Ace Doubles by Eric Brown

Brown writes human-oriented science fiction

Ace Doubles is a short novel (or novella) about a middle-aged science fiction writer named Ed Bently whose career has stalled out. After delivering the bad news to Ed that his current editor at the publishing house of Worley and Greenwood has not only rejected his latest manuscript but gone so far as to sever their relationship, Ed's agent tells him not to worry because he's already lined up a lucrative job that he can knock out in no time. Ed's first thought is that it's probably a Doctor Who novel but then quickly realizes he doesn't have the connections to get picked for a job like that. Instead, it turns out that a YouTube superstar named Tuppy Cotton wants to write a science fiction novel and has asked her publisher if Ed can be persuaded to "help" her with it. Her previous novel, ghost written by a horror novelist, earned huge profits for the publisher. The payday for Ed, if he accepts the assignment, is a flat fee of "thirty grand." Dollars or pounds isn't clear, but either way it's more than Ed earned on his last several duds. Going against his better instincts, he accepts because he badly needs the money to pay off debts.

Before going any further with the plot synopsis, I'd like to talk about the title because it's that (and not the bland cover art) that persuaded me to pick up the book. In 1952, Ace Books published its first "double" title, a pair of mysteries, Too Hot for Hell backed with The Grinning Gizmo. Ace published the books in a format called tête-bêche (head-to-toe), where two novels are bound together, one rotated 180 degrees from the other so that there are two front covers. The publisher logo read, rather clumsily, "Ace Double Novel Books," but they were known to fans simply as "Ace Doubles." Ace published mysteries and westerns, along with other genres, in the double format; but the science fiction doubles were the most popular and soon came to dominate the line.

In the novel, Ed Bentley is approaching sixty. He thinks back nostalgically about the Ace Doubles he discovered in used bookstores as a teenager, which caused him to fall in love with science fiction in the first place. A list of Bentley's novels have titles that are so similar to the titles of Brown's books that the autobiographical elements are unmistakable. When Bentley reminisces about Ace Double authors such as E.C. Tubb, Philip E. High, and Robert Silverberg, there can be little doubt that these are favorites of Brown's. Bentley's favorite author, George Lattimer, is fictional, but one wonders if Brown had a specific author from that period in mind as the model.

Ed's worst fears about what a YouTube star might be like prove to be unfounded. Tuppence Cotton (Tuppy to her fans, Penny to her friends) is smart, personable, and talented. While she's no writer, her draft for the novel contains good, workable ideas, and she's modest enough to happily accept Ed's changes and additions. As he settles into the mansion she owns, the two of them develop a productive and happy working relationship. To Ed's astonishment, he learns that the home Penny owns once belonged to George Lattimer. It's a coincidence that would strain credulity, except for the fact that it's not a coincidence, as we come to learn.

As short as the novel is (114 pages), it's built on character and develops at a leisurely pace. Much of Ed's journey is a reckoning with and acceptance of loss as he teaches others to deal with it, too. And, as much as Ed is a hard-headed realist, he will also have to confront something inexplicable and science fictional before the novel ends. The story that he hears from the aged and dying George Lattimer feels very much like a call back to Brown's 2011 novel, The Kings of Eternity, which I highly recommend. (In fact, you should go read that one first.) Ace Doubles is a light, quick read that reveals the appropriately double meaning of its title at the end.

Chocky by John Wyndham

 

Wyndham's full name, John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris,
gave him lots of fodder for pseudonyms

Historians of science fiction often speak of the years 1939–1942 as "the golden age." But it was more like a false dawn. The real golden age arrived a decade later, and—what is not always true of golden ages—we knew what it was while it was happening.

--Robert Silverberg

When I first ran across that statement by Silverberg a few years ago, I instantly concurred. While the roots of the science fiction I love were in the 1930s and 40s, the real flowering of the genre came in the 1950s. One of the best writers of that period was John Wyndham, whose works include The Day of the Triffids (1951), The Kraken Wakes (1953), The Chrysalids (1955), and The Midwich Cuckoos, aka The Village of the Damned (1957). Wyndham had written earlier novels in the 1930s and 40s, under different pseudonyms, but they haven't stood the test of time like his output of the 1950s and 60s.

