Tag Archives: classic science fiction

The Long Tomorrow

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Long Tomorrow [Amazon, Bookshop (New), Publisher (New), Local Library] by Leigh Brackett.

Brackett The Long Tomorrow

As an SF author, Leigh Brackett is known for her planetary romances, which are indeed very fine. But this novel, perhaps her most lauded book-length work, involves a more serious and credible look at the future of our society. Indeed, the book’s scenario for the not-so-distant time to come is not much less believable now than it was when she wrote it about sixty years ago. The only ways it seems dated are that she didn’t predict the microprocessor, or describe any anthropogenic climate change. Given the nature of the story, the first of these is not a significant lack. 

In some features, this book resembles Logan’s Run, which I read recently. Both involve a protagonist rejecting a stultified society and looking for a possibly-mythical site of organized resistance which has continuity with the lost values of the past. Where Logan’s Run has Sanctuary, The Long Tomorrow has Bartorstown. But while Logan flees an urban technocracy, Brackett’s Len Colter is trying to escape an American anti-civilization in the etymological sense: a society that has overtly rejected the idea of the city, along with all of the industries and technologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. 

With this rural, piously conservative, post-apocalyptic environment as the setting for what is in large measure a coming-of-age story, the novel invites an even more direct comparison with John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids. On the whole, I consider Brackett more successful. She better realizes the ways in which even those oppressed by the prevailing morals have internalized them, and she traces a more extensive and nuanced process of maturation in her characters. 

The Long Tomorrow reads quickly — “I finished The Long Tomorrow today,” I remarked paradoxically to my Other Reader — with digestibly short chapters divided into three component “books,” which might have been titled “Piper’s Run” (the village of Len’s childhood), “Refuge” (a community where his exile leads him as a young man), and “Bartorstown.” Although it was not issued as YA fiction, it would serve that increasingly sophisticated market well today. And it continues to deserve the attention of adults willing to reflect on social and technological change outside the myth of progress.

The Fifth Head of Cerberus

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Fifth Head of Cerberus [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Gene Wolfe.

Wolfe The Fifth Head of Cerberus

“Three novellas” says the cover, and that’s what this volume contains. Although the three share a science-fictional setting (the double-planetary system of St. Anne and St. Croix) and there is a single character (Dr. John V. Marsch) who appears in all three, they could be read in any sequence. They are mutually-illuminating, but not serial; while they form a greater whole, the end of each is only the end of one novella, and not the conclusion of a larger novel. In fact, Marsch only appears in the second novella “Story” by virtue of a fictional by-line. There is a strong metafictional element throughout, brought out most fully in the third novella “V.M.T.” where the principal content consists of documentary fragments being considered in largely “random” sequence by a reader within the frame of the tale. 

All three stories arouse musings about personal, cultural, and biological identity. Cerberus guards Hades, the realm of the shades of the dead, and various spectral ancestries are at play in these pieces as well. The first story is called “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” and it seems like Wolfe may have let that stand as the general title out of refusal to come up with a further name that would imply a greater unity to the multi-headed whole. The Cerberus in the book (a statue in the first story) is of the conventional three-headed sort, and the beyond-extra fifth head is a role that fits various characters based on their apparitional and fluctuating functions in the narratives. Indeed, for all of the links between the stories, they serve to raise questions about each other as much as to provide answers. 

One of the recurring questions is: Who–if anyone–is human in this story? Of course, that calls forth the necessary corollary: What is a human? To answer the second would require a crude didacticism far beneath this author. It is a signal of the artistry of this volume that the answer to the first is never entirely divulged.

The Incal

Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Incal Classic Collection by Alexandro Jodorowsky, illustrated by Moebius, introduced by Brian Michael Bendis:

Alexandro Jodorowsky and Moebius' The Incal

 

This beautiful hardcover collects the six original books of Jodorowsky and Moebius’s classic science fiction epic The Incal, originally published in French in the 1980s. A work as self-consciously mythic as this one is going to invite comparison to many other tales. But some of the lines of influence here are pretty obvious, with references falling outside the medium of comics into science fiction novels and films, as well as esoteric traditions.

Clearly, Frank Herbert’s Dune played a major part, with the contention of corrupted factions in a galactic empire, framed by a mystical apocalypse. Qabalistic references include the “theta dream” of Tiphareth, succeeded by the “daath dream” ascending the Tree of Life.

While the influence of The Incal on Luc Besson’s film The Fifth Element is so overwhelming as to incite accusations of plagiarism, it can also be traced in movies like The Matrix and its sequels. Jodorowski’s antihero John Difool is not Neo, who could be compared to the messianic Solune. Instead, as we see in “Planet Difool,” he actually bears closer comparison to Wachowskis’ Agent Smith!

The 10,000-light-year-view used in the narrative framing of The Incal leaves it open to accusations of stereotyped characters and perfunctory plotting. But this book occupies a pole diametrically opposed to literary realism; it is mystical allegory, in which the characters and factions represent spiritual orientations and capabilities. Moebius’s art is perfectly suited to its task here, and the revolting panels of the nightmare sequence near the book’s end are only rivalled by the exaltation that follows them.

Enjoyable in their own right, the contents of this volume are a landmark in the development of the graphic story medium and the science fiction genre. [via]

 

 

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