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).

Tales from the Forbidden Planet - Roz Kaveney (ed)

 This was a chance aquisition.   I was in London, in my favourite second-hand bookshop (Skoob, in the Brunswick Centre) and I didn't want to leave without a purchase.   That, I felt, would be letting the side down.   So I saw this, thought what the hell?   Wandered up to the counter where, of course, one of the books I had wanted for some time was on display ... but that's another story.

It was only when I was on the train, leafing through, that I realised this was a collection from the sci fi era currently interesting me - the Interzone Eighties, 1987 in fact, featuring several writers I have beens looking into recently.   Moorcock, of course (an End of Time story), Kilworth, Keith Roberts, and Lisa Tuttle, all of whom featured in the Other Rdens and New Worlds anthologies reviewed here in the last few weeks.   Aldiss is here, too, with a really enjoyable one called 'Tourney', and Iain M Banks (excellent).   I liked John Brunner('A Case of Painter's Ear'), Josephine Saxton's 'The Interferences' and Gwyneth Jones's 'The Snow Apples'.   I did not like in any way the story by Harry Harrison, but that's the point of anthologies, isn't it?

One of the things that attracted me in the shop was the fact the stories all had an illustration by a British illustrator of the period.   I thought this would be a bonus for me and my own illustrations.   As it happens, the only one I enjoyed was Dave Gibbons for the Banks story 'Descendant'.   I liked the cover illustration, too, the work of Brian Bolland.

Turns out the common denominator for the collection is that all these authors had done sessions at the Forbidden Planet bookshops.   As good a connection as any.

Other Edens - Christopher Evans and Robert Holdstock (eds)

 Other Edens is a sci fi collection from 1987 and very much from the Interzone period of British imaginative fiction.   Some of the most noted writers are respresented - Moorcock, Harrison and Aldiss - but not with their best work.   Those who stand out here are those who were then breaking through: Garry Kilworth, who I only knew from Interzone; Lisa Tuttle, who I had heard of but never read; and a couple of others completely new to me, such as Graham Charnock and Keith Roberts.

Roberts' story Piper's Wait was probably my overall favourite, a temenos story stretching very effectively over the ages.  Tuttle's The Wound was a close second, a very exciting take on mutable sexuality.   Kilworth's Triptych was by far the most radical and complex, a fragmented three-parter positively bursting at the seams with ideas.   I am increasingly interested in Kilworth.  He seems to have been extraordinarily prolific with over eighty novels spanning many genres, so it shouldn't be too hard to track one down.

New Worlds 8 - (ed) Hilary Bailey

 New Worlds magazine was founded before WW2 and taken over by Michael Moorcock in the sixties.   With the aid of an Arts Council grant Moorcock turned New Worlds into the monthly journal of the British New Wave in sci fi: Moorcock himself, Ballard, Aldiss etc.   Around 1970 the magazine started to flounder.   Moorcock persuaded Sphere to continue it as a 'quarterly' paperback.   By 1975 when this eighth and last edition came out, Moorcock's wife Hilary Bailey was editor and their close longterm collaborator M John Harrison was literary editor.

Bailey made a good job of editing this one.   The stories appear in descending order of quality.   We start with Harrison's 'Running Down', a Yorkshire-set tale combining his interest in climbing with nature horror.   Then we have 'White Stars', an interlude from Moorcock's long-running and intricate Dancers at the End of Time thread.   I was initially put off Moorcock by Dancers when I was a young teenager, but I thoroughly enjoyed 'White Stars'.   Barrington Bayley's 'The Bees of Knowledge' is different and well-written.   Peter Jobling's 'Building Blocks', which Bailey in her introduction suggests might be a debut piece, is equally interesting but not quite so well written.   The other, shorter, stories did not greatly appeal.

I was fascinated by the two book reviews at the end, one by Harrison, the other by John Clute.  Is this what sci reviews were like in the Seventies?   By way of illustration, I give you title of Clute's ten-page review of Brian Aldiss's novel, The Eighty-Minute Hour: 'I say Begone! Apotropaic Narcosis, I'm Going to Read the Damn Thing, Ha Ha.'   Worryingly, Harrison's marginally shorter review of Thomas M Disch's collection Getting into Death is in similar vein.

John Clute went on to become one of the founders of Interzone, which is in many ways was the successor to New Worlds.   The issue I have just acquired contains work by Harrison and Aldiss and Thomas M Disch.   I'll report on it shortly.

