Welcome to Phantaspasm Books

Over the coming months I'm intending to write reviews of some of those books that I think didn't get enough coverage at the time. Keep checking back for reviews, and feel free to leave a comment.

Dark Universe

Dark Universe by Dan Galouye

The inhabitants of the eponymnous Dark Universe live in underground world where all light has long since been extinguished, and the inhabitants eke out a miserable living by touch and sound. They remember light from an ancestral viewpoint, but with no frame of reference, they can't really work out what it is and have deified it to some extent.

All aspects and ramifications of this are well thought out, from the explanation of cooking without fire (and thus light), to the language, with the replacement of hearing for seeing in phrases like "I've been hearing for you everywhere!", and the 'monsters' roaming the upper levels. A great section is their attitude to light when they do finally see it, having no framework in which to place their experiences.

"And how would you describe these - sensations?" Elder Averyman completed the question.

"It was alike a lot of crazy shouts that kept bouncing against my face. And then when I put my hands over my ears I kept on hearing them"

.... The boy was an open-eyed type. Jared, himself, was open-eyed. Three other witnesses had fallen into the same category. And all of them had felt the strange sensations!" (p. 62)

Writing these reviews has made me aware of some of the motifs of what I like from fiction. This novel made me realise I like the following motif: "The protagonist(s) walk(s) around a strange environment trying to figure out what's going on. (S)H(h)e seems to be at the mercy of strange forces and ends up realising what he first thought about the whole situation was false." This motif is called CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH in my SF encylcopedia. Read the entry for that and you'll see that a lot of those books will end up here at some point. It's certainly reminiscent of the Generational Starship theme of books like Aldiss' Non-Stop and Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky (in fact the writing style is a lot like Heinlein's, without the annoying militarism and sexism however).

My only complaint is the author's name. His surname has every vowel in it bar 'i'. You'd think his parents would have called him Tim or something.

Camp Concentration

Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch 1968

Lefty poet Louis Sacchetti is a conscientious objector in a near-future war obviously supposed to be Vietnam. The story starts with him doing time in a prison, when one night he's whisked off to a strange secret windowless prison with no explanation. This is not Guantanamo however, all the other prisoners appear to be geniuses of some sort and all are encouraged to pursue their own intellectual and creative projects in well resourced if enclosed surroundings. All is well - until the prisoners start dying mysteriously.

The great thing about this book are the two twists. The first one I deduced from the reading the blurb on the book, though I've removed all references to it here (I'm sure you will too, I'm not being big-headed). The second one comes way from left of field and makes you want to read secti0ns of the book again, in a Sixth Sense, Fight Club way (no, he'd not dead and doesn't have a split personality).

Reading slightly like a blend of the Prisoner, the DHARMA videos in Lost and a John Fowles novel, the whole thing has a thoroughly 60's anything-might-happen feel so redolent of these early New Wave novels that you just don't get these days. Many a page is taken up with the mad characters' musings on their situation, and life. For instance, if you don't like writing like this:

"Intolerable forward! That he cannot at once annihilate anything! The just pause before that which tends to non-being. Barb-tailed Scorpia, as Master Durer demonstrates cannot annihilate anything. Therefore, come, tender litle ones - to plash again! Introduce yourselves to my blood's Phlegathon, Ah how nicely I burn now. Go it, guests! through all my talents!"

then don't bother with reading this. That paragraph makes slightly more sense put in context, actually.

All that said, it still feels relevant from a post-9/11-distrust-of-the-government standpoint; it could easily be made into a film set in the current day (a hint to any film makers reading this).

The Embedding

The Embedding by Ian Watson 1975

If you're the sort of person who likes to say, "They're off on a mission to steal a drug-addled Amazonian shaman's brain in order to trade it with aliens for the secret of inter-stellar travel" when asked how the book you're reading is coming along, then this is the book for you. If not, click 'Next Blog' at the top of the page (I did and got some erotic poetry).

The theme of this book is the relationship between language and reality. There are three threads which come together. The first is an institute where children are raised in an enclosed environment, pumped full of mind-expanding drugs, and observed for the effects it has on language. In one of the environments, mirrors and optical illusions are set up to permanently disorient the children (needless to say it doesn't all go as planned). The second story takes place in the Amazon, where a tribe which is about to have its environment destroyed by a huge dam, has been discovered to have a unique language, possibly inspired by a mysterious natural substance. The final, and perhaps weakest thread is that of the discovery, Greg Bear-style, of merchant aliens who trade in technologies and ideas, not the least of which is language. All these three threads have the same ultimate aim, the discovery of a new language form which can manipualte, or at least better describe, reality, although for the aliens the language seems to be a race, the Change-speakers. I'll let them explain it in their own words:

"They are variable entities. They manipulate what we know as reality by means of their shifting-value signals. Using signals that lack constants - which have variable referents. This universe-here embeds us in it. But not them. They escape. They are free. They shift across realities. yest when we have successfully superimposed the reality-programmes of all languages, in the moon between the twin worlds, we too shall be free."

See, simple.

I've often felt that science fiction is a genre and thought form which combines fiction with a particular discipline. This used to be purely science of course, but a book like this I would say was based on lingusitics. Anyone interested in this, particularly the Worfe Hypothesis, that language influences perception, will probably enjoy it. For those who want an adventure story, read Stainless Steel Rat.

