Conference noted::sf

1195.0. "Gerrold/Kuttner/Brackett/Petaja" by VERGA::KLAES (Quo vadimus?) Tue Nov 23 1993 08:27

Article: 442
From: [email protected] (Dani Zweig)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews
Subject: REPOST: Belated Reviews PS#28: Gerrold/Kuttner/Brackett/Petaja
Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services (408-241-9760 login: guest)
Date: 22 Nov 93 14:25:45 GMT
 
    Belated Reviews PS#28: Short Takes: Gerrold/Kuttner/Brackett/Petaja
 
I've been using the term "one-book authors" to refer to authors who made
one splash -- however many other mediocre books they may have written.
These ain't them.  There are various reasons I don't want to spend time on
the other works of the authors in this review (eg, Gerrold's are too
recent and too well known, and Petaja, by this taxonomy, is more of a
no-book author), but the shortage of other works is not one of those reasons.
 
David Gerrold is my token modern author in this review.  He currently owes
most of his visibility to his ongoing "War Against the Chtorr" series.
('Ongoing' may not be the word I'm looking for, except in the Looking
Glass sense that the more you go on, the further you are from the end.)
"The Man Who Folded Himself" (****-), however, remains his most interesting
book.  Its main virtue is that of cleverness -- but it's *very* clever.
The basic premises are those of Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" and, more,
his "All You Zombies", but Gerrold uses the novel length of his book to
really put the premise through its paces. 
 
The logical extension of using a time machine to go back and talk to your
past self is "why stop there?"  Why not go back every time you want to
change your mind about a past decision, for instance?  Why not go back to
three evenings when you had nothing to do and ask your selves if they want
to play bridge?  Why not kill Alexander the Great as a child -- just to
see what would happen -- and then, if you don't like the results, go back
and tell your former self that it's not a good idea?  Gerrold takes this
about as far as it can go.  One of the interesting things, by the end of
the book, is to realize just how few characters the book really had.  "The
Man Who Folded Himself" is 'idea' fiction.  (Readers who enjoy this book
will probably enjoy "When Harlie Was One" (***+) -- an interesting look
at the creation of a sentient computer -- as well.)
 
As I remarked in an earlier review, distinguishing between Henry Kuttner's
work and that of C.L. Moore can be a somewhat arbitrary exercise.  Still,
if you're looking for a book with Kuttner's name on the cover, it helps to
look under 'K', rather than 'M', so I might as well be arbitrary.  As I've
also remarked before, the sf/f of the forties and fifties was primarily
one of short stories, rather than novels.  (I'm worried that in slighting
the former I may be giving the impression that the novels are the "good
stuff" from that period.  That's not an impression I wish to give.)  With
those disclaimers out of the way, I'll get to my favorite Kuttner novel,
"The Dark World" (***).
 
I'm not sure why this should be my favorite.  It's not very good, by today's
standards.  To a large extent, though, that's because what it does in a
hundred-odd pages has, in the half-century since, been redone to death in
so many three-hundred-page novels and eight-hundred-page trilogies that
it's retroactively banal.  Edward Bond is an American who is summoned to a
parallel world -- one in which the supernatural dominates.  The summoning
has the effect of putting him in the place of Ganelon -- his evil Dark
World doppleganger, a member of the Coven which rules that world.  You can
fill in most of the blanks because they've been reused so often since:
Pick one from column A (Celtic names, and an Arthurian tie-in), one from
column B (a thin scientific patina, with what appears to be magic being 
explained as an effect of arcane science), one from column C (vampires and 
werewolves), etc.  Now *forget* all those columns, pretend that you haven't 
read all those followup pretenders, and imagine that the story is as fresh 
as it actually was when it was written.  It's *still* not very good by today's
standards, but it's one of the best instances of pulp-style fantasy, and
fun to read as such.  (A better Kuttner novel, though one I enjoyed less, is
"Fury" (***), which has one of the great closing lines in science fiction.)
 
Leigh Brackett was also writing in the forties and fifties, and many of
the same comments apply.  Her writing tended to owe more than Kuttner's to
the pulp tradition, though, with mighty-thewed (albeit relatively bright)
heroes adventuring their way across Mars or Venus or (when that became too
embarrassing) other solar systems.  The best of these is "The Sword of
Rhiannon" (***-) -- a novel which owes nothing to Welsh myth but the name --
the adventure of an Earthman fighting his way across the seas of Mars.
 
