Our last three blog posts were about SF stories which first appeared (in America, at least) in our most pretentious skin rag, Playboy.  I read them in The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, published in 1966 by Playboy Press.  In the comments to the first installment of this three part series, SF fans George, marzaat and I talked a little about Playboy Press's SF line; when I revealed that I own 1970's The Future is Now, edited by William F. Nolan, marzaat expressed dissatisfaction with the volume.  This piqued my interest, and I decided to read the book myself.  Marzaat actually has a review of The Future is Now, but I am going to hold off on reading it until I have read the book's twelve stories and recorded my own thoughts about them over three blog posts.  In the final post, I'll talk about to what extent marzaat and I agree or disagree about the stories.

The Future is Now is not an anthology of stories from Playboy, which is what I thought it was when I bought it.  Rather, it is a collection of all new stories edited by Nolan and published by Sherbourne Press in hardcover in 1970.  The paperback Playboy Press edition I have was put out in 1971 and has a strange and unattractive cover that reminds me of that famous recalled Beatles record sleeve and perhaps is suggesting the stories therein are about overpopulation.  In his intro Nolan talks a little about the history of all-new SF anthologies, and the decline of the SF magazines, suggesting that the future of short form SF lies in books such as The Future is Now and not in magazines.     

"The Ogress" by Robert F. Young

I recognize Young's name, but for some reason I've never read anything by him.  The intro to the story lists Young's influences and the various blue collar jobs he's held over his life.

"The Ogress" is one of those SF stories which explains the scientific facts behind an ancient legend.  (Just recently we read Ray Russell's story about the truth behind the story of the Fall of the Rebel Angels, and last year we got a scientific explanation from Edmond Hamilton for Norse mythology.)  You see, Grendel was real, a "superbeing" created by the collective mental energy of the superstitious local peasantry.  (Yahweh and Zeus, we are told, were also real for a time, until their creators became more sophisticated and ceased to believe in them.)  Unsophisticated people across the galaxy occasionally create such gods and monsters, giant-sized raiders who murder people and destroy property, and to deal with them the institution known as Galactic Guidance sends out expert hunters, the Beowulfs, who are armed with powerful firearms called Dammerungs.  The plot of "The Ogress" follows the hunt of one such superbeing, a female monster, by one such Beowulf.  Interspersed with the account of the hunt for the ogress are flashbacks to earlier hunts.

This is a decent adventure story.   

"Jenny Among the Zeebs" by "Frank Anmar"

I don't recognize Anmar's name, but I have read things by him, because this is a story by Nolan using a pseudonym.  Tricksy!  The title makes me worry it is going to be a dumb parody story.  I don't want to endure another piece of junk like "Gorf! Gorf! Gorf!"

Well, it is not quite a parody, but it is a dumb joke story that pokes fun at rock music and modern art and has the kind of attitude about sex that nowadays would be considered evidence of "rape culture."  The plot is like that of an off-color sitcom with wacky schemes that fail and mistaken identity hi-jinks.

Our narrator, Hoff, is the Earthling PR man for the Red Dogs, a Martian rock group.  (Martians, called "zeebs," can interbreed with Earth humans, but are physically different from us; most importantly for this story, they have four buttocks instead of two.  These are the kinds of jokes Nolan offers us.)  Hoff uses lots of slang, which is a little annoying.

Hoff has launched a PR stunt--one of the four Red Dogs will marry the Earth girl who writes the best application essay.  While this stunt is underway, an artist, a pretty Earth girl, serendipitously shows up and provides Hoff an opportunity for another stunt.  This artist, Jenny, specializes in making plaster casts of people's asses, and she wants to make casts of the Red Dogs' asses; Hoff has the idea of using the casts to produce chairs to sell to the Red Dogs' fans.  The Red Dogs are shy, and only agree to let Jenny make their casts in a darkened bedroom, one at a time.

