review of
A. Bertram Chandler's Frontier of the Dark
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - January 24, 2017

Usually, when I'm reading 2 or more things at once, as I was when I was reading this bk, it's b/c there's one thing that I'm reading that's important to me that I'm reading slowly & then one or 2 other things that I'm reading for relief from the seriousness of that. Frontier of the Dark was a relief bk. Note that I haven't uploaded a review for several wks - that means I'm somewhat dreading writing the 'difficult' reviews so I'm procrastinating. In the meantime, I've read 6 bks to be reviewed. The psychological pressure for closure is building. I must write these reviews.. or else.

As those of you who've following these reviews know, I've read quite a few Chandler novels in the past yr. I must be so relieved by now I might just blend into my bed, an amorphous mass barely f=distinguishable from the crumpled _____. Notice how I didn't fill in the blank? That's b/c you know to fill it in w/ "sheets". It's that much of a cliché. Or maybe I'll become a werewolf. That wd be a nice change, I've become so damned polite & considerate in my old age (sez who?! shriek the _____). &, yes, this Chandler bk is about werewolves.. in outer space.

I've noted in some other Chandler review (&, no, in my current mood I'm not going to bother to figure out wch one) that he seems to read other bks for inspiration & to then give the subject the Chandler-spin. In this case, I reckon he'd trolled thru the werewolf lit a bit.. or the movies.. or something.. & thought that putting werewolves in space might be worth dedicating a whole novel too. I'm not sure I agree, but, HEY!, he was 72 when this came out, at the end of his life.. who KNOWS what drek I'll be whiling away the hrs w/ a mere 9 yrs from now as I I wait for the Grim Reaper to make his next chess move (or shd it be Scrabble?).

The dedication is "For Harlan Ellison, who made me do it". Whenever I think of Ellison, I think of those Dangerous Visions anthologies that he edited that have the reputation, or the marketing image, of being outré (or some-such). Ellison's introduction to the 1st volume begins:

"What you hold in your hands is more than a book. If we are lucky, it is a revolution.

"This book, all two hundred and thirty-nine thousand words of it, the largest anthology of speculative fiction ever published of all original stories, and easily one of the largest of any kind was constructed along specific lines of revolution. It was intended to shake things up. It was conceived out of a need for new horizons, new forms, new styles, new challenges in the literature of our times." - p xix, Dangerous Visions

That was published in 1967 & the comp has 544pp. Ok, a few of my favorite SF writers are represented: Frederik Pohl. Philip K. Dick, R. A. Lafferty, J. G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delaney. I don't have any other SF comps from before 1967 that're more than 544pp but volume one of the Anthony Boucher edited A Treasury of Great Science Fiction is 527pp & is from 1959. Furthermore, a comp I have entitled The World's Great Romances (1929) is 724pp & another, The World's Great Detective Stories (1928) is 842pp.. so, methinks Ellison is, perhaps, enthusing a bit too much. Then again, he did specify "original" & the latter 2 comps just mentioned consisted of reprints of previously published stories.

Furtherfurthermore, all the stories look like the usual array of paragraphs containing linear prose so I question just how deeply the "new styles" went & just how much it wd "shake things up". We're not talkin' Naked Lunch here. What am I getting at? Wdn't you like to know. Well, maybe, you cdn't care less, maybe you're only reading this b/c yr 2 yr old is holding her new AK47 to yr head & DEMANDING that you do. Don't say I didn't tell you so. I mean what the fuck do you think you're doing giving yr 2 yr old such a destructive thing?! Do you think the NRA is going to pay for yr funeral dipshit?! Uh, where was I?

Oh, yeah, Chandler & Ellison: imagine this: maybe they were corresponding, maybe they were having a chat at a World SF Con, maybe Chandler sd something like: 'Y'know, Harlan, old boy, I''ve been toying w/ the idea of writing a novel about werewolves in outer space but I can't decide if it's too obviously pandering to a borderline illiterate sensationalism-seeking readership.' To wch, Ellison, whose 'revolutionary' editorial vision may've mainly been a wee bit on the shake-n-bake side of revolution, may've encouraged it as a stellar idea. Of course, that's completely my silly fantasy & isn't meant to actually critique Ellison, whose writing is, most likely, much more important than this trifling review.

