Frederik Pohl, Jem (1979) SFMW 41

Frederik Pohl's Hugo and Nebula nominee Jem (1979) is a rich, complex and conflicted novel that considers what a future of planetary exploration may look like through the lens of the late Cold War politics of the eighth decade of the twentieth century.

The Earth Pohl envisages is organised around fuel ('Greasies'), food ('Fats') and people ('Peeps')-producing blocs rather than geographical land masses, which makes for some unusual alliances. A restructuring of social and economic arrangements has putatively been undertaken in order to preserve world peace:

No nation could afford to fight any other nation in the whole world anymore. Food, Fuel, and People each owned enough muscle to smash both the others flat, and all of them knew it. (Loc. 2651-52)

Logic, however, has little to do with the nature of human relations, and it is Pohl's jaded but historically contingent perspective on humanity's seemingly irredeemable, atavistic and insuperable desire to compete and fight in perpetuity that drives the novel's plot: 'Remember Clausewitz: war is the logical extension of politics.' (Loc. 779)

Kung's Semistellar Object was not much larger than a planet itself. As stars went it was tiny, barely big enough to fuse nuclei and radiate heat, but it had a planet of its own that sounded like fun. Hot. Humid. Dense air, but about the right partial pressure of oxygen to be congenial to life—including the life of a human exploratory party, if anybody cared to spend the money to try it out. (Loc. 886-87)

The marginally habitbal planet Jem features three beautifully realised alien races:

At least three species seemed to possess some sort of social organization: a kind of arthropod [the 'crablike Krinpit', Loc. 1567]; a tunneling species, warm-blooded and soft-skinned; and an avian species—no, not avian, she corrected herself. They spent most of their time in the air, but without having developed wings. They were balloonists, not birds. (Loc. 303-6)

Pohl goes to some lengths to fashion separate historical, cultural and sociological matrices of understanding for two of the Jem's three races, and these passages form some of the work's most arresting, compelling sections. However, it is mankind's persistence in preying on itself throughout the work that the reader may find most bewildering, if all too plausible:

The world she had left was blowing itself up, and the world she had come to seemed determined to do the same. (Loc. 4025)

And so, at the last, what can one say of them? What is to be said of Marjorie Menninger and Danny Dalehouse and Ana Dimitrova—and of Charlie and Ahmed Dulla, or of Sharn-igon and Mother dr'Shee? They did what they could. More often than not, they did what they thought they should. And what can be said of them is what can be said of all persons, human and otherwise, at the end: they died. Some survived the fighting. Some survived the flare. But in the long run there are no survivors. There are only replacements. And time passes, and generations come and go. (Loc. 4787-91)

The novel's cataclysmic conclusion is followed by an afterword considering the intriguing proposition that humanity will only thrive subsequent to its genetic makeup having been tempered by other influences. Left to its own devices, Pohl implies that the history of humanity will continue to repeat the cycles of tragedy and farce Marx identifies in the 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte'.

Pohl imagines the implications of the final act that the Fats' commander Marge Menninger undertakes and the way in which the native species and the new arrivals intermingle in Jem's future, six generations hence:

Why fight Utopia? he thinks to himself. And so in that moment he completes the process of growing up. And begins the process of dying. Which is much the same thing. (Loc. 4915-16)

Walter Tevis, Mockingbird (1980) SFMW 70

Robert Spofforth, 'mankind's most beautiful toy,' (p. 278) is 'the last of a hundred robots designated Make Nine, the strongest and most intelligent creatures ever made by man. He was also the only one programmed to stay alive despite his own wishes' (p. 4).
Spofforth's personality has been derived from 'a brilliant and melancholic engineer named Paisley['s] […] personality, his imagination, and his learning had all been recorded on tapes when he was forty-three, and afterwards the man was forgotten' (p. 4)

However, Spofforth 'did not really want to live. He had been cheated – horribly cheated – of a real, human life, something in him rebelled against living the life that had been thrust upon him' (p. 10)

It is difficult to review the work without disclosing its plot, namely [select text to read] Spofforth's program of social engineering to make man extinct as a species and thereby allow his machine protocols to finally let him destroy himself. Spofforth's ambitions are threatened when Mary Lou and Bentley stop taking the sedatives and drugs, which (although unknown to them at the time) also contain contraceptives, and therefore place his agenda in danger through their propagation.

Spofforth's solution is to separate the pair by jailing Bentley for the illegal act of cohabitation, and to experiment with his pseudo-humanity in the interim by taking Mary Lou away with him and installing her in his apartment as a surrogate wife, despite his sexlessness.

