Brian StablefordRecensioni

F/SF

An adult read.

I saw this book on the shelf when I was still in high school...The DAW cover pic was enticing but when I read a bit of the back synopsis and the first couple of pages...it did not fit my desire for adventure, like say: Gate of Ivrel

Nor did it fit with the normal Sci-Fi notion of once star travel is discovered: then BOOM! Earth is suddenly surrounded by successfully colonized Star systems numbered in the HUNDREDS...

But now as an adult, I was moved to revisit some of the older books that the Kid passed over as too boring. And I must say that when you have an appreciation for good writing the Daedalus Series should be given a try.

No space battles. No Alien Empires. No Ancient mysteries. No Laser blasting...

And Most of all-- No sprawling Star Empire of Man.

Instead, the writer touches and delves into the unspoken social, technological and biological issues that underlie the whole simplistic 'Colonize the Stars' scenario.

What REALLY happens after a 'can' of colonists and materials is unloaded on a planet? What problems could evolve from humans, who are now the ALIENS, trying to transplant themselves on a world that is not Earth? What are the realistic policy issues behind the Colonizing agencies back on Earth?

A Team of 'specialists' set out to re-establish contact with colonies that went out a century before. They must ascertain the colony's current condition and possibly help correct some problems the colonists may not be aware of... Is the colony thriving or failing? Are the colonists still HUMAN or are they being changed by the planet?

...but first the Daedalus team must overcome internal disagreements as well as local hostility or worse, local politics as they go from world to world.

But most of all, the writer soberly explores the intellectual thought experiment: Exactly how HARD is it to colonize another World?

Sober, skilled writing. Technologically timeless so it avoids being 'dated'. Not as flashy or fantastic as I would have wanted when I was 17-- but a solid, contemplative read half a century later...

After owning for thirty years and admiring the artwork of the “ Hooded Swan “on the cover for as many. It was time to read. It was tough going but I’m glad I read it. The other books in the series I’ve had for years as well may wait a few years longer to be read.

Yes, I read every entry in the 575 pages of entries, from “Acoustics” to “Zoology”. (A bibliography, index, and list of entries pushes the total page count past 729 pages.)

The only comparable book I’ve come across is The Science in Science Fiction from 1982 which Stableford co-wrote with David Langford and Peter Nicholls. That was considerably thinner and featured many color illustrations. This book has no illustrations. That book focused on the scientific accuracy behind many common science fiction themes. This one throws a much wider net. For instance, there are entries on “Aesthetics”, “Occult Science”, “Pataphysics”, “Poetry”, “Narrative Theory”, and “Publication, Scientific”.

Generally, the scientifically themed entries focus on the development of a science or scientific theory and its interplay between science fiction and science fact. Generally, that’s the history of a subject and its scientific development and later use in science fiction. But the documented flow of ideas isn’t always from science to science fiction. The “Omega Point” started with philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and then was picked up by a series of scientists and fiction writers. (Stableford doesn’t seem to place much credence in the whole thing.) “Space Travel” could, arguably, be said to have first been initiated by literary dreamers and taken up by scientists. “Paracelsus”, “may be the “great grandfather of quack medicine”, but he was also one of the fathers of modern chemistry and influenced both science and fiction.

The entries range from half a page in length to several pages in the case of popular science fiction icons like “Robot” or areas of universal intimacy or concern like “Sex”, “Medicine”, “War”, and “Psychopathology”.

Stableford shows how some subjects are popular in science fiction because on their melodramatic utility and rhetorical utility. Through many entries, Stableford rails against the, as he sees it, pernicious “Frankenstein complex” which immediately thinks the worst of a new technology. Several of the entries cover the general literary use of certain sciences and technology (like “Telephone” which includes over distance-annihilating methods of communication) and not just their coverage in science fiction. Some mention is made of non-Anglo works of science fiction, specifically German and French works. Unfortunately, this book was written before the bulk of Stableford’s work in translating French works, and it’s very doubtful it will be updated to reflect that.

Some scientists, philosophers, and inventors (“Edison”) get their own entries as do several fiction authors. Many of the latter are those you would expect, but there are surprises like Clifford D. Simak, Robert Silverberg, C. H. Hinton, and Clifford A. Pickover. A surprising number of short stories are referenced including many authors I associate with the Analog stable. It was nice to see some get their due.

If you’re the type who might buy this book, does it offer something you can’t find at the Science Fiction Encyclopedia online? (Its Stableford entry says, of this book, “a massive encyclopediacal examination of the complex back-and-forth relationship between speculative fiction and scientific knowledge and advances.”)

So, let’s compare some entries in each. “Nanotechnology” seems to have shown up on the SFE in 2012 and is shorter there with much less material on the theory of the technology and its history.

“War” on SFE is short and refers you to “Alternate History” (which this book also under “Alternative History” and “Holocaust” or “Post-Holocaust”), neither of which gets an entry in this book. The SFE’s “Future War” (penned by Stableford) is shorter and removes historical context mentioned in the book.

So, if your tastes run to actually owning encyclopedias about science fiction, this one is worth a purchase, especially given its unique focus.

En lo profundo de las oscuras estribaciones de las Montañas Grises, un joven comerciante inocente descubre una trama oscura y mortal. Un misterioso extraño lleva al joven Reinmar Weiland a toparse con los secretos de un siniestro inframundo escondido bajo los pies del incauto Imperio, y descubre un legendario elixir, el misterioso y prohibido Vino de los Sueños.

Don’t ever do that again.

That, speculates Brian Stableford in his “Introduction”, is what Moselli’s usual publisher, Maison Offenstadt, told him after reading this “recklessly ultra-violent” story serialized as La Fin d’Illa in 1925 in Sciences et Voyages. It may, speculates Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier in The Handbook of French Science Fiction, also be one of the reasons the publisher lost a court case in 1925The Frenetic People and Renee Dunan’s The Ultimate Pleasure. Unlike those stories, though, Moselli’s novel takes place in the distant past in the lost land of Gondawanaland.