Report on Probability A

Report on Probability A by Brian Aldiss 1968

Would it make sense if I said this book was boring and psychedelic, but in a good way? Perhaps not, but that best sums up how I feel about this. The word 'unique' is much overused, but applied here by the fact that this book simply has no plot or characterisation in the standard sense ( and not because it's badly written).

The 'plot' consists of three people living in outbuildings, all watching a Mrs. Mary. These sections are described in stark factual detail, as an autistic person might write. There is no description of anything except the thoroughly concrete, not implications of emotion or undertone or anything like that. As the book goes on we realise these events are a report being viewed by some humans in some alternate reality, who are in turn being watched by other beings....

One theme running throughout this is a picture 'The Hireling Shepherd' which reoccurs time and time again in the various scenarios, eventually coming into its own. One moment of relief in all this comes when we realise the alternate humans are as bamboozled by all this as we are:

"..Let's get this clear. Here's the House. There's a café opposite. where apparently nobody pays for food. In the grounds of the house, there's a wooden summerhouse on the one side. We know rhere's an ex-gardener camping out more or less permanently in the summerhouse, and an ex-secretary camping out in the old stable. Now we're given to understand there's an ex-chaffeur hiding out over in the garage! Quite unbelievable!"

So does it all work? Well I'd say yes. There are probably English literarture experts out there who can explain how this all works, but I would explain it like this: It's like one of those drone songs that last 20 minutes and have one tabla and a tibetan chiming bowl and have no 'proper' musical structure. The idea is it tests your attention span, which surely must break at some point, allowing you to 'go to another level' or something like that. I found myself skimming sections, and I believe that was what one was supposed to do. The point at which you start skimming is the point where you come to realise that you won't miss any 'plot'. Maybe I should have made a note of the page number and we could have had a competition.

Book: WOLFBANE

Wolfbane by Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth 1959

From the blurb of the 1961 Penguin edition:

"The Earth itself is a prisoner in the cold dungeons of deepest space...the human race barely survives beneath the pale artificial sun that is now its only light and life.. one man still fights the awful domination of the Pyramids - a fugitive escaped from execution, a dead man with a living super-brain... a wolf in sheeps clothing."

What I love about blurbs like this is that once you've read the book you'll know that the author has condensed the plot so much that the blurb is basically meaningless. Despite this the pyramids, the main obstacle in the novel, are only mentioned once towards the end.

Anyway, the book tells the story of the earth, which has been moved out of orbit along with the moon and a binary planet. From the strange planet comes a giant pyramid, which sits on the sheared off top of Mount Everest, sitting silently, onmoving for centuries. The moon is reignited every five years and acts as the sun. The story begins on the day of the New Sun (like Gene Wolfe), four hundred years after the appearance of the Pyramid. My favourite part of this book is that when people meditate, strange eyes appear in the sky and the meditators vanish. All these events are (sort of) well explained in the course of the novel, which I won't spoil.Suffice to say there's a satisfying, slightly indeterminate ending, that does not resort to rescuing the entire Earth due to some single flaw in the Pyramid's system.

Written in 1959, it of course reads somewhat stilted today, but when it achieves lift-off, can be compared with some of the better (and thus wierder) works of A. E. Van Vogt.

Recommended, not least for the early descriptions of Eastern thought and meditation, at least a few years ahead of its time, and for the cyberpunk aspects.

Book: The House on the Borderland

The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson - 1908.

Two things tipped me off that this book might be great. The first was the second paragraph of the blurb on my 1980 Sphere papaerback:

"Horror-fantasy, science-fiction, pre-psychedelic odyssey to a private and alien cosmos, THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND is a blend of imaginative forms unequalled anywhere - or anytime."

The second was comments in the introduction, such as "The dialogue is unintentionally hilarious..".

This book essentially lived up to these two expectations, it reads a bit like Lovecraft (who has a comment on the cover "A classic of the first water", whatever that means), in the clunky style, but this does not detract from the overall feel of the novel. It essentially tells the story of two men reading a book found in the ruins of a house. This story takes two distinct parts, a bit like Dawn Til Dusk. The first section is him defending the eponymous house from the Swinefolk, a breed of half human half pigs. He does this seemingly without explanation, but with success. This section could easily be a plot for a zombie / horror B-flick. In the second section comes the pre-psychedelic odyssey, in which the protagonist watches time speed up until the universe ends, englufing itself into a green sun.

This book has everything for the reader who does not want everything explained. There is even an element of the unreliable narrator, where a woman features briefly in the remaining parts of the manuscript, but seems to have played a larger part in the destroyed sections. Like Lovecraft, and to an extent H.G. Wells, the author builds on what he has heard about Science, but never lets himself be shackled by mere possibility. Time travels quickly in a similar way to that of the Time Machine, which seems odd to us now. The Newtonian motion of the planets also seems strange to us, not to mention the race of swinefolk marauding the area of Ireland. To let this deter us however would be missing the point, it's all about getting pulled along by the feel and sweep of the story, in much the same way the protagonist is swept along by unseen forces throughout the universe.

Download from Gutenberg