Paul Bentley is what passes for a university professor in the twenty-fifth century that Tevis envisages. Education has become a much-degraded and perfunctory affair in the novel as humanity has lost the ability to read. Bentley is extraordinary in that having discovered some books, rare but nevertheless unvalued artifacts, he has taught himself to read with them. Bentley now wishes to teach others to do the same, and presents himself to Spofforth, Dean of Faculties at New York University (but formerly Director of Population Control) at the beginning of the novel. However, Spofforth sets Bentley about the task of recording the dialogue in archival silent film instead.

Mary Lou Borne is an escapee from a public dormitory for children who grew up in the desert and has been on the margins of the society the novel depicts ever since.

A section towards the middle of the work narrated by Mary Lou offers some insight into her radicalisation by an old man called Simon whom she encountered and lived with for a time in the desert. Simon inculcates in her the idea, if not a full understanding of, the impact that 'the death of intellectual curiosity' has had upon humanity, and the fact that 'everybody's head is a cheap movie show' (p. 98). Spofforth in his turn also has some bitter things to say along the same lines later in the novel: 'The American Individualist, the Free Spirit. The Frontiersman. With a human face indistinguishable from that of a moron robot. And at his home or his motel he had television to keep the world away. And pills in his pocket. And the stereo. And the pictures in the magazines he looked at, with food and sex better and brighter than in life' (p. 174).

Mary Lou offers some jarring reflections on her relationships with Bentley and Spofforth, which invite the reader to consider her inner life as a character more intently than the narrative to this point has suggested that they may need to:

'Paul was pathetically serious. It's comical just to remember how his face looked when I threw the rock at the glass on the python cage, or how gravely he went about teaching me how to read. And he used to read over the first parts of this journal, when we were living at the library, and purse his lips, and frown – even at the bits I thought were funny.

Bob was hardly better. It would be silly to expect a robot to have a sense of humour, but it is still hard to take his gravity and his sensitivity. Especially when he tells me about that dream he keeps having and that he has had all of his long life. At first I was interested, but eventually I became bored with it.

I suppose that dream has much to do with my living here in this three-bedroom apartment with him. It was almost certainly the beginning of his desire to live and act like an ordinary human being of a long time ago, to try to live a life like the life of the dream's original dreamer.' (pp. 98-99)

I miss Paul. I think I loved Paul in some small way. But when I get right down to it, I don't really mind this life, this being the companion of a brown-skinned robot. What the hell, I used to live at the zoo, for Christ's sake. I'll make out.' (p. 99)

Education's aim in the novel is to shame, pacify and alienate, expressed through parroted maxims such as “when in doubt, forget it.”' (p. 22); 'quick sex is best' (p. 10), and 'alone is best.' (p. 28)

This deadening of affect and interpersonal relations is completed by the tranquilisers (sopors), joints and drugged food that are routinely ingested by the citizenry. Self-immolations by combustion are described frequently within the novel, their agents depicted as being unable to either iterate or comprehend the stunted nature of their lives, but seemingly driven by deeper urges to end their existences rather than endure the mockery of being that Spofforth's plan has imposed upon them.

A good deal of the book is narrated by Bentley in the first person in the form of a journal that Spofforth instructs him to keep during his studies. Bentey's auto-didactic program brings him to self-consciousness, and prompts him to question every aspect of the rigid social structures his world is governed by: 'I discovered the word “memorize.” And this was the definition given:”To learn by heart,” and how strange that was – heart, to learn by heart. I could not understand it all. And yet the word “heart” somehow seems right, for I know that my heart has always beaten. Always.' (p. 35). Readers also share, and are thereby invited to reflect upon the implications of, several epiphanic moments in Bentley's self-education, including his coming to understand the purpose and function of dictionaries (pp. 69-72).

During his incessant search for printed matter, Bentley encounters a text published at that point in the novel's prehistory where reading died, which is interesting to encounter in our own historic moment as digital books supersede their printed antecedents:

'I have a copy of the last book ever published by Random House, once a place of business that cause books to be printed and sold by the millions. The book is called Heavy Rape, it was published in 2189. On the flyleaf is a statement that begins: “With this novel, fifth in a series, Random House closes its editorial doors. The abolition of reading programs in the schools in the past twenty years has helped bring this about. It is with regret...” and so on.' (p. 114)

Bentley also encounters a book by Alfred Fain called The Last Autobiography wherein the author opines 'A friend of mine who works part time as the head of a publishing house says the average book finds about eighty readers. I've asked him why they don't stop publishing altogether. He says he frankly doesn't know, but that his publishing company is such a tiny division of the recreation corporation that owns it that they have probably forgotten about its existence. He doesn't know how to read himself, but he respects books because his mother had been a kind of recluse who read almost constantly, and he loved her dearly.' (pp. 117-18).