Right off the silver-bullet-loaded bat, Chandler brings in an aelurophobe: "Nick Falsen had never liked cats, and cats had never liked him." (p 1) wch is a term I learned by reading his The Inheritors, my review of wch can be read here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/518842-cat-s-pajamas . I reckon Chandler has used the word & its concept enuf to be called an aelurophobephile, a person who loves cat-haters w/o having to be a cat-hater himself. Really, what I want to make a neologism for is: 'A person who loves the word aelurophobe' but that's tough one. A biblioaelurophobephile perhaps? That's not right either.

The main character isn't John Grimes for a change it's this Falsen upstart & he's being expelled from the spaceship that he crewed on:

"Canning had not forgotten and—to the displeasure of the other officers—the second mate was not popular—had ruled that Falsen be given a fighting chance. The master of the star tramp Epsilon Crucis ordered that his second officer be marooned on Antares VI, an inhospitable planet barely capable of supporting human life" - p 1

Abandoned on Antares VI the 1st woman he finds, on the very 1st fucking day, is highly compatible w/ him. Some werewolves have all the luck. Chandler then uses this meeting as an excuse to drop in Sirius, the Dog Star, & Beagle, Darwin's ship's name - both for obvious jokey reasons:

""You're Dog Star Line," he stated rather than asked.

""How did you . . . ? Oh, my uniform, of course. Yes, Dog Star Line. Purser, catering officer and maid-of-all-work aboard the good ship Beagle." - p 6

Of course, the detail that these 2 are werewolves isn't completely flung in the reader's face, it's slowly leaked, complete w/ silver bullet references such as "". . . with lethal ironmongery trained on us from inside that ship." / "That shouldn't worry us much. Unless . . ."" (p 13) ""Yes, Mr. Falsen. Teeth must have been its main weapon, perhaps its only weapon. But the really frightening part of it is that it must have been immune to the fire of my people's lasers.["]" (p 31) They didn't have silver DISCO BALL lasers, the anti-werewolf equivalent of a sawed-off shotgun light show.

After these 2 team up they meet a matriarchal group of space explorers who're their ticket off the planet, if they play their fangs right.

""But in the course of our survey we were bound to have investigated what appears to be a geological anomaly, the only hill within kilometers. This call for help that was not seriously required has impeded our work. You are not injured. You do not seem to be dying of starvation."

"Falsen said, "I'm sorry about that."

"The officer glared at him, then turned to Linda.

""Lady," she said, "I will waste no more time in conversation with this inferior being, Tell the man to follow us to the airship. You are to be taken to the Lady Mother." Linda looked bewilderedly at Falsen.

""The Doralans," he told her, "have a sort of matriarchal setup. The Lady Mother, I suppose, is the captain of their ship."" - p 14

NOW, here goes that Chandler fellow again: he can't just have the werewolves fighting it out w/ the humanoids, he has to have them be matriarchal humanoids. Really, it's a nice touch. Do were wolves kill their moms? Do androids dream of electric sleep? Do androids dream of electric sheep in wolves's clothing?

Linda, an aelurophobe, as we all know all werewolves are, I mean who ever heard of a werewolf w/ a pet cat?, let's it all hang out by page 24:

"While the body of the cat, its throat torn out, bled on the deck, she stripped. Falsen did not watch her change, nobody had ever seen him do so and he hoped that nobody ever would. he stood there, facing the door. From behind him, from deck level, he heard the tearing noises, the noisy slurping, the splintering and crunching of fragile bones to an assimilatable sludge." - pp 24-25

Is there a Guide to Eating Ettiquette for Werewolves? How about teen lesbian vampires who lurk in the appropriate aisle of Borders? Ok, all joking aside (or tucked under my tiny buttocks), Chandler pulls this off by doing things like introducing ecological concerns:

"Orders, thought Falsen, might be legally correct but morally wrong and, although he was coming to both like and respect the Lady Mother, he sympathized with the stand that the ecologist was making. He recalled the histories of one or two Earth-colonized planets where the conservationists had been shouted down. The flame trees on Austral, the water dragons on Cruxhaven, the first destroyed because their pollen caused some distress to certain asthmatics—among whom were the governor and his wife—the second wiped out because they made the occasional meal from the herds of Terran cattle grazing on the rover banks." - p 70

