"The Beast" by A.E. van Vogt

Offers the story of a flawed hero possessing almost superhuman strength. When his wife is kidnapped, war veteran Jim Pendrake embarks upon a search that takes him to a lost colony on the moon--and a secret, sinister society. Originally published in Astounding Science Fiction.

If I say too much about the plot of The Beast it will sound ridiculous. Maybe it is. Suffice it to say there are underground Nazis involved in a nefarious conspiracy, immortal polygamous cowboys, an interplanetary matter transporter, a million year old genius Neanderthal named "Big Oaf", and that most of it takes place within millennia old caverns created by an extinct alien civilization on the moon. With all of that and more van Vogt manages to harness his extravagant imagination and inimitable style to tell an amazing adventure story full of action and intrigue, and at breakneck speed. Oh, and there's a saber tooth tiger.

Seriously, what other author, then or since has so consistently and unabashedly unleashed his/her imagination to such an extent? van Vogt straps a rocket to his imagination, which either explodes after launch or takes you all the way to the moon and beyond. (GoodReads)

"Four For Tomorrow" by Roger Zelazny

Four for Tomorrow is the first story collection by Roger Zelazny, published in paperback by Ace Books in 1967. British hardcover and paperback editions followed in 1969, under the title A Rose for Ecclesiastes. The first American hardcover was issued in the Garland Library of Science Fiction in 1975.

Though the novellas in this collection appear in numerous subsequent collections (in fact the entire contents of this book are included in the 2001 collection The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth), this particular compendium stayed in print off and on for about 15 years. There’s great reading here, gang. Some readers today might find Zelazny’s often-florid prose stylings off-putting and pretentious — and they are at times, I’ll admit — but most of the time his work brought a rare beauty into the genre, as the saying goes, often imitated but never duplicated. There’s an introduction by Theodore Sturgeon to boot. The presence of both these late greats under one cover really brings it home what SF has lost. For absent friends, everyone...

THE FURIES ★★★★★

Spectacular tragic fable about a rebellious space captain pursued throughout the galaxy by three determined assassins with unique paranormal abilities. Often exquisitely clear storytelling, and Zelazny’s trademark fast pacing and sharp eye for making sympathetic and real characters even out of pure archetypes, carry this one right across the finish line. Funny and heart-wrenching in equal measure, its most impressive quality is the way Zelazny seems to have dashed it off so damn easily!

THE GRAVEYARD HEART ★★★★★

A brilliant engineer and ambitious social climber wangles himself acceptance into the Party Set, a clique of aristocrats who spend most of their lives in cold sleep, awakening only for days at a time to throw massive celebrations, and greatly extending their lifespans while decades go by in the outside world around them. Starts off as a rather amusing satire of the emptiness of wealth, high society and its “see-and-be-seen” ethos. Then it gradually morphs into something much deeper, as Zelazny examines the ramifications of how one fills the gap between who they really are and who they think they want to be, and how the very question of what is meaningful in life might be altered, or not, by such choices. Are those we envy the most really the most enviable? Poetic, dreamlike; a work of quiet profundity, utterly unique in SF.

THE DOORS OF HIS FACE, THE LAMPS OF HIS MOUTH ★★★★

Once there was a time when people thought Venus might hold tropical forests and vast oceans, and numerous SF tales embraced the concept (q.v. Poul Anderson's “Sister Planet”). This story is one of the more entertaining ones, winning a Nebula the first year they were given out. A thriving fishing industry on Venus lures the rich daughter of a cosmetics empire, and she hires her ex, now working as a “baitman,” to help her catch a leviathan-like creature that almost killed him the last time he went out after it. The story admirably skirts clichés involving whether they’ll reunite as a couple — indeed, Zelazny maintains a refreshingly cynical tone concerning their relationship — and he also goes out of his way not to make the giant fish a transparent metaphor for any great obstacle. (In other words, it’s not an SF pastiche on Moby-Dick.) But it’s a story rooted in character nonetheless, dealing with one’s need to set one’s own challenges and meet them. Fast-paced, too, and the setting is well-realized. The title is a reference to the description of Leviathan in chapter 41 of the Book of Job.

