Tag: classics

More Than Human

I’d never heard of this book, though the title itself seemed familiar (probably from the similar phrase from Blade Runner). I’d also heard of Theodore Sturgeon as one of the big names of the Silver Age, but knew nothing of his writing, and nothing of him beyond Heinlein famously helping him out of a spell of writer’s block. When I saw this book, I took the  opportunity to expand my classic SF reading.

Well. It was weird. I’ll give him that.

The story concerns a group of children with seemingly random psychic gifts: a young man with telepathy, a young girl with telekinesis, young twin girls with teleportation, and a…baby…thing…with partial telepathy and “superintellect” (not sure what an appropriate psychic term for this gift would be).

It’s a short book that covers a lot of ground. The first section concerns how they are drawn together to form a cooperative psychic ‘entity’ they call the “gestalt” – they remain distinct individuals, but their abilities link them into a greater, integrated whole. The second section addresses what happens when one part of the gestalt is lost and must be replaced – by the non-ideal replacement available at the time – and how it changes as a result. The third section concerns a normal person affected by crossing paths with the gestalt, and how what happens to him threatens to pull the entity apart.

As I said, it was weird. Not good-weird, like a Twilight Zone episode or a Lovecraft story, nor bad-weird, as in consciously trying to be outré or cutting edge or ‘experimental’. It was weird in a very similar way to Bester’s The Stars My Destination, from around the same time (1953 vs. 1946) – an unusual subject handled in an unusual way.

Sturgeon’s use of language is actually quite good, and he manages to successfully wrangle a number of details of the action, the nature of the various gifts, and in-story history, while showing believable character changes over time – all in, again, what is a fairly short novel.

Besides the resemblance to Bester, one thing that stuck out to me was the occasional pandering on racial issues. Like Heinlein, Sturgeon created non-white characters at a time (circa 1950) when that was not commonly done. But unlike Heinlein, Sturgeon wasn’t always as adept at smoothly weaving this ahead-of-the-times element into the story. There are moments when he presents the reader with a clumsy “racism bad, m’kay?” message of the type common to broadcast television of the Seventies, in what felt like the same manner: We interrupt the dramatic flow of this program to shoehorn in a Very Special Moral Lecture against __-ism. 

Overall, I can’t say that there was a much in it that stuck with me in terms of ideas. After reading it, it was like I’d…read it. That’s it. Entertaining in the moment but lean on lasting impressions, especially compared to Earth Abides, which I purchased at the same time and with which I read it back-to-back.

Earth Abides

This book caught my eye when I mistook it for the source of The Quiet Earth. (It’s plain from the jacket blurb that they’re not the same story at all.) It’s one of those books whose title I’d heard a number of times, enough to be at least aware that it was a post-apocalypse story, but surprisingly had never read.

My opinion is…mixed.

The story starts with the protagonist, Ish Williams, receiving a rattlesnake bite that happens to save his life. When he recovers and returns from his remote cabin, he discovers that nearly every human on Earth has died from “super measles”, an contagion of unknown origin and extreme lethality. The book then follows Ish through the next 50 years, focusing on three different periods, as he finds other survivors and builds a…er…tribe. 

And “tribe” is a big, big part of the problem.

On first reading, the story was entertaining and interesting. Stewart thought through a number of details well, such as the lingering of hydropower, the rapid failure of the roads, and the rewilding (or extinction) of domesticated plants and animals. There are a number of really good emotionally-charged scenes (dealing with Charlie, the Joey scene, and much of “The Last American”, for example).

It takes a little while to get used to his writing style, which I guess you could call “post-war experimental” (it was first published in 1949). The dialogue is sterile in some places, academic in others, rarely naturalistic. The ongoing effects of the near-disappearance of Man are described by italicized narrative dumps, whose perspective isn’t consistent (much of the time these read like excerpts from a far-future historical overview of the Great Disaster, but sometimes like a narration of ongoing events, and at other times like conventional omniscient perspective). It quickly takes on that “period” feel of other books from that era, e.g. Alas, Babylon (1959), and you just go with it.

