VINTAGE PAPERBACK OF THE WEEK: L. Sprague de Camp, THE HAND OF ZEI (1950-63)

The Ace Double edition of The Hand of Zei is a "moderately abridged" version of the "expanded" second half of L. Sprague de Camp's 1950 Astounding Science Fiction serial of the same title. Publishing this as a separate book from the serial's first half, which took the name The Search for Zei, is like what Hollywood does nowadays with books at the end of a series, to squeeze one extra payday out of a tentpole franchise. I'm sure Avalon Books had a similarly mercenary motive for splitting the original into two books, but I wonder why Ace abridged the second half for its reunion volume. Unless Ace had a smaller page limit for its doubles in the 1960s than in the 1950s, there should have been room for something more substantial than the 108 page Hand of Zei we get here, following the 138 page Search. In this abridged form Hand reads nothing like a standalone novel. It's blatantly just a wrap-up of the story started in Search which, as you'll recall from last week, had Earthman Dirk Barnevelt infiltrating the planet Krishna, disguising himself as an uncomfortably prominent native, to retrieve his lost employer, a celebrity explorer who turns out to have become a mind-controlled pirate. Zei is the crown princess of the matriarchy of Qirib, where females maintain control with an aprhodisiac drug now being smuggled throughout the universe. Admirably uncomfortable with the tradition requiring the queen of Qirib to conclude each annual marriage by devouring her husband, Zei is kidnapped by pirates but rescued by Barnevelt.

In Hand the superstitious crew of Dirk's rescue ship abandons Dirk, Zei and one loyal crewman on an island inhabited by carnivorous man-beasts. These promptly kill the loyal crewman while the two survivors escape via a minimalist raft after Dirk distracts the savages by setting a forest fire, for which he is chided later by his human sidekick, the Polynesian-Australian xenologist George Tangaloa. After this episode the title character of both books recedes into the background until the very end while Dirk becomes commander-in-chief of an international naval expedition against the pirates. At this point de Camp formally introduces a much-mentioned character who had first appeared in an earlier Krishna story: Prince Ferrian, his world's great modernizer, who contributes an oar-propelled aircraft carrier, technology having advanced only sporadically under a wide embargo of Earth technology, to the anti-pirate armada. After a hard fight the pirates sue for peace, but Zei's mother the queen proves treacherous, while some of the pirates, many of whom are male refugees from Qirib, prove honorable despite early attempts to assassinate Dirk. Barnevelt, having reclaimed his employer, wraps up his work on Krishna by leading the pirates in a coup d'etat against the Qirib matriarchy, to the relief of Zei, who has inherited the throne and a responsibility to marry and kill a friend. While this uprising promises the replacement of matriarchy with gender equality, I'm sure some modern readers will find something politically incorrect in Dirk's intervention, especially since de Camp shows the defeated amazons happily fraternizing with the occupying pirates. Dirk's reunion with Zei might not have been so happy, since the author has emphasized the incompatibility of species -- Krishnans appear mammalian but lay eggs -- but in a finishing touch reminiscent of many a hoary old melodrama about whites falling in love in the darker regions, it turns out that Zei is not Krishnan but human, having worn fake antennae since infancy after the old queen secretly adopted her to conceal her own disqualifying barrenness. All things end happily, as I suppose they should in these planetary romances. They're meant as light entertainment and often as exercises in stylish erudition, wordplay illustrating the foreignness of distant cultures. Zei is a fine example of this subgenre, and while an Ace Double isn't the ideal way to present the story the format ultimately shouldn't be held against a fun read like this one.