""The dolisen is. It is a herbivore that comes out of the rivers when the flaren trees bear their fruit. It is then that the females give birth. If, for some reason, the dolisen became extinct there would be no more flaren trees. The droppings of the animals are essential to fertilize the plants. And should the flaren trees be . . . exterminated there would be no more dolisen.["]" - p 72

The werewolves sit "down to a meal of some sweet mush and anise-flavored tea. It filled their bellies but did not satisfy." (p 76) I feel ya. A group of the Doralans & our 2 werewolves crash in an aircraft in a remote & 'inhospitable' area. The dead are put outside. The issue of how to survive, of what to eat, arises:

"["]There is not food in the car."

""There is outside," Carlin said.

"And there is precedent, thought Falsen, ample precedent. But usually survivors of a wreck waited until they were starving before doing the obvious thing.

""Carlin!" cried the pilot. "Surely you do not intend . . ."" - p 93

The following is paraphrased from this Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alive_(1993_film) :

'Piers Paul Read's 1974 book Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, details the story of a Uruguayan rugby team who were involved in the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which crashed into the Andes mountains on Friday, October 13, 1972. After extreme hardship the survivors resort to eating the passengers who didn't survive.'

I have to wonder whether this was an inspiration to Chandler. I assume it was.

Chandler tries to make some elements of the story not too obvious for the reader:

"["]that something must be identified and brought under control—or exterminated."

"Yes, there was something, Falsen thought.

"There was the thing that he knew about, that would be there no matter where the spaceship landed on this planet's surface.

"But there was something else." - p 106

& what that something else was was pretty damned obvious to this reader - but I'm not tellin'. I'm not tellin' b/c it wd be a spoiler but I will say that, for me, the weak point of this novel was how obvious the hints were all along & how much the plot of the bk depended on these hints going largely unnoticed by the reader. I reckon this was aimed at a not very sophisticated readership. One of these very obvious hints happens on page 113 & is akin to other stories of Chandler's that I've reviewed:

"At first he was awkward. But this, he soon realized, was not her first experience of interspecies sexual congress. (She must have done more at the Antarctic Academy than acquire a taste for Terran liquor.) She fondled him expertly, and her little capable hands guided him into the voracious depths of here, the hot moistness, the unfamiliar, soft-yet-firm internal protuberances that clutched and held.

"He wondered what the sound was, the vibration that was transmitted from her body to his, then knew she was purring with pleasure."

Chandler complicates the story by having his werewolf have ethics:

"the Lady Mother . . . For one of his kind conscience was an expensive luxury; nonetheless, he possessed one. It was troubling him now, nagging him about the immorality of giving with one hand and taking away with both." - p 158

As usual, any writer who manages to make a cultural reference that I'm both familiar w/ & enthusiastic about increases my enjoyment of the reading:

"Yes, in the city of Old Los Angeles, those fantastic constructions called the Watts Towers, steeples built from all sorts of metallic, glass and ceramic odds and ends. They were not the original towers, of course. They had been rebuilt more than once and improved upon every time." - p 163

In Chandler's future the Watts Towers had been rebuilt but in the century after they were built by Simon Rodia that still hasn't been necessary yet:

"In 1921, Rodia purchased the triangular-shaped lot at 1761-1765 107th Street in Los Angeles and began to construct his masterpiece, which he called "Nuestro Pueblo" (meaning "our town"). For 34 years, Rodia worked single-handedly to build his towers without benefit of machine equipment, scaffolding, bolts, rivets, welds or drawing board designs. Besides his own ingenuity, he used simple tools, pipe fitter pliers and a window-washer's belt and buckle.

