A For Andromeda - Fred Hoyle and John Elliot

 ET doesn't always have to come on a ship...  A For Andromeda is the classic of British science fiction in which First Contact is via a complex message from the stars.    The remote aliens send a blueprint and the gullible and hawkish military-industrial complex of which Eisenhower warned only a year before Andromeda was published can't wait to build it.

That, of course, leads to further challenges and problems which the combination of super-scientist Hoyle and scriptwriter Elliot handle very well.   The book is of its time but the questions it asks and poses its characters are timeless.   The science, thanks to Hoyle, is as it stood in 1962.   So is the fiction, with British women just starting to emerge from the home into science.   Interestingly, the stable characters here - Judy Adamson the security specialist, Madeleine Dawnay the super-scientist, and Andromeda herself - are all women.   The computer-whiz John Fleming is unmistakably Hoyle, the truculent big brain who most times turned out to be right in the end.   The two research bases, Bouldershaw and Thorness are almost certainly Jodrell Bank and Windscale-Sellafield.

Yes, there's an element of the formulaic about A For Andromeda, but the ending caught me by surprise.

Downward to the Earth - Robert Silverberg

 Interesting concepts abound here.   A decade after the planet was restored to its sentient people, Edmund Gundersen feels a compulsion to return to Belzagor to put things right on his own account.   A former worker for the colonial power, Gundersen was peripherally involved in some of the misdeeds that went on.   He encountered the notorious Kurtz (yes, Kurtz) who shared snake venom with one of the two sentient people, the elephantine nildoror.   Gundersen once saw Kurtz, venomed up to the gills himself, dance with the nildoror.   Gundersen's time on Belzagor wasn't all bad, though.   He met and fell in love with the beautiful Seema.

But now Seema is partnered up with Kurtz.   Kurtz, she says, is off on an expedition, but her sulidor (the sulidoror are the other sentient people on Belzagor, giant ape-like people) tells Gundersen that Kurtz is hidden away on the compound, ill.    Gundersen sees him - and is horrified.

It is rare for a planet to have two sentient races, particularly two races so strikingly different.   Both have speech, both are said to have souls.   The land is divided between them.   The nildoror have the fertile plains, the sulidoror occupy the misty uplands.   The nildoror are vegetarian grazers, the sulidoror omnivore hunter-gatherers.   There is no emnity: the two races come and go across one another's territory   Both have seemingly come to terms with their colonial past in which the sulidoror were servants, the nildoror transport.   They continue to provide these services for human tourists.   Now they do it by consent.

Gundersen has always got on reasonably well with the natives of Belzagor.   He can speak both languages, though he is not so fluent with the gestures that provide nuance.   He politely seeks permission from a senior nildor to go to the hill country.   Permission is granted so long as he brings back Cedric Cullen, who has apparently commited a serious transgression and exiled himself among the sulidoror.   Gundersen wants to find out what happened to Kurtz in the hill country.   Most of all he wants to find out about the rebirth ceremony the nildoror undergo there.   Every twenty years ot so a nildor is summoned to the rebirthing.   This was Gundersen's transgression: he needed nildoror to help repair a breached dam and prevented them going on their rebirthing trek.    So off he goes - into the heart of darkness.

Yes, Downward to the Earth is a sci fi take on the Conrad classic.   The question in both is what has Kurtz found that has turned him into a monster?   'The horror ...  the horror...."    Silverberg's version pays off big time, with a twist that I absolutely didn't see coming.   This is the first time I have read any Silverberg.   I was very impressed.

Menace of the Monster - Mike Ashley (ed)

 Classic Tales of Creatures from Beyond, says the subtitle.   These things are always subjective.   Lovecraft's 'Dagon' is a classic, no question, but this version of War of the Worlds, an abridgement for a continental abridgement, and a Boys' Magazine version of King Kong belong more in the Interesting Curiosity department.   The latter, by the way, is much better than the former, despite the former being done by Wells himself.