The Isotope Man - Charles Eric Maine

 Nobody in British sci fi of the Fifties spread their talent as widely as Maine.   Spaceways (also reviewed on this blog) was a radio play that became a movie and finally a book.   The Isotope Man (1957) was originally a movie called Timeslip (1955) starring two B-grade Americans, Gene Nelson and Faith Domergue.   The interesting thing is that the novels don't suffer in any way from being simply novelisations.   In the case of Spaceways they add to the original.   I haven't yet fully traced the antecedents of Timeslip but The Isotope Man certainly stands on its own feet.

Maine is at his best when he sets cutting edge science in the time he was writing.   The London of The Isotope Man is absolutely austerity London in the first half of the Fifties.   American journalist Delaney has been seconded to London's View Magazine.   He has experience of atomic experiments in the US and is therefore the science correspondent.

His task today is to cover the opening of a new NHS maternity unit in Stevenage.   This is not sci fi but a record of a time in which new hospitals were routinely being built.   Before he leaves the office, his eye is caught by a photo on the crime desk.   A man has been plucked from the Thames.   He has been beaten and shot and is now in hospital undergoing emergency surgery.   Delaney recognises him: he is Dr Stephen Rayner, US atomic scientist, and Delaney interviewed him Stateside.   There is something odd about the photo, a sort of haze hanging over the body.   Delaney has a hunch it has something to do with Delaney's research.   He isn't known as the Isotope Man for nothing.

The police are informed.   They check with Rayner's employers, a provincial science establishment doing secret governmental work.   The Managing Director says the injured man can't be Rayner; he's at the factory, and to prove it, is called to the phone to speak for himself.

So Delaney is sidetracked into becoming a freelance investigator, backed up (eventually) by his photographer, Jill Friday - a slick name and an attractive character in her own right.   The timeslip element is cleverly incorporated and Maine never loses track of the thriller element.   There is genuine menace and a compelling villain.   I don't know who played Vasquo in the movie but I suspect Maine had Orson Welles in mind.

I'm a big fan of Maine and there are several reviews of his novels on this blog.   The Isotope Man has got to be one of my favourites by him.   I really love the cover of this Corgi paperback.  

Shoot at the Moon - William F Temple

 A sci-fi semi-classic from the Sixties by a pioneer of the postwar British genre.   William F Temple was never as famous as Arthur C Clarke or as idiosyncratic as Brian Aldiss, but he knew them both and had his own literary characteristics.   I have already reviewed The Four-Sided Triangle, Battle on Venus and (the best title) Fleshpots of Sansato on this blog.   Shoot at the Moon is every bit as good.   As an extra bonus it took me back to the mid-Sixites when the debate among schoolboys was Is it even possible to land on the moon?

Well obviously it was, and Temple, being of a scientific bent, never seems to have doubted it.   He follows Clarke in his advocacy of atomic engines being the best and least damaging way to do it, and they may well have been right.   He then works in Charles Eric Maine's debut trick of murder in space.   Indeed, he doubles down on the device with two murders.   But the Endeavour only has a crew of five to begin with: the proto Musk, Colonel Marley, who has funded the expedition, his schizophrenic daughter Lou, who happens to be a leading scientist, her ex-husband Thompson, the celebrated Johan, Pettigue, who has a reputation of being the only survivor of several expeditions, and our narrator, the jobbing space pilot Franz Brunel.   Well, it can't be him, we assume - that would be taking the unreliable narrator too far.   And it can't really be either of the two victims, certainly not the first.   Temple hints that there are other crews elsewhere on the Moon, so it may be them, especially since the Endeavour is on a literal gold hunt on a forbidden patch of the Dark Side.

I'm not going to reveal the killer.   Just to say, it's a good one when it comes and provides an excellent chase to finish with.   The characters all have their strengths and weaknesses, their motives and guilty secrets.   Shoot at the Moon is Temple on top form.   If retro British sci-fi is your thing, you'll love it.

The Centauri Device - M John Harrison

Suddenly everyone wants Captain John Truck, which is odd, given that nobody has ever wanted him before.   General Alice Gaw of the Israeli army wants him, as does her opposite number with the Arab socialists, and Dr Grishkin, and even Chalice Veronica host of the longest running party in the universe.  Hitherto John Truck and his ship My Ella Speed has had to make do ferrying second rate cargo around the lesser spaceports at the ass-end of the Galaxy.   Now, people are kidnapping him off the street, recusing him and snatching him for their own nefarious purposes.

