August bukes part one

[realthog]

I've counted, and it seems I've read in excess of half a million books this month. Behind the cut can be found the first part of my informal notes on these; as usual, apologies for all typos, howlers, food-stains.

A couple of nonfiction books consumed during August aren't here because it'll be a few more days before I have the time to describe them. So they'll go into the September heap.







Extreme Measures: The Dark Visions and Bright Ideas of Francis Galton (2004) by Martin Brookes

Let me say right at the outset that, incredibly, this scientific biography has been published entirely without apparatus: no index, no references, no bibliography, no nuffink. I'm surprised the publisher included a Contents page. Reading it was, consequently, a maddening experience; I cannot tell you how many times I wanted to check up on something, whether it be reminding myself of who someone was or putting a source to a cited passage, and found my way was barred. It says a lot for the general quality of Brookes's text that I didn't hurl the book in disgust at the wall and go find myself an alternative Galton bio to read. As it is, Brookes's good work is largely wasted because of some blithering imbecile's decision to omit this important material.

Galton was, as I'm sure you know, the half-cousin of Charles Darwin (they shared Erasmus Darwin as a grandfather but had different grandmothers) who inflicted the "science" of eugenics on the world; when the evolution denialists shrill about how Darwin was responsible for the Holocaust what they're really talking about is Darwinism's bastard offshoot pseudoscience eugenics, a bastard that Darwin in his usual polite manner did his best to distance himself from. The place for discussing the stupidity of eugenics -- and the even more blinding stupidity of the anti-evolutionists -- is not here. What the book reveals is just quite how much else Galton did. Although I found myself thinking of him as being like a kind of cross between Professor Branestawm (although not nearly so nice a guy) and Christopher Monckton, this caricature does him less than justice. Unlike Monckton, he had a whole string of genuine scientific achievements to his name, from developing the science of fingerprints for criminological use to deriving the important statistical concept of the correlation coefficient to inventing psychological tools like word association and the psychological questionnaire; he even got closer, in those pre-Mendelian times, than did Darwin to working out the basic principles of heredity/genetics. He received all manner of recognitions for his scientific work, and most of them were rewards well merited.

At the same time he was a crackpot. Leaving the whole eugenics madness to one side, there were the months he spent investigating the properties and preparation techniques of the perfect cup of tea. He invented special spectacles for those on those occasions when you want to read a book or newspaper underwater, and a lidded top hat -- with a drawstring conveniently dangling from the brim -- so that you could offer your pate welcome aeration on hot days. He was an almost obsessive racist, his bigotry standing out even in that very racist era. His investigations of the inheritance of genius and worthiness, something in which he passionately believed, and in other areas of his research were destroyed by his habit of skewing or cherry-picking his own data to achieve the desired outcome. And so on.

There's much here to fascinate, and Brookes's breezy style -- occasionally perhaps too breezy -- makes light work of what could have been a stodgy read. But, as I say, the value of the book is almost fatally reduced by the exclusion of what I'm sure someone must have regarded as "the boring stuff at the back".


Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science (2008) by Robert L. Park

If you go to the Amazon page for this book, you'll discover that the Publishers Weekly review was a stinker; quite patently, the reviewer had some agenda of his own, and treated the book to an extended ideologically based sneer supposedly disguised by a dreadfully concocted faux-objectivity. Time was that PW didn't let that sort of thing slip through.

A few years ago Park, Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland, was out jogging one morning when an oak tree fell on top of him, hospitalizing him for months and enforcing a long period of convalescence thereafter. His life was saved by an immigrant who faded into the distance as the rescue authorities arrived and by two RC priests out on their morning walk. Later, once he was back on his feet, Park got into the habit of joining those priests on their walks, and the three men became friends. Naturally, a major element of their conversations was discussion of why the two priests are believers while Park's an atheist, and the overlaps between their conflicting worldviews. It was out of those conversations, Park tells us, that this book sprang.