The prologue starts in 1875 with the discovery, on a deserted Pacific Island, of a strange manuscript written on metallic sheets and an odd stone ball. The ship’s captain doesn’t end up selling them for the amount he hoped, and they end up being sold for a pittance to an antique dealer. Eventually, they are bought by a medical doctor, Akinson, in San Francisco who, in 1905, mails his translation of that manuscript to a friend in Washington D.C. Shortly afterwards, Akinson’s housemaid throws that stone balls in the fire – and the San Francisco Earthquake of 1905 results.

That manuscript is the account of one Xié, a general of Illa, one of two cities in the distant past on Gondwanaland. It’s the account of a dying, rather psychopathic, boastful man. He’s not much of a sympathetic character, but he’s determined, in the slim hope his writing will be found, that the future know of the ignoble Rair and that he, Xié, was the savior of Illa. Except, almost right from the beginning, we know he was the destroyer of Illa.

Illa is a city, a massive cylinder with its government on top and the earth beneath the domain of apes and food processing plants. Stableford speculates that this book is a response to Henri Allorge’s The Great Cataclysm from 1922 which may have irked Moselli by its literary acclaim and pacificist message. And there are similarities.

Allorge’s novel, taking up a motif of many French science fiction stories I’ve read, has artificial food in it. Not really food as we know it but liquors and pastes. Moselli’s Illans have gone a step further. They don’t even eat. Rather, massive amounts of pigs and apes are killed and converted into a nourishing radiation that feeds the Illans. Only the brutish head overseer of the apes eats what we would call food.

And those apes aren’t really apes, but Africans. Through “appropriate nourishment and cleverly designed exercises”, their mental abilities have been deliberately degraded while their strength has been increased. They have also been bred to have four hands. In Allorge’s novel, intelligent apes are domestic and tranquil servants who only cause trouble towards the end of that novel. Here they are brutal miners and the enforcers, armed with poison gas grenades and matter disintegrators, for Limm, head of the secret police.

And, like Allorge’s novel, Illa has an enemy, the much larger city of Nour.

Apart from those ape policeman, is Illa a good place to live? Well, Xié tells us the “Queen of the World” is a happy if monotonous place. But Xié is a warrior. We learn almost nothing about Illa’s culture or arts or if it even has any.

But we learn a lot about its intrigues and factions which are reminiscent of real ones that would arise in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

Illa is another argument, like Dunan and Pérochon’s novels, that you don’t want scientists running things. Here, that’s Rair, Illa’s head scientist, inventor of torture devices and also that elaborate process of converting flesh to nourishing radiation.

Like Dunan’s head scientist, Broun, Rair is concerned with matters of health. He’s decided that he can improve his food plants by using humans instead of pigs or apes. That will extend the lifespans of Illans. And he knows just the place to get the food: Nour. And, to prove a point, he’s not even going to bother getting the Supreme Council’s approval to launch a war on Nour to force an annual tribute of suitable foodstock in the form of its citizens.

Xié is asked to lead the military effort. He’s not pleased. He despises Rair, doesn’t like his usurption of authority, and seems to have moral qualms about using Nourans as food.

But Rair has his methods of persuasion, those torture chambers and thorough surveillance of key political figures like Xié and his friends, and Limm is utterly loyal to Rair. In fact, one of his apes stabs Xié’s daughter at the novel’s beginning in a not so subtle intimidation. The daughter is in love with Rair’s grandson, and Xié likes his perspective son-in-law.

But, for not entirely clear reasons, Xié does participate in that attack which brings on the beginning of the end.

Multiple imprisonments, escapes, attack and counterattack, war in the air and underground, a brutal ape revolt, flight, and a whole lot of dead people are the result.

In the violent climax, Xié will ponder if he’s become a bit of a brute himself. But that doesn’t stop him from setting Illa’s ultimate weapon, the zero stone, the very same material that caused an earthquake in 1905, to detonate. That’s the great savior of Illa.

Stableford, in his introduction and, unusually, in an “Afterward”, speculates on Moselli’s motives — boredom or to make a moral or aesthetic point or an extreme example of “melodramatic inflation” – in writing such a violent, brutal, and, (for the time) disgusting story. With unusual caustic irony, Stableford talks about how the story calls into question the morality of the revenge tale, our automatic identification with a first-person narrator (which Mosselli rarely employed), and fiction writers pandering to readers’ love of disgust and danger.

There’s no doubt that Moselli’s short novel is lively, exciting, and has a breakneck pace. No other French writer did anything like it before. And neither Moselli – or anyone else – did something like it again.

paperback

Daedalus Mission 2

Daedalus Mission 4

Daedalus Mission 1

Realms of Tantalus 1

paperback

Delante de 80000 testigos Paul Heisenberg, el nuevo Mesías, ha entrado en un trance de dimensiones inconmensurables; donde él estaba se alza ahora una brillante estatua de plaza. No pasará mucho tiempo antes de que otros lo imiten. Pronto miles de seres humanos huyen atravesando eones, encontrándose en puntos de reunión a cientos de años en el futuro, y dando nuevos saltos hasta llegar al fin de los tiempos. Pero, ¿a dónde irán después? ¿Y dónde están aquellos que quedaron atrás?

In the 1936 second edition of [The Xenobiotic Invasion], Varlet mentioned a sequel to that novel. However, that sequel, titled Aurore Lescure, pilote d’astronef wouldn’t be published until 1943, five years after Varlet’s death.