It was compelling enough to read straight through over the course of a weekend. But the more I’ve thought of it over the past week, the more problems I’ve found with it.

  • The repeated malthusian elements, which seem common to the point of obsession with SF authors from the end of WWII through perhaps the mid-1980s. Okay, we get it. There are a lot of humans. Fine. But it gets really tiresome when (like global warming, which took its place as favored hobby-horse) it has to be repeatedly, compulsively, reflexively inserted into every story.
  • The nihilism. There is a thread throughout that, hey, you know, maybe it’s a good thing, after all, that human civilization is nearly dead. Maybe it’s overrated, and even a mistake, and we should let it die. Which they do, albeit passively.
  • The passivity – the characters’ unwillingness or lack of motivation to do anything active to preserve civilization for the following generations. This is demonstrated intentionally through the running “joke” about getting a gas-powered refrigerator working, the single, desultory instance after two decades of scouting for other long-term survivors, and the lack of interest in restoring electricity or repairing the water supply. Ish himself comments repeatedly on how he feels himself to be an observer, which appears to restrain him from taking meaningful action when necessary.
    The most significant instance is Ish’s petulant and impotent complaints about lack of support from the other parents regarding teaching their kids to read. The abundance of long-shelf-life food is blamed (nobody has to work to eat, so the kids are allowed to play all the time, there’s no sense of urgency in learning or preserving knowledge, etc.), but this abundance could have had exactly the opposite outcome had Ish put any effort at all into actually being a leader: having no need to hunt, forage, or farm, the kids had all the time in the world to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to restart human civilization. But he didn’t plan for that when the kids were still infants, and he didn’t put his foot down when the parents didn’t support him, in spite of being the obvious and unquestioned leader of the Tribe.
    When he discovered that his failure to push their education had resulted in a growing superstitiousness among the children, Ish could have harnessed it to ensure a longer-term recovery of civilization by creating a “priesthood” to serve (and preserve) the university library. But nah. Better to let the kids continue goofing off and remain illiterate and innumerate, and complain  impotently about it, than to try.
    After Joey meets his blatantly telegraphed doom (you didn’t see that coming fifty pages away?), Ish performs one last act of teaching: showing the kids how to make a bow and arrow – as a toy. After that, he gives in and gives up, and does nothing more to rekindle civilization, letting the Tribe degenerate into a primitive, superstitious, and ignorant band of savages.

Ish is a pathetic coward. Kinda ruins the book.

The only other apocalypse fiction where I’ve encountered this “giving up on civilization” element is the rebooted Battlestar Galactica. But there, a clear reason for doing so – the cycle of growth and collapse – had been established from the beginning (“All of this has happened before; all of this will happen again.”). The active choice at the end of the series to abandon technological civilization and merge with the early homo sapiens of our Earth is portrayed as a measure to break this cycle. The characters accept its necessity yet are hopeful that something better might emerge in time – they’re not passive in the moment and ambivalent about whether regains civilization or even survives as a species.

It’s a Zoo

Obligatory excuse-making: I’ve been finishing up a project at work (now completed) and trying to get done the Tile Job From Hell (not completed).

In the meantime, I’ve finished Parallel Lives, The Aeneid, Pilgrim’s Progress (Part 1, like Dante’s trilogy, I couldn’t make myself do the rest), and am halfway through Arabian Nights, and most of the way through The Moulding of Communists.

Parallel Lives was interesting, in part for the history it covers. I thought I knew a good bit about Roman history in the transition period from Republic to Empire, but nope – there was way more to it than I had previously learned, and Plutarch crams a whole lot of it into a short piece. The other interesting part was how obviously it was a primary source for several of Shakespeare’s plays (Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, specifically).