In a sense, through surveying numerous areas in which science is slowly pushing back the forces of unreason (or, tragically, in some instances failing to to do so), Park is covering ground that others have covered before him. Yet I found here a great deal that was new to me -- just as a single example, the technique of "quantum holography" used by one "Adam Dreamhealer" to cure cancer, yeah, right -- and, even where I'd come across the subject matter before, my knowledge of it was enhanced by Park's always perceptive commentary. He has, too, a way of refusing to suffer fools gladly without raising his voice: he reproaches rather than abuses. The net result is an immensely readable book -- virtually a page-turner, in fact, which is rare for a nonfiction text -- that's on occasion also very funny. Even so, and despite his obviously deep affection and respect for his priestly friends, Park's conclusion is staunch: "Science is the only way of knowing -- everything else is just superstition."


Time's Child (2007) by Rebecca Ore

A couple centuries from now, there's a program underway in 23rd-century Philadelphia to pull people out of the past to enrich both the gene and the cultural pools of a humankind whose numbers have been much reduced. One of the first to be fished from the past is the 15th century armourer Benedetta; soon the Viking called Ivar joins her, as does the 21st-century hacker Jonah. Benedetta, with Jonah's help, breaks out of the centre whose time machine brought her here; she establishes, as it were, union rights for the time rescuees . . . which means that, as they stomp around thinking they're libertarians, they're in fact subjugating themselves to a society dominated by the likes of Mr Wythe, an enigmatic figure who seems ever ready to shaft the protagonists. The driving point of the plot is that the denizens of various futures are prepared to expend quite a lot of energy to ensure they're the ones to survive.

Somewhere along the line, something seems to have gone desperately awry during the publication of this book. In its first one-third or so, the text plods along as if in the process of eking itself out to form the first volume of a trilogy: it's typified by stretches of pointlessly prolonged dialogue that contribute nothing to the book, as if the author had promised herself to put in so many hours today and was determined to keep typing no matter what; when the reader hits the title of Chapter 9, "Boredom Attacks", it's difficult to keep a straight face. The latter two-thirds suffer, with a vengeance, the opposite problem: they read as if Ore submitted to the publisher a very full outline, with some of the scenes pencilled in pretty fully and others left until later, only the "later" never happened. Thus numerous incidents that represent major plot elements are brushed off in a line or so. Perhaps the oddest is the Knights Templar Moment: for tens of pages we've been told about the protagonists' dilemma concerning the fact that one potential future wants a particular bunch of Templars to be brought into the present while another wants the exact opposite. As readers we wait agog. The relevant transition, when it comes, as the Templars enter our Now, lasts perhaps two lines (p201). If this were a solitary example one might attribute it to bad pacing; alas, there are others.

Also bizarre is that Benedetta, who's by far the most interesting of the characters on display, is rightly the focus of attention for the first one-third or more of the book but is then almost forgotten for great chunks of it. Instead, we spend much of the time with Ivar the Viking, who's not so much a character as a collection of cliches; he has a burning desire to visit Iceland, so our expectations are high that something interesting will happen there . . . and instead what happens is that he goes there, doesn't like it much, and comes back to Philly. His frequently stated desire is that, when he dies, a woman be killed to be buried with him; otherwise he's more or less completely adapted to the modern world -- as are just about all the time travellers, who have an astonishing knack for being able to juryrig equipment that would be highest hi-tech even for 21st-century folk. At the end Benedetta reappears so they can start bonking, because she needs to become pregnant as a conclusion to the book, anything like plot-resolution being too much to hope for because, in a sense, there hasn't been a plot, just lots of bits of plot stirred around as if in a bowl of alphabetti spaghetti.

And did I mention that the time machines are powered by dinky little portable black holes? They come in thick protective cases about the size of a walnut that you can peek inside. You don't need to do so, though, because you can tell the black holes are there by the way the walnuts are a lot heavier than they should be. "Black holes that small and that light aren't supposed to exist," remarks one of the characters with devastating accuracy, but that's as much of a scientific explanation as we get for them.