A ROSE FOR ECCLESIASTES ★★½

I don’t know that I can say honestly that this Hugo-nominated 1963 story has aged terribly well after all these years, and that’s not just because no one writes stories about intelligent humanoid civilizations on Mars any more. The story — about a poet laureate who saves the moribund Martian race from its own folly and gets a Martian girl pregnant into the bargain — still has the potential to be emotionally affecting, but Zelazny’s writing, with its nonstop literary allusions and poetic indulgences, comes off as extremely precious and pretentious to a contemporary sensibility. In other words, I liked the story, but didn’t care for its execution. Nevertheless, I can see how it would have made an impact in its day, even if Theodore Sturgeon waxes a bit hyperbolic in calling it “one of the most beautifully written, skillfully composed and passionately expressed works of art to appear anywhere, ever.”  (Thomas M. Wagner, SFF180)

"Monsters" by A.E. van Vogt

van Vogt proved that each monster can be just as weird and frightening as the last. Indeed, he continues his fine "space monster" tradition in this collection, where, again, each proceeding monster is as original and well thought as the last. I was expecting some cheesy storylines as one would often find from 1940s sci-fi thrasher movies, but van Vogt surprised me when he took a mature stab at all these stories. A fine collection!

The stories are all written around 1945, with 1939 ("The Sea Thing") being the earliest and 1950 ("War of Nerves" and "Enchanted Village") being the latest. Your initial suspicions would rest on generically scary squid- or ant-based aliens with slimy skins and evil intentions. Guess again.

Monsters (1965) was later republished as The Blal (1976) with exactly the same stories in exactly the same order. The only difference is The Blal's addition of giving each monster its own classification through a "genre." For the sake of cinematic drama, I've also included the genre of each monster to give it that special B-Grade sci-fi quality.

[Space Monster] Not Only Dead Men (1942, shortstory) - 4/5 - Frog-like, benevolent race of aliens coyly renders the human whalers assistive in the hunt for the great galactic space monster hidden in earth's oceans. 28 pages

[Robot Monster] Final Command (1949, shortstory) - 3/5 - Robots assisting humans in their lives prove to be equal in humanity to the humans themselves; if only they could be aware of the fact and find the means to meet that equality. 29 pages

[Avianoid Monster] War of Nerves (1950, novelette) - 4/5 - Grosvenor of the Space Beagle is back to psychically manhandle the bully avian monsters light years away with the assistance of the ship's gear and his specialty in Nexialism. 29 pages

[Martian Monster] Enchanted Village (1950, shortstory) - 5/5 - A first person pure narrative about a man shipwrecked alone on Mars where his only possible source of shelter and sustenance is an abandoned organic alien village. 20 pages

[Mystery Monster] Concealment (1943, shortstory) - 3/5 - The Watcher senses an approaching Earth starship and attempts to suicide as his warning to Fifty Suns is shot off, but the crew capture him to find the origins of his people. 20 pages

[Oceanic Monster] The Sea Thing (1939, shortstory) - 3/5 - Island stranded shark hunters confront the supposedly island shark god, which poses as a man yet can revert to a shark at will. 39 pages

[Revivified Monster] Resurrection (1948, shortstory) - 3/5 - Character laden alien craft encounters vertebrate bipedal species who have an unknown apocalyptic past which they try to revive through resurrection, yet through ignorance, too. 23 pages

[Multimorph Monster] Vault of the Beast (1940, novelette) - 4/5 - Transdimensional xeno-morph takes the shape of various humans in order to bring a talented mathematician to Mars to unlock the prime number secured vault of a mysterious entity. 32 pages.  (Potpourri of Science Fiction) (Potpourri of Science Fiction)

"Space Captain" by Murray Leinster

The protagonist is a certain Captain Trent. Much is made of his ancestry -- he is 
descended from a series of English ship captains (as well as some spaceship captains and explorers), and many of his actions in this book are compared to his ancestors' heroism with sailing ships. Trent is hired by a group of merchants who have been losing money because of the activities of a group of pirates in a rather isolated area of the Galaxy. His new ship, the Yarrow, will be augmented by a special weapon, which will be controlled by its inventor, an engineer named McHinney. But, Trent tells the merchants, he doesn't hold with gadgets. Nonetheless, he is compelled to take McHinney and his new weapon.

The rest of the novel, then, is a somewhat episodic account of Trent's various encounters with the pirates -- usually preceded by the spectacular failure of McHinney's weapon, after which Trent does things the way he wanted too. In one case he rescues the daughter of an influential politician, and he starts to feel responsible for her. And she seems quite interested in him. That changes Trent's emotional involvement when the politician, assuming the pirate problem has been solved, lets his daughter travel again. So Trent (all along claiming to be a gruff unsentimental ship captain) heads out on a final mission to finally take on the pirates at their planetary base, and once and for all eliminate them.