The main plot of this unfunny and nonsensical story revolves around the fact that in the darkened room one or more people had sex with Jenny, a virgin before she met Hoff and the band, and is now pregnant, and Hoff has to figure out how to deal with this potentially troublesome situation.  It doesn't make any sense that Jenny doesn't know who had sex with her, because she called the bandmembers into the dark room one at a time, and Nolan further cheats us readers by leading us to believe that only the Red Dogs got casts of their asses made, and then later revealing that Hoff and the band's manager also had casts made.  Why would Jenny want casts of the asses of the band's PR guy and their manager? 

Bad.

"Jenny Among the Zeebs" would be republished in two collections of stories by Nolan, 1974's Alien Horizons and 2005's Wild Galaxy.  I see that these collections also include "Gorf! Gorf! Gorf!" under its alias "The Day the Gorf Took Over."  Tricksy!

"Earthcoming" by Richard C. Meredith

I got interested in Richard C. Meredith when Joachim Boaz wrote about his novel We All Died at Breakway Station but I couldn't lay hands on that novel and so instead read the first two of Meredith's three Timeliner books, At the Narrow Passage and No Brother, No Friend.  For some reason I never got to the third one, but tarbandu read all three.  Like Nolan, Meredith has an association with Playboy, Playboy Press having put out an edition of the Timeliner books.  Nolan here tells us interesting little tidbits about Meredith's academic, business and writing careers.

Back cover of my copy

Nolan lists Astounding among Meredith's influences, and "Earthcoming" does have an Astounding feel to it.  There is lots of hard SF talk about orbits and astronomical distances and the chemistry of space drives and so forth, and the story integrates the point of view of a hostile alien seeking to infiltrate the Earth, like what A. E. van Vogt does in the classic "Black Destroyer" (1939) and "Asylum" (1942), both Astounding cover stories.  (I read the original magazine version of "Asylum" today to refresh my memory of it, and was amazed to find a hotel named "Constantine's" figures prominently in it, while Meredith's "Earthcoming" features a planet called "Constantine!"  Coincidence?  Well, the evil aliens in "Asylum" are the "dreegh" and the good aliens the "lennel," while the evil aliens in "Earthcoming" are the "druul" and the good aliens the "luntinasel."  Both stories include cargo ships, van Vogt's captained by a Hanardy and Meredith's captained by a Haledon.  Lots of coincidences, or sign that this is an homage to our favorite Canadian?)

Earth, allied with some friendly aliens, is at war with evil parasitic aliens, the druul.  Meredith's story takes place on a cargo ship bringing valuable fuel from beyond the solar system to Earth for our war fleet.  Unfortunately for us, one of the crew members of the cargo vessel has had his body invaded and taken over by one of the druul, and, if this druul can get to Earth, it can release a hundred spores which will in turn take over a hundred more humans!  In less than a year all of Earth could be under the control of the druul and the human race kaput!  "Earthcoming" is written in the third-person, but our main character is the alien, and we learn all of his inner thoughts and various doubts as he struggles to accomplish his mission and deal with aspects of the personality of the man whose body and mind he has hijacked.  Most of the text, it feels like, is devoted to the technical issues of steering the ship, but Meredith also describes in gory detail the many injuries suffered by the characters.  The story ends when the druul, in the battered body of the human, crash lands on Earth.  As he has touched ground in an uninhabited arctic wasteland and his host body is incapacitated, I think we are supposed to understand that his spores can reach no hosts and thus Earth is safe.

This story is actually pretty good.

"Belles Lettres, 2272" by Norman Corwin

Corwin is a famous and important broadcaster and Hollywood screenwriter of whom I had never heard; it seems he did a lot of work with government entities and the United Nations creating radio programs designed to "build world unity" and that kind of thing.  In the early 1980s he published a best-selling book attacking American culture.