There are sections in the early part of Time's Child that indicate Ore is a more than capable writer, so I may at some point try another of her books. But this one's a mess.


The House on the Borderland (1908) by William Hope Hodgson

Two friends go for a tramping 'n' fishing holiday in a remote part of western Ireland. One day they come across the ruins of a huge old house; it and the pit nearby give them the creeps, but they stay long enough to unearth the manuscript that forms the bulk of this novel. It was written by the last owner of the house (usually called The Recluse), and recounts the events, some horrific and others full of a sort of sorrowful enlightenment, that filled his final days.

The Recluse buys the house and moves in -- with sister Mary and dog Pepper -- seemingly in order to escape from his memories of his dead true love. In the first of his extraordinary experiences there he is transported to the far end of the universe where he sees an "arena" surrounded by colossal statues of cruel pagan gods and with, at its centre, a vastly huger replica of his house, but built of jade rather than the usual stones and timber. Wandering around the house is a large creature, mannish but with the head of a pig, that he can tell on sight is vicious and evil.

Returned to mundane reality, he explores the pit near his house, under which dwell a herd of  swine-headed creatures like the one he saw at the other end of the universe. Presumably because disturbed by his investigations, they besiege the house several nights in a row before he succeeds in driving them off. At this point anyone sane would leave the house as far behind as possible but, on another of the spiritual journeys the house has facilitated, The Recluse has had an encounter with his dead lover; so he stays on.

It's the second half of the novel that makes it the great visionary classic of fantasy that it is. As he sits in his study, The Recluse begins to realize that time is running faster and faster, until the sun is just a streak of light in a sky that is gloomy because day and night can no longer be separately distinguished. He understands that he is making this extraordinary journey into the far future in spirit only, because he can see, under increasingly thick layers of dust, the shape of his own body; finally it too settles into formless dust. In due course the sun, now red and vastly swollen, becomes visible as an orb once more; tidal friction has slowed the earth's rotation until locking it with one face ever to the primary. By the time the sun burns itself out, both it and what's left of its planetary retinue have travelled a good distance across the universe and been captured by an enormous green star. Once again he meets his dead lover, although this time it seems the encounter is a tad more physical than before.

And then he's back in his study, the only evidence of his travel to the farthest shores of time being that his faithful dog Pepper has been reduced to a pile of dust. Another, grimmer piece of evidence will soon emerge. The Recluse obtains a new dog to serve as guard, for he has heard sounds at night of something heavy moving around in the garden. This proves to be the gigantic swine-headed creature he saw poking around the jade replica of his house. It wounds the dog and the wound glows a fluorescent green. The Recluse tends the dog, but it dies and he's infected by the green fluorescence. As his narrative very abruptly closes, he's dying and the swine-headed monster is battering its way into the room . . .

Although I was unable to make any unifying sense of the plot -- events just happen, without any apparent rationale -- I was rocked back on my heels by the visionary power of Hodgson's tale. It's very clear that this was a major influence on Lovecraft (and anyway that's a matter of record); but Hodgson was far the better writer of the two and so the incoherence of the plotting didn't bother me as much as it always does when I try to read Lovecraft. All in all: Golly!


The Fires of Paratime (1980) by L.E. Modesitt Jr

The people of the planet Query are wizards of space and time -- at least, all of them are wizards of space, being able to slide from one place to another at will, and some of them, like our hero and narrator Loki, can slide through time as well. One of the best timeriders in living memory (which is a very long time, because the Querians are nearly immortal), he's rapidly recruited into the Temporal Guard, a sort of timecops institution set up after the aeons-ago last battle with the Frost Giants and charged with both fetching hi-tech gadgetry from elsewhere (because the Querians, being nigh-immortal, are predictable in a long downward glide of cultural decline) and tampering with the past to eliminate any developments that might threaten the tranquility of Query -- up to and including, on occasion, genocide. Even before you learn that most of the other members of the Temporal Guard have names recognizable from Norse mythology (Odinthor is the near-senile ex-warrior, Heimdall is a sly manipulator who's weaselled his way into the upper echelons of power, bluff, honest, well intentioned Baldur is Loki's first mentor, and so on), with a few from other panthea, you can make a pretty smart guess as to what one of the elements of the novel's denouement is going to be.