It's all, well, what you expect. The love story is perfunctory, really, but it has its cute aspects. The science doesn't really bear close inspection. The plot details, and the battles, are pretty implausible. Certainly this is not Leinster at anything close to his best. He's enough of a pro that I still kind of enjoyed the story -- but it's pretty minor work, no doubt. (Strange At Ectaban) 

The Green Brain by Frank Hebert

The Green Brain is one of the novels that Frank Herbert published following the 
release of Dune. It was first published as a novelette under the title Greenslaves in Amazing Stories in 1965. Apparently the title is a reference to the English folk song Greensleeves. It was released as a novel by Ace Books in 1966. My copy is one in a series of four Frank Herbert titles reissued by Tor in 2002, to coincide with the release of The Butlerian Jihad by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. I read The Green Brain shortly after this publication became available and I think it is the only Frank Herbert book I didn’t like when I first read it. This second reading didn’t really alter my opinion. It’s a rather pulpish novel.

The Green Brain is set in a not too distant future in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso. Here war is being waged to bring Brazil’s abundant insect life under control. In the so called Green Zones, all harmful insects have been eradicated in the belief that his will boost productivity and thus support a larger population. The Red Zones are yet unconquered and teeming with insects. It is the job of men such as Joao Martinho to enlarge the Green Zones. Until recently this has been going well, and there is good money to be made in the business. Signs that all is not as it should be have begun to appear, however.

To investigate the situation, a team of the International Ecological Organisation have been sent to Brazil. Lead by the Chinese Dr. Chen Lhu, they are to investigate and get the process back on track. It quickly becomes obvious that Lhu has a hidden agenda. China is one of the driving forces of the project and efforts to eradicate harmful insects have progressed furthest there. Although the Chinese preach this new way of dealing with the environment to the entire world, they are quite secretive about their own Green Zones, not allowing any outside visitors to check on their claims. People are getting suspicious, and with good reason as it turns out.

Many of Herbert’s books have an ecological theme in them; it what makes them stand out among other works published at the time. In Dune the ecology is worked intricately into the story; in The Dosadi Experiment ecology is applied to human society to explain the unusual characteristics of the population. In those books the use of this theme is not as heavy-handed as in The Green Brain, however. The reasoning behind the project to get rid of all harmful insects has a glaring and obvious error. Ecology deals with interactions between species. To take one species out of the equation requires the whole system to adjust. Given the enormous complexity of an ecosystem like the Amazon rainforest, it takes a huge amount of knowledge of the system to predict what those changes are going to be and which species will be most affected. To do it on the scale proposed in the novel is a recipe for disaster. Separating harmful from useful based on partial knowledge and hope the system won’t collapse is not a particularly smart move.

Herbert understood this; it is quite obvious from the start of the novel that the project is doomed to end in famine. Too obvious for any suspense to be left in that part of the book. To oppose this folly, Herbert uses a well-known science fiction plot device. He creates a non-human intelligence as an adversary. Based on the fact that insects procreate faster than humans and thus can evolve a lot faster, and inspired by colonial insects, an insect intelligence known as The Brain arises and takes control of the efforts to combat developments that it considers a path to the death of all life on earth. The Brain is described as highly intelligent but also immobile and completely dependent on the insects that take care of its physical needs and provide it with information of events outside its hiding place. A very vulnerable position to be in, if humans had been aware of its existence anyway. It is by far the most unlikely element in the plot.

Interestingly enough, Herbert also mentions human opposition to the project. The author never reveals whether such resistance actually exists and how widespread it is, but it is constantly accused of sabotage and re-infesting recently cleaned areas. Maybe it is used as a convenient scapegoat, but this kind of resistance makes a lot more sense to me than The Brain, and I thought it a shame Herbert didn’t go into this in more detail. With a project that is unlikely to be endorsed by any serious ecologist and a huge insect brain hiding in the jungle fighting it, my willingness to suspend disbelief broke down after the first couple of chapters. Herbert would go on to write Hellstrom’s Hive (1973), a much better novel using colonial insects as a model.

I guess I didn’t like the concept of this book, but I have to admit the way this story plays out between Martinho, Lhu and the third main character Rhinn Kelly is interesting. Events take them deep into the jungle where a complex psychological game between them develops. Although not everybody will appreciate the less than flattering description of Kelly’s services to the IEO, Herbert does manage to build the tension to great heights before the climax of the novel. The pressure heaped on Joao in particular is very well done.

Although not without its qualities, in my mind The Green Brain is the weakest of Herbert’s novels that I have read to date. He never manages to really lift it above a science fiction monster story. For an author who was reluctant to enter the field of science fiction and made many attempts to break into the mainstream fiction market in his career, it is a disappointing work. In each and every one of his novels Herbert tries to raise the level of the genre with lots of attention to the psychology of the characters as well as a good idea to support the novel. In The Green Brain he does not achieve the desired result. The combination of ecology, social insects and science fiction has potential as Herbert would later show, but in this book he did not find the right combination. (Ron Weber, Fantasy Literature)

The Mad Metropolis by Philip E. High

Philip E. High's stories had a tendency to be very weird, and to be a bit shoddily 
constructed. I think that applies to The Mad Metropolis. It opens with Stephen Cook, a Prole in an overcrowded future, being pushed out of his home building to the street. Streets, it seems, are near certain death for the unprepared, and Cook, in terror, is nearly a plaything of an upper class woman ready to torment him with psychic weapons -- until he is rescued by the Metropolis' private police force, the Nonpol. He is soon released, with almost no money, after an investigation hints that his intelligence is higher than a Prole's should be.