"Belles Lettres, 2272" is a lame joke story.  I feel that Corwin is one of those men who was a giant in his day but will be quickly forgotten, in part because much of his work is in an obsolete medium, so it is perhaps appropriate that much of the humor of this story derives from the idea that people in the future won't remember much about the major figures or artistic productions of our time.  The form of the story is that of a letter written from one computer to another which includes extensive quotes from a third computer (a poem by said computer) and a fourth computer (an analysis of the poem.)  The story includes lots of pictographs or logograms that, I guess, we are to believe are commonly used in the written communication of the 23rd century:


The punchline of the story is the letter writer's complaint about obscurantism.

Only four pages, but still a waste of time.

**********

Well, we've got two duds so far, but also two decent traditional SF adventures full of sinister creatures, high technology and bloodshed.  We'll continue our look at The Future is Now in our next episode!

On the one hand there was a sense of sincerity, of total and complete honesty exuded by the old female Krith, yet, on the other hand, over the years the Kriths had told so many lies, so many lies that had seemed to be totally convincing, I found it hard to credit truth to anything a Krith said without hard objective proof to back it up.

I'm blonde myself, so I think I am permitted to make the requisite "blonde brings an axe to a ray gun fight" joke

My mother, for reasons I cannot fathom, has become a partisan of Thriftbooks.com, and for my birthday got me a gift card usable at their website.  I'd prefer a gift card usable at amazon, because the people at Thriftbooks.com ruin the appearance of the books they sell by affixing to them large stickers which are impossible to remove.  It is similarly impossible to tell this to my mother, who doesn't let one get a word in, and already thinks I am a snob ("Why do you wear those fancy clothes?  Why don't you wear something comfortable like the rest of us, like jeans and a T-shirt?") an ingrate ("We are very disappointed that you aren't using that education we paid so much money for") and a failure ("We thought you were going to be a professor, and now you have that dead end job....")  My whining to her about stickers on the books she bought me is not going to have a positive effect on our relationship.  So I guess that makes me a steady Thriftbooks.com customer.


Anyway, I liked the first volume of Richard C. Meredith's Timeliner Trilogy, At The Narrow Passage, enough that I used my birthday present to buy the rest, as well as Meredith's The Sky is Filled with Ships.  To my disappointment We All Died at Breakaway Station is quite expensive online; I'll have to hope to stumble on a cheap one in real life.

This week I read No Brother, No Friend, the 1979 paperback edition put out by Playboy.  Originally, the novel appeared in 1976 with a very odd, modern art collage cover that reminded me a little of Max Ernst.  The text of the Playboy edition, with a more conventional sex, violence, and aliens cover, is apparently revised in some way.

I was pretty disappointed as I started No Brother, No Friend.  It felt long and slow, with nothing much happening.  Our narrator from At The Narrow Passage, Eric Mathers, is hiding out with a girlfriend on one of the multitudes of alternate Earths, and after just a few pages they get captured by the Krith.  The Krith are one of two advanced nonhuman races competing for dominance of the multiverse, in part by manipulating the more numerous but less sophisticated humans; in the past Mathers has worked in their employ as a mercenary, but in the course of the earlier novel he became disillusioned with them.

The portion of the narrative covering Mathers's captivity includes lots of flashbacks to scenes from At The Narrow Passage and surreal dream sequences when Mathers gets drugged.  The style is irritating, tedious and overwritten, with unnecessarily wordy sentences (a Krith says "I am rather certain that your murder of Kar-hinter will not go unavenged" instead of just "I am certain you will be punished for murdering Kar-hinter" or "I am certain your murder of kar-hnter will be avenged") and odd and distracting metaphors--check out this sentence on page 17:

This one was tall, a full seven feet, built like a wrestler, but with no fat, and he carried an energy pistol exactly like Pall's--big, black, and ugly as patricide and incest.

Maybe this apparent non-sequitur about patricide and incest is supposed to foreshadow the relationship between humanity and the Krith which is revealed in the final third of the novel?

Fortunately around page 60 Mathers escapes to a timeline with a kind of Norse Viking flavor, and the style and pacing of the novel make a turn for the better. In this timeline North America is split up into smallish competing English ("Anglian"), German ("Imperial"), French ("Frankish") and Native ("Skralang") political units, and Mathers falls in with the English, who are allied with the American Indians.