VINTAGE PAPERBACK OF THE WEEK: L. Sprague de Camp, THE SEARCH FOR ZEI (1950-62)

L. Sprague de Camp's The Hand of Zei, a novel in his Viagens Interplanetarias series, exists in at least three different forms. It first appeared as a four-part serial in Astounding Science Fiction (the present Analog) in 1950. The serial was published as two separate books, the second taking the original title, and each with new material by de Camp, in 1962. The following year, Ace published both, somewhat disingenuously, in one of their popular double novel editions, with Hand "moderately abridged" from the expanded version and Search complete and unabridged. The Viagens stories are set in a 22nd century in which Brazil is the dominant power on Earth and humans are exploring the stars. They feature a cosmopolitan cast of human characters and eccentric aliens. The hero of Zei is Dirk Barnevelt, a Dutch-American writer and publicist for Igor Shtein, a celebrity traveler and explorer. Barnevelt is a type common to postwar literature: a sort of corporate drone longing for adventure yet tied to Mom's apron strings until his employers assign him to hunt for the missing Shtein on the planet Krishna, where an aphrodisiac drug giving women dominance over men is becoming a dangerous export to Earth. Dirk's sidekick for the search is George Tangaloa, a Polynesian xenologist who oddly uses a lot of stock Australian slang ("shiela," "dinkum") in his speech. On Krishna they'll be limited to the planet's approximately 19th-century level technology due to a Viagens embargo, though they carry miniature cameras to shoot footage in secret, and while humans trade on the planet they will disguise themselves as natives, the better to roam more widely than humans might. Impractically, Dirk is given the alias of a famous Nyaman warrior, and his challenge will be to live up to the name's reputation as a swashbuckling strategist. Most of the action takes place in the matriarchy of Qirib, where the queen takes a new husband every year after executing and eating his predecessor. Zei is the heir presumptive of Qirib and happily takes a dim view of the custom, in light of Dirk's growing affection for her. The Search portion of the original novel climaxes with Dirk leading a rescue of Zei, who had been kidnapped by pirates who control the realm's supply of the crucial drug. What happens after, I'll find out next week.

This is the first de Camp novel I've read in decades. Growing up, I knew the author, who first appeared in pulp in 1937,  for his involvement in the paperback editions of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories. I read his time-travel story Lest Darkness Fall and some of his collaborations with Fletcher Pratt. None of these really prepared me for Zei. The blurb on the cover compares it to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian stories, but in retrospect the more obvious stylistic comparison is with the work of Jack Vance. Arguably, de Camp had Vance's style before Vance did. It's all there in Zei except for Vance's pseudo-erudite footnotes. The rococo speech patterns of alien characters are definitely there, and that sort of word jazz give Zei much of its entertainment value. De Camp writes action and description well enough, but once he gets his protagonists off his somewhat stodgy, gray-flannel-suit Earth, the novel becomes an exercise in style for its own sake that modern readers will have to take or leave. In this sample, Zei's mother the queen introduces her daughter to our hero.

And now, sirs, to your business. You shall deal, not with me, but with my daughter, the Princess Zei, whom you see sitting upon my left. For within a ten-night comes our yearly festival called kashyo, after which I'll abdicate in favor of my dutiful chick. 'Tis meet, therefore, that she should gain experience in bearing burdens such as sit upon our shoulders, before responsibility in very truth descends upon her. Speak.

And that's a mild sample, with conventional grammar and few archaic usages or neologisms. Try this one, the queen's response to Zei inviting our heroes to a Krishnan version of Chinese Checkers:

Ever a creature of whim. Such an invitation before even their bona fides have been confirmed! Oh, have 'em in, since not without dishonor may we withdraw an invitation once extended. But post a guard over the best royal plate. Perchance they'll prove more guestly than the locals, all of whom are either queer or dull, and oftimes both.

While you might question whether it conveys the truly alien or renders all the universe a vast Ruritania, some find it a pleasure to read, myself included. This much of Zei, at least, is an unapologetic romp to de Camp's tuneful, dancing prose. Come back soon to see how the rest goes.

"I was to be a first Earth meal for the abomination of the Universe!"