In his “Introduction”, Brian Stableford speculates Varlet may have hoped this novel would be picked up in translation in America. Varlet was almost alone among roman scientifique authors of the time in his interest in advances in rocketry. While Varlet’s style probably wouldn’t have been amenable to an American pulp audience, if he had managed to place it in that market before he died, it might have been fondly remembered as the first pulp story to feature sentient dinosaur-like creatures. Instead, that distinction goes to Norman L. Knight’s “Saurian Valedictory”.

This novel is Varlet’s least ambiguous and most explicit attack on modernity, specifically industrial civilization.

It’s two years after the events of The Xenobiotic Invasion. The great powers of the world, still fearing infection from more alien fungi, are still maintaining a moratorium on rocket flights exiting the atmosphere.

But what are they doing behind the scenes? Well, young reporter Oscar Frémiet has discovered, working undercover, that the German military is very interested in rocketry and has been doing secret launches. (Varlet even mentions Hermann Oberth, one of the future inventors of the V-2.) He plays a minor, but important, role in the preceding novel and is narrator Gaston-Adolphe Delvart’s nephew.

Oscar, not so coincidentally, shows up at his parents’ house to see Delvart and his wife, Aurore Lescure. He’s trying to sniff out why Aurore Lescure is meeting with the famous Madame Simodzuki. She’s a billionaire and a very famous philanthropist who inherited her dead husband’s industrial fortune.

Gaston, Oscar’s father, argues with the narrator and Oscar that each nation developing rocket technology will, inevitably, lead to an arms race as it did before World War One. Delvart argues that many nations possessing rocket powered weapons could achieve peace through deterrence.

Professor Nathan, Aurore’s scientific colleague, has died two weeks ago in a car accident. He was the only reason she continued working at a scientific institute run by the Moon Gold Company. (Aurore is very wealthly and doesn’t need the money.)

While she isn’t about to tell this to prying Oscar, Aurore has been asked to pilot the Ad Astra I by Simodzuki. Delvart eagerly encourages Aurore in this. He’s lost interest in his profession as a painter and has been wishing that, as when they first met, he and Aurore could work on an enterprise together. He is delighted to accompany Aurore into space, to “serve science” under Aurore’s orders.

But the political fallout of Oscar’s revelations have caused many governments to reconsider going into space. The French government is now quite interested in what Simodzuki, a private citizen, is up to on the Île du Levant.

A raid forces a premature launch of Simodzuki’s ship. The goal was originally to check out Eros, now at its closest position to Earth and exhibiting some unusual changes in lumonosity, and then Mars. Oscar is brought along to be an engineer.

But Oscar brings something extra: a stowaway, his fiancé Ida Miounof.

They can still reach Eros, but there will be no trip to Mars.

There they find a race of sentient, dinosaur-like aliens and a human-like race so degraded, dumb, and cannibalistic they are dubbed the “bowwows”.

The four are imprisoned, but the aliens are really only interested in human science, and only Aurore knows anything substantial on that subject. She is interrogated for months, so long that the position of Eros will not allow an immediate return to Earth.

Delvart may be at a loss as to what to do with his eventual freedom, but Oscar and Ida aren’t. She is determined to make the lives of the bowwows better.

Ida is an unpleasant person, the novel’s villain because Ida is a Bolshevik agent, and she proves surprisingly competent and clever in inciting a revolt among the bowwows.

As is always the case with Varlet’s novels, solo or collaborative, his style is smooth and pleasant. Here he switches between past and present tense and presents the story not only through Delvart’s account but journals, newspapers, and radio broadcasts.

There’s a reason Varlet is considered one of the best of the inter-war roman scientifique authors. If you’re interested in French science fiction, Varlet is a good place to start.

Varlet’s firsr science fiction novel mixes astronomy with the “dismal science” of economics for a tale of international intrigue, French post-World War One woes, impending war, and romance while also managing to be somewhat prophetic.

The story begins with narrator Antoine Marquin, a medical doctor, attending a party the day before he is to leave on an expedition to the Antarctic. There he meets the Kohbulers of Switzerland. He doesn’t much like the pushy Dr. Kohbuler, but he is immediately smitten with his beautiful daughter Frédérique-Elsa, an accomplished mathematician.

A radio broadcast announces a great storm in the North Atlantic with the loss of many ships. Here Varlet raises early his theme of the changes modernity has brought and humanity’s dangerous character. Marquin remarks to Dr. Kohbuler that “The rhythm of life on our planet has accelerated, and humankind is increasingly forming a whole, a single organism palpitating all at once with the same reactions.”

If this storm had happened 13 years ago, it would have taken three or four days to learn about the loss of life. Dr. Kohbuler says the Great War showed humanity was not a homogenous mass, that the races are irreconcilable.

Later, the party members feel a shaking which reminds Marquin of an earthquake he once experienced in Italy. A later radio broadcast says tsunamis hit the coasts of Western Europe from Ireland to Spain and even more damage was done on the eastern coasts of Canada and America. Submarine cables and wireless transmissions have been affected.

France is heavily in debt, inflation is high, and the franc is taking a pounding in its exchange rate with the pound sterling, the international currency of the time. The French public is demoralized.

Marquin boards his ship, the Erebus II, and we find it’s well stocked with various scientists including several geologists, mining engineers, and mining equipment. It seems there are hopes that minerals worth exploiting will be found in the Antarctic.

But a new island has been discovered, dubbed N, in the North Atlantic, and the French government retasks the ship and expedition to check it out.

N, it will quickly be realized by a geologist, is not some new volcanic island. It’s a bolide of gold, soluble gold chloride specifically, and iron. Its wealth could vastly improve France’s fortunes, and N’s nature is kept secret while negotiations are held at the League of Nations as to which country will get the island.
Discipline takes a hit on an island where you can pick up large gold nuggets with your hands, and the ship’s captain, afraid to describe the island’s true nature even in coded transmissions, heads back to France leaving some of the crew there where they facilitate a deception to further the cover story that the island is just a regular volcano.