The work also envisages the impact of a future peak oil crisis within the novel's fictional world from Tevis's 1980s viewpoint 'before the Death of Oil and long before the Nuclear Battery Age […] when gasoline had become more expensive than whiskey, and most people stayed home.' (p. 173)

Subsequent to his escape from prison, Bentley takes shelter briefly in a defective factory, a 'mindless parody of productivity' (p. 168) which stands as a metaphor for the banal nature of the endless consumption of manufactured needs in a world of finite resources: 'The factory was a closed system. Nothing came in and nothing went out. It could have been making and unmaking defective toasters for centuries, for all I knew.' (p. 167)

Mockingbird begins and ends in Manhattan. This paradigmatic urban environment, read backwards from the twenty-fifth century Tevis imagines to the historical present of the work's composition around 1980, holds a totemic fascination for the author as an archetype of everything that has gone awry with human endeavour: Manhattan, where 'white men had focused their fretful intensity of power and money and yearning, pushing up buildings in hubris, in mad cockiness, filling streets with taxis and anxious people, and, finally, dying into drugs and inwardness.' (p. 277) The SF Masterworks edition's cover echoes this sentiment, with the Empire State Building which features in the work situated between the shattered remnants of two other skyscrapers, the outlines of which it is impossible not to view post-911 as representing the former World Trade Center.

Tevis lambastes organised religion through its representation as an historical curio as described by Bentley:

'I am not certain whether Holy Bible is a book of history or maintenance or poetry. It names many strange people who do not seem real […] As well as I understand it, Jesus claimed to be the son of God, the one who was supposed to have made heaven and earth. That perplexes me and makes me feel that Jesus was unreliable. Still, he seems to have known things that others did not know and was not a silly person, like those in Gone With The Wind, nor a murderously ambitious one, like the American presidents.

Whatever Jesus was, he was this thing called a 'great man'. I am not certain I like the idea of 'great men'; it makes me uncomfortable. 'Great men' often have had very bloody plans for mankind.' (pp. 140, 141-42).

The prostration of the intellect before the tyranny of monotheism is considered at greater length during Bentley's residence within the neo-fundamentalist community of Baleen he encounters towards the end of the novel, but which I will not address at length here.

Mockingbird plays with layers of symbolism in a deft and satisfying manner, for example the tableau that Mary Lou forms in the artificial python's cage at the zoo: 'she had to stand tiptoed and reach as far up as she could reach, just to catch the bottom of the fruit with her fingertips...”Why did you pick it?” I said.”I don't know,” she said. “”It seemed to be the thing to do.”' (pp. 41, 47) The scene amusingly parodies the Biblical Eve and the serpent retrospectively in the context of the narrative arc that follows and the fate the awaits Bentley prior to the text's resolution.

Tevis seems to disclose his own fondness for Kentucky's most famous export in ensuring that his protagonist is well-provided with what you would have thought to have been a near-impossible commodity, to acquire namely bourbon: 'I have a half bottle of whiskey – J.T.S. Brown Bourbon – and a pitcher of water and a glass on the table.' (p. 250)

Despite the consolations of mellowed alcohol, the melancholy air that pervades the work is encapsulated in the titular quote that reoccurs frequently in Bentley's mind after his initial exposure to it during his film studies left an enduring impression:

'Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods,' spoken by an old man to a young girl.' (p. 20)

The quote's lilting yet downbeat cast seems to colour much of Bentley's world-view, and he reaches for it frequently when unable to express himself in any other manner. 'It was my intention in beginning this to summarize what I have learned about human history and how that history appears to be coming to an end. But the prospect of trying actually to do it, after thinking about it for so long, is more than I am up to facing.' (p. 230).