 
Of the so-called big four general-adventure pulps, Argosy published the most science fiction (or "fantastics" as they were often called in the 1930s, while Adventure probably ran the least, if any. Blue Book ran a fair amount, most notably Wylie and Balmer's When Worlds Collide and its sequel but also quite a bit from Nelson Bond and others in the 1940s. Anthony M. Rud was no sci-fi specialist. The onetime editor of Adventure had no specialty that I can see, though he published detective stories about Jigger Masters throughout his career. Rud's "Visitors from Venus" from the October 1937 Blue Book is really more horror than science fiction. It's horror of the "Look how horrified I am!" sort, heavy on not only the exclamation points but also whole paragraphs of italics in case readers might miss the urgency of an alien invasion.

Tom, our narrator, recalls events from the previous year from a converted chicken house in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, on a farm where 1,800 hens died in the events to be narrated, and where Annie Overalls the husky handywoman says, "This land is damned." It was damned by the naivete of Tom's astronomy mentor, Dr. Armstrong, who called him to New England to help unearth a spaceship from Venus that crashed into Ranger Mountain. From his observatory in Arizona Armstrong had been in contact with Venus, and specifically "Ooloo, the highest-powered of six message-sending stations," for several years. It was often a one-way conversation. "They never thank me," he complains, "They always ask more questions. They never answer the questions I ask -- or only partly. I -- well, to be frank, Tom, they have me worried. I fear they have no souls."

Armstrong keeps digging just the same, and as they unearth the vessel a "disintegration mechanism" activated by contact with air breaks down the vehicle's protective shell. A little more foreshadowing is in order. With hindsight, Tom knows that "more than 200,000 loathsome things were waiting down there -- held by a high pressure of indrawn breath, in that queerly constructed cylinder below ground. Waiting to destroy me, the Doctor, Helen, Mrs. Kramer, Annie Overalls, the half-witted Ranny and every other human being and living thing on the face of Mother Earth!" (emphasis in original)

The Venusians are sort of freeze dried until released, then forming "floating amber-colored balloons" that quickly turn predatory, attacking en masse and smothering people before settling down for dinner. "Oh, God, i was insane then for a time myself!" Tom recalls, "Those damned things were alive! They had big spots like bull's-eyes, that stared unwinkingly at me! Seven eyes apiece! I shrieked and tried to run."

Armstrong is killed and Annie Overalls scarred by the aliens, but like any proper monster they prove vulnerable to fire, as Tom discovers when he reaches desperately for a cigarette lighter as his only tool of defense. If that didn't work, "I was to be a first Earth meal for the abomination of the Universe!" Instead, some other unfortunates are the first meal before Tom can get a big enough fire going to wipe out the invaders. Later, he learns, Armstrong's old correspondents from Ooloo threw a hissy fit over what happened and informed the doctor's assistant in Arizona that they won't talk to Earth any more. I think the assistant was going to kill himself anyway to close the story, after what had happened to Earth, but that couldn't have helped much. In the end, "Visitors" is no more than an exercise in hysteria that looks cheesily out of place in the relatively upscale pulp confines of Blue Book. In fact, it was advertised on the cover, presumably because Rud had some prestige with pulp readers. And to be fair, I've read some Rud stories that I've liked. But "Visitors" is the sort of story that gave pulp a bad name.

VINTAGE PAPERBACK OF THE WEEK: Edmond Hamilton, STARWOLF: THE WEAPON FROM BEYOND (1967)

Edmond Hamilton was one of the founding fathers of "space opera," spacefaring tales in which science took second place to the conventions of adventure stories. The nickname "World-Wrecker Hamilton" testifies to an apocalyptic tendency in his stories, while the term "space opera," used to describe his work, echoes the "horse opera" label for formulaic westerns. Hamilton started out in Weird Tales back in 1926 and kept busy through the 1960s. No doubt beloved by many old fans for his Captain Future series and other adventures, he's probably considered the inferior writer in the household he shared with his wife Leigh Brackett. The Starwolf series was a late effort in a more hardboiled style that lasted for only three books. The protagonist is not the Starwolf but a Starwolf, one of a piratical race that plagues the stars, albeit an exceptional one. Morgan Chane is part Tarzan, part Superman -- the latter a character Hamilton wrote during the Golden Age of Comics. He's the son of human mercenaries who settled on the pirate planet Varna, a high-gravity world of finely-furred strongmen who are unbeatable space pilots because "nobody could endure physically the shattering impact of inertial stress [they] endured, maneuvering their little ships at man-killing velocities." The gravity is too much for Morgan's parents, but the boy grows into a mighty man, possibly stronger than any human in the galaxy, and a Starwolf in his own right until he falls out with friends and has to fake his death to escape their vengeance.

