Tag Archives: james blish

Galactic Empires: Volume Two

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Galactic Empires: Volume Two [Amazon, Abebooks, Local Library] ed Brian W Aldiss, with Poul Anderson, Roger D Aycock, James Blish, Fredric Brown, Algis Budrys, Avram Davidson, Gardner F Fox, Harry Harrison, John D Macdonald, Mack Reynolds, A E van Vogt, F L Wallace, trans Heinz Nagel, epilogue Olaf Stapledon, and cover by Karel Thole.

This second volume of Brian Aldiss’ multi-author science fiction anthology is at least as good as the first. As before, selections are drawn from periodicals in the tail end of the pulp era: the 1940s and 1950s. (Harry Harrison’s “Final Encounter” is an outlier from 1964.) The thematic sections of the book treat “Maturity or Bust” and “Decline and Free Fall,” but the stories are more accurately characterized by the subsections, such as “The Other End of the Stick,” which uses narrative reversals to point out subaltern perspectives.

In his editorial remarks, Aldiss is especially fervent about the James Blish story “Beep.” It is definitely an interesting tale, adding the espionage bureaucracy flavor to a narrative that uses FTL communications technology to explore philosophical determinism. I was curious to read the Gardner Fox story “Tonight the Stars Revolt!” but it turned out to be pretty unexceptional sword and planet fare.

Women authors are conspicuous by their absence from this book, and the relatively late Harrison story is the only one with anything interesting to say about gender. The fault lies with Aldiss’s choices more than with what was written in the period. Leigh Brackett and C. L. Moore wrote many stories that would have suited this collection. The Poul Anderson story “Lord of a Thousand Suns” particularly struck me as perhaps Brackett-derivative. Anderson is also a repeat author from the previous volume, the only one to have two stories selected by Aldiss.

In its two books this anthology supplies a distinct perspective on Golden Age science fiction. It was notable to me that I had read none of these stories collected elsewhere. Still and all, I will be happy to turn my sfnal attention to more recent works after this excursion into an early phase of the genre.

A Case of Conscience

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews A Case of Conscience by James Blish.

Although it was the first to be written, author Blish classed his A Case of Conscience as the third of a trilogy. It is the third in terms of chronological setting, although the three do not have a continuous plot, and the mid-21st-century A Case of Conscience could not, in fact, follow after the events described in the 20th-century Devil’s Day. The three books of the trilogy are joined by theme, rather than plot. They each enigmatically address the question of whether “secular knowledge” leads inevitably toward supernatural evil.

As a piece of thoughtful Golden Age science fiction, A Case of Conscience includes what now stands as an alternate history for the second half of the 20th century. Blish projected a “shelter economy” in which the threat of nuclear war drove all the wealthier countries literally underground, creating an economically committed but psycho-socially unsustainable troglodyte civilization composed of city-states under a UN aegis.

But the core dilemma of the book has to do with humanity’s first contact with an alien intelligence. FTL interstellar travel has been recently invented, and the exoplanet of Lithia has been found to harbor a race of intelligent bipedal reptiloids with utopian social and material harmony, and no god-notions at all. The principal characters of the novel are the four members of the first exploratory team to Lithia, to which is added the Lithian Egtverchi, brought back to Earth as an egg. More than half of the narrative centers on the Jesuit exo-biologist Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez.

There are two plot arcs in the book, with the first taking place on Lithia, and the second on Earth. The Lithian part–culminating in the joint decision of the exploratory team regarding future human relations with Lithia–was originally a stand-alone short story, and many reviewers seem to prefer it, and to be uncomfortable with the transition to the second arc. The second part is to Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land as King Kong is to Tarzan.

The most artful feature of the novel is an ending that ties both plot arcs together, and justifies the supernaturalist dogmas of the Jesuit father without violating the materialist presuppositions of the other characters. Ultimately, though, no matter how sympathetically drawn Ruiz-Sanchez might be, I found his intricately stabilized doctrines to be unsound, and ludicrously based on an unwarranted privileging of humanity, to say nothing of their wrongheaded affirmation of what Jan Assman calls the Mosaic distinction, elevated this time to the far reaches of outer space.

The Devil’s Day

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Devil’s Day by James Blish.

Although the two halves of this book were originally published as separate volumes, they do form one continuous novel between them, and it is good to have them under one cover. With this story, Blish inaugurated a form of naturalistic fantasy that James Morrow (with a more conspicuously satirical bent) was later to make his own: realistic modern characters are subjected to the consequences of supernatural events postulated in biblical religion, or variations thereon.

Among several central characters, the chief protagonist of The Devil’s Day is probably black magician Theron Ware. The magic in the book is well researched, and all in the genuine historical tradition, not the fictitious stuff of Harold Shea, Harry Potter, or even Gilbert Norrell. All the characters are a little too psychologically self-consistent to be convincing as people, but this ever-so-slight cartoonishness befits their semi-allegorical status, and helps to maintain the adventurous pacing of the story.

The initial scenario has arms tycoon Baines employing Ware to perform some sorcerous assassination. But the project rapidly snowballs in the synergy of the two men’s ambitions, until the entire world is in danger. Black Easter (the first half) is in many ways simply a setup for The Day after Judgment (the second). And although there were points in the middle of the latter that I thought it had gone off the rails, it turned out to have very effectively raised what seemed to be the impossibly high stakes of the former. I found the ending quite satisfying. [via]

Doctor Mirabilis

Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews Doctor Mirabilis by James Blish.

Although first issued and mostly reprinted under science fiction imprints, Blish’s Doctor Mirabilis is a quite conscientiously historical piece of fiction set in the thirteenth century. Although it’s written in modern English, there are enough Middle Englishisms in it that it might seem like a chore to those who have no prior familiarity with the language of the period, and there are a few short passages of untranslated Latin. It was a fast, enjoyable read for me, but I can’t second-guess how it might read to someone who hadn’t formally studied medieval history. The book stands as part of an alleged “trilogy” (with one of the three parts most often published as two volumes) joined only by theme, rather than plot, character, or even style. This one is probably the strongest, though least-read, book of the set.

The chapters are episodic, and the plot has the nature of a biography, covering the whole of Roger Bacon’s adult life. Other characters are filled out credibly, particularly Adam Marsh, but it’s mostly just Roger’s story. Many 21st-century magicians might be satisfied to read only the chapter about Roger’s alchemical investigations in Paris, if they want to maximize entertainment for time spent.

Blish’s picture of his central character is decidedly that of a scientist–not an inventor/technologist, but a researcher trying to understand the world, and to empirically verify or disprove the ideas about it that have been supplied to him in the hard-to-obtain “commmon” knowledge of his medieval university world. Even without the mass of clinical notions developed since the writing of this book in the 1960s, Blish also effectively presents Roger as a very high-functioning inhabitant of the “autism spectrum.” He’s passionate about knowledge, good with words and numbers, and terrible with people. The upshot of this condition is something nobler than an idot-savant: a tragic hero.

My previous reading on Roger Bacon had never suggested any connection to the Spiritual Franciscans and Joachimism, but Blish is certainly within his rights to imagine one, inasmuch as the conflict within the Ordo Fratrum Minorum could not have been invisible to Roger. The attraction of apocalyptic thinking for pioneering English men of science is well attested in such other cases as John Dee and Isaac Newton, and Blish doesn’t go so far as to make Roger into a Fraticello, but simply one who staunchly credits the possible validity of Joachimist prophecy.

Another feature of Blish’s Roger Bacon is his lifelong dialog with his personal genius, or “demonic self.” This aspect, along with the attention to historical context and the emphasis on the spiritual value of knowledge about the world, makes the book an admirable piece of creative hagiography, especially for adherents of the Gnostic Catholic Church whose canon of saints includes the Doctor Mirabilis. [via]

The King in Yellow

Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews The King in Yellow by Thom Ryng:

This stage play text was written to fulfill a literary hoax, one that in fact helped to inspire the notorious Necronomicon of Lovecraft. In the weird fiction of Robert W. Chambers, The King in Yellow was a play with a degenerative effect on the morals and sanity of its readers. Thom Ryng is not the first to flesh out the text of the play; in his introduction he suggests that he is perhaps the eighth, and he refers specifically to two earlier attempts: one by Lin Carter and one by James Blish. (I’ve read both.) In the first edition of the Ryng text, the conceit was that the text had been recovered from a 19th-century French edition. In this softbound reprint, editorial and authorial matter confesses its actual late-20th-century composition in the distant wake of Chambers’ fiction. It has been produced on stage at least once, if we are to believe the current edition.

Materially, the book is a sturdy softcover volume with a generous font size. I was a little disappointed that the cover had the false Yellow Sign originally designed by artist Kevin Ross and corrupted in the editorial process for the Chaosium role-playing game Call of Cthulhu. (Chambers’ original Yellow Sign was probably the “inverted torch” insignia that appeared on the binding of early editions of Chambers’ story collection The King in Yellow.)

There is a vein of socio-political commentary that is disturbingly prescient (the author implies that it could have been causative), considering that the book was written in the 1990s. Readers are also furnished with a Hasturian incantation to achieve magical invisibility.

When I read this book, the experience was attended with appropriate inter-textual synchronicities. The Oedipus eyes of Thales echoed my recent philosophical reading in Nietzsche criticism (to wit, The Shortest Shadow and Foucault’s Lectures on the Will to Know). Also relating to that reading, but opening onto a perpetual return to a secret place, is the play’s portrayal of Truth as a phantom who is martyred.

Overall, I was suitably impressed, instructed, and infected by Ryng’s deposition from the ether of this dread volume. [via]

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The Thing in the Attic

You may be interested in “Thing in the Attic” by James Blish which was recently added to Project Gutenberg.

“The reputation that they had given him, too, had helped to bring him to the end of the snap-spine tether. They had given weight to his words among others—weight enough to make him, at last, the arch-doubter, the man who leads the young into blasphemy, the man who questions the Book of Laws.

And they had probably helped to win him his passage on the Elevator to Hell.”

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Faint gibbering heard from somewhere near the restricted stacks