The novel proposes that whilst a machine intelligence coming to consciousness may regret the fact of its own existence, humanity, although prey to the same exigencies of fate, appears better equipped to deal with its vagaries. The following exchange between Spofforth and Bentley occurs close to the end of the work, where the former's life is close to its cessation, and the latters is about to bloom fully:

'I am sick of life. I never wanted it.'
I stared at him. 'That's the name of the game. I never asked to be born either.' (p. 237)

That is not to say that Tevis, through the mouth of his protagonist, does not rue the fact that our species-being is not perhaps a little better equipped to deal with the tests to our patience that human interactions can present. In conversation with a sentient bus that he adapts for his own use, Bentley asks:

'Why are you so... so pleasant?' I said.
'We all are,' the bus said. 'All thought buses are pleasant. We were all programmed with Kind Feelings, and we like our work.'
'That's better programming than people get,' I thought, with some vehemence.
'Yes,' the bus said. 'Yes it is.' (p. 252)

It becomes evident during the course of the work that Bentley is the titular mockingbird, his solitary intelligence the song, and the edge of the woods the precipitous twilight of humanity:

'Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods,' the bus said.'
It was startling to hear that. 'You took those words from my mind?' I said.
'Yes. They are often in your mind.'
'What do they mean?'
'I don't know,' the bus said. 'But they make you feel something strongly.'
'Something sad?'
'Yes. Sad. But it is a sadness that is good for you to feel' (p. 258).

Mockingbird is beautifully structured, perfectly paced, artfully composed, and compelling in its subject matter. It is a most satisfying entry to the SF Masterworks series, and is to be commended to new readers without reservation.

Philip K. Dick, Ubik (1969) SFMW 26

'Runciter took a good long look at the fifty-cent pieces. He saw at once what the attendant meant; very definitely, the coins were not as they should be. Whose profile is this? he asked himself. Who’s this on all three coins? Not the right person at all.

And yet he’s familiar. I know him. And then he recognized the profile. I wonder what this means, he asked himself. Strangest thing I’ve ever seen. Most things in life eventually can be explained. But — Joe Chip on a fifty-cent piece?

It was the first Joe Chip money he had ever seen. He had an intuition, chillingly, that if he searched his pockets, and his billfold, he would find more.

This was just the beginning.'

Glen Runciter's 'prudence organisation' offers the services of psychically gifted anti-telepaths and 'pre-cogs' who foresee future events and intervene in order to influence the outcomes they have envisioned to counter the effects of telepaths employed by other businesses.

Runciter, and/or Runciter's team is/are killed having been lured off-world to Luna by business rival Ray Hollis. The novel subsequently recounts the quest of Runciter's technical lead, Joe Chip, to try to determine what has happened as the world around him appears to begin to revert to the early decades of the twentieth century.

It is impossible to determine whether the text is unfolding from the reported point of view of Runciter, or Chip, or whether they are both dead on the basis that all three positions are presented and vie for the reader's acceptance and belief. In this way, the text colludes with the indeterminate nature of the author's intentionality in disorientating the reader: "We haven’t gone anywhere. We’re where we’ve always been. But for some reason — for one of several possible reasons — reality has receded; it’s lost its underlying support and it’s ebbed back to previous forms" (Loc. 2348-50). For example, after a continuous section of chapters constituting more than half of the novel's length, the narrative shifts from Chip to Runciter's point of view with no visual signifiers such as asterisks or a section break to signify the same (Loc. 2899).

Matters are complicated by the fact that Dick wrote Ubik at the height of his addiction to prescribed amphetamines, dispensed as a treatment for depression and anxiety. Dick's world-view appears to imbue amphetamines with health-giving properties, and it makes perfect sense to him that they should be available to Glen Runciter from a vending machine (Loc. 2096-7) at the Beloved Brethren Moratorium where the book begins and ends, and where much of its reported actions may be taking place in the minds of the deceased, suspended in half-life in a cryogenic 'cold pac'.

A further layer of befuddlement is added to the novel's already complex perceptual structure in the person of Jory, a half-life teenage inhabitant of the Beloved Brethren Moratorium whose over-developed psychic abilities may be allowing him to rampage through the intelligence of other residents, influencing and possibly even consuming their minds.

Finally, there is the titular artifact Ubik itself. Each of the work's chapters begins with an advert for Ubik repackaged as some sort of consumer good, be it a foodstuff, a cosmetic or a medication. This alone invites a meta-textual reading of Ubik as a critique of the disorientating, alienating, all-pervasive nature of late capitalism. However, within the context of the narrative, Ubik is presented as something offering a (fake?) redemption, a substance that, if only Joe Chip could lay his hands on a spray can of it, Glen Runciter's messages inform him would stop further temporal regression. For the majority of the work's extent, however, Ubik remains tantalisingly out of reach for Chip, reverting from its spray form to an unusable powder or balm leaving him to 'wonder how much difference Ubik — dangled toward [him] again and again in countless different ways but always out of reach—would have made' (Loc. 2554-55).

Ubik is described in both scientific and religiose ways.