As you may remember, At The Narrow Passage began in a dimension where the Krith were aiding the British, and featured Mathers participating in a British commando raid in France, the object of which was to capture a German aristocrat.  In the Norse world which is the setting for the middle part of No Brother, No Friend the Krith are working against the English, and Mathers participates in an English-American commando raid in Georgia, the object of which is to capture a Krith secret headquarters.  The German aristocrat is back, this time as a leader of the raid and a comrade of Mathers's.  It is nice to see this guy doesn't hold a grudge, even though Mathers not only tried to kidnap him but has been sleeping with his wife.

This middle part of the novel that focuses on the attack is an improvement over the slow and clumsy beginning.  The military and espionage aspects are entertaining, and a new character is introduced who is somewhat interesting, an embittered female spy who acts as a love (or maybe we should say "lust") interest for our narrator.  (She is a lot more interesting than the girlfriend I mentioned.)  The pace is faster, things actually happen, and the writing seems tighter.  I wonder if the first third of the novel got more revision, or less revision, than the rest of the book; this could perhaps account for the differences in style.

The English force falls into a Krith trap, and most of the characters don't live to see the final third of the book.  Mathers survives, of course, and after some shenanigans revolving around him capturing Kriths and Kriths capturing him, back and forth across a variety of dimensions, he ends up in the Krith home dimension.  Here he finds himself before the Krith ruling tribunal, the handful of rare female Krith, who are repulsively obese and wrinkled from age, but also gifted with tremendous psychic powers.  These female rulers explain the crisis facing the universe, hint at the multiverse-shaking importance of Mathers himself, and explain the bizarre origin of the Krith race--they are the descendants of genetically-engineered human beings, created and then abandoned by callous high-tech humans from a particularly advanced timeline.  (Of course, any or all of this could be a lie!)

When I talked about At The Narrow Passage I compared elements of the novel to the work of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein.  Today I am going to compare elements of No Brother, No Friend to the work of A. E. van Vogt and Alfred Bester.  A few times in these first two Timeliner books a shadowy figure appears out of nowhere to aid Mathers.  In the last few chapters of No Brother, No Friend we learn that this figure is Mathers himself, the Mathers of the future, who has attained great psionic power and travelled back in time to help his younger self.  Van Vogt, of course, is known for having characters who develop super mental powers.  (At one point Meredith actually uses the word "supermind," which I thought might be significant.  While the first edition of No Brother, No Friend was published a year before DAW published Van Vogt's Supermind, Supermind is a fix-up of stories that appeared long before, and, of course, the revised edition of No Brother, No Friend appeared two years after Supermind.)  One of the memorable elements of Bester's well-known 1956 novel The Stars My Destination (AKA Tiger! Tiger!) is how the protagonist's future self travels back through time to periodically appear before him in a dramatic and mysterious fashion.

At the end of No Brother, No Friend, Mathers reunites with the (boring) girlfriend from the start of the book, and with the help of shadowy future Mathers they escape the Krith to a presumably safe timeline.  Of course, they hoped they were safe in the timeline that started the book.

The first quarter or so of No Brother, No Friend is weak, but the remainder has some of the strengths that led me to enjoy At The Narrow Passage--the military stuff, and the uncertainty surrounding  the true nature of the universe and which factions deserved the reader's sympathy.  So, a mild recommendation.  I'm definitely curious about what goes on in the third Timeliner volume, Vestiges of Time.

**********

The back pages of No Brother, No Friend advertise other paperbacks produced by Playboy, including a horror novel, The Siblng by Adam Hall, that Robert Bloch says will haunt your dreams, and a series of adventures by Graham Diamond which are apparently about a sexy princess who fights "the creatures of the forest" in a grim far future.

"I have only your word," I said, "and I'm sick and tired of taking other people's word for things.  I'm going to find out for myself."  

I think I bought At The Narrow Passage, Berkley N2730, a 1975 edition of the 1973 novel, over a year ago.  I bought it because I loved the cover painting by Richard Powers.  I like Powers, but often his work seems flat, physically and emotionally. Here was a Powers that had a strong sense of physical depth, and a terrible emotional power: it looked like the landscape that would confront you if you were assigned to explore a planet inhabited by feral vampires or sentenced to Hell by a merciless God. I had no idea who the hell Richard C. Meredith was, and the alternate universe soldier plot described on the back cover didn't particularly interest me, so I just put the book on my shelf and admired the cover occassionaly.

Then, back in June, Joachim Boaz reviewed Meredith's 1969 novel We All Died at Breakaway Station.  He only gave it a middling review, and complained about the book's characterizations and gender politics, but it sounded to me like it had some pretty cool ideas, and, if done well, the kind of bleak tone that would go along with the Powers painting on At The Narrow Passage.  This put At The Narrow Passage onto my radar screen, and I even kept it out of the moving cartons when I packed up my books for storage.  This weekend I finally read the novel.

Revised edition

(Tarbandu wrote about At The Narrow Passage and its sequels in January of 2014, but somehow I didn't make the connection until I had started reading this volume. Maybe because he read a revised edition put out in 1979 with a different cover.)

There are many different "timelines" in the universe, visualized as branches on a two-dimensional tree.  When the universe began there was just the one trunk, but when points of uncertainty are reached, decisive moments when something of consequence may occur (will the Roman Empire embrace Christianity or not?) the line will split into two lines.  By the 20th Century there are a "near infinite" number of lines.  In relation to each other, these lines are described as being to the East or West.  Far to the East of our own line are lines in which the Earth is inhabited by the Krith, an inhuman intelligent species that can't or won't manipulate tools or machines (they don't even wear clothes), but which can travel between the timelines (this is called "skudding") thanks to a special nervous organ.  The Krith become friendly with humans while exploring West, and warn them that in the 40th century or so hostile aliens are going to come to Earth, threatening the extermination of the Krith and human races.  So the Krith, Hari Seldon style, go to many human-inhabited timelines and scientifically predict what courses of history are most likely to produce a unified human civilization with the technological level to defeat the aliens. Then they try to push and prod the human race, more or less secretly, in order to get history to move in that world-peace/high-tech direction.

Our narrator is a human, known in his current timeline as Eric Mathers.  Mathers is a mercenary soldier, paid by the Krith to fight in the wars of various timelines on the side the Krith think more likely to lay the foundations of a civilization that will be able to resist those aliens in 2000 years.  ("Timeliner" mercenaries like Mathers can tip the balance of battles and wars because they bring with them special equipment, like rayguns and biological augmentations that provide them better eyesight and faster reflexes.)  In this timeline he is playing the role of a British Army officer; here the British Empire is in a war of attrition in Europe against the German Empire, a war roughly similar to World War One in our timeline.  Very few natives of this timeline know about the Krith and the timeliners, just people like the King of England and Britain's highest commanders.

Hardcover first edition

In the first 100 pages of the book Mathers is a member of a commando team trying to capture a German aristocrat who is in charge of an effort to develop atomic weapons.  Things go wrong and Mathers gets captured by mysterious allies of the Germans who turn out to be timeliners (they call themselves "Paratimers") from the West side of the Temporal Spectrum, lines the Krith have not yet visited.  These people claim the future alien invasion is a Krith fabrication, and that the Krith are manipulating people like Mathers and the British of this timeline for their own unknown purposes.

Mathers spends the middle third of the book as a prisoner in a secret underground city in Florida, where American revolutionaries are plotting to overthrow the British Empire (which in this timeline still rules all English-speaking parts of North America.)  The Paratimers try to get Mathers to switch sides.  This section of the book reminded me of bits and pieces from Robert Heinlein's work (Mathers has sex with lots of women, reminding me of parts of Glory Road, and witnesses pro-independence political meetings, like those portrayed in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Between Planets and Red Planet) and from George Orwell's 1984 (Mathers reads books purporting to be the true history of mankind's relationship with the Krith, like how Winston Smith reads The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.)  Unlike Heinlein and Orwell, however, Meredith doesn't discuss any kind of political philosophy or seem to have any particular political axe to grind. (Tarbandu suggests that he gets philosophical later, in the sequels.)

