B.E.A.S.T - Charles Eric Maine

 I have been fascinated by Charles Eric Maine since I learnt that he wrote the first sci fi radio drama, Spaceways (1952).   In those days Maine (the pseudonym of David McIlwain, 1921-81) was at the forefront of postwar British sci fi, a more literary version of Arthur C Clarke.   I say that because Maine was much more rooted in popular fiction than the scientific Clarke; Spaceways, in many ways, is a detective story with a technological setting.   But Maine was not able to maintain his standards.   B.E.A.S.T. (1966) is A for Andromeda with an added dash of nympho dolly birds.

Having recently read Andromeda I was straightaway startled by just how similar this is.   Setting, standpoint, theme - all pretty much identical.   Obviously Maine has done more than just change the names, but not much more.   The sci fi element in both is the creation of new life forms by computing.  The computers in both are housed in remote Cold War facilities where isolated men and women go slightly off the rails.   Our hero Mark Harland is sent in by the Department of Special Services (quite a promising idea, I thought) to follow up a whistleblower report that the Research Director of RU8, Dr Charles Howard Gilley, is spending a lot of time on an off-the-books project.   Given that the official remit of RU8 is genetic warfare, clearly this is something that needs looking into.

So off Harland goes.   Everyone other than Dr Gilley is standard fare hearty young scientific males interested in pubs and girls in that order.   The object of their shared lust is super-hot programmer Synove Rayner.   She is Swedish and blonde, this is 1966, so of course she responds with enthusiasm and soon falls prey to Harland's wiles because he is to all intents and purposes a spy and, moreover, a spy who already has a 'congential nympho) on the go in London.

The mysogyny is of its period but still hard to ignore.

Dr Gilley, on the other hand, is obsessed with his not so secret program, the Biological Evolutionary Animal Simulation Test - an intelligent entity which has been evolving on the computers and which is now possessed of an enquiring mind.   Its main interest, currently, is sex.   So Gilley has snapped gyneological photos of the ever-helpful Synove to feed in to the data banks.   He has also taken in a big way to vodka.   It all ends badly, of course.   I was inescapably reminded of the end of King Kong, albeit on a more modest British scale.

In conclusion, B.E.A.S.T is highly derivative, fairly predictable, and a repository of some very outdated attitudes.   But Maine is nevertheless a skilled writer and his work is never dull.   With a bit of toleration this story is good fun with some effective moments.   I enjoyed some of the period incidentals - none of your fancypants memory sticks here, it's good old manilla folders for Mark Harland.

It is such a shame that Maine, for whatever reason, couldn't realise the early promise shown by Spaceways.

ALSO BY CHARLES ERIC MAINE and reviewed on this blog: Spaceways, The Isotope Man, The Tide Went Out, and The Darkest of Nights.

A Fall of Moondust - Arthur C Clarke

 I remember this as a study text in third form English.   I instantly recalled the opening: passengers board what is effectively a tour bus on the Moon.   But I don't remember finishing the book or, indeed, anything other than mild disappointment.   This was because I was a third former in the year of Space Odyssey.   None of us had seen it then, and I still haven't, but Kubrick's vision of waltzing space stations was our preconception of the imagination of Arthur C Clarke.   Not this...   Not the future, our future, as humdrum.

Now the world has reached the era in which A Fall of Moondust is set, the second quarter of the 21st century, and the disappointment is very different.   Now I am disappointed that I can't get on a moon-bus like the Selene and scoot across the Sea of Thirst where dust flows like water.   Sixty-plus years after the book was written, part of the fun is seeing what Clarke got right and what he didn't.  He was certainly right about communication satellites, which play a part here.   He was wrong is what names people would have and which population would oversee the future of space travel.   One thing he got spectacularly wrong but which is nevertheless fascinating is that by 2030 many people would be born and brought up on the Moon and thus unsuited to life back on Earth.   The stewardess of the Selene, for example, recoils from the idea of carrying a baby in Earth gravity.   That's a nice touch, I thought.

Something that Clarke got spot-on in 1961 was that the big thing in popular entertainment by the end of the Sixites would be disaste\r movies.   That is what A Fall of Moondust effectively is - a once in a millennium moon tremor sees the Selene sink into the Sea of Thirst without trace.   It's a brilliant concept.   I cannot fathom why no one turned into a sort of Posiedon Adventure in space.   Perhaps it's the mundanity of Clarke's style put producers of.   Clarke, for all his hard science, cannot envisage life in anything other than surbuban Middle English of the mid-1950s.   He does, however, do a good job of maintaining the tension throughout.

As a newly-minted teenager I seem to have scorned A Fall of Moondust in its drab school edition.   Almost sixty years later I stuck with it, learned quite a bit about attitudes and ideas of the time, and, frankly, had a great time with a good read.

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Other books by Arthur C Clarke reviewed here: Earthlight, Childhood's End and Prelude to Space.   Use the search box on the right to find them (I did).