Among the others, I liked 'The Dragon of St Paul's' by Reginald Bacchus and C Ranger Gull and 'Discord in Scarlet' by A E Van Vogt, which Vogt successfully claimed was source material for the Alien  franchise.   These stories illustrate the dichotomy editor Ashley has juggled with here.   'Dragon', like 'Dagon', is really weird fiction, or even weird adventure; 'Discord' is science fiction, pure and simple.  I am perfectly happy with the mix but suspect purists might jib.

Of the others, I found 'Personal Monster', by 'Idris Seabright' aka Margaret St Clair (1911-95) stayed with me longer than any other.   The ending I thought was masterful.

NOTE: Turns out I made it to my 1000th post sooner than expected.   This is it.   Monsters, sci fi, classic and weird ... I guess that about sums up this blog.   On to the next milestone!

Engine Summer - John Crowley

 Engine Summer (1979) is a post-apocalyptic coming of age story.   A millennium or more in the future, Rush That Speaks grows up in Little Belaire, a town of truthful speakers.   The Storm has knocked humankind back into the stone age.   They have no writing or literature but pass on history as stories.   Here and there relics and ruins of former glories linger on, regarded as the work of angels and thus unfathomable.   Saints wander the land, spreading insights and speaking of other settlements elsewhere.   Rush That Speaks dreams of becoming a saint when he grows up.

But first he must deal with adolescence and his love for Once a Day, a neighbour belonging to a different cord but taught by the same teacher, Painted Red.   One day members of Dr Boot's List visit Little Belaire, as they do every year, to trade.   Once a Day decides to travel with them, and leaves.   Rush cannot fathom this.   Why would anyone want to leave Little Belaire?   Why would Once a Day leave him?   He expects her to return.   Everyone does.   But she doesn't return.   Finally, he feels he has no choice but to track her down and rescue her.

People have no transport, but believe that Road leads everywhere.   Rush gets distracted by a hermit called Blink, who lives up a tree and hibernates.   Rush had heard Blink called a saint, though Blink flatfly denies any such thing.   Ultimately Rush finds Once a Day in Service City.   The List have different skills and practices.   They lives with large cats and emulate the feline lifestyle.   Once a Day doesn't want to leave so Rush decides to stay with her.   He is assimilated into the List.   Finally, he is taken to meet Dr Boots, and learns his destiny, a revelation that sends him reeling, half-mad.   Visions, hallucinations, insights - until it is revealed who he is telling his story to.

From the very first page it is clear that Rush is speaking to someone other than us.   Every now and then someone asks italicized questions.   There is mention of crystals which seem to be recording what Rush says (recording? we wonder, in a world without machines?).   There are four crystals and each facet is a chapter.   The answer, when it comes, is quite something.

It is a boy speaking, so the style is straightforward and provides a framework in which we learn alongside Rush how to navigate his world.   The half-remembered names of things from Before the Storm is a fun device.   The title for example, try saying it aloud.   Avvenging and avengers took me longer to figure out.   Dr  Boots is best of all.   Rush's tortured pubesence is of course timeless, instantly familiar.   The characters are nicely defined, the locations differentiated.

All in all, an intriguing classic of the post-apocalypse.

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.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers - Jack Finney

 

This classic demonstrates the axiom that in sci fi the idea is everything.  'The Body Snatchers' started out as a magazine serial, then it was refined into book form.  Then came the first movie and the book was renamed, then it was updated for a second movie a quarter of a century later, which is this version.  It all makes no difference.  Smalltown USA is infiltrated by pod plants that turn into exact facsimiles of whatever they find themselves close to - other plants, discarded trash, human beings.  It fundamentally similar to The Day of the Triffids but more claustrophobic (the facsimile people can seal off the township).  Another neat twist is that the voices of science and reason - an absolute necessity in alien life form fiction - are themselves facsimiles.  The best part of the movies - when Kevin McCarthy runs up against a speeding car - is here too, and indeed is one of the best-written sections of the novel.  All in all, it's great fun.