review of
Keith Laumer's The House in November
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 31, 2015

I wrote a review of a Laumer bk yesterday ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7673026-the-day-before-forever-and-thunderhe... ). That was about all I got done yesterday. Not a good day. Today's not much better, the only slightly substantial thing I've done today is take apart an accordion, now I know a little more about accordions, maybe I'll take my last few dollars & buy some carpenter's glue so I can try to fix it. Who cares, right? Get to the fucking bk review, right?!

This is another hack work by a hack writer who had some 'success' a few yrs before this bk came out w/ his Invaders wch was made into a tv series. I reckon he was trying to milk the last pennies out of the-things-from-outer-space-that-imitate-humans-who're-gonna-kill-us-all type story b/c that's what this is.

"There was a sharp thwack! of the mechanism, the stiff jolt of the recoil. Six inches of bright steel stood quivering against the bright-patterned chest. Mallory realized quite suddenly that the "shirt" was not a garment; it was part of the not-man's body, molded with it. . . ." - p 34

Mallory's trying to figure out what's going on, he's got amnesia, has the army fought the invaders?

"A hundred yards from his starting point, a burned out tank rested on its side in the ditch. So the army had fought—and lost. He plodded on, head down against the chill wind, headed north into the dark countryside." - p 36

It's ambiguous, there're a multiplicity of interpretations:

""There's been a war," the elderly man said cooly. "A short war—one which the United States failed to win. The country has been invaded. We're under occupation by Soviet troops."" - p 40

Is it the Russians? The Chinese? Devils? Aliens? Disease?

""Satan's clever," Brother Jack said. "Oh, I underestimated him. I'll confess to you that for years I was skeptical in my heart. I spoke the word of God, but in my private thoughts I was an unbeliever. That's why He loosed Satan on the world, you see, I admit it. I'm the guilty one!"" - p 75

""No . . . invade is not the correct word," the old man said. "Your planet is not occupied; it's infected. They're not invaders; they're a disease."" - p 94

The bk's 'dated' in a way that caught me off-guard:

""Then one day I caught a faint echo from deep space. I monitored it, watched it grow until there was no longer any doubt: A Mone space pod was approaching, had in fact passed the orbit of Pluto, and was falling sunward with gradually increasing velocity. In short, the day long-dreaded was approaching. the Mone was here.["]" - p 98

This casual mention of Pluto was made during the time Pluto was considered to be a planet. I imagine that any references to it these days wd be subtly different. This gives me an excuse to quote at length from NASA's website:

"Discovered in 1930, Pluto was long considered our solar system's ninth planet. But after the discovery of similar intriguing worlds deeper in the distant Kuiper Belt, icy Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet. This new class of worlds may offer some of the best evidence about the origins of our solar system.

10 Need-to-Know Things About Pluto:

1. If the sun were as tall as a typical front door, Earth would be the size of a nickel and dwarf planet Pluto would be about the size of the head of a pin.
2. Pluto orbits our sun, a star, at an average distance of 3.7 billion miles (5.9 billion kilometers) or 39.5 AU.
3. One day on Pluto takes about 153 hours. That's the time it takes for Pluto to rotate or spin once. Pluto makes a complete orbit around the sun (a year in Plutonian time) in about 248 Earth years.
4. It is thought that Pluto has a rocky core surrounded by a mantle of water ice with other ices coating its surface.
5. Pluto has five known moons. Pluto is sometimes called a double-planet system due to the fact that its moon Charon is quite large and orbits close to its parent planet.
6. There are no known rings around Pluto.
7. Pluto has a thin, tenuous atmosphere that expands when it comes closer to the sun and collapses as it moves farther away -- similar to a comet.
8. NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is the first mission sent to encounter the Pluto-system and other members of the Kuiper Belt.
9. Scientists do not think Pluto can support life as we know it. Although, some scientists believe it is possible Pluto could possess a hidden ocean under its surface.
10. Pluto was considered a planet from 1930, when it was first discovered, until 2006. The discovery of similar-sized worlds deeper in the distant Kuiper Belt sparked a debate which resulted in a new official definition of a planet. The new definition did not include Pluto." - https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=Pluto

Wasn't that fun? That little bit of quoting from NASA is the only thing that even makes this shitty little review worth writing. Imagine if I were writing this review under the conditions described in the next The House in November quote:

""But—Jeff Mallory—there is no human race to save. Surely you know! The first act of the Mone pod on picking a breeding site is to broadcast a killing gas which wipes the planet clean of organic life except in the protected area of the nest. The people of your city of Beatrice live—as mindless slaves of the Mone. All the rest, Jeff Mallory, are dead!"" - p 111

Some people are such downers, always looking on the negative side. But when the chips are down, there's nothing like a little mind-melding to save the day:

"Awareness of a woman's self-picture flooded into his mind; all the memories and complexities of a full human existence were comprehended in a single polyordinal gestalt. For a fractional instant he sensed her startlement at the strange touch invading her identity, the beginning of a flash of atavistic fear; then he had shunted aside her feeble ego-assertion reflex, adding the computational and conceptualizing circuitry of her mind to the Mallory/Strang duality." - p 146

Whatever. I'm being cynical here but Laumer's bk is better than my review of it so I deserve more criticism than he does. I enjoyed it, it served its purpose for today, escapism n'at. ( )