On the one hand, in a description larded with jargon seemingly for comic purposes, a spray can of Ubik is described as 'a portable negative ionizer, with a self-contained, high-voltage, low-amp unit powered by a peak-gain helium battery of 25kv. The negative ions are given a counter-clockwise spin by a radically biased acceleration chamber, which creates a centripetal tendency to them so that they cohere rather than dissipate. A negative ion field diminishes the velocity of antiprotophasons normally present in the atmosphere; as soon as their velocity falls they cease to be anti-protophasons and, under the principle of parity, no longer can unite with protophasons radiated from persons frozen in cold-pac; that is, those in half-life. The end result is that the proportion of protophasons not canceled by anti-protophasons increases, which means—for a specific time, anyhow—an increment in the net put-forth field of protophasonic activity…which the affected half-lifer experiences as greater vitality plus a lowering of the experience of low cold-pac temperatures' (Loc. 3242-48).

On the other, Ubik appears as some sort of self-aware life-force with supernatural abilities:

I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be. (Loc. 3267-69)

In summary, Ubik is a work of exceptional interest and an outstanding entry into the SF Masterworks series, offering both a rewarding reading and re-reading experience, and an archetypal example of Philip K. Dick's unique and dislocating craft.

Gregory Benford, Timescape (1980) SFMW 27

Gregory Benford's 1980 Nebula award-winning novel imagines what scientists of the late 1990s would do if they wished to send a message back in time to the early 1960s to warn their historic peers of the catastrophic effect that long-chain molecule pesticides have had upon the environment, and to thereby change the course of history.

Expressed in so reductive a manner, the text sounds preposterous and juvenile, but is in fact both nuanced, sophisticated and at time hugely enjoyable if the reader is prepared to suspend judgement on the absolute truth-value of the physics it contains. Benford's novel has often been praised for its hard science and plausible explanations of how tachyons could theoretically travel faster than light and, if aimed at the correct coordinates at the right time could theoretically send messages backwards or forwards in time.

Benford's work contains a number of dramatic set pieces: the discovery of the note in the bank vault proving that messages have been received; Greg Markham's fevered dream state as he perishes in an air crash in the original timeline whilst resolving crucial equations; the fact that Kennedy survives the assassination attempt which killed him in our reality as a consequence of a student interrupting Oswald whilst fetching a journal featuring an article by Gordon Bernstein discussing his discovery of the 'spontaneous resonance effects' - Markham's transmissions from the future - and the inevitable meeting of the two protagonists in an alternate future that they have both been instrumental in constructing.

The latter conceit is that which precipitates the final sequence of occurrences depicted in the gripping last 30 pages of the novel and elevates the work above the status of being merely 'interesting but worthy'. It is as clever a re-imagining of such a hackneyed historic event as a reader is ever likely to encounter.

The novel does have its weaknesses. Beyond Bernstein in the 1960s and Markham in the 1990s, Benford and his sister-in-law Hilary Foister Benford, whom the author credits as having 'contributed significantly to the manuscript' in a special acknowledgment, have a tendency to indulge themselves in some broad but generally unconvincing characterisations in the persons of their extensive ensemble cast. The bit-part characters' contributions to the plot are slight and their antics can give the work something of a 'soap opera' feel at times. The novel could easily have lost at least a quarter of its 400 pages without impacting on its thematic development in any way. For example, whilst it's nice to meet Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse (p. 173), and read a peon of praise in honour of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (p. 213) you have to wonder what they are doing in the book.

Overall, Timescape nevertheless ranks as one of the most enjoyable entries in the SF Masterworks series, and despite the Benfords' tendency towards the linguistically gaudy (some of the laboured puns the characters are forced to opine can grate, for example) the work contains some thought-provoking, powerfully conveyed ideas:

'Behind the equations were immensities of space and dust, dead but furious matter bending to the geometric will of gravity, stars like match heads exploding in a vast night, orange sparks that lit only a thin ring of child planets. The mathematics was what made it all; the pictures that men carried inside their heads were useful but clumsy, cartoons of a world that was as subtle as silk, infinitely smooth and varied. After you had seen that, really seen it, the fact that worlds could exist within worlds, that universes could thrive within our own, was not so huge a riddle. The mathematics buoyed you' (p. 176).

'He had a sudden sense that time was here, not a relation between events, but a thing. What a specifically human comfort it was to see that time as immutable, a weight you could not escape. Believing that, a man could give up swimming against this river-run of seconds and simply drift, cease battering himself on time's flat face like an insect flapping against a blossom of light' (p. 410).

'No matter how the days moved through them, there always remained the pulse of things coming, the sense that even now there was yet still time' (p. 412).

