('Demon's Bridge', 'What Fools These Gods Shall Be', 'The Streak') are cartoony works of low quality.

Bizarre Adventures will fold with issue 34,but there still are some memorable stories within its pages, and for issue 32, 'Sea of Destiny' certainly qualifies as memorable. It features Thor, and some outstanding graytone artwork by the British artist John Bolton. It's one of the best stories ever to appear in a Marvel / Curtis magazine. I've posted it in its entirety below.

Book Review: SS-GB

May is 'Third Reich Triumphant' Month at the PorPor Books Blog

 

Book Review: 'SS-GB' by Len Deighton

4 / 5 Stars

'SS-GB' first was published in hardcover in 1978. This Ballantine Books mass-market paperback edition was issued in March, 1980.

 

The novel is set in an alternate timeline where, in February 1941, Hitler succeeds in conquering the UK. Winston Churchill is executed and King George imprisoned in the Tower of London. Prisoner of War camps are established in the countryside, and the German military police maintain checkpoints throughout London. Rationing is universal, and privation and tightened belts are a fact of life. 

As the novel opens it's November, and the cloudy skies, and the drizzle falling on ruined buildings, imparts a grim aspect to London. Lead character Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer of Scotland Yard, is by now accustomed to working under the supervision of SS General Fritz Kellerman. While outwardly avuncular and even-tempered, Kellerman is, in reality, adept at manipulating (to his own advantage) the ongoing political and bureaucratic infighting between the SS and the Army. Each faction: Army and SS, seeks to be the dominant power in charge of the occupation government, and the English can do no more than look on with the passivity of a defeated people.

 

Kellerman, who holds Archer in high regard, dispatches the detective to investigate a murder in a flat in London's Shepherd Market neighborhood. The deceased man has been shot to death, but also bears strange burn marks on his arms. The owner of the flat is a known operator in the black market, and may have ties to the British Resistance. 

However mundane the murder may at first appear, it has provoked Heinrich Himmler to send SS Standartenfuhrer Oskar Huth to London to supervise the investigation. Huth intimates to a bewildered Douglas Archer that the German government has a keen interest in the activities of the dead man. And thus Archer finds himself entering a maze of conspiracies and unlikely alliances, all centered on the scientific research being conducted at a German physics laboratory on the Devon coast. Research that has the potential to determine the polity that rules the world in the last half of the twentieth century........

I approached 'SS-GB' with some skepticism, since the Len Deighton novels (such as 'The Ipcress File,' and 'Funeral in Berlin') I have read in the past, were talky and dull. But 'SS-GB' is, to its credit, a livelier novel despite its length of 375 pages. Deighton is very good at crafting a believable incarnation of the UK under Nazi rule. While the narrative primarily is framed as a detective novel, Deighton inserts enough story beats to keep the plot from being overwhelmed by the details of the investigative process. The book's denouement is genuinely suspenseful and contain some twists and turns designed to avoid a pat outcome.

For me, the novel's closing chapters cause it to lose a ratings star. These chapters are meant to explicate various plot developments, but come across overly reliant on coincidence and contrivance, and some rather forced behaviors on the part of some of the major characters.

Taken all in all, 'SS-GB' is a solid Four Star novel, and one of the better speculations into what a Third Reich Victorious scenario would entail.

Eight Science Fiction Stories About Drugs

Eight Science Fiction & Fantasy Stories About Drugs

Starting in the New Wave era, sci-fi writers began to examine drugs as a portal to recreation, mind expansion, strange phenomena, and maybe, too, some danger. These adventures borrowed heavily from the counterculture and the treatment of drugs in the alternative media (like underground comix).

The entry for drugs in the 'Science Fiction Encyclopedia' is broad, slotting recreational drugs in amongst drugs as agents for increasing intelligence, life extension, lie detection, physical transformation, aphrodesiacs, etc., etc. With the list below, I'm focusing on lesser-known short stories that depict 'trips' occasioned by recreational drugs. The trip can be good, it can be bad, but in the end, well, it's a trip !

I'm concentrating on stories that were released in the era covered by this blog (i.e., late 1960s to early 1990s), and as such, the stories (such as those published in the National Lampoon), are not easy to access. But hopefully, if this is a category you find engrossing, you can be on the lookout for the publications that contain these entries.

 

***

'Psychedelic Flight,' by Robert Ray: this tale appeared in the 1972 anthology ‘Generation: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction,’ edited by David Gerrold. In 'Flight,' some hippies find that their new choice of recreational drug triggers unpleasant revelations. This story stands alongside Harlan Ellison’s ‘Shattered Like A Glass Goblin,’ and Avram Davidson and Grania Davis’s ‘The New Zombies,’ as an effective treatment of the dark side of the hippie movement.
 

Then there’s Gerrold’s own entry: ‘All of Them Were Empty,’ from the same anthology, in which junkies Deet and Woozy enter a decaying tenement in search of a strange new trip.
 

In his introduction to the story, Gerrold proudly states that he wrote it spontaneously after smoking pot, and listening to the Donovan Leitch song Sunny Goodge Street. Ominously, Gerrold states that the published story is (aside for some grammatical corrections) a first draft. Be that as it may, under its 'trippy' prose, this story has a functioning plot and a convincing denouement. Hooray ? 

***

 

'Sleepwalkers,' a John Shirley story from 1988, showcases cyberpunk themes with its depiction of a group of junkies (the opening pages detail the process of cooking, and shooting up, meth) living in squalor in a bad neighborhood of a near-future Los Angeles. Needing money, would-be rock star guitarist Jules decides to temporarily rent his body to the Sleepwalkers Agency. Upon waking from his 'rental' period, Jules leaves the Agency 200 dollars richer.........but with an ache between his legs..............This story can be found in Shirley’s 1989 anthology ‘Heatseeker.’

***

'Lifeguard,' by Arthur Byron Cover: Bob Strawn has a part-time job as a pool lifeguard, and is enjoying a carefree summer, in Blackton, Virginia. That is, until he takes a toke of some really powerful ‘grass’…… This story can be found in the anthology ‘The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series IV’ (1976).

 

***

Shirley’s 'Six Kinds of Darkness,' which first appeared in High Times magazine in 1988, and also is included in ‘Heatseeker,’ features a near-future New York City where the 'Hollow Head' drug den offers users a genuinely life-changing experience. The first page of the story is quintessential cyberpunk and, I would argue, an exemplar of how to begin any story, novelette, or novel in the genre. 

***

Chris Miller's 'Pipe Dream' is about a New York City slacker who finds some truly amazing 'grass'. 'Pipe Dream' mixes stoner and sci-fi themes in a comic fashion. It's a great story that should be an entrant in any anthology covering sci-fi and drugs. You can only find it in the National Lampoon, June 1972.

***

 

Another tale from Miller, ‘Telejester,’ from the August 1973 issue of the Lampoon, deals with a couch potato who does a little too many drugs….and brings strange things to life on TV screens. Everyone’s TV screens. This story has the absurdist quality that many New Wave sci-fi authors dearly wanted to express, but could not do as adroitly as Miller.

 

***

‘Black Coral,’ by Lucius Shepard, is about Prince, an American expat who lives a dissipated life on an island off the coast of Honduras. Prince makes a fateful decision to smoke a local blend called ‘black coral’, and winds up on a very, very bad trip………. This story first was printed in the anthology ‘Universe 14’ (1984) and also can be found in the anthology ‘The Jaguar Hunter’ (1989).