IS IT NINETY PERCENT OR ninety-five? I ought to look it up, in fact, I ought to know it by now: but at the moment I cannot even recall with certainty where it is that I keep seeing the figure —the Analog editorials, I think. Well, ninety or ninety-five: in any case a staggeringly large percentage of all the scientists who have ever lived on Earth are—I am told, repeatedly—alive at this moment.
Through, one assumes, a similar and equally imperative historical dynamic, a comparable proportion of all future concepts ever generated in science fiction (plus, to be fair, a few new ones —well, at least a few urbanely renewed variants) are contained in the combined 400,000-or-so words of four new books.
One hesitates to use the word novel to describe both John Brunncr's quarter-million-word globovistar macroscopic, STAND ON ZANZIBAR (507 large-size small-type pages from Doubleday at $6.95), and Bob Shaw's tidy little THE TWO TIMERS, containing barely (if any) more than ten percent of the combined word-total of all four books (191 plenty-of-white-space pages, an Ace Special, 60¢). Shaw confines himself modestly to five main characters and four main sets for a psychological thriller set a scant twenty years or so in a future with virtually no sociological changes and an apparently much reduced rate of technological innovation—aside from what might fairly be called mixed-media time travel. Brunner spreads literally dozens of detailed characters over as many meticulously constructed settings in his teeming and frenetic world of 2010—utilizing the basic techniques of Dos Passos' USA trilogy for sequential closeups and long-shots on the mores, morals, and minutiae of politics, industry, education, entertainment, drug habits, dress fashions, computers, commercials, sex, slang, and all the etceteras of Greater New York and Ellay in North America, The Republic of Beninia in Africa, the Guided Socialist Democracy of Yatakang in the Pacific, and all points between.
The other two novels are from Clifford Simak and Roger Ze]azny. Zelazny's ISLE OF THE DEAD (another Ace Special, 60¢) is one page shorter and maybe 5000 words longer than THE TWO-TIMERS with as many planets as Shaw had locales, and at least four times as many characters (of whom about one-fourth are less than ornately bizarre), in a 32nd Century adventure tale about a galactically wealthy, system-hopping hero—a worldscaping planetary architect-contractor and (also by profession) not-quite-immortal god. Both ISLE and Simak's THE GOBLIN RESERVATION (Doubleday, $4.95) belong to that special and, recently, all too rare sub-category first clearly delineated in Unknown (of blessed memory) which gave rise to the need for the term, science-fantasy: the genre of supernatural science, of the technology of magic, matter-of-fact fantasy, the territory just this side of weird-gothic-horror, fantastic whimsy, and sword-and-sorcery. But the two books, inevitably, are as far apart in style, theme, and concept as the genre permits.
Simak, predictably, stays with the traditional category-novel length: 55-60 thousand words (192 standard pages); he also maintains a median time-distance (26th century) and a familiar setting (the wooded countryside of the north-midwest): there ends the expected. The Goblin Reservation is a forest preserve for all varieties of Little People: trolls, fairies, leprechauns, et al., as well as goblins. It is administered by the College of Supernatural Phenomena, located next door to Time College (and its adjunctive Time Museum) on the Wisconsin Campus of Planetary University. The cast of characters includes, besides Little People, a ghost (named Ghost), a banshee, a biomech (Sylvester), Alley Oop (a Neanderthaler), one dragon, William Shakespeare, a generous handful of imaginatively (even for Simak) constructed extraterrestrials (only two types with more than walk-on parts), and roughly a dozen straight humans (assorted academics, one artist, one cop, one conman, one each professional waiter and hostess).
