Ian Wallace (1)Recensioni

F/SF

F/SF

F/SF

F/SF

An almost unreadable mix of pseudoscience babble, confusing stuff about time manipulation, political intrigues, mega cities and some mysterious unexplained threat called the Z-Sting. I have literally no idea what the narrative was about.

This was Very striking cover art for the time. The book itself deals with an earth trapped in a kind of opioid [or electronic media
?} addiction while invaders gather from the vast beyond to give us another form of enslavement. There are moments involving almost "Mindswap" techniques and a clever ending. It seems to have established in my mind the idea that when the interstellar invaders come, they will come with really good junk food for us....such good junk food that even knowing it will poison us, we will still take it. Ian Wallace has a very good body of truly inventive work.

The Rape of the Sun is a DAW Books paperback original sci-fi novel published in 1982 that reads like it was written at least twenty years previously. Set in the mid-1990s on an Earth with much more advanced aerospace and energy technology (but still mired in the depths of the last phase of the Cold War with all of its concomitant tensions and dangers of a full-scale nuclear war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.), the premise involves a humanoid manta/dragon-like race named Dhorners, from the planet Dhorn -- the males sport impala-style horns, while the females have hair (the cover painting, by David Mattingly, doesn't really do justice to the descriptions of the Dhorners' bat-like snouts and flipper-like feet) -- for a handful of religious, duplicitous, and frivolous reasons, deciding to hijack our entire solar system to serve as the crowning exhibit in their religious (Dhorn has but one religion) museum-cum-temple. Four Earth scientists and one high-level psychic named Wilkie Collins (no, really) learn of this nefarious plot and try to stop it.

There's enough honest-to-Gernsback scientific extrapolation (mixed with some not too objectionable authorial chicanery) to please those who prefer their science fiction to have at least some real science; there are also a few mind-snapping concepts tossed around -- time travel that works only in moving from the present to the past and back to the present again, although perhaps not quite in the manner that one might first think (the term "time chord" is a clue); a tweaking of a concept of Richard Matheson's -- freely blended with some cutesy/cheesy/questionable elements (a character proves to be the reincarnation of William Shakespeare; a smart, tough, strong female protagonist who, being unable to decide between her husband and her former "fearsomely arousing lover," races into the latter's bed with her husband's blessing; gratuitous line-readings from Henry VI, Part III; irritating neologisms, abrupt switches in diction for no convincing reason, and gaffes such as referring to uranium as a fossil fuel [p. 18]). As rendered here, Ian Wallace's style -- and his idea of a smart, tough, strong woman referring to her inamorata as her "god," in the manner of a character from a Victorian novel (p. 255) -- may remind one more than a little of Robert A. Heinlein. This is not an unalloyed good thing.

Still and all, The Rape of the Sun is a decent time-killer for those whose ambivalence about Heinlein's work leans a bit more strongly towards the "like" side of the dial than to the "dislike," particularly if you've already read most of Heinlein and don't care to re-read any of his books at the moment. This is also apparently one of the few -- if not the only -- non-series books that Wallace published, so The Rape of the Sun is perhaps the only opportunity that a reader has to decide if he wants to read more of Wallace without feeling obligated to go on a used bookstore crawl or work the bejeezus out of his local library's inter-library lending system.

i love Ian Wallace: for the ideas, which are outlandish, and pretty fun. i hate Ian Wallace: for the actual reading part. what's wrong with the guy? it doesn't read like English. well, maybe English as she is spoke in Outer Mongolia. stiff and skittish. weird. but he has nifty thoughts. and every book plays out some new extraordinary and outrageous premise. so i keep on picking them up, whenever i see one. i should sit down and read all the Croyd stuff in order, maybe that would help.

this one's about a future that might be our past, and there are two brothers, see, and one's an angel, one's a devil. sound simple, so far? ha! clearly you haven't read enough Ian Wallace. in fact the angel's a version of Prometheus, the bringer of fire, getting his liver eaten at intervals, and the devil brother might just be the good guy. or possibly God. not too bright, but he creates, where his brother does the crit; and he hates the crit. he also hates fire, and spiders. and it's all about, of course, creation, seen from the PoV of a future us, following the trail of stars. and also the PoV of them as did the original work. and, oh yeah, there's a Lilith too, the before Eve version, and she's actually the snake. as in snake in the woodpile, maybe; needless to say, more than one point of view on that one.

but see? the only thing to do with Ian Wallace is to read his stuff. even though sometimes it requires a bit of plowing. because it keeps taking turns of its own, and the fun for the reader is in the follow.½