After returning to France – a munity is quickly put down on the way back, Marquin meets with his friend Rivier, a banker and sponsor of the original Erebus II expedition, and tells him about the island. Rivier is clever and convinces the French government to wage an economic war against several of the world’s currencies, particularly the pound. Holdings in foreign currency are sold off, making the franc more valuable, and France spends down its gold reserves (presumably to buy up francs).

The franc appreciates in value. Normally, France’s actions would be foolish and only effective in the short time with the franc eventually returning to an even lower value, inflation getting worse, and exports falling. Even gold as a reserve of wealth is going to take a hit if all the gold of N enters the economy. But France can take advantage of it now to pay off debts.

But the French government isn’t the only one that knows the true nature of N. Marquin, in an “amorous indiscretion”, reveals the truth to Frédérique. And the Kohbulers, as we learn in an earlier scene (outside of Marquin’s point of view), are German spies. Frédérique breaks codes and her father is involved in an operation to flood France with counterfeit francs.

Soon international tensions ramp up with several nations claiming N, and Japan and Germany prepare for war.

Varlet’s short novel is compelling in its own right and also provides an interesting look at the psychology of Europe between the world wars.

Also included in the volume are three interesting short stories, not romans scientifiques, from early in Varlet’s career that show his deep ambivalence about modernity and the many changes he had already seen in his life.

“The Thunder of Zeus” pits Ancient Greece against modern vulgarity represented, of course, by an American businessman, Colonel William Klondyke. In Sicily, the narrator comes across the ruins of a large Greek temple recently discovered. His discussion with the site’s custodian when the Colonel shows up. After hearing the temple was one of the very largest Greek temples ever built, the Colonel launches into a remarkable rant against Greek architecture, comparing it unfavorably to the wonders of the modern world. When the narrator points out that, even in America, the Greeks are regarded as the progenitors of modern civilization, the Colonel extends his tirade to include Greek philosophy, religion, and science. It’s such a bitter rant that the narrator feels the Colonel is in “mysterious proximity to antiquity”, his very essence rebelling against the old gods.

The custodian relates a legend that the spirit of Jupiter took up residence in the temple after the emergence of Christianity. Later, after some monks started to live in it, Jupiter brought the roof down on them which accounts for the extreme jumble of the ruins. He also posted an eagle to watch over the site, the only eagle in Sicily.

And then the eagle shows up, and the Colonel is determined to kill, cook, and eat it. Things don’t go well for the Colonel.

Greek themes show up again in “The Last Satyr”. While visiting Greece and reading aloud some verses by Theocritus aloud, the narrator encounters a satyr.

A discussion follows with the satyr revealing he’s not his old self. He no longer knows the “language of my youth”. He’s almost lost his soul. People throw rocks at him. Sure, there are still a few nymphs around, and he lays in ambush for the occasional peasant girl, but he’s impotent these days. The narrator is disgusted that the only tunes the satyr can play on his flute are vulgar and very modern ones.

Holding, perhaps ironically, that modern elixirs can cure all sorts of ills now, the narrator procures in town a mixture of rum, caffeine, and cola for the satyr.

It does the trick, and the satyr talks about the good old days: sex with nymphs and women and running with centaurs. But, things go very wrong and modernity has the last say when the satyr, feeling his oats, rapes a girl.

“Messalina” is a semi-erotic tale. The narrator has a very unfulfilling sexual encounter in a railroad hotel with a local prostitute. Trying to sleep afterwards, he overhears the occupants of the next room. And their sex seems to be much more rewarding. Their dialogue brings very pleasing images to his mind. The woman next door is an ‘excellent courtesan” compared to the mediocre one in bed next to him.

Wanting to see this remarkable woman, he seeks her out the next morning. She is not at all what he expected.

I took the tale to be about the sometime incomprehensibility of other people’s erotic lives and that sexual attraction may be partly a process of self-deception or, perhaps, sex changes perception.

While this story evokes, in its title, the ancient world, it’s not clear if Varlet is expressing much of an opinion about modernity. However, the dialogue of the “expert courtesan” is full of classic allusions which puts her above the banal conversation of the narrator’s rental.

Published in 1930 as La Grande Panne, this is a charming science fiction novel that succeeds as a romance and a treatment of alien invasion and social upheaval. It also has some surprisingly modern resonances.

Our narrator is Gaston-Adolphe Delvart, a fairly successful painter. The book opens with him visiting his friends, Géo de Ricourts and his sister Luce. The subject turns to a rather rare topic in French romans scientifique – rocket powered space travel. Varlet was one of the few authors of French speculative fiction to use the idea before 1950.

It seems that it’s a potentially a big day for the advancement of aeronautics and rocketry. The American Moon Gold Company is launching, from Columbia, Missouri, a rocket ship to the moon. It’s part of a well-publicized attempt to bring back gold from Luna. The ship was developed by Professor Lescure and to be piloted by his famous daughter Aurora.

Alburtin, a medical doctor also visiting the de Ricourts, says he’s seen Aurora in the newsreels and found her “very pretty”. Delvart admits he does too. But what he tells us is that he is really fascinated with her. His disdain for famous film actresses is inverse to their popularity, but Aurora . . . And why he wouldn’t he be attracted to Aurora? She’s beautiful, has several doctorates in math and science, and is a skilled pilot and, now, a rocket test pilot.

Luce asks why anyone would find a bespectacled American scientist attractive. Luce herself is quite attractive and knows it and flirts with Delvart. But, despite her beauty, Delvart knows there’s an “undeniable moral incompatibility” between the two of them. Besides, Luce has made no secret of her plans (to the horror of her mother) to marry a rich American when she can find one.

Wanting a break from the de Ricourts, Delvart accepts a ride back to Cassis with Dr. Alburtin. And, along the way, the woman of Delvart’s dreams falls from the sky.