Meantime, Loki performs various time-travelly chores as he works his way rapidly up through the hierarchy of the Temporal Guard, along the way learning the necessity of a few Machiavellian ruses when dealing with his fellow-officers. This is all quite interesting, although for much of the book I felt that Modesitt had managed to dream up some pretty natty notions and then put them to the service of a plot that was, essentially, about office politics. When, however, Loki finally sickens of the ruthless selfishness of the Temporal Guard, and realizes too that their near-omnipotence is a major factor in the imminent doom of the Querian culture, everything begins to pull together well, and the final one-quarter or so of the tale, as he manipulates the past such that in essence he destroys the Temporal Guard in order to save it, is bracing stuff indeed. But the text takes a while to get to this point,  and if I'd been in a different mood I might have abandoned the book before I got that far. Obviously, now, I'm glad that I didn't, but . . .

As an aside: Modesitt makes use of Bob Shaw's concept, slow glass (and names it as such). I'm wondering if this is the only usage by another author of this idea. It's strange that such a very promising addition to skiffy's armoury of nifty gadgetry -- the time machine, matter transmission, etc. -- never got picked up much. At the time Bob introduced it I thought it would in due course become yet another standard sciencefictional trope.


The Young Oxford Book of Timewarp Stories (2001) edited by Dennis Pepper

I bought this book because I was looking for a copy of Garry Kilworth's "Let's Go to Golgotha!", one of the very best time-travel stories ever, and found that it was remarkably under-anthologized: shame on anthology editors. The story's here, along with a bunch of other genuine classics of the subgenre, some of which I'd not heard of before; I'm extremely glad I bought this book. In his Introduction Pepper states that the term "timewarp" allows him to include ghost stories (which is perfectly reasonable: I for one wouldn't like to be put on the spot decide whether, say, Field of Dreams tells a ghost story or a timewarp story), and there are some good timewarpish supernatural yarns among the rest; I'll not treat them in my yatter below because my research quest is currently for time-travel tales.

And perhaps the best piece in the book, Penelope Lively's "The Picnic" (1975), is neither ghost story nor time-travel tale, but genuinely fits the "timewarp" parameter. A family go for a picnic on the moor, within eyeshot of another family doing the same. Before long there's a slippage of both families -- our narrator excepted -- back to a prehistoric level of savagery and tribal distrust, and they enter a state of potentially lethal warfare. To be clear: This isn't just a matter of the mask slipping from spoiled socialites in dispute over who gets the best deckchair; we're talking about a supernatural transformation of mentality. It's a very powerful piece: track it down if you can.

Now, to time travel, with quick notes on the items I liked:

Poul Anderson's "My Object All Sublime" (1961) is a minor tale with an excellent idea at its core: that the people of the future use their past, which of course includes our present, as a sort of penitentiary to which certain nonviolent criminals can be sent. Of course, this begs the question of why those superscientific folk haven't worked out a better way of dealing with miscreants than punishment, but Anderson was I gather a libertarian.

Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" (1952) has to be one of the most famous time-travel stories ever written. I hadn't read it in decades, and was surprised to find that I'd misremembered its emphasis; my guess is that many others have the same fault of memory. What I remembered as the story's point is that one of a group of time travellers to the Age of Dinosaurs, there for the big game hunting (how vile our species is), accidentally steps on a butterfly, thereby altering in trivial but essential ways the present to which the butchers return. That's a great and splendid piece of skiffying: a kind of prefiguration of Chaos Theory (the butterfly flapping its wings and creating a hurricane on the far side of the world) but operating in a timelike rather than spacelike direction. (Although the conclusion makes sense, Bradbury's reasoning to get there sucks: see pp34-5.) The emphasis of the story itself, though, is quite different: it's really about the macho-ness, or lack thereof, of the central character -- he's a coward in the face of a charging tyrannosaur, and so when, at the end, the safari leader prepares to put a bullet through his brain, we're somehow supposed to think that murder is justifiable. And the other focus is that, before the hunting party left, a politician whose attributes Bradbury clearly regarded as worthwhile got elected as US Prez; the big shock-horror-gasp alteration when the hunters return is not stuff like their families might no longer exist but that the Tea Partiers' fave lost rather than won the election.