Orion launches SF Gatweway

Congratulations to Gollancz's Darren Nash on the launch of the highly promising SF Gateway. I was taken with this proposition as soon as I read the following press release:

Imagine your perfect specialist bookshop; it stocks not just the highlights from your favourite authors’ careers, but every book they ever wrote and the people who run the shop have an encyclopaedic knowledge of SF. The future of Science Fiction and Fantasy e-book publishing is here. We invite you to join us.

Suddenly, owning a Kindle seems very important. I say more about why I feel such initiatives as SF Gateway are significant to the future of publishing here.

Much as purchasing another electronic device doesn't fill me with glee, I have to concede that the limitations of the battery on my current HTC phone means that reading SF Gateway titles on my Kindle Android app is not a viable option. I will therefore be adding an SF Gateway review section as soon as I've purchased a dedicated e-reader, and have read my first title from the launch list.

As long-time readers of this blog know, nothing happens quickly around here, so such developments are unlikely to take place before the end of 2011. Of course, by that time I may have decided to get an Android tablet instead - or perhaps a spare battery for my phone.
In other news that is bound to cheer readers of this blog, Gollancz have used the SF Gateway forum to announce the welcome return of the Fantasy Masterworks list. I've put in a plea that the numerical sequence and ormer fcover design are retained. If you feel the same way, please add a comment to this thread.

Lucius Shepard, Life During Wartime (1987) SFMW 66

Lucius Shepard's Life During Wartime(1987) conjoins the standard Apocalypse Now reading of Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness with the author's own experience of living in Latin America and use of hard drugs, whilst Scarface plays on a constant loop in the novel's background.

The story arc is an unholy mess, emerging unconvincingly from the first section ('R and R') which was originally published as 'a Nebula award-winning short story' in its own right.

One can only assume it must have been a slow year for the short form of genre fiction.

The Wikipedia entry for the novel currently provides more detail about this dreary, preening work than I am prepared to waste further time rehearsing here. Suffice to say the idea that the titular war, not to mention the totality of the global economic and political structure, are being manipulated as part of a psychically-conducted vendetta between two ancient Panamanian families is preposterous in the extreme.

In the interests of fair balance, it should be noted that when the fit takes him Shepard is capable of writing beautifully, and has the keen eye of a miniaturist: 'her blue skirt swayed like a rung bell' (p. 64); 'over the bumpy hill road in the hotel's Land Rover[...] they seemed to be pulling the night along with them' (p. 116). However, the author's ambitions appear to have exceeded his abilities over the duration of the 418 pages of this work. Perhaps Shepard's aspiration did not extend beyond writing a novel of some weight, if not of any substance. If so, he achieved his target only at the expense of some uneven characterization, a meandering, repetitive, and parchment-thin plot, and occasionally lurid prose.

If Life During Wartime must remain in your slush pile, be sure to put it at the bottom. Not only is that where it deserves to be, but the heft of this weak addition to the SF Masterworks series will provide a solid base for the books above it to rest upon.

Walter M. Miller Jr, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) SFMW V

'Over each city a sun appeared and was brighter than the sun of heaven, and immediately that city withered and melted as wax under the torch, and the people thereof did stop in the streets and their skins smoked and they became as fagots thrown on the coals. And when the fury of the sun had faded, the city was in flames; and a great thunder came out of the sky, like the great battering ram PIK-A-DON, to crush it utterly. Poisonous fumes fell over all the land, and the land was aglow by night with the afterfire which caused a scurf on the skin and made the hair to fall and the blood to die in the veins' (p. 198)

'From the confusion of tongues, the intermingling of the remnants of many nations, from fear, the hate was born. And the hate said: Let us stone and disembowel and burn the ones who did this thing. Let us make a holocaust of those who wrought this crime, together with their hirelings and their wise men; burning, let them perish, and all their works, their names, and even their memories. Let us destroy them all, and teach our children that the world is new, that they may know nothing of the deeds that went before. Let us make a great simplification, and then the world shall begin again.' (p. 72)

A cornerstone of the post-apocalyptic SF sub-genre, 1961 Hugo winner A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) was the only novel Walter M. Miller Jr published in his lifetime. The work emerged from short stories that Miller published separately, rewritten as the three parts of the final text: Fiat Homo ('Let there be man'), Fiax Lux ('Let there be light'), and Fiat Voluntas Tua ('Let thy will be done').

Fiat Homo is set in the 26th century some centuries after a cataclysmic nuclear war referred to as the 'Flame Deluge' subsequent to which humanity has reverted to a neo-medievalism.