The men pull the unconscious Aurora from her rocketship after a controlled landing, and they also grab a bag of meteorites collected in Earth orbit.

Taking Aurora back to his clinic, Alburtin takes a few meteorite samples to x-ray out of scientific interest.

Aurora turns out to be all right, but she fears reporters knowing where she is, so Alburtin takes steps to hide the rocket. Aurora does send a telegram to the Moon Gold Company letting them know her fate.

It seems the Moon Gold Company is running a scam. It doesn’t know if there’s any gold on the moon, and Aurora certainly never landed on the moon as planned and her rocket drifted off course enough to force a landing in France and not Missouri.

Soon Cheyne, the company’s financial officer and chief source of funding, is on the way to Paris with Professor Lescure. Planted newspaper stories start showing up advancing the story of coming lunar riches, and Lescure is afraid that, if reporters find her, her congential honesty will ruin the company. And that would ruin her father who Cheyne has some kind of hold over.

So, Aurora sets out incognito to Paris with Delvart escorting her. Along the way, the two will get closer. (And why not? Aurora turns out to be cultured, knows Greek and Latin, speaks excellent French due to her French-Canadian mother, has a photographic memory, and can learn anything.) But Aurora doesn’t want to hear Delvart loves her and says they must remain friends since, it seems, Cheyne also has some kind of hold over her too.

But they aren’t alone on that trip. Under the influence of Alburtin’s x-rays, those meteorites sprouted a red fungus, and the fungus is brought to Paris with the other meteorites. The itching it induces is a minor problem compared to its need to feed on electrical fields. Soon, the lights, wires, and subway tracks of Paris are covered by it.

Life begins to grind to a halt, and here the novel becomes weirdly familiar when the authorities, in order to stop the fungus, impose what we now call a lockdown, enforced by the Xs (for Xenobiotica Police), to prevent people from moving about and using electricity.

Varlet tells this part of the story not only from Delvart’s point of view but using newspaper quotes. (Varlet worked as a journalist at times.) There is economic dislocation and political agitation, and, Stableford suggests, Varlet may have drawn on not only his own imagination but the work of his friend Gustave Le Bon, an early theorist on crowd psychology.

There are two outstanding scenes where Aurora and Delvart are trapped underground when fungal growths stop the train, and there is a great wind rushing through the tunnel as the rapidly growing xenobiotic sucks the oxygen from the air. (Varlet doesn’t really do much else with this part of his concept). The other is the appearance of the “ardent lichen”, a new form the rapidly evolving fungus assumes.

The reset button isn’t hit at the end of this novel. Life on Earth isn’t ever going to be the same, and, as one scientist puts it, perhaps the survivors will develop a needed “neophobia” or, at least, take “the first step towards a higher wisdom, which will include a consciousness of cosmic harmony and the duties it imposes . . . "

Despite his interest in modern technological and scientific developments, Varlet’s novel is ambiguous about the value of technology. Aurora, beautiful symbol of scientific accomplishment and its possibilities, brings great disruption to Earth, and, at novel’s end, that turns out to be more than just the xenobiotica.

Perhaps, as Delvart’s uncle remarks, it wouldn’t be bad if man went back to a pre-electrical time. He certainly lived that way when young, and maybe war wouldn’t be possible. No, replies Delvart, humans would still continue to kill each other because “It’s a necessity of human nature”.

The first time I read this, many years ago, I didn't get much from it. I suspect I blitzed it in one go during a period of insomnia, and so didn't absorb any of it at all. In fact it is a dark and brooding fantasy that feels hopeless. A hero who doesn't feel like a hero, doesn't want to be a hero, but is forced by his values of humanity and loyalty to strive to defeat an evil that terrifies him. It is a bleak fantasy, very close to horror, but is well written and well characterised. I often prefer the older Warhammer fiction with its emphasis on common humanity rather than bombastic heroes, and this is a fine example.

In this final part of his 'Asgard' trilogy, Brian Stableford works through all his themes to a conclusion. However, there is only so much you can do with a story where you've already revealed the existence of machine intelligences in the artificial world of Asgard, and getting another volume out of the idea of one group chasing another on a trip down through the various levels of the world was going to take some doing. Thus we get a lot of telling rather than showing, with what seems like whole chapters of expository lumps and Mike Rousseau's internal monologues as he first realises that he has become host to an AI hitchhiker that may or may not be dormant, and then has his consciousness cloned so that it can try to reach the centre of the world via a sort of cyberspace before Rousseau reaches it physically. This virtual journey involves an excursion into a sort of fantasy world, complete with heroic fantasy trappings, with a large number of borrowings from Rousseau's surprisingly deep knowledge of Earth mythologies (for a character who was born off-world and has never visited Earth). Given that the world took its name from Norse myth, Stableford rather stretches that idea beyond breaking point, making his characters draw mythological analogies to their situation and other characters, though Stableford is not beyond mixing and matching different mythological elements, ultimately to little end.

For all that Rousseau has been a cynical protagonist who prefers to live by his wits, the denouement is rather out of character and not particularly climactic; the best bits of the plot's climax actually occur a couple of chapters early and turn out to be red herrings. Indeed, Stableford has used the chapter end cliff-hanger throughout the trilogy, and so he had to keep raising the stakes in cliff-hanger peril in the full knowledge that our protagonist has always managed to escape in some way or other up to now. Translating one copy of Rousseau into a virtual world only enables the peril to be ratcheted up, but with the same outcome.