The thing is, the Opener archeologist Grishkin has found the legendary Centauri Device on Centauri VII, the only planet to have been murdered.   Nobody knows what the Device will do.  The Israelis and the Arabs assume it's a super-weapon that will decide their endless Earth-shattering war.  Grishkin dreams it is a religious revelation, possibly apocalyptic.   Chalice envisages the high of all highs, or at least trading it for a megaload of drugs.   The one thing upon which all agree is that only a Centaurian can operate the Device.   Which is a problem, given the race has been all but exterminated.   Truck is the all-but in question.   His prostitute mother Spaceport Annie coupled with one of the last Centauri and space John is the result.

It's a hell of a take on the Grail Quest - an off-kilter, typically Harrison take - complete with Fisher King 9the aesthetic anarchist Pater) and a Merlin of sorts (Pater's son, the conjurer Himation.   Guinevere has a scarred face and Truck is an unlikely Lancelot.   But he gets there in the end.   He conjoins with the Device and---

I simply cannot get enough of M John Harrison.   This is the third of his novels I've read this year and I want more.   He is so different, so unique.   Nobody does it like him.   Nobody does what he does better.

Empty Space - M John Harrison

 Spanning time, space and planes of existence, Empty Space is just breathtaking in conception.   It may well continue stories from earlier books - Nova Swing is the name of the beat-up spaceship owned and run by Fat Antoyne and his two shipmates, and also the title of the Harrison novel immediately before this.   It doesn't matter.   Everything we need to know is here.

On what we might call the terrestrial, twenty-first century plane, Anna Waterman is a widow in her late fifties or early sixties, living in a prosperous village on the fringes of London.   After two unsatisfactory marriages Anna has rather lost her way in life.   At her daughter Marnie's insistence she is grudgingly seeing a London psychiatrist.   Half the time Anna doesn't show up or forgets.   Marnie fears the onset of dementia.   Anna, however, is mapping out a future for herself.   It isn't easy.   Her summerhouse keeps setting on fire without being burnt, and there are copper-coloured poppies in her garden.

About as far away from this as it is possible to get, on the scrubby minor planets of the Kefahucki Tract, Toni Reno wants Fat Antoyne to collect and transport what can only be called mortsafes.   This being the far distant future, the mortsafes are self-aware.   Meanwhile an assistant investigator in Saudade City is called to a troubling death.   The victim is suspended in mid-air, as if falling in empty space.   Toni Reno soon becomes another victim, and the chop-shop proprietor who artificially enhanced (tailored) the nameless assistant.  They may not actually be dead, but they are certainly fading away, literally.

One of the mortsafes might possibly contain the Aleph.   The Aleph may be someone we have already met.

Harrison's skill in handling all the strands and bringing them together at the end is just staggering.   I was swept along throughout, totally engrossed.

Children of Ruin - Adrian Tchaikovsky

 Children of Ruin (2019) is worldbuilding at its best.   In Tchaikovsky's intricately imagined universe humankind has taken to terraforming in order to evacuate the poisoned Earth.   They have been doing it for millennia, the terraformers often transcending the ages by cryogenic sleep.   One group we follow have travelled so far that it takes 31 years for messages from Earth to reach them.   They listen keenly, even though they know these are the last communications of a dead world.   One of the crew is Disra Senkovi, who spends most of his time with the pet octopuses he has managed to smuggle aboard.   Their spaceship happens upon two planets, which Senkovi names Damacus and Nod.   He is sent to seed life on one while the mission commander Yusuf Baltiel explores the other.

We then join another mission.   Slowly, we realise that we are thousands of years further on from the arrival of Baltiel and Senkovi in the binary system of Damascus and Nod.   This ship is commanded by evolved spiders, Portiids,    They are assisted by Humans with a capital h, one of whom, Meshner, carries an implant which enables him to link more thoroughly with the portiids.   The Portiids also use AI, which is the way in which the very first terraformer, initiator of the original project, Avrana Kern, survives.   She lives on through a living computer made of ants.

Meanwhile the worlds created on Damascus and Nod live on.   One is ruled by evolved octopuses whose multiple brains, the Crown and Reach, remember and revere their creator, Senkovi.   The other world is inhabited by molecules which can combine to infect and takeover other entities.