Review

Chocky came out in 1968 and was the last of Wyndham's novels to be published during his lifetime. The story is told from the point of view of David Gore, who is married to Mary. They have two children, Matthew and Polly. At the outset, the younger of the children, Polly, has an imaginary friend she calls Piff. Polly's antics involving the invisible Piff are annoying to everyone else in the family, but, eventually, to everyone's relief, she forgets her imaginary friend and moves on. David and Mary are, therefore, very unhappy when their older child, Matthew, begins to exhibit signs of having an imaginary friend of his own. For one thing, at twelve he's too old for that sort of thing, and, for another, his imaginary friend Chocky causes Matthew a great deal of consternation. Chocky is always asking perplexing questions that no one can answer and expressing opinions that go against Matthew's own.

Eventually David seeks advice from an old college friend named Alan who is now a psychiatrist. But, after meeting Matthew and spending time with him, Alan isn't so sure Chocky is imaginary. Chocky says things that Alan doesn't think Matthew could have thought of himself. In going over his assessment with Matthew's parents, Alan makes the mistake of comparing it to the old-fashioned idea of being "possessed." He later retreats from that word because Chocky doesn't seem to be controlling Matthew in any way, but Mary is so disturbed by the notion that she wants nothing more to do with Alan.

As time goes on, however, Matthew learns to let his mind go blank and allow Chocky to take control of him. S/he teaches him how s/he sees the world and in the process teaches him how to draw and paint. His art teacher is so amazed by this efflorescence of a hitherto unseen talent that she asks Matthew for one his drawings. On another occasion, an accident occurs and Matthew and his little sister are swept into a fast-flowing river. Chocky takes control of Matthew, who can't swim, instantly teaching him to swim and having him hold his sister's head above water until they can be rescued.

By the way, I'm using the construction "s/he" because, in exchanges with Matthew, the entity makes it clear that gender is unknown where s/he comes from. For convenience, though, David and Matthew eventually settle on referring to Chocky as she/her because to Matthew she seems more feminine than masculine. (In 1968, non-binary pronouns weren't really a thing.)

David also begins to think Chocky might somehow be real, but Mary clings to the belief that s/he is merely a product of Matthew's mind. Alan comes back to David with the suggestion that they take Matthew to a renowned psychiatrist he knows, Sir William Thorpe, who has recently been appointed to a high government position because he is so highly regarded. With persuasion from Alan, Thorpe agrees to see Matthew. When Matthew later describes the experience to his parents, it's obvious to them that Thorpe hypnotized Matthew during the session, which they find disturbing. But they have to wait for his report. When it comes, David is disappointed because Thorpe dismisses all of Matthew's experiences as common manifestations of typical psychological issues that boys go through -- which is obviously ridiculous -- and assures them that Chocky will fade away soon enough.

And, indeed, shortly thereafter Chocky does leave Matthew, which saddens him. He had grown used to sharing thoughts and understanding with Chocky. Though they are concerned about his depressed state of mind, his parents hope this is the beginning of a return to normalcy. Nothing is going back to normal anytime soon, though, because Matthew is kidnapped after school one day. The only clue to the kidnapping is that a boy from school saw Matthew getting into a car with a man.

Weeks later, Matthew finds himself in another town and goes looking for a policeman to get help. The police question Matthew, examine him medically (finding that he has received many injections), and return him to his parents. He explains why he got into the car with the man (who said he was looking for the Gore house), and tells how the next thing he remembers is waking up in a hospital with a cast on his leg and that the doctors and nurses explained he'd been in a car accident and that it was broken. Everyone was nice to him and said they were using a new technique that would heal his leg quickly. In a couple of weeks, the cast was off and he was ready to go home. Then he woke up in an abandoned car in a strange town.

The implications become obvious: Thorpe understood he was dealing with an alien entity and agents of the government kidnapped Matthew to inject him with drugs and extract all the information they could. Seeing how badly things were going wrong, Chocky had left Matthew. But, late one night, s/he returned a final time to fully explain her mission. I believe the book would have been better without the last couple of chapters. Readers had enough to fill in the blanks, and going through it all methodically to make everything explicit robbed it of some of the narrative pathos and wonder it had built up.

That said, Wyndham had a delightful way of unspooling the story, making everything feel homey and familiar while slowly introducing elements of strangeness. The imaginary friend that turns out to be real is a staple of horror stories, but Wyndham never ventures in that direction with this story. He is more interested in provoking questions and contemplation. He suggests that progress is made by actually looking at the things you think you already know and questioning your assumptions. Toward the end, Chocky explains that s/he reaches across the void to other minds because "intelligent life is the only thing that gives meaning to the universe." I'll buy tha

The Loop by Jeremy Robert Johnson

 

Did this Robert Johnson meet the Devil at a crossroads? 