Overall, I found this unsatisfying.½

Rummet, engang i fremtiden
Rumpiloten Grainger er styrtet ned på en øde planet med sit rumskib Javelin og hans ingeniør Lapthorn er død. Heldigvis er planeten godt nok øde, men dog til at overleve på. Grainger tænker tilbage på tidligere tider, hvor han og Lapthorn i deres rumskib Fireeater futtede rundt på en planet om en blå stjerne og handlede med eksotiske lyskilder. Senere arbejder de for biblioteket på New Alexandria. Og besøger de andre nye verdener, New Rome, New Israel og Penaflor for at støve bøger op til biblioteket.

En dag kommer et andet rumskib forbi og giver Grainger et lift.

???
De et-benede rumpiloter med træben og en papegøje på skulderen sætter ud med deres stolte rum-galease for at finde skatte-planeten og E.T.'s nedgravede skat. Med andre ord: der er dømt space-opera.

We return to the adventures of Mike Rousseau, who has left the artificial world of Asgard comfortably well-off after the events of the first volume in the trilogy (Journey to the Centre) and is heading for Earth, a world he has never visited. But his past catches up with him, and he finds himself heading back to Asgard with a status that swings from felon to hero in the blink of an eye. There he finds himself trying to find out the origin and motives of invaders that have flooded into the inhabited portions of the frozen artificial world from inside the planet.

As with the previous book, the title is misleading. Just as Rousseau never reached the centre in the first novel, so these invaders aren't from "the centre" at all. But who are they? What is their motivation? What is their relationship with the powerful civilization that Rousseau briefly encountered on his last expedition into the planet's depths? And what do they know of the creators of Asgard?

Stableford continues to throw the reader curve balls in this instalment. Outwardly a straightforward planetary adventure, none of the protagonists are entirely out of the usual adventure fiction writer's catalogue of stock characters. Mike Rousseau remains one of Stableford's cynical and less than trustworthy central figures, though in this book he finds that others are less trustworthy than he. And his impressions of his opponents are constantly having to be reviewed.

And then, seventh-eighths of the way through the book, we shift into a strange account of disembodied personalities with their own explorations of Asgard, albeit from a very different perspective. This fits the narrative well, though a reader who picked this book up for the adventure would find it unsettling. (Assuming that they'd made it through the info-dumps, which are more extensive in this book than the previous one. But when you're trying to tell a complex story with an exotic setting in 250 pages, telling rather than showing becomes quite necessary.)

Brian Stableford is a highly intelligent writer, and no matter how much he sets out to write an adventure story, the rational underpinnings of his setting can't help but poke out of the text. How much a more casual reader can overlook this and not trip over the expository lumps is a good question.½

The review of this book on the Quasi-Brian Stableford website which suggests that it is a science fictional working out of ideas from Plato’s The Republic. Tanagar society has three classes, and Stableford combines Plato’s ideas with William Sheldon’s theory of personality determined by body type. Intellectuals are passionless, thin, ascetic, and supposedly not given to emotion. Pragmatists, also not given to much emotion except at chosen times when they “jeckle”, are strivers, rightfully regarding themselves as the only ones who can get things done between the other two classes’ indecision and indiscipline. They are medium-framed, Sheldon’s mesomorphic body type. Hedonists are fat and emotional.

The novel also partakes of some common themes of science fiction from the 1970s and 1980s: biofeedback, skills obtained through memory implants, nuclear holocaust, and resource depletion on Earth.

Our castaways are those who just couldn’t fit in to Tanagar society. That was the planet settled by a generation starship fled Earth before a nuclear war broke out. The Tanagarians put them in cold sleep.

But, now that Tanagar has found out that people are still alive back on Earth, maybe those convicts can be of use to spy out what’s happening on Earth which seems to be undergoing something of a renaissance based on digging up buried books, manuscripts and machines. But Earth isn’t going to be able to recreate our world. Energy and mineral resources are too depleted to effectively extract them.

Our Tanagarian malcontents include Charon Felix. He is the oldest inmate in cold sleep. He’s been on ice 8,000 years, not for a murder per se but a murder of passion. (Tanagarian society, emphasizing the taming of the emotions, sanctions pre-meditated murder less harshly.) Another fellow Hedonist is Talavar.

Sarid Jerome is on the trip because even the Intellectuals view him as a resourceful and intelligent Pragmatic. He did, after all, lead a revolt against the Intellectuals.

Running this mission of covert reconnaissance of Earth from orbit is Intellectual Cyriac Salvador and his aide, the Pragmatic Teresa Janeat. Cyriac, being an Intellectual, doesn’t really have a plan about what to do with old stock humans on Earth. Observe them or help them? He thinks Sarid being on Earth will be a “catalyst” for something.

But, of course, things don’t go according to this tenuous plan.

The other 20 convicts don’t last long on Earth, and an accident forces Cyriac and Teresa to the surface too in North Africa.

Most of the book, 192 pages out of 319, is an ok adventure story. It doesn’t plod. But it’s not memorable either.

Sarid, Cheron, and Talaver all get drafted into the Macarian army going into the African jungle reason to set up camp and exploit a forest there. The group is separated before that happens.

Sarid’s cover is blown when a Macarian member of its Church, the institution in charge of mining the resources of the past, gets suspicious when the gold coin he tries to pass is too pure.

It’s then the story gets a lot more interesting as Sarid reveals the back story of Tanager and its origins in a generation starship, the Marco Polo.
The future Tanagarians were concerned with two things: maintaining social stability in the limited environment of a starship and determining what technologies should be adopted and how they should be used. They were interested in knowledge, but not necessarily using it. They eventually come to regard this as a duty, and the Pragmatists and Hedonists are happy to do that.

They try to construct a society, unlike capitalism on Earth, that aligns innate desires with a person’s place in society. This is contrasted to capitalism, a regime where people were more maladjusted in their place yet forced to participate in ways that made them unhappy.
Intellectuals devoted themselves to the pursuit of pursue knowledge. Pragmatists got to create projects and plans and see them through. Hedonists devoted themselves to pleasure. Biofeedback, drugs, psychological training, and social pressure mold people when young for their place though the Intellectuals do recruit some trainees which doesn’t always work out. The difference in lifespan between the classes is the result.