I was completely, 100% fascinated by these extreme lifeforms who have to come together to resist the virus whose system wholly depends on their ability to combine.   Tchaikovsky is able to takes us into the different thought systems of octopuses and spiders, to establish ways in which they can communicate, and to establish empathy.   Truly, a stunning achievement.   No wonder it won the Arthur C Clarke Award for book of the year.

The Fleshpots of Sansato - William F Temple

 Great title - but a novelette only likely to interest the literary acheaologists amongst us.  Temple was a pioneer of British sci fi from the war period until the Seventies.   He mixed with the best but never really rose above the level of supporting player.   His best-known novel was Four-Sided Triangle, which I reveiwed earlier on this blog.

To me, Temple is interesting purely because he is a bystander, observer of what the better-known were up to.   Fleshpots is basically a take on Psychedelic sci fi of, most notably, Michael Moorcock.   Temple has ingenuity but a distinctly prosaic imagination, so the result is basically pulp detective noir in space.   Ray Garner of the Sidereal Intelligence Service is ordered to the distant planet of Montefore to find SIS source Dr Lowry who has disappeared into the titular fleshpots.

A classic example of period sci fi - the galaxy has intergalactic travel but still uses telephone landlines.   Interestingly, Temple's take on the travel element is that it has been made available to earthlings by the otensibly friendly Dorians of a far distant planet.   Temple is a bureaucracy man and, typically, the Dorians retain a measure of control: earth travellers can only go one way on the instant relocator; the other half of a round trip has to be by conventional spaceship.   Dr Lowry, a prominent scientist, was sent into space to try and figure out how the quick version works.

Despite mixing with aliens (and doing more exotic things to alien females in Sansato) human intelligence agents still favour racial stereotypes.   Thus Garner's contact on Montefore is the very Italian Arnoldo (Arnie) Monicelli, who drinks Italian wine and favours long lunches.   Garner is American and therefore a whisky man.

So Garner plunges into the fleshpots and meets the Satos, the Montefore version of geishas.   Their sexual specialities are various: one is invisible, another is literally electric, a third a humanoid cat complete with claws.   The one who leads Garner to the truth is Vygynia, an autistic waif whom both Lowry and Monicelli have taken under their wing, the Italian in a paternalistic, protective way, the not-so-good doctor probably not.

It's all good fun with plenty of betrayals and red herrings.   I've no idea why this NEL edition is 'specially abridged' but having done my research on Four-Sided Triangle I'm betting there is another, very different version out there somewhere.

The Society of Time - John Brunner

This fantastic British Library collection, edited and introduced by Mike Ashley, contains the original three long short stories/novellas, plus two additional time-based stories, 'Father of Lies' and 'The Analysts'.

In John Brunner, I have now found a sci fi writers whose interests sit closely with mine and who can actually write in a highly-acceptable literary style.  The problem with many sci fi authors is that they prioritise ideas over craft-skill.  I can understand this to an extent; describing the challenging in a basic, functional manner might seem an obvious turn to take, however going too far can easily put off the more discerning reader, and has done in my case many times.   You really need to give your writing a bit of character - and fortunately Brunner has it in bucketloads.

For the Scoiety of Time trilogy Brunner envisages a world in which the Spanish Armada succeeded.  England is now - in the twentieth century - a well-integrated part of the Spanish Empire, which divides the world more or less equally with the Confederation, dominated by China and Russia.   Thanks to the victory of the Spanish Hapsburgs in 1588 there has been no Austro-Hungarian Empire, thence no World Wars.   On the negative side, because of the dominance of the Catholic Church there has been very little progress - no industrial revolution, no cars or planes.   People still ride about and defend themselves with swords. 

Science has, however, made one stupendous advance: it has become possible to travel back in time.  The potential benefits and dangers of this are so extreme that the Empire and the Confederacy have come together to lay down rules, adminustered by twin societies in the two jurisdictions.  Time travellers have to be licensed by their society, their expeditions severely restricted.   In all three stories, therefore, the rules are broken and the very existence of the 'contemporary' world is threatened.