I saw the movie of "A Sound of Thunder" a few months ago and thought it was a total travesty of the story as I remembered it. Now I think the moviemakers did a creditable job of salvaging it.

Fredric Brown's "Vengeance Fleet" (1950) is one of those squibs he was so good at. Out of the interstellar blue, an alien fleet descends to annihilate the human presence on Venus. The humans of earth and Mars launch their navies against it, and with suspicious ease destroy it. Soon after, humanity sends a fleet of warships off to track down the aggressors and spifflicate 'em. And you've guessed the rest, right?

In Arthur C. Clarke's "All the Time in the World" (1952) a seedy PI/criminal is approached by a time-travelling alien from the future and asked to purloin various inconceivably valuable items from the BM . . . with the help of this here time-freezing device that she gives him. At story's end he discovers all the rewards she has given him are worthless because, in a matter of mere minutes, the latest superbomb test is going to destroy the world, him too.

Jack Finney's "The Love Letter" (1959) is a precursor of the 2006 movie The Lake House. A ma who buys an antique desk discovers he can exchange letters with the long-dead woman who owned it decades earlier. In a way the story is better than the movie because it doesn't try to do a work-around: the lovers remain in love, but they can never actually meet.

I giggled at Harry Harrison's "If" (1969; originally published as "Praiseworthy Saur"). A far-future saurian civilization succeeds in persuading a boy of our own time that he should release rather than keep a captured lizard who is the ancestor of their kind; otherwise the future in which they exist will be annihilated. The boy agrees, frees the reptile, and almost immediately, unknown to him, it's scarfed by one of the local cats. Oops.

The notion of Gerald Kersh's "The Brighton Monster" (1948) is that a famous sumo wrestler who had the misfortune to be in Hiroshima when the atom bomb was dropped was bulleted by the shockwave back to 1740s England, where he was assumed to be a monster.

As noted above, Garry Kilworth's "Let's Go to Golgotha!" (1974) is one of the classics of the time-travel subgenre: it's difficult to think of a relevant story that's harder-hitting . . . unless it's Bob Shaw's "Light of Other Days" (1966). The tourist trade has got hold of time travel in a big way. Simon Falk and his family want to witness the Crucifixion, and so -- after undergoing various forms of indoctrination to teach them the language, etc. -- they do. As the Passion of Christ continues, however, Simon starts to realize that all of the people who've called for the sparing of Barabbas and the torture of Jesus are not the local Hebrews but time travellers like himself and his family, coached to do exactly this by the time-tourist company . . . because, of course, that was the way it was known to have happened.

Louise Lawrence's "The Silver Box" (1987) is kinda sorta a ghost story, but it's also a tale of using technology to bridge a gap of time . . . and a very beautiful one at that. Carole is stuck in bed with the flu when contact is established between herself and a pair of future paranormal researchers, who assume she's a ghost -- which, by their time, she'd have to be. As they converse and see each other, she and one of the researchers fall in love. His colleague can witness none of this: mentally, he's just not tuned in. Carole tries to leave proof the communication has indeed occurred, putting a message in the title's silver box and hiding that in a fireplace, but in attempting to recover it the boy she loves is killed. Who, now, is the ghost?

The anthology's concluding story is Wayland Hilton-Young's short-short "The Choice" (1952), garnered not from the usual fantasy sources but from the satirical magazine Punch. This is the other contender, beside Lively's "The Picnic", for the best story in the book. A time-traveller to the future returns to the present with his memory wiped clean except for the knowledge that he was shown all the future world had to offer and then given the choice as to whether he should remember it or not.