"The Long Tomorrow" (***) is her conspicuous break from adventure sf/f,
and it's a pity there weren't more of them.  It's a post-holocaust novel:
Science is blamed for the Destruction, and steps have been taken to suppress
it.  Society has reverted to a pioneer-era level of technology, with law and
religion joining to make sure it stays there.  There's talk that a hidden
city of scientists, called Bartorstown, still exists, but that's religious 
hysteria talking, not something to be taken literally.  Until Len Coulter 
and his cousin Esau find a radio.  It doesn't work, but it does get them 
thinking along inappropriate lines which eventually lead them to the real 
Bartorstown.
 
What makes this book work is its lack of easy answers, black-and-white
dichotomies, and pat technophilic solutions to difficult questions.  The
future it paints is not one in which fanatical ignorance confronts science
and progress, but one in which mostly-decent people live with a legacy of
fear.  (Granted, fear and the occasional less-than-decent rabble rouser
can make an ugly combination.)  And Bartorstown itself is not so much an
answer as a question:  *Can* the scientific genie be controlled?  The
novel is a product of the fifties, a time when public fears of nuclear
warfare frequently found their expression in science fiction, but it's one
of the better expressions and explorations of that fear. 
 
	No city, no town, no community of more than one thousand
	people or two hundred buildings to the square mile shall
	be built or permitted to exist anywhere in the United
	States of America.

		--Constitution of the United States, Thirtieth Ammendment
 
Most of Emil Petaja's science fiction was written in the sixties, fairly
late in his career.  It tended to run the gammut from uninspired to
adequate.  Of particular interest, however, is a series of sf novels based
upon the Kalevala -- a mythos which has inspired surprisingly little sf/f
in the English language.  Well, maybe not surprising:  The Finnish epic is
less dramatic and less melodramatic than the more popular Norse or Greek
or Celtic sources, and plays itself out upon a much smaller stage.
 
Each of the novels in Petaja's series focuses upon a modern (future)
avatar of one of the major characters of the Kalevala.  The hero of "Saga
of Lost Earths" (**-) corresponds to Lemminkainen (hero, lover, rogue,
a bit of a buffoon).  That of "The Star Mill" (**-) corresponds to 
Ilmarinen, the smith.  The hero of "The Stolen Sun" (**-) corresponds to 
Vainomoinen, who might best be characterized as a sorcerer.  Each book 
places a man from the dystopian Earth of the future in conflict with 
forces believed to belong to Finnish myth.  The books are not very good:
Elements of the Kalevala are reinterpreted in terms of science-fictional 
cliches.  "Tramontane" (**+), the last in the series, is somewhat better, 
not least because its protagonist is Kullervo -- the ill-omened jinx who 
didn't have the grace to drown at birth -- a character who doesn't lend 
himself to cliche.
 
None of the books in this series particularly depends on any of the
others, so there's no need to read them in order.  Insofar as their
overall quality is concerned, there's no real need to read them at all, I
suppose, but they're interesting as a window on the Kalevala -- an epic
unfamiliar to most readers.  (Or you could simply go to the library and
borrow a copy of the Kalevala.  It repays reading.)
 
%A  Gerrold, David
%T  The Man Who Folded Himself
 
%A  Kuttner, Henry
%T  The Dark World
 
%A  Brackett, Leigh
%T  The Long Tomorrow
 
%A  Petaja, Emil
%T  Saga of Lost Earths
%T  The Star Mill
%T  The Stolen Sun
%T  Tramontane
 
=============================================================================
 
The postscripts to Belated Reviews cover authors of earlier decades who
didn't fit into the original format -- whether because the author seemed
an inappropriate subject, or because I was unfamiliar with too much of the
author's work, or whatever -- or sometimes just isolated works of such
authors.  The emphasis will continue to be on guiding newer readers
towards books or authors worth trying out, rather than on discussing them
comprehensively or in depth.  I'll retain the rating scheme of ****
(recommended), *** (an old favorite that hasn't aged well), ** (a solid
lesser work), and * (nothing special). 
 
-----
Dani Zweig
[email protected]
 
Roses red and violets blew
  and all the sweetest flowres that in the forrest grew -- Edmund Spenser

    re:  -1
    
    Couldn't you tell us that greatest closing line in sf?