Fiat Lux takes place some six centuries later in 3174 as the Earth emerges from the new Dark Ages into which it has descended and begins to experience 'a revival of learning in a dark world' (p. 174)

Fiat Voluntas Tua occurs a further six centuries in the future in 3781. Technologies have been rediscovered, and humanity teeters on the brink of self-extermination once again.

The novel is set largely within a monastic world of 'bookleggers' and memorizers, custodians of an intellectual history that the 'simpleton' survivors of the Flame Deluge sought to destroy having deemed knowledge to have been the cause of humanity's near-destruction:

'To escape the fury of the simpleton packs, such learned people as still survived fled to the sanctuary that offered itself. When Holy Church received them, she vested them in monks' robes and tried to hide them in such monasteries and convents as had survived.' (p. 73)

The titular character, a scientist before the cataclysmic events that reorient the narrative's history, seeks refuge with the Cistercians:

'Isaac Edward Leibowitz, after a fruitless search for his wife, had fled to the Cistercians[...] Father Isaac Edward Leibowitz had won permission from the Holy See to found a new community of religious[...] Its task, unannounced, and at first only vaguely defined, was to preserve human history for the great-great-great-grandchildren of the children of the simpletons who wanted it destroyed.' (p. 74)

A Canticle for Leibowitz is a brilliant but melancholy work, the relentlessly maudlin nature of which gives some insight into the depressive nature of its author, who took his own life in 1996. It is characterised by its protagonists' lengthy reflections on humanity's seeming inability to cast aside its own predilections towards self-harm, and its inability to break out of its orbiting of disaster and set a heading down a route of progressive, linear development.

'Can you believe that that brute is the lineal descendent of men who supposedly invented machines that flew, who traveled to the moon, harnessed the forces of Nature, built machines that could talk and seemed to think? Can you belive that there were such men?[...] I can't accept it. How can a great and wise civilization have destroyed itself so completely? (p.139).

Man as an 'imperfect incarnation, a dark reflection' (p. 155) of the design of the Creator that he was personally burdened with believing in echoes the title of Miller's famous 'Dark Reflection' short story and gestures towards the dejected world-view of A Canticle for Leibowitz, tempered by fleeting hope: 'Truth could be crucified; but soon, perhaps, a resurrection' (p. 156).

However, it is a burden that Miller, a convert to Catholicism after the Second World War, seems to have been both ill-equipped to bear and unwilling to reconcile himself with. For example, whilst it is ostensibly the character of Abbot Zerchi who enunciates the following passage in the novel, but they seem rather to be being mouthed by the conflicted author himself in the historical context of the late 1950s, with war behind it, war within it, and war ahead of it:

'The world's been in a habitual state of crisis for fifty years. Fifty? What am I saying? It's been in a habitual state of crisis since the beginning – but for half a century now, almost unbearable And why, for the love of God?What is the fundamental irritant, the essence of the tension? Political philosophies? Economics? Population pressure? Disparity of culture and creed? Ask a dozen experts, get a dozen answers. Now Lucifer again. Is the species congenitally insane, Brother? If we're born mad, where's the hope of Heaven? Through Faith alone? Or isn't there any? God forgive me, I don't mean that.' (p. 275)

'Are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall?[...] Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing?' (pp. 280-81).

'They had not yet seen the madness and the murder and the blotting out of reason. Then they did it, and then they saw it'. (p. 292)

Abandoning the earth in the novel's final sequence, the last monk to board to the spaceship bearing humanity away from the planet it has been such a poor steward of murmurs Sic transit mundus: 'thus passes the world' (p.338) in much the same way as Kurt Vonnegut shrugged 'so it goes' whenever his authorial eye happened to linger momentarily over the ineluctable stupidity of our species-being.

In A Canticle for Leibowitz, mankind's imbecility and incapacity to learn from the mistakes of its past as it wheels around to embrace future catastophes of its own making is personified in the figure of the omnipresent wanderer or pilgrim. A mythical figure of extraordinary age whose longevity is put down to his partaking of the milk of a mutant goat, the wanderer resembles both an Old Testament prophet, and the person of Leibowitz himself:

'And now this Francis, he meets a pilgrim – wearing what?- wearing for a kit the very burlap cloth they hooded Blessed Leibowitz with before they hanged him. And with what for a belt? A rope. What rope? Ahh, the very same -[...] By tonight, the whole novitiate is buzzing with the sweet little story that Francis met the Beatus himself out there, and that Beatus escorted our boy over to where that stuff was and told him he'd find his vocation' (pp. 52-53)

Published in the stand-alone 10 volume SF Masterworks hardback series, A Canticle for Leibowitz is a superb addition to the SF Masterworks list. It is a haunting, lyric, obsessive, and more than slightly depressing meditation - in many senses of the word - on the ways in which our lives are is lived 'in a dark sea of centuries wherein nothing seem[s] to flow' and within which 'a lifetime [is] only a brief eddy, even for the man who live[s] it.' (pp. 92-93).

