[John D Macdonald - Wine of the Dreamers]
John D Macdonald was a prolific writer of crime and suspense novels, which started appearing as paperbacks in the early 1950's. Before that he had earned a living selling stories to pulp fiction magazines. Wine of the Dreamers published in book form in 1951 was a venture into science fiction, he tried again in the next year with [Ballroom of the skies], but soon turned to a regular churning out of crime novels, usually three or four a year. Wine of the Dreamers starts off with a car journey: Bard Lane a scientist and Sharon Inlay a psychiatrist are speeding across New Mexico after being summoned by the military head of Bard Lanes' rocket building project. General Sachson is looking at ways to curtail the project after one of the scientists has run amok injuring two military personnel and smashing some delicate equipment. The tension of the car journey is well described interspersed with news flashes of people across the country doing crazy things, many of them involving murder. It is in chapter three that I realised I was reading a science fiction novel when we meet Rual Kinson trapped in a building on a planet of dreamers.

The early part of the novel is well written as is the development of the dreamers on the mystery planet, the two stories run side by side until the connection between the dreamers and the crazy events on earth is made. The later part of the novel runs away with itself a little, as far too much happens too quickly and events that seemed plausible in science fiction terms rapidly become less so. The idea of alien mind control leading to murderous events on earth is not a new trope, but the rational behind the events is given a twist by Macdonald. The quality of the writing, the characterisation and the absence of racism and sexism helped to keep me reading right to the end. Not bad and so 3 stars. ( )

El mundo de los Soñadores es un mundo viejo y decadente; sus pocos habitantes son capaces de proyectar mecánicamente sus sentimientos y percepciones a otros planetas y controlar mentalmente sus poblaciones. Al creer que los demás mundos no son más que creaciones de sus propios sueños, no se reprimen a la hora de dar rienda suelta a sus impulsos más oscuros sobre los pueblos que controlan.

Early science fantasy by John D MacDonald

An outsider in a controlled society discovers the evils being perpetrated by that society and fights back. Set against backdrop of a more contemporary society than Bladerunner. Written in the cities some of the prognostications about the future ring eeriely true. What cars the craziness of our school shootings. The answer proposed here is entirely fantastical, and the dialog and concerns are dated the idea that women lack the logic of men certainly sounds laughable to a contemporary reader. ( )

Rating: 3 surprised stars of five

The Publisher Says: Wine of the Dreamers, a classic science fiction novel from John D. MacDonald, the beloved author of Cape Fear and the Travis McGee series, is now available as an eBook.

They are the Watchers: pale laboratory creatures living in a remote, sealed-off world. Their game, their religion, their release is to dream, and their dreams carry across the galaxy to lodge in the minds of the inhabitants of another world: the planet Earth. But as the human race approaches a dream of their own—traveling beyond their own planet to other worlds—the Watchers step in. For escape from Earth is an impossible dream, one that the Watchers will go to any length to destroy.

My Review: JOHN D. MACDONALD WROTE SCI FI?!?

*splutter*

Well blow me down and call me Shorty! I would never, ever in a month of Sundays have guessed that Travis McGee's daddy ventured into outer space! But he did, and I have now passed its odd and lumpy lineaments before my eyes.

I poke around the Internet when I'm at a loose end. I found a Wikipedia article on Startling Stories, a pulp rag from the Golden Age of SF. Oooh, lookee here, what innocent things the ancestors were, I thought, and oooh how scrummy there's a link to an internet archive of the magazines!

Babes in brass bras...ads for defunct brands of whisky using Mexican artists...Vaseline Hair Tonic...JOHN D. MACDONALD?!?

Downloaded and read. And what a ride it was: Square-jawed hetero male has non-rapey friendship with bodacious curvy babe. Not at all like the MacDonald we know and love. (Or don't love, as the case may be.) This is an aberration, explained by a plot twist in the story of the Dreamers. Now this is an old chestnut, the mental passengers who suddenly take over innocent earthlings for malign purposes. It wasn't the latest thing in 1950 (!!) when the story appeared in Startling Stories. But it's an evergreen for a reason, it explains the strange turns and periodic about-faces that humans actually do have. There was a moment when I thought, "aha this explains Parseltongue!" before I realized JK Rowling's younger than I am and not known to be related to MacDonald...the only means I can imagine whereby the Scottish lassie would've heard of this obscure gem.

In more or less 50,000 words, MacDonald hit all the buttons of an action adventure on multiple planets, America's inevitable domination of the Space Race, and that eternal favorite of male readers, Man's Unique Destiny to Rule and Dominate! It was 1950, go fight the odds.

As I scrolled through the PDF file, I was increasingly amazed at the un-MacDonald-ness of the story. His touch with a wisecrack was entirely absent, his trademark pessimism was not yet at full cry as the ending was hopeful (!), and while I would not put MacDonald up there with Henry James in the ability to convey character in a few well-chosen words, these folks were Central Casting call sheets.

So it was that, despite the siren call of sleep, I scrolled and scrolled through the scanned pages of this deeply forgotten footnote to the popular career of MacDonald. It was certainly MacDonaldy in the sense that, despite the humorously outdated science, and despite the hoary familiar trope being unspooled before me, I couldn't think of a good reason not to keep right on reading until the inevitable ending. And by inevitable, I mean so clearly telegraphed in the set-up that Helen Keller running out of a burning building wouldn't have any trouble supplying it for you.

Sophisticates are therewith warned.

In fact, would I recommend starting this little marvy to most people? No, not really, it's not earth-shatteringly good at anything. It's a curiosity, and a charmingly old-fashioned stroll down memory lane for those of us on the downhill slide to death.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. ( )

This is a thought-provoking, surprisingly modern science fiction story that MacDonald wrote in 1951 and that is one of his two works of science fiction. Didn't know exactly what to expect, and this greatly exceeded my expectations. It has its awkward moments in alternating between Earth, where a scientist and a psychologist are key players in building an interstellar spaceship, and a distant world whose inhabitants enter "dream machines" where they can inhabit and take over the bodies of men and women on Earth (and visit a couple of other planets as well.) These two threads become closely entwined, of course, and the story is surprisingly moving in places as we see the violence inflicted on Earth by these alien dreamers, who don't consider any of their dreams to be real. In his excellent afterword, written in 1968, MacDonald talks about why he allowed the book to be republished and why he didn't change a word of it, even though he was tempted. All in all, this book, despite some very dark and cynical passages, and a few stock bad guys (generals, politicians, broadcasters--the usual suspects) succeeds in being one of MacDonald's more hopeful works. ( )