The Intellectuals are suspicious of utopian planning, and they desire to have a society not dependent on forced social cooperation or forcing people to love one another. But this society was not well suited when the Marco Polo disgorged its contents on Tanagar, a not entirely suitable world where people had to live in metal enclosures.

Still, the limitations of life, compared to onboard the Marco Polo, lessened. At first, the Intellectuals regarded life on Tanagar as a chance to prove their engineered society even works in a new environment. On Tanagar, says Sarid, the social system that worked “extremely well” on the Marco Polo only worked well on Tanagar. Sarid suspects that was because there were now metaphorical and actual horizons. There had always been dissidents, but now the Intellectuals begin to undertake a sort of eugenic program of removing, via suspended animation, those dissidents.
Sarid emphasizes he is not, despite what the Intellectuals claim, an agent of chaos. In a certain sense, he admires what the Intellectuals were able to accomplish on the Marco Polo. The changes the Intellectuals have introduced to society -- drugs, psychological conditioning, and social pressure -- they view as constancy. Sarid argued, in his revolution, that even more changes were needed.

But, as Cheron and Talaver find out in the jungle, the Tanagarians aren’t the only ones interested in Earth’s social evolution.

This seem to be an early Stableford work using a theme that would dominate his later science fiction: genetic engineering.

It also shows his thoughts on the problems of Utopia and building societies where people can find meaning and happiness without being perfect, thoughts covered in some of the essays on Marxism and science fiction in Opening Minds.

Stableford seems to have sympathy for the Intellectuals and Hedonists but not so much for the Pragmatists. Both Teresa and Sarid come to bad ends, but so does Cyriac but more because of Sarid’s actions than his own. Personality-wise, I suspect Stableford’s scholarly pursuits make him more sympathetic to the duty of the Intellectuals, but the Hedonist Cheron is portrayed sympathetically, and the Pragmatists are right about Intellectuals’ chronic indecision.

The novel also deals with Stableford’s interest in evolutionary processes, both in the adaptation of an individual to society and Darwinian evolution.

Stableford’s ultimate theme, the difficulty of life in a society unchosen by one, is interestingly worked out. That makes the novel interesting and not its opening two-thirds.

Relatively inoffensive space opera, reads like a story written for 12-year-olds by a 6-year-old. I may have enjoyed it more when I was 13.½

This short novel is the first in Stableford's 'Asgard' trilogy. Nothing to do with Norse gods (in any form), this is a Big Dumb Object story, the object in question being the planet Asgard - an artificial world comprised of nested levels, like an onion - deserted by its inhabitants in the distant past. Or was it?

To this now frozen world come explorers and trophy hunters, looking for ancient alien relics that they can profit from. And so we meet Michael Rousseau, one such trophy hunter who comes into possession of information about penetrating deep into the centre of the planet instead of the four levels that has been the best people could do so far. But Rousseau gets caught up in an adventure involving a crime boss, an alien android on the run, and the ruthless star troopers sent to track the android down.

Rousseau is another of Stableford's cynical, hard-boiled, competent loner protagonists. He reads like Star Pilot Grainger in his earlier Hooded Swan novels and he seems to have a similar facility of getting into and out of trouble. Given the potential of the setting, the story here barely scrapes the surface (so to speak), the upper levels of this world providing the setting for this fairly conventional caper story. Only towards the end do we see hints of a deeper story. Partly this is the fault of the huge expository lumps where Rousseau spends a lot of time explaining stuff to the Earthling star troopers and their Commander.

This isn't entirely Stableford's fault: in the 1980s, US publishers were desperate for material because the sf paperback original novel was selling like mad and publishers could not get enough material to fill their schedules. A number of British writers first saw print in US editions at that time, and Stableford was one such. However, the format was fairly fixed; so the Asgard trilogy was sold to the US publisher Ace as just that - three 200-page novels. It was therefore inevitable that much of the first volume would be taken up with explanation. Nowadays, a story like this would be sold as a 600-page or more doorstopper of a novel, giving the writer a lot more space to show rather than tell.

But do not be misled; Stableford is an intelligent writer and he makes his protagonists intelligent and insightful as well. Yes, there is action, and an exotic setting, and strange aliens; but Mike Rousseau thinks first and shoots second, and that's refreshing. Worth finding.½

This is Stableford’s companion to his four volume New Atlantis series on British scientific romances.

As usual, Stableford writes in a clear way with some nice turns of phrase though he lets some of his snarkiness and sarcasm show at times and has some nice turns ohphrase.

The book starts out in 1657 with Cyrano de Bergerac’s Histoire comique des États et Empires de la Lune [Other Worlds] and goes through 1939. Because of World War Two, little French work was published in the 1940s. Like the British scientific romance, it was subsumed into the dominant American mode of science fiction after the war.

Stableford mentions, as did James Gunn’s in his Alternate Worlds, some of the genres that fed into sf/roman scientifique: traveler’s tales (le merveilleux), imaginary voyages, utopias, and satires. (He talks about how French censorship of books meant many were published with bogus foreign printing information and under pseudonyms.) However, a unique French element was what Voltaire coined contes pilosophiques. The interest in telling “fay stories” in the French court also played a role.

Stableford divides his analysis by historical eras and themes within them.

The first is the prehistory of the roman scientifique which is not clearly distinguished from the literature of the Age of Enlightenment, next is the revolutionary eras of 1789 through 1851, the Second Empire from 1851 through 1870, the era between the Franco-Prussian War and World War One, and, finally, the period after World War One.

There are some broad similarities between the scientific romance and the roman scientifique.

Both started with extraordinary voyages and utopias.