In The Weapon From Beyond Chane is rescued by a ship of mercenaries from Earth, headed for planet Kharal. Hamilton tells us that Earth is a relatively poor planet because the other planets in its solar system are resource-poor, so its primary export is its resourceful, honorable fighting men. Initially contemptuous, Chane comes to respect the Earthmen, especially their captain John Dilullo. They've been hired by the arrogant Kharalis to investigate reports that their longtime enemies, the albino Vhollans, have acquired a superweapon. Since Chane is genetically human he can pass for a Merc, though displays of superhuman strength and speed threaten to reveal him as a Starwolf. Only Dilullo knows that that's exactly what he is, and while he intends initially to exploit that knowledge and hold it over Chane, he too warms to his new colleague. Together they infiltrate Vhol, offering to sell the natives weapons or their own services, in order to find the secret weapon. The big twist is that the secret weapon isn't a weapon at all. It's the wreck of a massive expeditionary vessel of an apparently benign species, the Krii -- this book appeared in the same year that Marvel Comics introduced the Kree space empire -- that only records specimens from across the universe and uses no weapons whatsoever. Their science is so advanced, however, that they can neutralize all the technology and weapons of Vhollans or humans. The arrival of a Krii rescue mission after who knows how many years would be an anticlimax if you're expecting a big battle, but it has its appeal on a sense-of-wonder.

Hamilton writes artlessly in a manner that only betrays its age when he indulges in goofy made-up techno-jargon like the Mercs' "ato-flash." He sometimes editorializes in oddly irrelevant fashion, as when he describes a Vhollan red-light district that "was a gusty, crowded place but was not sinful, for most of these people had never heard of the Judeo-Christian ethic and did not know they were sinning at all." He isn't big on character development and most of his world-building is of the throwaway sort. Weapon From Beyond is padded somewhat by episodes that have no plot value but are meant to provide a momentary thrill, as when Chane's outing on a Vhollan pleasure boat is interrupted by, or interrupts, the ritual feeding of sea monsters.  It's really pretty bad for its first half, but picks up considerably in the second. The action highlight is an attack on the Merc ship by Starwolves who may or may not be hunting Chane. Hamilton ratchets up the tension by reiterating how hopeless the fight must be before Dilullo takes Chane's advice that the best defense against Starwolves is a good or reckless offense. One we discover the Krii ship and meet the Vhollan scientist who's been exploring it and resisting his military's demands for exploitable technology, it feels like this is what Hamilton wanted to write about all along. The last half of this 154 pager redeems it enough to make Weapon From Beyond worth enduring its first half, but there's no denying that this was old-fashioned stuff already when it first appeared almost 50 years ago, a trifle even by genre standards. Still, I can't complain when I only paid a dollar for it. It's worth at least that much.

VINTAGE PAPERBACK OF THE WEEK: Harold Livingston, THE CLIMACTICON (1960)