'[Change] will come to pass by violence and upheaval, by flame and fury, for no changes comes calmly over the world. It will be so. We do not will it so.[...] Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power.[...] They will press the battle upon the world when their interests are threatened, and the violence which follows will last until the structure of society as it now exists is leveled to rubble, and a new society emerges. I am sorry. But that is how I see it.' (p. 228)

'We bury your dead and their reputations. We bury you. We are the centuries' (p. 259)

Walter M. Miller Jr, Dark Benediction (1951-57) SFMW #69

Best known for his Hugo Award-winning A Canticle For Leibowitz (1959), Walter M. Miller Jr also authored dozens of stunning short stories in the 1950s, 14 of which are gathered together in this highly attractive entry into the SF Masterworks series.

The tales are not of uniform quality, but the work's best pieces rank among the very finest examples of the short form in the canon of speculative fiction. Miller's mastery of the post-apocalyptic sub-genre, his struggle to make sense of religious convictions, his attractive, sparse style and the manifestation within his work of the depression it is suggested that he lived with prior to his suicide in 1966 combine to produce a complex, satisfying corpus which merits frequent revisiting.

A child's frantic combing of the future for a cure which medical science has failed to provide for him in 'The Will' (1954) is compelling and mysterious, whilst 'Anybody Else Like Me' (1952) presents meditations on evolutionary telepathy presented in the disturbing contexts of rape.

Construction worker Manue Nanti struggles to come to terms with the atrophying of his lungs in 'Crucifixus Etiam' (1953) on a Mars without faith:

'Faith needed familiar surroundings, the props of culture. Here there were only swinging picks and rumbling machinery and sloshing concrete and the clatter of tools and the wheezing of troffies. Why? For five dollars an hour and keep?' (p. 57).

A 'machine' comes to a sacrificial self-awareness in 'I, Dreamer' (1953) as it learns the truth about its origins, while 'Dumb Waiter' (1952) presents a brilliantly conceived parable about humanity's limited capacity to perceive both its salvation and destruction in the self-regulating yet vulnerable technology it develops as an engineer struggles to save a civilization his peers are intent on destroying:

'Humanity has waited a hundred thousand years before deciding to build technological civilization. If he wrecked this one completely, he might never decide to build another [...] Some men thought that the a return to the soil was desirable. Some men tried to pin their guilt on the machines, to lay their own stupidity on the head of a mechanical scapegoat and absolve themselves with dynamite. But Mitch Laskell [...] liked the purr of a pint-sized nuclear engine much better than the braying of a harnessed jackass' (p. 88).

'Conditionally Human' (1952) is one of the anthology's highlights. The protagonist sets about righting the wrongs the state's strict control of the conditions of reproduction have wrought, 'knowing that it would never be all right [...] as long as the prohibiting, the creating, the killing, the mockery, the falsification of birth, death and life continued [...] He hoped Man could fit into it somehow' (pp. 235, 265).

'Dark Benediction' (1951) provides the volume's titular inspiration and forms its conceptual centre. The story offers a stirring, thematically multi-faceted study of our primitive responses to crises, fear of difference, and qualified contextualization of unexpected and societally transformative change. 'Dark Benediction' provides the reader with an opportunity to reflect upon the fact that destiny is not ours to control, and that unstoppable external forces could radically alter what it means to be human. Our curiosity, the story suggests, could be the death of us in the face of an implacable evolutionary process over which we have no influence; humanity, the story suggests, is not a Leibnizian monad, and we should perhaps be grateful for the universe's attention, whatever the outcome.

Regardless of other stories of lesser quality that it contains, 'Dark Benediction' is an excellent entry into the SF Masterworks catalogue. Miller's perspectives on his topics are usually engaging, often challenging, and occasionally macabre in the extreme; see 'Vengeance For Nikolai' (1957), with a plot as outlandish as anything Jacobean Tragedy has to offer.

'When the machine age cracks up, you crack up, too. Because you never made yourself its master; you just let yourself be mechanically pampered' (p. 105).

'If the universe lets you live, then you're doing all right' (p. 135)