Musings from Brian J. Noggle

This book is a fifty-year-old collection of science fiction short stories from some of the luminaries of the business.

It includes:

• “Beyond Bedlam” by Wyman Guin. In a world where individual humans are split into two distinct personalities through medication and the personalities take turns with the body, one man stops taking his meds and begins to have a forbidden affair with his wife’s alternate personality.
   
• “Bridge” by James Blish. This might be the first of his non-Star Trek work I’ve read. A West in decline builds a scientific installation in Jupiter’s atmosphere, and workers use virtual reality gear to man repair and building robots in the hostile environment. A supervisor, crankier than the other employees, might be going mad. Notable now for projecting the US-Soviet conflict as lasting hundreds of years into the future.
   
• “There Is A Tide” by Brian Aldiss. In a future Africa, a grand planner runs into some difficulty with his grand plans when mother nature does not work according to the plan, leading to extensive, catastrophic flooding. Also, thrown into the history as an aside, all white people have been killed, although I’m not sure whether this means in Africa or worldwide and what bearing this has on the story.
   
• “Second Variety” by Philip K. Dick. After four years of a devestating US-Soviet war (those guys again!), the United States has developed small robots that can quickly infiltrate and destroy Soviet installations. But down in their automated factories, the robots have built themselves new models and unleashed them on both sides of the human conflict. Frankly, I found this to be the most contemporarily chilling story, but the main character of the story is entirely too credulous. Why aren’t more people in Philip K. Dick yarns untrusting?
   
• “The Feeling of Power” by Isaac Asimov. Many years in the future, a low level technician amazes his betters with his ability to perform computations without a computer. This might give man an advantage in a long-running war with an alien (I think) adversary.
   
• “Sense from the Thought Divide” by Mark Clifton. A researcher tries to use PSI energy to create antigravity pods.
   
• “Resurrection” by A.E. Van Vogt. A research team from an invasive, conquering, and genocidal race visits a planet that had housed an advanced civilization. As part of their protocol in investigating new homes for their ever-burgeoning population, the resurrect a specimen of the civilization to find out what happened to it. Unfortunately, this specimen is very advanced indeed and outwits them in their efforts.
   
• “Vintage Season” by Henry Kuttner. A man leases some rooms to some very strange people who come from very far away. He begins to suspect they’re from the future, and his house is a sought-after spot for a very nice May with some hints that something bad is coming. And it does.

Overall, in retrospect, these are some pretty grim tales that don’t necessarily present an optimistic view of the future. However, they’re very imaginative in that they go off in a variety of directions, and you’re not sure where they might end up. So each has the potential to be a treat in its own right. I liked the book, and I think this is shaping up to be a science fiction year for me already.

Books mentioned in this review:

I picked up this book as I was browsing my bookshelves and the name Vox Day popped out at me. I’ve visited his blog a couple of times recently (and how recently that might actually be is subject to speculation, as we will see below), so that’s good enough reason to read the book immediately.

The book is based on a video game, but I’m no stranger to books based on video games (see The Dig or Halo: First Strike). However, the authors of the book are actually responsible for the game itself, so that means they have a greater understanding of it and can put the story they would want you to play into the book, kinda like I ran Dungeons and Dragons games back in the day: No matter what you players do, you’re not getting in the way of the good story I’ve put together.

The book deals with a lunar rebellion. It seems to me I just read a book about a lunar rebellion. Well, I did. In 2009. That’s the second time recently I’ve been stunned that so much time has passed since I read a particular book.

At any rate, this book is pretty good as a read, but. It jumps right into the rebellion, with the beginning of the rebellion and not a lot of leading material as to why the moon’s colonies are rebelling. The lunar colonists have secreted parts for weapons and materiel over the course of a decade (it is discovered). So the UN sends up Peacekeepers, which are surprised by the resistance. Then the UN turns to the Germans, and it gets complicated as they eventually start pushing the lunar rebels back.

It’s got engaging characters, including a proxy for the game-playing reader, a gamer himself who’s a good hacker. The technology isn’t dated in the book, as it’s the beginning of the Internet era so the projections aren’t squirrelly in other directions from where we’ve gone in these twenty years. There are a couple of spots where they shout-out to the video game — finding a hidden elevator, for example–but it’s got some depth that’s not grafted on.

Unfortunately, it builds to a point, and then, instead of a climax, we have the big reveal which is not exactly a climax and no resolution. After all, there’s a sequel to wrap it up. That’s unfortunate, but it doesn’t turn me off to more books by the author if I should find them in my immense stacks. But I’m not so invested that I’m ordering the sequel right this minute.