Meredith's treatment of minorities and women also reminded me of Heinlein's; there are non-whites and women in leadership positions, Mathers specifically condemns racial prejudice, and there are inter-racial sexual relationships--Mathers, who is white, thinks a black woman is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.  It is also made clear that there are timelines in which sub-Saharan Africans developed modern industrial civilizations and colonized Europe instead of the other way around.

(While I'm talking about possible connections to other works, I should note that Meredith's dedication to this book, and tarbandu's discussion of the series, make clear that Meredith owes a lot of this timeline business to H. Beam Piper, but that I personally haven't read any of Piper's own work in this vein.)

Mathers escapes from the secret base and in the final seventy or so pages of the 250-page novel tries to figure out the truth behind both the Krith and the Paratimers.  He learns that both of these groups have been lying to and manipulating humanity--the alien invasion scare is a hoax, while the Paratimers' leaders are ruthless inhuman killers in disguise.  After a climactic ray guns and machine guns blazing confrontation in a desolate timeline where the Earth has been sterilized by Paratimer nuclear weapons, Mathers escapes both his Krith masters and the blue-skinned Paratimers. Safe in our own timeline, Mathers resolves to do something to protect humankind from these two sinister groups.  What the inhumans are ultimately up to, and what Mathers can do about it, I guess we learn in the sequels.

At The Narrow Passage seems to be designed to appeal to history buffs, particularly military history buffs.  There is a lot of talk about firearms and lots of long expository passages in which one character or another describes how his or her timeline got to be how it is.  (For example, in the timeline in which most of the book takes place the British were able to quash the American Revolution in the 1770s and make France a British satellite during the 1790s Revolutionary crisis there thanks to widespread adoption by the British Army of the Ferguson rifle.)  On the intellectual history side, the guy who is credited with figuring out the Krith are lying about the aliens and writing one of the Paratimer propaganda books is an analogue of Martin Luther named Martin Latham, while many of the Paratimers come from a timeline in which the Cathars came to dominate Europe.

There are lots of action and battle sequences: firefights, ambushes, artillery and aerial bombardments, burning towns and so forth.  As we almost always see in these adventure stories, plenty of people get captured and plenty of people escape capture--sometimes I feel like every book I read has multiple scenes in which people get tied up and at least one scene in which somebody gets knocked out with a blow to the head, only to wake up just fine a few hours later.  There is also a strong lascivious element to the book: Mathers meets lots of beautiful women and we receive descriptions of all their breast sizes; the topic of rape comes up several times; and it is normal for characters of both sexes to be naked, because they come from nudist societies or because they have been caught in dishabille during a sneak attack or because somebody needs to use their clothes as makeshift bonds to tie somebody up.

I like sex and violence as much as the next guy, and Meredith handles that material well enough, and all the science fiction stuff, while not believable, is adequately explained for an adventure caper.  And I'm a history buff myself, so all the references to Ferguson rifles and Albigensians were interesting.  On the negative side, the characterizations are pretty thin, and the book feels a little long and slow.

The best thing Meredith does is keep you in the dark as to whether you are supposed to sympathize with the Krith and the British or the Paratimers and the rebellious Americans; both sides put forward arguments that don't hold water, and both count among their members some admirable figures and some creepy suspicious figures. This is more interesting than those stories in which one side is racist or exploiting the environment and so you know right away they are the villains, and have to trudge through half the story to the "surprise" of the main character switching sides to join the multicultural tree-hugging side.  Meredith kept me guessing and wondering through the entire novel.

I enjoyed At The Narrow Passage enough that I plan to read the sequels; I am genuinely curious as to where Meredith is going to go with these ideas.  So call this one a positive review!  It is not for everybody, but it does what it sets out to do creditably.