"And you chose not to? But what an extraordinary thing----"
"Isn't it?" he said. "One can't help wondering why."

There's one very major flaw in this otherwise excellent book: the copyright section at the back is a complete stinker. There's a "Despite every effort to trace" notice, but it's pretty obvious Pepper and his editors didn't try all that goddam hard: some of the stories are missed entirely, the details of others extend only so far as the reprint anthology in which Pepper chanced to find them. Me, I got all the relevant bibliographical details within about ten minutes. Yes, internet resources have vastly proliferated since 2001; it might have taken me, oo, gosh, about twice that long nine years ago. The section is shoddy, and 'way below our rightful expectations of OUP. Shame on them.


Mastodonia (1978) by Clifford D. Simak

Palaeontologist Asa Steele is taking a sabbatical on his farm in his old hometown in Wisconsin when blast-from-the-past girlfriend Rila turns up and moves in with him. His dog Bowser, with whom local simpleton Hiram believes he can converse, has a habit of coming home with the oddest of things, like newly made flint arrowheads and fresh dinosaur bones, almost as if he'd discovered gateways into the past. And on Asa's farm there's a crater at the bottom of which he's becoming increasingly convinced there's a crashed alien spaceship. Soon he is, through Hiram, conversing with the sole, immortal survivor of that crash, Catface, a specialist time engineer who's been hiding out in the woods for thousands of years. And, yes, Catface would be willing to open up other pathways to the past.

Rila, who since Asa last knew her has become a hardbitten businesswoman, immediately sees the potential: big game hunters would pay millions for the chance to safari in the Cretaceous knocking down dinosaurs. And that's only the start of it. Soon the pair, with the aid of friends, have set up in business. Aside from the hunters, there's a US senator who thinks the downtrodden of the slums might leap at the offer of a fresh start, with plenty of land, in an earlier geological epoch There's even a group of Christian churchmen willing to pay good money to stop people going to the time of Christ, in case they might find out anything to contradict the Biblical portrayal. (It's a sign of changing times that Simak didn't think to have a parallel group of Muslims wanting to bar trips to see the Prophet.) For tax reasons, Asa and Rila are advised to make their own principal home in the past -- how could they be asked to pay US taxes if their company's based in territory that predates the US by 150,000 years? -- and so they stake out their territory and call it Mastodonia.

One of Simak's gifts was to take the way-out and make it mundane and folksy, and Mastodonia is part of this pattern. I personally found the concept pretty disgusting that humankind, given the wondrous gift of travel into the past, sees it primarily as an opportunity to go slaughter wild animals; but I suppose Simak's assessment of our species, or at least our culture, was fairly accurate. That aside, and ignoring my irritation with the character of the money-grubbing Rila and with the text's assumption that everyone's entitled to the benefits of a liberal society but it's okay for our protagonists to duck out of their responsibilities to help maintain it, the novel made amiable enough reading -- and was certainly a cut above some of the other late-period Simak books I've tackled.


Time is the Simplest Thing (1961) by Clifford D. Simak

Some while ago humankind discovered that the physical barriers to interstellar travel were insuperable. But soon after the techniques were found to enable various paranormally powered individuals to teleport themselves across interstellar space, this method having advantages such as instantaneity, cheapness, and not least the ability to explore planetary environments that would be lethal to humans. The corporation Fishhook, based in Mexico, is in charge of space exploration and also of the worldwide distribution and sale of all the goodies, from superdrugs to hi-tech to exquisite dress fabrics, that the explorers bring back. Meanwhile, the US has sunk into theocratic barbarism, with people terrified to go out at night for fear meeting bogles or werewolves and "parries" sure to be lynched on detection.