I hate marketing copy that says a book is like x crossed with y. It's lazy and it's rarely accurate. Mostly, the marketing department is looking for an easy way to grab onto the coattails of what is popular at the moment. Right, so... I'm going to make one of those comparisons in this review, anyway. 

Review

In the early pages of The Loop, a high school student begins having some sort of seizure in class. He suddenly becomes hyperviolent and, before first-responders to the scene shoot him, viciously murders one of his teachers in front of everyone. This happens near the end of the school year. Rather than try to bring students back to school after the traumatic event, the district cancels classes for the rest of the year, and graduating seniors will be mailed their diplomas rather than receiving them in a ceremony. As a result, a number of students in this small, central Oregon town decide to have an end-of-school party one night at some caves in the nearby mountains.

In the wake of the killings, the son of one of the more prominent families has gone missing. While the authorities are searching for him fruitlessly, he is holed up in one of the caves where the party is going to take place. Whatever was wrong with that other student is wrong with him, too, and he plans to share. Before the party night is over, a plague of violence will be unleashed on the town. Only a small group of students who managed to escape the infection will remain to stand in the way of the others.

The blurbs for the book inevitably invoke Stranger Things, but that's a misleading comparison. It's not a book about kids on bikes fighting otherworldly creatures. The more apt comparison -- one I think the author himself made -- would be Dazed and Confused crossed with 28 Days Later. The students are slackers, druggies, jocks, and all the other social gradations to be found in a high school. In an interview, Johnson said he was inspired by the social dynamics of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, with its the rich kids versus "greasers," to attempt something similar in a more up-to-date context. The main protagonists, Lucy and Bucket, are perhaps the ultimate outsiders: an adopted Peruvian orphan and a child of Pakistani immigrants. They both have to navigate not only the tensions caused by their racial heritages in a mostly white rural town but also the pressures of a town where the disparity between rich and poor is stark.

While the setup and the inspiration may be Young Adult, the novel doesn't stay in that lane. By the second half it has veered into something closer to what David Schow called "splatterpunk." The high school kids have the homicidal energy of the infected in Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later or either version of The Crazies, and the author isn't shy about describing the mayhem in vivid detail. While tourism may be the town's main industry, its most prominent employer is a biotech firm called IMTECH. And it is, of course, an IMTECH experiment gone wrong that has unleashed biomechanical parasites engineered from alien octopus tissue and an Internet-based hive mind on the unsuspecting denizens of Turner Falls.

The Loop starts slow, taking time to build out its young protagonists as believable characters, and then it kicks into overdrive with a fast-paced narrative style that invites you to quickly rush through to the end. To the author's credit, he follows the logic of the book's premise to its bitterly inevitable outcome. Honestly, it's fine, but there's nothing new here. My only complaint is that there aren't enough new ideas or narrative-shifting twists to warrant the novel's 300-page length. I'd give it an extra star if it were a hundred pages shorter. 

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

I first read Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama around 1974, about a year after it came out, while I was still in college. I enjoyed it, but my interest in Clarke was beginning to fade a bit by that time. As a kid and a teenager I'd loved his short stories and the cosmic novels like The City and the Stars and Childhood's End to the point that Clarke's work pretty well embodied what I thought science fiction ought to be. His novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, which came out of a collaboration with Stanley Kubrick based on an old short story called "The Sentinel" (1948), was published at the end of the 60s and was his last novel before this one. Each of them featured what has come to be known in science fiction circles as a Big Dumb Object (i.e., the monolith in 2001 and the cylinder in Rama). The term, which was invented by a sf fan/critic and is meant to be a bit derogatory, refers to huge, inexplicable devices created by alien technologies at which humans can only marvel.

Having heard that Denis Villeneuve is planning to adapt the novel into a movie, I decided to reread it.

Review

Sometime in the not-too-distant future, a cylindrical object passes through the solar system. At first assumed to be an asteroid, which they name Rama, astronomers soon come to realize it is actually a constructed artifact -- a spaceship perhaps, or a probe -- that is 12 miles wide and more than 30 miles long. (There is no doubt in my mind that the speculation surrounding ‘Oumuamua as it passed through the solar system in 2017 was in part sparked by this book.) In the Clarkean near-future of the novel, humans have already built colonies on the moon and nearby planets, so they have the ability to send a manned expedition out to rendezvous with Rama and examine it up close. 