Books mentioned in this review:

After I finished The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, it felt the right time to delve back into the Gor series. I was taken a bit aback how long it’s been since I read the previous book in the series–I read Raiders of Gor in October 2007.

This book, though, was a bad place to resume. It’s not a Tarl Cabot story. Instead, it’s one of the one-off stories featuring a woman on Gor. The first, actually. It deals with a spoiled high society girl from Manhattan who’s taken to Gor to be a slave. And so she does.

The basic story arc is that the ship in which she is a passenger is shot down; she’s found by a slaver, trained to be a slave, gets rescued by some Forest Girls who are like Amazons, except they’re really just ‘liberating her’ to sell her to someone; she’s delivered to that someone in a building in the woods, but she escapes from that to be recaptured by guards of her original slaver. She’s sold and sold again, finally becoming the property and lover of a leader of a town, but he sells her, and she goes from owner to owner until getting pressured into an attempt on a merchant’s life.

That’s the high view. The details and bulk of the book are in the politics of the slaves, how this character is a weak liar, thief, and betrayer of other slaves. She’s never really redeemed in any fashion except (perhaps according to the ideology of the book) that she becomes a perfect slave.

There are hints and foreshadowing that she’s been chosen to be part of something, so I’d hoped that would come out at some point, but ultimately, it gets related very hurriedly in the last chapter, where she’s part of an assassination plot. At that point, things foreshadowed and hinted at are dumped into a couple of paragraphs, and it resolves kinda poorly.

So I was disappointed with this book, and I’ve got at least three remaining on my shelves. I might pick up another one soon–before 2021, I would hope. You can see a little bit as the series progresses, or at least I can looking back to my reports of the books, as to how Tarl Cabot gets to do a lot of different things like Conan did. He’s a pirate, he’s a warrior, he’s a slave. Norman really owed those old pulp books a debt, and he repays them pretty well.

Just not in this book.

Books mentioned in this review:

This is a fascinating book, especially on the meta level.

It is the autobiography of Horace Conner, born in 1919. Here’s how he puts it in the first lines of the book:

I was born on May 15, 1912 in Cotton County, Oklahoma, the southern part of Oklahoma on the Little Red River. I was the second child. The year I was born my father’s house was blown away in a cyclone.

And we’re off.

The book chronicles, in some order, his youth in a large, blended family; his businesses throughout the Depression with his father, particularly working on farms and orchards; his drafting into World War II and his service in the Navy and in post-surrender Japan; then his return to the United States, his failed marriage, his carousing and carrying on with women; and then his jobs after the war, including time in a produce market and a distribution center for Marshall Fields in Kansas City.

It’s a life of some dude who didn’t do particularly heroic things or live a particularly memorable life. But the voice is complex and engaging, or maybe I’m reading too much into it.

He’s humble, saying he wasn’t very good at writing at school, but here he’s written the book. He does a lot of humble bragging, where he does something and throws in that someone who saw him do it thinks he’s the best they’ve ever seen at it; I’m not sure if he is actually humblebragging because he’s good at it and wants affirmation of it or if he’s throwing it in to say it’s because he’s showing us he is too good at something. Some of the things he’s done that are less than heroic are just dropped in, like selling stuff from the Navy on the black market. But he also throws in stuff that he does that’s all right, like feeding Japanese war orphans from the back of his ship. He admits that he’s a bit of a carouser and not good relationship material, but that’s matter-of-fact and he doesn’t regret it or think it’s immoral or counterproductive. He goes out of town on a pleasure trip and ends up missing a day of work, and the excuse he gives his boss is that he was in jail in Sedalia. That’s his best excuse. And the manager buys it and keeps him on. What does that say outside the text of the book?

Most tellingly, he mentions that he wanted to have children and that he enjoyed time with his stepson while he was married, but he leaves no admitted progeny. He talks about retiring and picking up his small entrepreneurial ways, delivering some produce and selling it from his trucks. But he doesn’t much mention church–although he claims to read the Bible, particularly Proverbs. And he talks a little about his methodology of research at the library to make sure he gets his dates right in the book.

But he never explains why he wrote the book.

It’s not for his kids. Perhaps his nieces and nephews? I don’t know. For someone who claimed to not be a good writer, he didn’t do badly. But why did he do it? The writing of this book does not necessarily jibe with the simple man described within it.

As I said, on the meta level, it’s fascinating. And it wasn’t a bad read (better than An Ozark Boy’s Story for example) but there’s no real climactic payoff. After all, this is the life of a man. Also, gentle reader, it’s apparently $125 on the Internet, so you’ll probably not pick it up.

Books mentioned in this review: