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.