Conference noted::sf

1194.0. "Knight/MacDonald/Leinster" by VERGA::KLAES (Quo vadimus?) Thu Nov 18 1993 15:23

Article: 434
From: [email protected] (Dani Zweig)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews
Subject: REPOST: Belated Reviews PS#27: Misc 6: SF by Knight/MacDonald/Leinster
Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services (408-241-9760 login: guest)
Date: 18 Nov 93 02:35:34 GMT
 
	Belated Reviews PS#27: Misc 6: SF by Knight/MacDonald/Leinster
 
As SF novelists, Knight, Leinster and MacDonald are all somewhere in the
third tier.  In a sense that's not fair:  The novels in this review are
mostly from the fifties, when the short story dominated.  For most of
Leinster's career, the short story was practically all there was.  Knight's
gifts showed to better effect in his work as an editor and a critic, and
most of MacDonald's novels are mysteries, not sf.  So why am I bothering?
Because these authors weren't always in the third tier.
 
Damon Knight's best-known work is probably the short story, "To Serve Man"
(***+), which appeared in 1950 and subsequently made the transition to tv.
(It's a gimmick story, and too spoiler-prone to discuss, but if you haven't
read it, you probably want to seek it out.)  In terms of sf history, he is
more significant as an editor and a critic -- an important force behind the
transition to competent writing in the genre.  He only wrote a few novels,
two of which stand out.  At least, they stood out in the forty years ago.
 
"Hell's Pavement" (***) is a half-satirical novel placed in a future in
which almost everyone is mind-controlled.  It starts with good intentions:
You can condition killers not to kill, you can condition public servants
not to accept bribes, you can condition brawlers not to brawl.  By the
twenty-second century everyone is conditioned to be a good citizen, though
the definition of good citizenship my differ from one place to another.
For example, some conglomerates, early on, legally paid consumers
generously to accept conditioning not to buy from their competitors.  The
descendents of those consumers are still effectively 'owned' by those
conglomerates.  To top it off, a few people are secretly Immune to the
conditioning, which gives them the tremendous advantage of being able to
think and do the 'impossible'.  By the time of this novel, the whole
unstable system is on the brink of collapse. 
 
"A For Anything" (***-) has a lot in common with "Hell's Pavement".  It
also starts with a gadget -- in this case a matter duplicator known, not
inappropriately, as a Gismo.  And it also starts with good intentions:
Properly used (especially since we're not worrying about conservation of
mass or energy here), the Gismo could end poverty.  Incautiously
introduced -- as it is -- it's more likely to bring the economy to a
crashing halt.  In the world Knight projects, that leaves only one kind of
wealth that is meaningful -- servants...or slaves.  (I'm leaving out
complications here.  For instance, the Gismo will also duplicate people.)
 
"Hell's Pavement" (aka "The Analogue Men") and "A For Anything" are both
science fiction of the same old school:  Posit a gadget, work through the
implications, and write a story set in the resulting society.  (Note that
this is a giant step up from the earlier paradigm of "posit a gadget and
tell the reader how it works.")  "A For Anything" is the weaker of the
two, both because the society doesn't seem to follow reasonably from the
premise and because most of the implications of the Gismo are ignored.
Still, both these books are among the better novels from near the end of
the period in which an sf novel could get by on a clever idea. 
 
John D. MacDonald is the author of the better part of a hundred novels and
Lord knows how many hundreds of short stories (okay, his bibliographers
probably know as well), mostly in the mystery genre, and is best known for
his "Travis McGee" novels.  His forays into science fiction -- mostly in
the nineteen-fifties -- are relatively few, but interesting. 
 
"Ballroom of the Skies" (***) is also a mystery, in a sense, but on a
larger scale than those of Travis McGee:  The mystery is why the world is
such a mess.  As the novel progresses, we see parts of the answer.  There
is a secret organization dedicated to keeping the pot boiling.  Using
telepathic powers and impossibly high technology, it sabotages peace
conferences, nurtures paranoia, and murders people who are in a position
to do too much good.  Strangely enough, this organization is in mortal
conflict with another, similar organization, which is dedicated to the
same goals.  Dake Loring begins to discover this when the man for whom
he works -- who was making genuine progress towards world peace -- suddenly
sabotages his own negotiations.  The novel follows Loring as he learns the
secret, and then learns what lies behind it.  "Ballroom of the Skies" has
probably aged better than any of the other books in the current review:  It
creaks a bit, but it still holds up in its own right.
 
