Battle on Venus - William F Temple

 Intrigued by his Four-Sided Triangle, I decided to explore more of William F Temple's work and found several of his lesser output in an online bookshop in Liverpool.   This one is actually a double bonus - an Ace Double from 1963 - two Temple short novellas or long short stories for the price of one.

Like many in the second rank of Fifties sci fi writers Temple began in traditional book format and was reduced to pulp publications to keep going.   Battle on Venus is typical.   The first Earth mission crashlands  on Venus to find the air breathable and the planet at war with itself.   Tanks and aircraft and torpedos and giant cutting wheels battle around them.   While the crew try to repair the spaceship explorer George Starkey sets off to find whoever is in charge of the machines.   But first he finds a Venusian girl with a gift for thieving.  She leads him to the immortal being who has created the war to allieviate the boredom of immortality and who has thus wiped out 99% of the planet's population by remote control.

As ever it is the ideas which intrigue - the window they open on the scienctific consensus of the time.   In 1963 we knew that Venus is shrouded by poisonous clouds but had no idea at all what lay beneath.   Actually, nowadays many scientists wonder if Venus was Earth's twin, a lost paradise, which leads some to wonder if life began there and migrated here.   In 1963 I suspect that idea was confined to outliers like C S Lewis and William F Temple.   Automated warfare is another idea which has come to fruition.   I liked the concept of Teleos, caps with electronics which enable Starkey and the Venusians to communicate by thought.

Battle on Venus is fun and interesting.   By this time Temple had developed more of a gift for character than in Four-Sided Triangle.   The 'Jonah', Captain Freiberg, is amusing, as is the petulant immortal Senilde.   Mara, the thief girl, is more interesting than our hero.

Quantico - Greg Bear

 I felt in need of a good, fast-moving thriller - and found it, big time, in Greg Bear's Quantico.   I wasn't familiar with Bear's work - he sadly died last year - who was mainly known for his science fiction.  Quantico is very hi tech and scientific and is set in the very near future.   A bunch of fresh graduates from the FBI training centre at Quantico are plunged into what seems to be a rightwing Christian fundamentalist plot to produce industrial quantities of anthrax but turns out to be something far bigger and (incedibly) even worse.

Bear is superlative in handling complex science and the forest of acronyms which modern intelligence agencies has spawned.   His characters have back stories and complexity.   They all have redeeming features.   Some have truly horrific secrets.   The most impressive thing about Quantico, though, is that in more than 400 pages there wasn't a single dull or ineffective sentence.   My interest - and I am not at all scientific - didn't flag once.   I shall certainly read Quantico's successor Mariposa and then sample some of his other prize-winning work.   Darwin's Radio sounds like my kind of thing. 

Thirst for Love - Yukio Mishima

 Thirst for Love (1950) was apparently Mishima's third novel.   He is not yet twenty-five and is still experimenting with form and content.   Here he tackles a female protagonist, the newly widowed Etsuko, no longer young but by no means old.   After her husband's horrific death from typhoid she is invited to live with his family, the Sugimoto family, on the farm outside Osaka.   The father, Yakichi, is a retired executive; his son Kensuke a feckless intellectual married to the shewish Cheko.  The wife of the third son, who is working abroad, also lives on the farm with her two young children.   The family keep two young house servants, the housemaid Miyo and the gardener Saburo.

Etsuko's late husband was a faithless and cruel philanderer.   His mistresses visit him on his deathbed at the hospital for infectious diseases.   Etsuko placidly accepts everything and does her duty.   She is the only one present when her husband dies.   She leaves central Tokyo for the rural hinterland of Osaka.   Again, she accepts her fate, accepting Yakichi's hospitality and his overtures.  She becomes mistress of the household in every sense.

Her fantasy is to be loved, not just used.   The object of her fantasy is young Saburo.   But Saburo is enjoying himself with Miyo, who falls pregnant.   After a surreal visit to the local Autumn Festival Etsuko determines to she must have the boy whatever it takes.   The outcome is complex, violent, and for me at least, unexpected.

The novel has its flaws but it also contains many passages of brilliant writing.   It is short, only 200 pages, and the ending more than makes up for any duller patches.  The characters are well-drawn and convincing; they attract and repel as real people do.   It would be going too far to claim I enjoyed Thirst for Love but I am certainly glad I read it.

Four-Sided Triangle - William F Temple

 Another of the British Library's wonderful reprints of mid 20th century UK sci fi.  Four-Sided Triangle was originally a short story in the US magazine Amazing Stories (November, 1939).   Temple then expanded it into a novel during his wartime service - as Mike Ashley recounts in his useful introduction, Temple had to do so three times, having twice lost the manuscript in battle action.

The end result is a peculiar animal.  The padding is obvious and in expanding a very short story into a 300 page novel is going to take some significant new material (a subject I hope to expand upon myself in a forthcoming monograph).  But the question arises, what if anything could be cut?   And I can't answer that one.   The story certainly takes a while to get going but I could argue the delay is necessary to establish the credentials of reckless inventor Bill.   Perhaps moving the key development into a prologue to hook us in would be the answer.