Things spiral from there, in a somewhat Van Vogtian fashion. We soon learn that Stephen Cook is a superman whose intelligence has been artificially restrained. Cook is soon involved in a multi-sided battle for the fate of the world. It involves Mayor Tearling of his home city, and other politicians just trying to maintain the status quo, as one side; the Nonpols as another side; a group of super intelligent people called Oracles; and, perhaps most importantly, a computer (called Mother) that has been taking over the world in "With Folded Hands" fashion -- keeping people safe from themselves to an excessive degree. Oh, and the mob too. And a love interest for Cook.

It's quite a strange and overwrought book. There are some neat ideas, such as the hypnads that mediate everyone's access to their senses, such that a decrepit city can appear glorious, and such that most people look beautiful. There is also a sense of moral ambiguity -- Cook, for example, is brought to realize that his super powers are being manipulated in potentially dangerous ways. But on the whole the story is really just too much of a mess to work. High could be interesting -- though he was never exactly good -- but I think this book rates as one of his lesser efforts. (Strange at Ectaban)

The Gates of Creation by Philip Jose Farmer

The Gates of Creation is another unusual and outré adventure in Philip José Farmer’s World of Tiers series, though, like most sequels, it isn’t as fresh as the first. It has plenty of action and adventure to keep you in your seat, and its brevity (under 200 pages) works in its favor to boot. Farmer has an admirable facility for not wasting time, or padding out his tale with needless exposition. 

Whereas The Maker of Universes called upon a broad spectrum of religious tradition for its combination of allegory and satire, Gates has been fashioned specifically as a pastiche of the religious poetry of William Blake, particularly such works as Vala, or the Four Zoas and The Book of Urizen. Farmer explicitly derives many of his characters’ names and personas from these poems, as well as the underlying theme: the loneliness of immortality and the vengefulness of gods.

Opening an unspecified amount of time after the events of Universes, the story pits Robert Wolff — who has now reclaimed his position as the Lord of the World of Tiers, though he has renounced his former tyrannical ways — against the treacherous wiles of his father and siblings. Wolff’s father, Urizen, is the Lord of Lords responsible for initiating the creation of all of the “pocket universes” over which he and his children rule. (Farmer is still remaining deliberately hazy on where these Lords really come from, or how they create these universes, speaking vaguely about indescribably advanced technologies. Too much explanation would probably spoil the stories’ ability to function allegorically.) The thing is, the Lords have a tendency to tire of their creations — a problem you rarely see addressed in mainstream religion. What value would an all-powerful and omniscient God place upon existence if there was nothing left to know?

Wolff is confronted by Urizen one night and told that Urizen has kidnapped Wolff’s beloved Chryseis, and that to recover her Wolff must endure a dangerous series of trials. Traveling through a gate into his father’s universe, Wolff finds himself on an oceanic world where he encounters his numerous brothers and sisters — each of whom is suspicious and hostile towards all the others. One of Wolff’s brothers, the tragic Theotormon, has been cruelly transformed into a hideous fishlike humanoid. One sister, Vala, definitely has more going on behind her seductive smiles than she’s letting on.

Wolff, by the hardest, convinces this haughty consortium of mutual enemies to unite in the interests of finding and overthrowing Urizen. Thus they travel from world to world through a series of gates, never knowing where they’ll end up. And each world presents its own series of challenges that must be overcome before moving on to the next one, like advancing levels in a video game.

Farmer keeps the adventure ticking along generally well. The opening scenes on the waterworld, which include a spectacular pitched battle on an airborne, floating island, are the best. But it’s true that, even as short as the book is, the repetitive structure of the plot (journey to new world, barely escape death, struggle to find way to next gate, repeat) causes the whole thing to lose much of its steam along the way. And the absense of such colorful characters as Kickaha is a demerit. There’s pretty much nobody in The Gates of Creation besides Wolff to root for. 

And yet the book rebounds handily in the seventh inning stretch, and delivers a satisfying, bravura climax. On another positive note, the numerous bizarre artificial worlds Wolff and his ragtag band of brothers and sisters are forced to traverse do a great job of demonstrating why Farmer was considered one of SF’s most fecund imaginations. Overall, The Gates of Creation is fun old-fashioned Saturday matineé entertainment that will make readers happy they are mere mortals after all.  (SFF180)