"Wine of the Dreamers" (***-, also published as "Planet of the Dreamers")
addresses the same question as "Ballroom of the Skies" -- the question of
why the world is such a mess -- and presents an even more paranoic answer.
The world of the Dreamers is old and decadent, and its few inhabitants are
able to mechanically project their perceptions to other worlds, and thought-
control their inhabitants.  Since they think the other worlds to be
artifacts of their dreams, they are not inhibited about acting out their
ugliest impulses through the people they control, and account for the
worst of the world's senseless violence.  This book wasn't as good as
Ballroom to start with, partly because in this case the violence and
misery in this case *doesn't* have a compensating motivation, partly
because the resolution is psychologically unconvincing. 
 
MacDonald also wrote a good number of sf short stories, some of the best
(i.e., good but not special) of which are collected in "Other Times, Other 
Worlds", and a novel titled "The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything", 
which is borderline classifiable as science fiction.  
 
Murray Leinster (Will Jenkins) goes back a good deal further than Knight
or MacDonald.  He began writing sf in 1919, and established himself as a
popular sf writer of that period.  (His most influential story from that
period may be "Sideways in Time" (***-), an early story of parallel worlds
and alternate histories.)  Leinster was one of the few to successfully
make the leap into the Golden Age, continuing to publish well into the
sixties.  The timing is still such, though, that most of his work appeared
in the form of short stories.  The best of those are clever, but dated.
Most of his novels, unfortunately, do not read well today, tending to come
across as bad space adventure.  The books which still read *relatively*
well include: 
 
"The Planet Explorer" (***).  This is a fixup novel consisting of four
'problem' stories.  In each story, Bordman, a senior Colonial Survey
officer, has to come up with clever technical solution to a problem which
threatens to make a colony uninhabitable.  Actually, three of them are
problem stories.  The one which is not, "Combat Team" (I've also seen it
titled "Exploration Team"), won the Hugo award for best novella of 1956.
It's also the story I like least of the four.  Oh well.  The sf problem
story is a relic of a phase which has largely passed -- but it can still
be fun to read. 
 
"Operation: Outer Space" (***-) mixes space adventure and satire.  When a
scientific breakthrough makes faster-than-light travel possible, it is a
television team that is in a position to take advantage of it:  Finding
themselves on the first interstellar flight, on a ship with a working
communications link to Earth, they proceed to make interstellar flight a
PR success.  Their adventures are relayed to Earth, where they appear on
prime time and bring in tremendous advertising revenues.  They sell
interests in the planets they discover.  They appeal to the cupidity of
their audience, and in so doing make interstellar travel a real success.
Satire, being necessarily topical, tends to age rapidly, and this book shows
its age.  Still, it was enjoyable fluff then, and it's not bad fluff now.
 
Most of Leinster's novels of this time seem to have been aimed at the
traditional sf audience of teenaged boys.  Some of these are actively
painful to read today, including his "Space Platform" (*) trilogy (which is
interesting for its vision of space travel as a massive government effort,
rather than Kitty-Hawk-level private tinkering).  Among his better light
space adventures are "The Pirates of Zan" (**+) and "Space Captain" (**+).
 
The novels in this review were well received -- in some cases very well
received -- forty-odd years ago.  Today, in terms of contemporary science
fictiondom, they are half-forgotten works of half-forgotten authors.
They reflect concerns and stereotypes of half a lifetime ago, and they
were written in a period when science fiction was just starting to mend
its tradition of Bad Writing.  But they *were* well received in their time.
Today?  I'd suggest reading "Ballroom of the Sky" if it seemed interesting,
and other MacDonald books only if Ballroom particularly impresses you.
The Knight novels fall more into the "historical interest" category,
though some readers might find "Hell's Pavement" worth a look.  The
Leinster novels fare both better and worse:  They've aged better than most
of the others, largely by virtue of having been less ambitious to begin
with.  Bear in mind that most of the novels discussed here are in the
150-odd page range, so if you spot them on the shelves, casual curiosity
won't cost you much time.
 
%A  Knight, Damon
%T  Hell's Pavement
%T  A For Anything
 
%A  MacDonald, John D.
%T  Ballroom of the Skies
%T  Wine of the Dreamers
 
%A  Leinster, Murray
%T  The Planet Explorer
%T  Operation: Outer Space
 
=============================================================================
 
The postscripts to Belated Reviews cover authors of earlier decades who
didn't fit into the original format -- whether because the author seemed
an inappropriate subject, or because I was unfamiliar with too much of the
author's work, or whatever -- or sometimes just isolated works of such
authors.  The emphasis will continue to be on guiding newer readers
towards books or authors worth trying out, rather than on discussing them
comprehensively or in depth.  I'll retain the rating scheme of ****
(recommended), *** (an old favorite that hasn't aged well), ** (a solid
lesser work), and * (nothing special). 
 
-----
Dani Zweig
[email protected]
 
   "You have the reputation of being one of the nicest guys in the field.
    We both know you're a hyena on its hind legs.  How have you fooled
    everyone?"  "By keeping my mouth shut when I read garbage." -- Gene Wolfe