Around the late 1800s through 1939, both started to produce stories of speculations based on science and technology though interest in technology seems more akin to 1920s American pulp fiction (and Hugo Gernsback did actually pay to have a couple of the novels Stableford mentions translated and published).

Both, unlike American sf, were pessimistic in the interwar years with tales of anxiety and man’s inability to control his technology. France’s pessimism in those years was expressed earlier than Britain. Most of its tales of post-war anxiety started after the war and continued until 1930. British scientific romances started to get gloomier in the 1930s.

In none of the three countries was its form of sf particularly respected.

France, like Britain, had a few noted literary writers who wrote a few pieces of roman scientifique including Émile Zola. He extolled something he called roman experimental which employed a “scientific method of character analysis, based on the study of the influences of hereditary and environment in shaping individual behavior”. (It was Alexander Baumgarten that proclaimed mimetic fiction to be the highest value in literature.) Some writers, like Maurice Renard, were enthusiastic supporters of the roman scientifique and wrote significant works, but, eventually, they couldn’t support themselves in the market place and took to crime and thriller fiction.

Indeed, the “melodramatic” (a word Stableford uses a lot, though I’m not sure if, ultimately, he disapproves of exciting adventure fiction and plots) potentials of mad scientists and extravagantly dangerous devices led to something like the modern technothriller which almost always go back to what Stableford calls a “normalizing” ending, i.e. hit the reset button so the world is essentially the same at the end of the story as at the beginning.

The roman scientifique, in the mid-1800s, created the modern superhero.

Then there was the freakishly prolific Joseph Morelli who produced up to 100,000 a words a month for a period of 30 years. But no book was ever published under his name. His roman scientifique work was published in the French equivalent of the pulps and even he eventually turned to crime fiction. (His life somewhat mirrors William Hope Hodgson’s. He became a cabin boy at a young age and had a hard time of it.)

The roman scientifique did have some unique features.

It was much more interested in utopian works and their flip side, the dystopia. Stableford divides utopian works into three categories: the eutopian (a utopia displaced by geography but contemporary to the time of the story’s writing), the euchronic (a utopia displaced into time, either the past or the future of the story’s writing), and the eupsychian (a utopia achieved by altering human conscious or attitudes).

The roman scientifique produced, starting in the age of Napoleon III, a lot of stories about a future Paris (and, sometimes, Paris’ prehistory). These were stories often featured archaeologists and normal people of the future making erroneous deductions about the author’s world. This type of stories were inspired by the reconstruction of Paris in that time which continued after the Franco-Prussian War.

Anarchism and its related movements of Symbolism and Surrealism were a theme in the roman scientifique.

Of course, Stableford talks about Jules Verne and how his publishers limited what he was allowed to publish and that some of his atypical works were stories he re-wrote as a sort of a ghost writer for other authors. The Vernian extraordinary voyage endured into the 1920s before it petered out. Before Tachiovsky’s papers on rocketry in 1913, many interplanetary voyages had implausible rationalizations before then and even after then. But, surprisingly for being known primarily as a hard sf writer specializing in biological speculations (though a look at his bibliography shows much fantasy and weird fiction), Stableford doesn’t get very hung up on scientifically plausibility. It’s nice if sf of whatever country has scientific plausibility, but the “literary elegance” of possessing it is not essential, and its absence does not mean a work has no value.

The one extraordinary technological prediction from a writer of roman scientifique is from a writer who never wrote another one: Henri Austruy’s “L’Olotélépan”. It basically describes the modern world of the smartphone and internet.

There are many stories here which touch on images and motifs that showed up later in famous works of British and American sf written independently. Maurice Renard came up with the idea of what would become Bob Shaw’s slow glass though Stableford says that space constraints kept Renard from developing the idea more thoroughly. Another idea thoroughly developed and prominent in the roman scientifique is the mad scientist. That was the primary theme of Félix Bodin who specialized in depicting the obsessive mind of the scientist, its occasional impracticalities, unconcern with common morality, and disconnection from regular society.

There were a number of writers I have read or definitely want to read more of: Albert Robida (who, after The Engineer von Satanaas seems to have become less bitter and Stableford makes it clear that he was a major author in roman scientifique), Edmond Haraucourt, André Couvreur, and Renard.

There is a bit of gloominess about this book. At the time of its publication, Stableford was 69 years, and he says in the introduction that he perhaps cut his survey off a decade too early. However, to extend its scope further would require another 10 years of reading (even for Stableford!), and he thought it worthwhile to present what he did have.

The conclusion of the book is more barbed. He talks about the courage of these writers in doing what they did despite their failures artistically and commercially. (Perhaps he was thinking of the last twenty years of his career in which he’s basically only had his novels published by small presses using print-on-demand.) Those French authors were writing “antistories” because stories purport to represent an understandable and predictable world. Sf and the roman scientifique are paradoxical in that they pretend, with the word “science”, to objectively and truthfully present the real world even though they present imaginary worlds to one degree or another.

It is good, contends Stableford, that we have such stories because they remind us the world is always changing and not knowable even in its present. Yet, we can gain understanding of the world and science’s effect on it, even in stories with implausible “science”. He evokes one of his favorite authors, Alfred Jarry, and his pataphysics in this regard. But Stableford wearily notes, with bitter resignation, that too few authors and readers, even today, want to engage in truly original and imaginative sf.

The book’s index only references the authors discussed. A timeline of significant works is also presented. There is a convenient listing of all the covered titles that have been translated for Black Coat Press, also the publisher of this book. There are a number of covers reproduced throughout the book. However, all are in black and white and, frankly, only a minority have any cover illustrations, so that was not as interesting as I hoped.

I still highly recommend this book for anybody interested in the history of the tributary known as the roman scientifique before its banks vanished, and it joined the literary river we now call science fiction. There is no other equivalent to this book in English.