Shep Blaine is a parry working for Fishhook. On one trip he encounters an alien, the Pinkness, which says to him, "Hi, pal. I trade with you my mind." Shep returns to earth moments later knowing that he has a little bit of alien within him, and immediately goes on the lam because he knows Fishhook's policy towards individuals like himself is ruthless. He soon finds that his inner Pinkness allows him to manipulate time: he can make it pass with glacial slowness, and can travel into the past and future. What follows is essentially a merry adventure yarn (albeit, with one really outrageous coincidence in the plot) as he hares through this backwater US, seeking safety amid the rudimentary parry revolutionary group, who seek an end to Fishhook's monopoly and of course civil rights for parries. There's some quitesharply satirical commentary on the cowardliness of irrationalism and the cynicism of those who exploit it to engender hatred.

The portrayals of past and future worlds are interesting. Here's what it's like in the past:

This was the past and it was the dead past; there were only corpses in it -- and perhaps not even corpses, but the shadows of those corpses. [. . .] There was no life here; the life was up ahead. Life must occupy but a single point in time, and as time moved forward, life moved with it. And so was gone, thought Blaine, and dream that Man might have ever held of visiting the past and living in the action and the thought and viewpoint of men who'd long been dust. For the living past did not exist, nor did the human past except in the records of the past. The present was the only valid point for life -- life kept moving on, keeping pace with the present, and once it had passed, all traces of it or its existences were carefully erased. (p87)

What then of the future?

It was a place without a single feature of the space-time matrix that he knew. It was a place where nothing yet had happened -- an utter emptiness. There was neither light nor dark; there was nothing here but emptiness. There had never been anything in this place, nor was anything ever intended to occupy this place -- until this very moment when he and his machine had been thrust upon it, intruders who had overstepped their time. [. . .] He lifted the flashlight and shoved the contact button, and the light sprang out and the machine was there before him, but strange and insubstantial -- the ghost of a machine, the trail that it had left behind it when it had moved into the future. (pp174-5)

The book's title comes from something the Pinkness says: "Time is the simplest thing there is." Although I'm very fond of this title -- it's one of the most evocative in sf, I think -- I can't help feeling that maybe it would have been even better with the extra two words!


Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa (1980) by W.P. Kinsella

As remarked in my notes for a different book, it's a bit of a dilemma for me as to whether the movie Field of Dreams is a time-travel tale or a ghost story or both. In fact, my remit for this essay/chapter is to cover the printed form of the genre, so the status of the movie isn't that important right now (though obviously, when I have more time, I'll watch it yet again with this question in mind). What then of the original novel on which the movie is based, Kinsella's Shoeless Joe? As luck would have it, my local library's copy had gone AWOL when we went in, so I picked up instead this story collection, containing "Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa", the story upon which the novel was based that became the basis for the movie . . . Wheels within wheels, Mycroft.

I decided to read the collection as a whole in case it might contain other time-travelly tales. No such luck . . . and the title story has helped me not at all in solving my dilemma. I must lay hands on the novel, and Real Soon . . .

I found that Kinsella's writing lapsed rather too often into self-indulgently whimsy-pimsy mode, as in the later work of Ray Bradbury after the conjurer lost his knack but kept on trying to perform the same old tricks nevertheless. Some of the stories I found to be almost egregiously slight -- "A Picture of the Virgin", for example, is just a kind of smutty urban legend or bar story blown up to 20 pages or so by the admixture of plentiful purple prose, and I sought in vain any rhyme or reason for "Sister Ann of the Cornfields" -- but others were genuinely effective and on occasion moving.

"The Grecian Urn" is an excellent fantasy. A man has the power to put his essence into inanimate objects, and to extend this ability to his wife. Together they have for decades been transported around the world, moving from one object to another as the whim took them. Now, though, his power has waned, and he and his wife would like to make one last transformation: into a Grecian urn in the local museum. They enlist the aid of a friend who, secretly, has always had the hots for the wife; it is he who tells the tale from his residence in a mental facility. Once in the urn, husband and wife discover it's not Greek but a fairly modern fake; the prospect of spending eternity in such an insalubrious environment is anathema to them: could the friend get them out again? Well, he does his best . . .