"Construction worker by day and artist by night, Rodia adorned his towers with a diverse mosaic of broken glass, sea shells, generic pottery and tile, a rare piece of 19th-century, hand painted Canton ware and many pieces of 20th-century American ceramics. Rodia once said, "I had it in mind to do something big and I did it." The tallest of his towers stands 99½ feet and contains the longest slender reinforced concrete column in the world. The monument also features a gazebo with a circular bench, three bird baths, a center column and a spire reaching a height of 38 feet. Rodia's "ship of Marco Polo" has a spire of 28 feet, and the 140-foot long "south wall" is decorated extensively with tiles, sea shells, pottery, glass and hand-drawn designs.

"In 1955, when Rodia was approaching 75, he deeded his property to a neighbor and retired to Martinez, California to be near his family. A fire ruined Rodia's little house in 1956. within a few years the Department of Building and Safety ordered the property demolished. A group of concerned citizens, calling themselves "The Committee for Simon Rodia's Towers in Watts", fought successfully to save the Towers by collecting signatures and money and devising an engineering test in 1959 that proved the Towers' strength and safety. Bill Cartwright and Nick King purchased the Towers from Mr. Montoya for $3,000.00 in 1959. They founded The Committee for Simon Rodia’s Towers in Watts and saved the Towers from demolition with a “stress” or “load” test, designed by Bud Goldstone. The Towers proved stronger than the test equipment. Therefore, the test was stopped and the Towers were deemed safe, and preservation efforts began. The Watts community considered the Watts Towers part of their heritage and called upon the new owners to also invest in the community. Thus the Watts Towers Arts Center began." - http://www.wattstowers.us/history.htm

I laud the preservation of these towers. They DO represent the perseverance of an individual's will & imagination & I scorn the visionless scum who wd've torn the towers down if they'd gotten their way.

Regular readers of Chandler's work will've read descriptions of the "Mannschenn Drive" ad nauseum. By having a werewolf worried about having a change triggered by the Drive's peculiar qualities he at least managed to inject a little fresh _____ into the stock language:

"He knew what recalibration entailed, working at the control panel in the Mannschenn Drive room in close proximity to the uncannily precessing rotors, exposed to the full intensity of the temporal-precession field, an intensity far greater than that experienced while the Drive was working normally in deep space. Should he be involved too closely in the operation, there would be the very real danger that he would not be able to control himself." - p 185

& even werewolves deteriorate w/ old age even tho they can't be killed by lasers:

""You'd be sicker still if we had to live like wild animals on some savage world. Oh, you might like to revert every now and again, just as any human enjoys a holiday away from the big cities, in the woods or on the seashore. But all your life? You wouldn't like it. Even people like us need the attention of a dentist now and again, are subject to failing eyesight and deteriorating digestive functions, and all the rest of it. There's one killer who's bound to get us in the end: old age." - p 187

& Chandler didn't live much longer after writing that. If his characters had lived in the US they might not have gotten dental care either given that entirely too much of their money wd be stolen for 'health insurance' (HA HA) that doesn't cover dental. These days, if you want to feast on human flesh it's not enuf to be a werewolf, you have to actually be in the health business - then you can cannibalize off everyone around you AND have PR camouflage to disguise it as somehow altruistic. ( )

Yes, this really, truly, honest-to-God is a book about werewolves in space. Horny werewolves, to be exact. Probably written on a bet (the dedication is "For Harlan Ellison, who made me do it").

In the future, the ftl drive that grants access to the stars has an odd effect on those few folks unfortunate enough to have the (extremely recessive) lycanthropic gene, and after the discovery of a few too many random bloodied crew member corpses, our protagonist Falsen finds himself marooned on an uninhabited and fairly dreary planet. Fortunately, it doesn’t take long to find a similarly abandoned and horny female werewolf with whom to sate mutual needs. Opportunity and adversity arrive in the form of the horny ostensibly all-female crew of matriarchal cat/human-hybrid-like aliens who are exploring said planet to evaluate its suitability for colonization. The story follows a sequence of exploration, violent confrontations with horrific ostensibly native fauna, and observations on aspects of the anatomy of cat/human girls in various stages of undress.

There’s not much good to be said about this book. The engineering problem that dominates a good part of the second half of the book is reasonably interesting. And, while the ostensibly big surprise at the end was really no surprise at all, the final couple of paragraphs offer a deliciously Martinesque conclusion that perhaps makes the fairly minimal effort to slog your way through this one worth it. ( )