The explorers manage to find a point of entry into Rama and discover that it is cold and dark and apparently dead inside. It does have a breathable atmosphere though, and, because of its spin, it has gravity along the outer surfaces of the interior. As the object nears the sun, it begins to heat up and come to life inside. Gigantic lights illuminate the interior, a body of water that forms a ring around the midpoint begins to melt, and weather patterns develop inside the enormous habitat.

Lifelike entities emerge and begin to perform tasks, paying no attention to the human visitors. The entities appear to be an amalgam of biological and mechanical components, and the human visitors can't decide whether these are actual Ramans or merely the programmed servants of the Ramans. As Rama gets nearer the sun, the visitors have only a short time to explore as much as possible before they must abandon it. As they explore, making ever more puzzling discoveries, some of the massive processes that happen inside Rama get dangerous.

This is the kind of science fiction adventure at which Clarke excelled. There are no villains or monsters to contend with -- there are only the powerful dynamics of physics and the inscrutable ways of alien intelligences far beyond our own. After all, it was Clarke who famously predicted that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." The ultimate goal of the novel is to provoke a sense of wonder at the possibilities that may await us "out there." Inevitably, it feels a bit dated nearly fifty years later, but for someone approaching it with the right frame of mind, I think it would still serve that purpose well enough today.

2001: A Space Odyssey did pretty much the same thing. Reviewers of the movie often described it as more of a "trip" than a movie because, instead of the usual Hollywood plot devices, character development, and conflicts, 2001 offered audiences a thought experiment on human evolution and cosmic destiny. If he handles the material right, Villeneuve may be able to do something similar for 21st century audiences. Will it fly today? Only time will tell.

The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis

 

The author of The Queen's Gambit considering his next move.

Walter Tevis’ The Man Who Fell to Earth is about an alien who comes to Earth from the planet Anthea, which sounds a lot like Ray Bradbury’s Mars – an ancient, depleted world that is home to a dying race. The alien, who calls himself Thomas Newton, tells us there are only about 300 Antheans left and that the tiny spaceship he came in was 500 years old. Their world didn’t have enough fuel remaining to allow them to send more than one.

Review

Science fiction is never about the future; it’s about the present in which it is written. It’s important to keep that in mind when reading old science fiction stories. The Man Who Fell to Earth was written in the early 60s, so its depictions of subsequent decades are merely projections of the technologies and cultural trends of the 60s. And Tevis isn’t really interested in trying to imagine the world of the 80s and 90s anyway. He is, instead, far more interested in using his extraterrestrial character to explore the feelings of alienation and existential despair shared by many in the culture of his time.

While the Antheans are different in appearance from humans, they aren’t so different that Thomas Newton can’t disguise himself to pass as human. Eventually, he earns some money and hires an attorney to secure patents for his “inventions.” In truth, Newton invents nothing; he simply adapts existing Anthean technologies. These inventions make Newton rich, which in turn allows him to establish a base of operations for his real goal.  

I wasn’t a fan of the 1976 Nicholas Roeg film, in which Newton’s goal is to transport water to Mars. His motivations in Tevis’ novel are far more complex and interesting. This is a bit of a spoiler, so you may want to skip the rest of this paragraph if that sort of thing bothers you. Newton’s goal is to use Earth’s resources to build an interplanetary ferry that will bring more Antheans to Earth. By disguising themselves, the Antheans will fit into Earth societies, as Newton has done, so that they can eventually gain control of terrestrial governments and militaries. Ultimately, they plan to do two things: save us from ourselves and establish a new homeland (and a future) for themselves.

Tevis wrestled with alcoholism, and so too does his alien. Perhaps the genius of this novel is that it doesn’t depict the sort of extraterrestrial invader that we’re used to, i.e., one that proceeds with superhuman efficiency and determination. Rather, Newton is beset by emotional as well as physical frailties. He suffers from self-doubt, he broods in alcoholic despair, he makes mistakes. And, one more spoiler, he fails. Completely.

So, no, this isn’t a rollicking sci-fi adventure. It might be more accurate to describe it as something more like a Raymond Carver story by way of Kurt Vonnegut (but not as fun as the latter). Tevis didn’t describe any future that came to pass, but his description of the heart in conflict with itself remains pretty true.