In all three cases Brunner's hero is Don Miguel de Navarro, a young licentiate of the Imperial Society.   In 'Spoil of Yesterday' occupt licentiates have been selling time trips to rich diletantes.  Someone has brought back an Aztec mask as a souvenir, not realising how an out-of-time artefact can turn the world on its head.  'The Word Not Written' is set in London on New Year's Eve.  Society members will gather at their HQ for midnight mass but first there is a spectacular party thrown at the Prince Imperial's Palace at Greenwich (the Prince is Head of the Society).  Don Miguel is not one of nature's party-goers but he forces himself to attend and is paired off with the Scandanavian ambassador's daughter.  Scandanavia is naturally a progressive country and Lady Kristina is a liberated ypung woman.  She wants to see how orifinary people celebrate, so Miguel escorts her into central London (Londres, in Brunner's Spanish empire).  There they realise something has gone out-of-time when an Amazonian female warrior first excites the mob, then fights them off.   Meanwhile their is an insurrection.  The Empire is about to be overthrown - until Father Ramon, the Jesuit master-theoretician of the Society, steps back in time and fixes the anomaly.  The third and final story 'The Fullness of Time' is set in America where, in a fun development, the Empire has chosen the Mohawks to bring together the traditional tribes.  The anomaly in this case is a modern drill bit in a mine supposedly sealed in ancient times.  Father Ramon suspects Confederate involvement.

The additional stories are both associated in theme and time of writing (the early Sixties).  In 'Father of Lies' a small corner of rural England appears to have been sealed off from modernity, to the extent that dragons and ogres live there.  'The Analysts' has the advantage of a compelling character, Joel Sackstone, who has turned his unique gift of visualisation into a profession.  He looks at architect's models and visualises them in reality: how people will move about there; the limitations of the plan and the solutions.  He is called in by his main employer who has been asked to design a very odd building for a mysteruous research organisation.  Joel visualises it in practice and realises that all the odd angles and levels are leading visitors in a direction that doesn't really exist.  He tries it out in his main room at home - and walks clean through the solid wall.

As I mentioned, Brunner was writing this stuff in the early Sixties.  He was slightly ahead of his time, albeit he reflects and develops trends that were incipient at the time - women's liberation, mixed marriages, racial prejudice, even plundered treasures.  He wrote lots before his death in 1999, but to my horror yesterday, none of my usual obscure book dealers in London had a single one!   I shall have to delve deeper and venture further afield, because I absolutely want to read more. 

The Darkest of Nights - Charles Eric Maine

 Charles Eric Maine (real name David McIlwain) was a pioneer of British sci fi in the late Forties through to his early death in 1981.   To my mind, only John Wyndham is better.   Maine's gift is for very near future cataclysm brought on by man's reckless technical innovations.   In The Tide Went Out nuclear tests crack the earth's crust and all the water drains away.   Here - startlingly - a covid virus develops in the Far East and becomes a worldwide pandemic.  In reaction, governments hugely restrict personal freedom and protect the elite in secure underground bunkers.

The relevance is so extreme that even this British Library reprint predates Covid 19.   The novel itself came out in 1962.   I mean ... wow!  OK, there are differences.  For one thing there are always two versions of the Hueste virus; one which kills in hours, another which is harmless to the victim, granting them immunity but making them carriers.  Actually, that second version sounds very much like Covid 19, now I come to think about it.   The other major difference is that the underclass rise up in rebellion when they are effectively left to die by the state.   Of course, Maine wrote before social media - indeed, before absolutely every household had a TV.

As ever, once he has set up his disaster, Maine personalises it through characters at the heart of the dilemma.   He does so especially well in The Darkest of Nights.   Pauline Brant works for the International Virus Research Organisation (IVRO) in Tokyo, and is thus on hand when the virus first begins to spread.   She is sent back to England where she reunites with her husband Clive, Foreign editor for a major Fleet Street newspaper.   Clive has been offered a gig in America and wants a divorce so he can marry the boss's daughter.   Pauline asks for time to think it over.   Then the virus comes to Britain and Pauline is subsumed back into IVRO where she meets DR 'Vince' Vincent.   The triangle plays out to very end, with a twist I didn't foresee.

Whilst not perhaps the Maine novel closest to my academic interests (that remains Spaceways), The Darkest of Nights is a better novel than The Tide Went Out, itself very good.  My appetite for more is whetted and fortunately series editor Mike Ashley includes some useful pointers in his introduction.

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.

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.