Spaceways - Charles Eric Maine

I was reading Arthur C Clarke's Prelude to Space (reviewed below) in the 1953 paperback when I was struck by one of the ads in the back. Spaceways (never heard of it) was "originally a radio play, broadcast by the BBC in 1952 with immense success. Later it was made into the first British science-fiction film." As regular visitors must know by now, my doctorate is in radio drama and, as I say, I had never heard of Spaceways. As for movies, what about The Shape of Things to Come (1936)? That was science fiction, surely? It was certainly British (London Films). Anyway, I had to investigate further. Firstly I bought the book.

Not as good a cover as the Clarke paperbacks of the same era. The science is not as heavy as in Clarke, but ironically that results in it being closer to what actually happened - rockets taking off vertically in the middle of nowhere, rather than Clarke's fancy of horizontal runways. Maine, however, is a much better novelist than Clarke. His characters not only have inner lives, they have sex lives too, something the early Clarke would never countenance. In fact Spaceways is a genre hybrid, a noir-ish murder mystery based on the eternal triangle and set on a space research facility in the Nevada desert. Oh yes, I should have mentioned that. The pseudonymous Maine was British but this is an entirely American novel.


The other thing I should mention is that the novel is not directly based on the radio play. The radio play was turned into a Hammer movie, written by Maine, which he then turned into this book. I have looked up the credits for the radio broadcast, which seems to me to use the framing device of a court trial. It lasted 75 minutes, as did the film. The protagonist of the novel, Barry Conway of the Security Division of Special Services, is not in either the radio play or the movie. The movie seems to have a different plot to either the play or the novel. The central plot device, however, remains the same.


One of the key scientists is having a torrid affair with the wife of a senior colleague. The wife has cheated on the husband before, and he has responded violently. On the morning before the launch of the first space rocket (the novel is specifically set in 1955) the husband turns up for work with a black eye. When the rocket is safely heading for orbit, from which it will never return, it is discovered that both the wife and her lover are missing. The theory is that Hills, the cuckold, has killed them and stowed their bodies aboard the rocket. On that basis he stands trial, only to cause a sensation when he offers to prove his innocence by flying the second prototype rocket and bringing back the original. This is what happens - with an almighty twist, which I won't spoil for anyone who wants to seek out this curiosity for themselves - albeit I have as yet no idea whether it was remotely the same in either the play or the film.


And I do intend to take this further. The movie is easily available on DVD but the play will be harder to track down. In the meantime I have discovered that Maine did the same trick with other stories. Timeslip aka The Atomic Man is the movie version of his novel The Isotope Man, both of which I have already acquired.


As for the suggestion that Spaceways was the first British science fiction film, my interim theory is that whoever wrote the blurb in the back of the Pan was drawing a distinction between the post-Hiroshima technology-based fiction of Clarke, Maine and their contemporaries, and the purely speculative future fiction of Wells and Verne. Interestingly, directly underneath the blurb for Spaceways is an ad for The Time Machine and The Man Who Could Work Miracles (the latter a celebrated BBC radio drama of 1934, adapted by Laurence Gilliam). This describes H G Wells as, specifically, a "Pioneer of Space Fiction".


In the meantime, check out the long-forgotten Mr Maine. He really does merit rediscovery.

Earthlight - Arthur C Clarke

Two hundred years in the future (from 1955) Earth has colonised the planets of the Solar System. Generations of humankind have been born and lived off-Earth. The situation is not much different from that of the British Empire in 1939 - the subordinate states are too big, the dominant hub too small and too demanding. The Earth is considered to be withholding essential heavy metals from the Federated planets. Conflict is inevitable and imminent.


For this reason Bertram Sadler, accountant, is sent to the Moon to try and track down whoever is leaking secret information to the Federation. The Moon consists of Central City and peripheral specialised bases, like the Observatory Sadler is officially auditing. But the Observatory's work is hampered by unknown traffic. It turns out an unauthorised base is being built nearby. Is this the first act of war by the Federation?


It all sounds like the perfect plot for a sci fi thriller. But, this being Arthur C Clarke early in his career, there are no thrills. Indeed, we are lucky to get a plot. What Clarke is interested in is the science. Sixty years on, of course, the science is faintly risible. Men have colonised the solar system but are still reliant on teleprinters and analogue radio. Even television scarcely figures. The standout sections for me were the ones about light beams on the Moon and the limited effect of atomic weapons in space. I sincerely hope Arthur C was right on both counts.

Childhood's End - Arthur C Clarke

Childhood's End dates from 1954 and was therefore written not long after Prelude to Space; yet it is a million miles away in terms of literary craft and scientific ideas.

In my review of Prelude (see below) I suggested that it barely qualifies as a novel, lacking all the normal constructs of the form (character development, tension, etc.). It was, in fact, a framing device for explaining Clarke's ideas about early space travel. In Childhood's End the ideas are much more radical - how does Earth deal with the sudden arrival of aliens, specifically 'good' aliens as opposed to, say, the Martians of H G Wells? The structure is also much more novelistic, albeit there is no real protagonist and only an antagonist if you regard the aliens as collectively a single character, not an unreasonable proposition given what happens to the titular children.