Do not be misled. THE GOBLIN RESERVATION is neither Disneyland whimsy nor latter-day Robert Nathan—any more than the twisted dwarf, cruel lady, knife artist, and psychopathic killer of Zelazny's melodrama (not to mention Shimbo of Darktree Tower, Shrugger of Thunders—the deific alter ego of megamillionaire Francis Sandow—or the central image of Sandow's favorite creation, the gloom-shrouded Isle of the Dead itself) are really either Grand Guignol or H. P. Lovecraft. Beneath the (separate, indeed opposed, but equally) simplistic surface of each book (slaphappy stereotype symbols and sweetness-and-light in the Simak; a sort of Playboy-Philosophy sophomore sadism, cynicism, and calculated shallowness in the Zelazny), the comic-book images resonate at surprising depths. The greatest fault of both books, in fact, is (startlingly, for both authors) in the story-telling. But never mind —the images are bright, and they last well; the symbols ring true. One feels Zelazny has at last emerged from his long spell of preoccupation with veneers—that Simak is approaching a new level of meaning as significant as that he found with his first Webster Family stories. Both stylistically and story-wise, these two books are inferior to much of what each author has done before. The fact remains that I could not put either one down till it was done.
I cannot say the same for either Shaw or Brunner, although—again—for different reasons in each case.
THE TWO-TIMERS is a beautifully fitted piece of work: where Simak and Zelazny both sacrificed emotional conviction to imagic effectiveness, working at conventional lengths too short to allow for both—and where Brunner's detailed visualizations rather outgrew his basic vision—Shaw's novella is paced and laid out (almost staged) precisely to fit its dimensions—which are small. Unlike last year's bombshell "Light of Other Days," the book offers nothing new in its time-travel theories or techniques, nor does it provide the sort of thrill of insight that lifted the prize-winning short story completely out of the class of other clever Analog technogimmick stories.
TWO-TIMERS is an admirably competent sci-fi thriller. STAND ON ZANZIBAR is something, very, else.
In a sense, Brunner has written the first true science fiction novel. That is, he has taken a true novel plot, developed it in proper novelistic style, and at the same time extrapolated fully, in accordance with all the basic science fiction rules, a future environment whose initial assumptions provide not only the background for the story , but an essential component of its central conflicts. The "classic" science fiction novels of the past have ordinarily achieved their fame by doing (either) one of these jobs so successfully that any simply passable performance of the other was acceptable.
I still remember the world of Heinlein's UNIVERSE, for instance, vividly; but the individuals in it—except for the physical attributes of the two-headed hero—are gone beyond recall. The members of the Gestalt group in Sturgeon's MORE THAN HUMAN are impressed in my memory as indelibly as children I have known and loved myself; so is the "personality" of the Gestalt itself; I cannot remember at all what rationale was provided for its existence.
A third type, of course, is represented by Miller's A CANTICLE FOR LIEBOWITZ, which provided discontinuous "close-ups" in the form of a series of shorter stories containing the necessary balance of intellectual and emotional content, leaving the reader to fill in the parts between for himself. This approach has been, till now, the closest to the "true science fictiofi novel": or, on second thought, there was an earlier example—Frank Herbert's DUNE, which I (alone, I believe) found flawed in logic and consistency, as well as pretentious and dull. It did, however, fulfill in theory, if not (for me) in effect, the job Brunner has now, to my mind, done for the first time with minimal—but at least minimal—success.
It is a success which raises some questions about the worthiness of the endeavor, however. Within his established premises, Brunner conducts himself brilliantly: I do not complain this time of any internal inconsistencies; but the more detailed and believable his world of 2010 became, the less believable (while equally detailed) seemed the behavior of his characters. Question: is it possible for a writer in one culture fully and adequately to project the mores and emotional responses of realistic human beings in a (realistically) different environment?
Next question: is it possible to spread out this much detail about a world conceived in the author's mind (and—inevitably—dedicated to the proposition that his own logic is supreme) without getting to sound a bit pompous and pretentious?
I am not answering these questions, but asking them. I expect the answers will come from the other ambitious efforts that will assuredly follow now. It will be interesting, finding out.
Meantime, one can explore the book itself. I make no attempt to describe or summarize here, because any brief picture would be misleading. Read it straight through, or dip and skim: there's something for everyone, and an impressive amount overall. (The book is so full of a number of—fascinating—things that it doesn't really matter whether they add up to that increasingly ambiguous term, A Good Novel.)
-JUDITH MERRIL