The Drought - J G Ballard

Ballard's classic climate disaster sci fi has never been more relevant.  Dr Charles Ransom lives on a houseboat on a lake by a river, a hundred or so miles from the sea.  But it hasn't rained for years, the river is drying up, fresh water is at a premium and society is starting to break down.  Ransom is one of the last to leave for the coast, taking with him a few fellow strays.  He has left it almost too late.  The beaches are now a militarized zone, cut off by chainlink fences to protect the desalination plants.  But the people are restive.  Every day there is an incursion...

Years pass - this is Ballard's clever move - and the populace by the coast is fragmented.  Some live miserable lives, working together to collect seawater on desalination beds.  Others, like Ransom and his ex-wife, fend for themselves on the periphery.  Ransom develops the belief that there is a secret supply of water inland.  The best way to find it is to follow the dry river bed back the way he came.  He collects another rag-tag band and sets off.

He returns to Mount Royal and Hamilton, to the very street he lives on back in normal times.  The water supply is virtually next door, at the Lomax estate.  Richard and Miranda Lomax were always eccentric.  Now they are stark mad, eating stray people and breeding mystical halfwits with the demented shaman Quilter.  Ballard makes his final section a dark, twisted take on The Tempest, which is pretty dark anyway when you think about it.

It's a magnificent book, the best of Ballard's sci fi that I have read thus far.  With a great last line.

Consider Phlebas - Iain M Banks

Consider Phlebas is the first of Banks's 'Culture' sci fi novels.  The Culture is at war with the tripedal Iridans and our protagonist, Bora Horza Gobuchul is a humanoid Changer working with the Iridans.  Indeed, the novel begins with the Iridans rescuing Horza from a fate worse than death - only to plunge him into another when their ship comes under attack and Horza is picked up by a bunch of space pirates and taken aboard their spaceship Clear Air Turbulence (CAT).  Their leader Kraiklyn is heading for the artificial world of Vavach and the ultimate high stakes game of 'Damage'.  The stakes couldn't be higher, because the Culture has announced it is going to destroy Vavach at midnight.

Horza escapes by assuming Ktaiklyn's identity and taking over command of the CAT.  His real identity is revealed by another escapee from Vavach, the Special Circumstances Agent Perosteck Balveda.  Horza leads the group to Schar's World, where he used to live with a group of other Changers and where a Culture Mind is said to be hidden.

Consider Phlebas is pure space opera.  Like all space opera, it is drawn with a relatively broad brush.  Entire civilisations are either wholly bad or wholly good.  Banks tinkers slightly with the form, blurring friendships and loyalties.  The imaginative stakes are very high.  Banks clearly loves describing the science behind his ultra-high tech conceptions.  To balance this, the prose and dialogue is deliberately prosaic.  Things move along nicely and there is refreshing humour when required.  In the end, things more or less work out.  But I still have no idea what the title refers to.

I'm new to the space opera form, though I have several other examples stacked on my Kindle, ready to try.  I enjoyed Phlebas and will certainly explore further.

The Tide Went Out - Charles Eric Maine

 

I have written before on this blog about the twisted road that led me to the speculative fiction of Charles Eric Maine (David McIlwain, 1921-81).  His writing career really only covered the Fifties and Sixties but he was at the top of his game from the outset and for a time was up there with John Wyndham, John Christopher and the young J G Ballard.  Like them, he tended towards the eco-disaster, which is what The Tide Went Out is.

It is 1958 (Maine is always contemporaneous) and US A-Bomb tests have gone too far.  A sub-ocean blast has cracked the Earth's crust and all the water is seeping away.  Philip Wade is seconded from the science weekly he edits and placed at the secret governmental hub in London's Kingsway (I suspect at the former General Electric building where the BBC started out) to produce sanitised news for the Press.  Officially the world's combined efforts and trying to pump water back from the core.  In reality, there is nothing they can do and ninety percent or more of the population is going to die very soon.  Wade's family, and the families of other personnel chosen to survive, have been taken to polar camps where there is still plenty of ice.

Maine paints a vivid portrait of London at the time as society slowly begins to crumble.  Barricades go up and the army comes in to protect the elite from the masses, and soon the soldiers go rogue too, but with all the weaponry they can want.

Maine explores the key questions we are currently asking about the COVID pandemic.  Why have we so crazily damaged the only world we have?  Who chooses the elite?  Can we trust anything the government tells us?

Another well-selected reprint from the British Library.