The narrative is in three parts. The first, in Clarke's favoured end time of the 1970s, is a few years after the sudden appearance of gigantic alien ships over the major cities of earth. Their leader, Karellen, is over New York where he interacts only with the Secretary General of the United Nations. The aliens refer to themselves as the Overlords, Karellen is the Supervisor. They say they have come to save Earth from its own atom bombs. They enforce peace across the globe and promote the notion of one world. Other than that, they do not interfere. From the moment they arrived, everyone has wondered what the Overlords look like. Even Secretary General Stormgren, who has regular meetings with Karellen aboard his spaceship, has never actually seen his host, who is hidden behind a screen.


The second section is set 50 years later, when the Overlords finally decide that the people of Earth are ready to see them. I did not for a moment guess what they look like, and I won't reveal it here. For me, it was a masterstroke, the best moment in the book. We then meet other people who are involved with the Overlords one way or another. We meet the Greggsons, George and Jean. We meet Jan Rodricks, who stows away on one of the Overlords' transports when it returns to the home planet. The journey there and back will seem to him like four months; in Earth time it is eighty years.


The third section is ten years after the second. The Greggsons have two young children, nine-year-old Jeff and the infant Jennifer. They are now living in a sort of dropout community, two Pacific islands, New Athens and New Sparta. Perhaps Clarke had heard of the American Nature Boys certainly he seems to be predicting the hippy reaction to world of hi tech science. Finally it become apparent why the Overlords came to Earth and what their long term (very nearly a century) aim was. It involves the children. And when Jan Rodricks finally returns after eighty years, he finds that he is the last true human being.


All this in less than two hundred pages is an astonishing achievement. With Clarke you of course get all the technical context and the predictions. My favourite of the latter is on the subject of TV:

Do you realise that every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels? f you went without sleep and did nothing else, you could follow less than a twentieth of the entertainment that's available at the turn of a switch! No wonder that people are becoming passive sponges - absorbing but never creating. Did you know that the average viewing tome per person is now three hours a day? Soon people won't be living their own lives any more. It will be a full-time job keeping up with the various family serials on TV!

Clarke underestimated the number of channels and overestimated the quality of the programmes. But in essence he's spot on.

Prelude to Space - Arthur C Clarke

Prelude to Space was apparently written in 1947 but not published until 1953, which I find hard to believe. There seems to be a manuscript from 1947 but is it the same text as that published in 1953? Or is it, as with so many authors, just a portmanteau title that was attached to several works until the right one came along?

Certainly it is the right title for this novel. It is entirely about events leading up to the first moon shot in 1978, British of course, from Woomera in Australia, here rechristened Luna City. The book ends with the spaceship taking off and we can only guess the outcome from the epilogue in which our retired hero, Dirk Alexson, is living on the Moon for health reasons, a benefit I have never seen elsewhere. Other prophetic content includes the famous geostationary communication satellites, but it is the spaceship itself which is the most interesting.


Clarke envisages a two stage process for Prometheus. Beta is the mother ship which transports the rocket Alpha and fuel pods into Earth orbit. From the back of Beta, Alpha attaches itself to the fuel source and uses atomic power to head off the Moon. Thus Clarke gives us a recyclable, affordable system which causes vastly less pollutants than a the skyscraper of inflammable carbon fuel that was actually used by NASA. In time some parts of the system will be moved to the lunar surface which will become Man's gateway to the stars, hence this really is the prelude to space, not just the prelude to the Moon.


All of this stuff, framed as debates between the characters or presentations at press conferences, is totally fascinating. As a novel, however, it is a total failure. The characters are simplistic mouthpieces, even though they are supposed to possess giant intellects. There is no action, mystery or tension. Frankly, there are no meaningful human relationships. The only real fantasy is Alexson's afterlife on the Moon. Yet I loved it.

Transition - Iain Banks

The problem with sci fi is that there is a balance needs to be struck between big idea and human interest.  So far as I am concerned Arthur C Clarke never found it, albeit his ideas were admittedly huge.  Transition isn't officially sci fi, in that Banks hasn't used his middle initial, his usual sci fi signature.  Perhaps he considered it more of a dystopian novel.  If so it is a multiverse dystopia.  His polished narrative skills just about got me through the 450 pages, and there were many passages of great interest, but there was no human interest, absolutely none, and that was a huge disappointment.

The crux of the matter is there are too many central characters spread across too many parallel Earths, none of them emotionally engaged with any other.  None have any engaging human traits and all are, to a greater or lesser extent, servants of the all-powerful Concern - the ubiquitous future-Nazis of far too many similar works.  Their means of travel - the titular transition - is trite, a device for getting them out of any peril at the speed of thought.  The consequences of the device are blithely ignored by Banks whereas for me that would have been the key to human interest - what does the non-transitioner make of the fact that their loved one's body has evidently been taken over by someone from a parallel world?

I can't deny Banks' narrative gifts but Transition has put me off any of his overt sci fi and I shall carefully check the nature of any of his straight novels before taking the plunge again.