The Aeneid was slow going, and as I’ve discovered is typical for classic epics and dramas, was poorly structured and edited by modern standards. It was like a story told by a five-year-old: this happened then this happened then this happened for ten thousand lines of dactylic hexameter. But like Parallel Lives, it was an engaging overview of Roman pre-history (albeit heavily mythologized and not exactly reliable), or at least how Romans of the early Empire wished to see their history.

It also portrayed the Trojans as the heroes of the Trojan War and the Achaeans as the bad guys, which amused me at first and which I attributed to the pro-Roman slant of the poem. Then I looked it up. Yeah. Even by Homer’s pro-Greek account, the Greeks were dicks.

Pilgrim’s Progress wasn’t bad, but it was overly-long and by the end seemed like a treacly Anglican reduction of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Arabian Nights is not what I expected at all. I knew it was a series of stories, but the framing device and its nesting/recursion of stories is handled quite well (in contrast to the chaotic structurelessness of The Aeneid), with the stories fairly short and to the point. They remind me very strongly of the stories in Idries Shah’s books, although it’s not entirely clear that they’re intended that way (some do appear have an obvious moral or underlying meaning, but that could simply be me reading things into the story out of habit from reading Shah).

Finally, The Moulding of Communists has been somewhat of a slog up to the current chapter, but it’s turning into an insightful look at how communists were recruited into the Party back in the day, and after recruitment, selected and formed into “cadre” members. The resemblances to cult practices are remarkable, so much so that I repeatedly wonder whether the cults of the 1960s-1980s weren’t actually following the same playbook (and in turn, it makes me wonder how Soviet communists managed to figure all that out, systematize it, and successfully spread it globally such that it was already commonplace by the mid-1930s in the US).

Shaver Mysteries, cont’d.

I’m a few pages into the wonderfully-titled “Zigor Mephisto’s Collection of Mentalia”, the second of the stories in the collection, and can already see why Shaver is compared to Ed Wood. The writing is schlocky, the names are cheesy, the dialogue is campy, and the overall quality is at the level of a high-school creative writing assignment.

But…

There’s something endearingly strange about it all, and something compelling about the storytelling. For all its faults, there’s something that holds my interest enough to keep going with it.

I suspect that someone could make a project out of rewriting Shaver’s stories in a more competent form (assuming they’re out of copyright) and organizing and clarifying his mythos along the way. Behind the ineptitude there are some interesting ideas a good writer could explore further in new Shaver Mythos stories as well.

They Make It Sound So Appealing

Resuming my personal project of reading classic SF from the 1930s – 1950s, I decided to give the oft-discussed Shaver Mysteries a try. I figured that if I’m going to make arch jokes about hell-creatures from the hollow Earth and Nazi flying saucers, I should probably know the source material. This wasn’t what I expected to find:

Armchair fiction presents extra large paperback editions of the best in classic science fiction novels. “The Shaver Mystery,” by Richard S. Shaver, is perhaps the most controversial piece of science fiction ever written. Supposedly a true story, it is widely considered to be the nadir of science fiction literature, the “Plan 9 From Outer Space” of the whole genre. Some people considered Richard Shaver to be a genius, but most others considered him and his editor, Ray Palmer, to be two of the biggest blights to have ever entered the field of professional science fiction writing. Shaver’s wild ramblings are a thing to behold. We have never encountered an author who could write such consistently overlong sentences that appeared to make no sense whatsoever. Genius or nut-case? You decide. Here in Book One, are the first three parts, just as they appeared in the June, 1947 issue of Amazing Stories: “Formula from the Underworld,” “Zigor Mephisto’s Collection of Mentalia,” and “Witch’s Daughter.” Also included in Book One is the mind-boggling, yet essential “How to Read the Shaver Alphabet,” which pertains to Book Two as well. “The Shaver Mystery” is presented in paperback for the first time. Heaven help us.

In other words, Shaver’s writing skill is on the same level as today’s Hugo Award winners. On the plus side, at least he (probably) didn’t write his stories as clumsy vehicles for cockamamie cultural Marxism and cringeworthily intimate unwanted explorations of his personal dysfunctions.

We shall see.