However what Temple has really done in adding material is develop characters we are intrigued by, something so often lacking in science fiction of the period.   The story of their relationship is as old as the hills - two friends love the same enigmatic girl, but only one can have her.   The twist, the sci fi maguffin, is to make a duplicate so they can both have one.   Again Temple cleverly develops this through his narrator, a bachelor doctor too old to be interested in young girls but who happens to be Bill's foster parent.   He sees what the youngsters cannot, he is a practitioner of other people's science, not an innovator.

It's slow but it is engrossing.   Nothing else Temple wrote came anywhere near, apparently, though the British Library has also reprinted his Shoot at the Moon, which I will certainly try.   I am also intrigued to find that Four-Sided Triangle became an early Hammer film, directed by Terence Fisher and available on DVD.   That might be on my list of acquisitions too.

Incubus - Ray Russell

 The more Ray Russell I read, the more fascinated I get.  How has he been so neglected?   In The Case Against Satan he created the paradigm for The Exorcist.  Sardonicus is the precursor for the Gothic revival in the 1980s and '90s.  As for Incubus, as I far as I can judge it is unique, the full sexual implications of the sexual demon.   I can't think of a single novel that even encroaches on the same territory.

Julian Trask returns to smalltown Galen for a break and to perhaps catch up with Laura Kincaid, a student of his back in the day, now editor of the local paper.  Julian was definitely attracted to Laura when he taught her at the local college but professionally she was untouchable.  Now... who knows?

Over the years Julian's academic field has shifted from pure anthropology to the anthropology of the occult.  His mentor Professor Henryk Stefanski has given him a copy of the Artes Perditae, the book of the dawn gods, said to be bound with skin flayed from witches.   It is one of the rarest books on earth - yet there is another copy in Galen, in the home of the founding family, brought there by the mother of young Tim Galen, whom his grim aunt believes was a witch.

Tim dreams of witches and his mother.  He dreams of one young witch being tortured in Tudor times.  Is she the witch whose skin bound the book?  Tim possesses something Julian Trask doesn't - a skinning knife.   Tim is dating the daughter of Doc Jenkins, who is run off his feet with women being raped and murdered - literally torn apart by the huge penis of their attacker.

The twist at the end is truly jaw-dropping, but Russell plays absolutely fair and seeds the clue well in advance.  As I have already said, more than once, nothing in occult fiction compares to this.  An absolute must-read for any horror aficionado.  

Drive - James Sallis

 Drive (2005) is the best known novel by James Sallis, mainly thanks to the 2011 movie, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, starring Ryan Gosling.   It's the story of the unnamed Driver who runs away to Hollywood as a teenager with dreams of being a stunt driver in the movies.   With the help of established stunt man Shannon, he gets a chance.  Driver himself develops a sideline as a getaway driver.   He doesn't want to know about the crime; he just drives.   One heist goes badly wrong.  Crime boss Nino refuses to pay Driver's fee.  Bad idea...

Drive  is contemporary US noir at its very best.  James Sallis is the best US writer of noir crime since James Ellroy.   Some of us would argue that he is as good as Ellroy in the early novels, a lot better than Ellroy this century.  Drive is short, taut, cleverly structured, and packs a terrific punch.

Myra Breckinridge - Gore Vidal

 Myra, the young and extremely nubile widow of the late Myron Breckinridge, pitches up in Hollywood, a girl with a plan.  Her plan is to claim her widow's mite - a half share in Buck Loner's acting academy.  Uncle Buck was the brother of Myron's equally deceased mother.  Gertrude and Buck inherited a then worthless orange grove from their father.  When his career in cowboy movies began to tail off, Buck decided to build an academy for Hollywood hopefuls.  Gertrude let him do so, without ever relinquishing her entitlement to half of the land.

While Buck does everything in his power to keep hold of his money, Myra starts teaching at the academy.  She is popular with the students and soon singles out a pair of likely stars, the mean and moody Rudy Godowski and the sweet as apple pie singer Mary Ann Pringle.  The trouble is, they are a couple.  Myra, "whom no man will ever possess", is only interested in Mary Ann - which means Rudy must be broken, dispatched, and otherwise got rid of.

In the end Rudy is gifted to Hollywood super agent Letitia Van Allen, who has an unquenchable taste for masochistic sex.  She turns Rudy into a star.  Myra and Letitia between them turn him into a promiscuous homosexual.

Meanwhile Buck Loner's legal team of Flagler and Flagler come up earn their fee.  Not only is there no trace of a marriage between Myra and Myron, but there is no evidence Myron is even dead.  There is a reason for that and, in the novel's most famous scene, Myra shows them.   Buck instantly hands over the cheque.  It looks like everything will turn out hunky dory, until----

Myra Breckinridge is an American classic and a great one, in its way every bit as reflective of its period (late Sixites) as The Great Gatsby was of its.  Vidal was a genius who could have his off-days (this wasn't one) but who was never ever dull.  My edition of Myra comes as a double bill with Myron.  I can't wait.