"First Names and Empty Pockets" is the retelling by a man whose trade is repairing dolls of his fantasy existence with Janis Joplin, whom he may or may not have once encountered in real life but who lives on in his mind's alternative history because, of course, he repaired her. It's a surprisingly lovely tale.

The title story, "Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa" (1979), is narrated by a young, not very successful Iowa father whose baseball-crazy father, now dead, always talked to him of the great baseball player Shoeless Joe, and of how he was deal a great injustice when banned for life from the sport for a corruption in which he probably did notr participate. One evening, in his cornfields, the narrator hears a voice say, as if over a sportsground's announcement system, "If you build it, he will come." Accordingly, he constructs not an entire baseball ground but just the left field, with corresponding lights and bleachers; Shoeless Joe's fielding position was left field. In due course, sure enough, Shoeless Joe (or his spectre) appears; by story's end the two men are planning to expand the field and their horizons, bringing in other players . . . including the narrator's dad.

There are some other good stories in this book ("The Blacksmith Shop Caper", in which a freelance reporter assigned to a story about the singles life discovers how much he loves his wife; "Mankiewitz Won't be Bowling Tuesday Nights Anymore", which is less a story more an extended cameo, but as such works well), but overall, as noted I wasn't overwhelmingly gruntled by this collection.

PS: The library's copy of Shoeless Joe has now been located, so I'll be trying to fit in a quick reading of it before my deadline . . .


The Great Time Machine Hoax (1964) by Keith Laumer

Chester W. Chester, owner of the near-broke circus called Interconintental Wowser Wonder Shows (oh, the hilarity), has just inherited from his great-grandfather the old man's entire estate . . . which proves to be: a Fonthill Abbey-like ancestral pile; a vast computer which for decades has been being fed with every available datum historical, scientific or general; and a real headache with the IRS. In company with sidekick Case Mulvihill, he investigates the pile's wine cellar and the computer. It emerges the computer can produce astonishingly accurate VR-type representations of past eras; and it occurs to Case that the Wowser enterprise might be saved if he and Chester pretended the computer simulations were actually windows on the past. Say, if those simulations could be made just a little more complete -- introducing, say, sonic and tactile components -- the illusion would be so perfect the marks might be conned into thinking they were actually hunting dinos (guffaw, guffaw).

Having first been persuaded to produce an avatar of itself that takes the form of a stark naked (chortle! wheeze!) babe, Genie, the computer creates simulacra of the distant past, a skewed version of the present, and a future that comes complete with an extended riff on those boring bits in kung fu movies where the master spends a few years instructing the youthful acolyte in such wisdoms as "Feel the Force, Luke! Feel the Force!" After Chester has survived the future thanks in part to a variant of The Flight of the Phoenix, he rescues first Genie from the sort-of-present and Case from the past -- except that Case doesn't all that much need rescuing, having instructed the prehistoric tribes he's encountered in a welter of simplistic Libertarian tosh, through murder if need be; yes, those principles might work in what was in effect an infinitely large world with societies limited to 300 people (ignore for the moment the inbreeding), which is what Case has been working with, but Laumer editorializes that this is clever political analysis: in reality, which is rather like saying a spring picnic would be wonderful fun even if eight billion people turned up.

It proves that the changes Case has effected in prehistory are responsible for the fact that the version of the present that Genie and Chester visited was so similar yet disconcertingly different, and the future so bizarre. Yes, folks (gasp! stop tickling that funny bone!), even if the computer thinks it's been producing simulations, in fact they've had the status of realities . . . so who's been hoaxed now, eh?

This is the Laumer book I've enjoyed least of those I've read. I managed to polish off the last 50 pages or so of it the other day in the waiting room while the dentist was avenging 9/11 on the furnishings of Pam's mouth (she was having an especially hard time of it, I learned later, because at one point the technician advanced the viewpoint that Obama's a Muslim; stupidity's not just alive but stalking the land), and it's perhaps a valid critical judgment of the book that, from time to time, it crossed my mind it might be a relief to change places with her.