Harold Livingston's Climacticon barely qualifies as science fiction. Set in the present of its writing, it's really a satire of that moment. It's a moment the 21st century knows through the Mad Men TV show, and like that series Climacticon is focused on the world of advertising. The ad businesses fascinated and horrified people during the 1950s, a decade in which advertising became unprecedentedly intrusive thanks to TV. Critics decried the raucous banality of oldschool hard-sell sloganeering advertising, but also saw a distressing resemblance to the propaganda industries of totalitarian powers. Others found it all so stupid that it was just funny. Livingston falls in that category.He's fascinated by the raw hucksterism of it, as practiced by colorfully grotesque corporate huskers who make Donald Trump look presidential by comparison. The ad agency where our hero works is run by a southerner and a former college football star; that gives Livingston an excuse to write the character's dialogue in drawling dialect and stuff it with gridiron metaphors. The industrialist whose account the agency covets -- its main product is a laxative -- talks in staccato telegraphic outbursts consciously modeled on the supposed efficiency of newspaper headlines. One problem a modern reader will have with Climacticon is Livingston's assumption that these odd ways of speaking are inherently funny. These characters are outsized clowns to exaggerate the contrast with our hero and narrator, a typical neurotic corporate striver who bumbles his way into a coveted five-window office thanks to his almost random encounter with an equally archetypal "milquetoast" scientist whose invention is the dread Climacticon, the wonder device that by the time of the novel's opening retrospective chapter has been banned by the United States government.

What is the Climacticon? Nothing quite as climactic as its name suggests. Let its inventor, Richard Richards, explain:

The Climacticon is a simple device. It detects and measures emotion.It is capable of measuring the very peak of an emotion, its climactic moment. Hence the name, Climacticon....It receives impulses. Vibrations. Like a Geiger counter. This, on the extreme left, this is the 'emometer.' Merely by consulting this meter, and by proper correlation, I can determine what type emotional vibrations are being transmitted....The second instrument measures the intensity of an emotion. For example, I could determine whether two women in an argument were likely to become dangerously violent....The third instrument is a quite elementary homing mechanism.The 'homer,' as I call it, is an almost exact facsimile of an aircraft radio compass. It simply homes in on the signals -- the vibrations -- and indicates their geographic direction.

Thanks to an authorial gimme, the Climacticon can only detect female emotions. Richards had been hoping to detect love, but that has proven too subtle for his invention's sensors. It's better at detecting "urgent desire." Practically speaking, it allows a man to determine who in a room full of women is horny, ready and willing. It has the potential to be a time and labor saving device for single men and straying marrieds. Our hero borrows it to test its potential, lets a colleague from the laxative company borrow it, and is fired when the colleague is laid up the following morning. The hero's superiors are understandably doubtful when he explains how the man exhausted himself, but after the bosses take the Climacticon out for an evening they not only rehire our hero but leap into the Climacticon business, albeit at a moment when Richard Richards is still expecting our hero to return his prototype.The hero persuades Richards by hooking him up with a onetime girlfriend and the factories start to hum.

At some point The Climacticon becomes less of an ad-agency satire or mild sex comedy and more of an outdated political satire. An inevitable female backlash against the Climacticon -- its slogan is "Does She or Doesn't She?" -- gets the attention of the congressional Immoral Activities Committee and its boisterous chairman, Sen. Jim Maginty. Yes, with Joe McCarthy three years in his grave, and his movement dead before that, Livingston proceeds to regale us with not so much a satire of McCarthyism than a parody of McCarthy and his ambiguous minions, Roy Cohn and G. David Schine. You know, "I have in my hand" this, "Point of order" that. Perhaps, you don't know, since all this happened a long time ago, but it probably seemed like a long time ago within very few years, and I can't help thinking that people would have found Livingston's mockery of McCarthy akin to beating a literally dead horse, if they didn't find it still too sore of a subject to be funny. The second option is unlikely, for we were thicker-skinned people in those ancient days. The end result of it all is that the Climacticon is banned and our hero is fired again. His last-ditch attempt to redeem himself involves burning the Climacticon factory for the insurance money, but there are just a couple more abrupt twists in his trail to that five-window office. Suffice it to say that his triumph is based on the ruin of innocent people -- not that he cares, this being a satire and he being a soulless organization man with a contraband Climacticon in his closet. There were many like him in popular fiction of the time, and you might catch a faint resemblance between him and the desperate status-seeking corporate strivers in some of Philip K. Dick's early novels.  While Dick made his novels timeless by projecting them into the future, Livingston's Climacticon is trapped in its own time and is worth reading only as an artifact of that era, for those who might find its datedness more entertaining now than its satire was then.