Showing posts with label DAW Books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DAW Books. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 23, 2023

The Mind Behind The Eye


The Mind Behind The Eye, by Joseph Green
No month stated, 1971  Daw Books
(Published in the UK as Gold The Man)

I found this one on the clearance rack of a local Half Price Books the other week and picked it up for no other reason than it had one of the more bonkers plots I’d ever seen: namely, a genetically-enhanced super genius operates the corpse of a 90-foot alien and masquerades as one of the aliens to discover whatever nefarious plans they have in mind for Earth. Indeed the plot is so out-there that the editors at DAW didn’t even bother to synopsize it on the back cover, instead running an excerpt from a London Sunday Times review. 

That’s another thing: the Times review, the small and dense print, the British misspellings (I mean a “u” in “color??” You all invented the language – you should know better!); all of it indicated that The Mind Behind The Eye was the product of a British writer. And also the copyright page states that the book was first published in the UK as Gold The Man. However, it turns out that author Joseph Green was in fact an American, one who worked in the PR wing of NASA during the space race. He published several sci-fi stories and a few novels, but this one for whatever reason was first published as a hardcover in England, with this US edition coming out as a paperback original. 

Now here is an admission, the first such admission I’ve made in all the years of running this blog: I couldn’t even finish this book. The concept was so ludicrous that I kept getting pulled out of the story. And despite appearing like a quick read – a mere 191 pages – the print is so small and dense that The Mind Behind The Eye is a ponderous and slow read. But it’s the plot that was my main hangup; I mean imagine, if you will, a book about a dude secretly operating a giant alien in all aspects of its life, even so far as banging the alien’s wife, and all of it is played totally on the level (the novel is dead serious), and maybe you’ll see what I mean. 

But I liked the setting of the book. We learn it’s around 2009, one of those “past future” scenarios I enjoy so much with space travel and whatnot. But in this world, giant friggin’ aliens attacked Earth’s Mars colony in 1989(!), then later sent bioweapons into Earth orbit, crushing most of the population. But that is just the framework, and in fact Joseph Green takes his time establishing all this. Our main plot concerns Gold, a perfect phsysical and mental specimen of 28 who is one of the two men on Earth who were given a few extra ounces of brain matter in the womb: a supergenius who no longer considers himself homo sapiens, but a new breed far advanced above common man. 

The other supergenius is Petrovna, a deformed dwarf a few years older than Gold, a supergenius created by the USSR. The Cold War still wages in this 2009, but has little impact on the storyline. Nor does the interesting, Colony-esque setup that the United States is now run by the friggin’ United Nations (seriously, just give them a few more years), with “Peacekeepers” running roughshod over the American populace. The opening features a memorable bit where Gold’s estate is invaded by Peacekeepers who have come to round him up, and Gold tells his loyal security force to stand down. 

But Gold isn’t being persecuted; instead, he’s being requested by the UN to take up a challenging task that might save the planet. And he’s not the only man for the job due to his super powers of the mind – it’s because he was also once a pianist! I mean folks it just keeps getting more and more bonkers. They give him a lift to the Moon – which happens quickly, and mostly off-page – and there Gold finally meets Petrovna, who has been running a secret program. It turns out one of the giant aliens has been captured, or at least the corpse of one; recently left behind on Mars by his fellows, the giant alien suffered brain failure due to lack of oxygen. An army of technicians has kept the body alive, and meanwhile Petrovna has had the dead portion of the alien’s brain scooped out and replaced with a two-level compartment in which a pair of human operators can control the body – every aspect of movement, save for involuntary things like breathing or catching oneself before falling down, all of which are still controlled by the remaining portion of brain. 

But it’s all relayed so factually, so blandly. The alien, by the way, looks much as depicted on the cover art of this DAW edition; in fact the illustration, credited to Josh Kirby, is quite faithful to how everything is described when Gold first views the body. It’s just a giant human body, and Green shows off his science background with a lot of off-hand musings on how giant human forms operate the same as smaller ones due to the laws of nature and whatnot. Meanwhile, Petrovna appeals to Gold’s egotism to take the job; Gold, we learn, quickly masters any challenge before him, and in fact even became a millionaire after a day or two on the stock market, and he feels there is nothing to challenge his massive intellect. 

Until now: Gold’s mission will be to go with Petrovna aboard this animated corpse, with Gold helming all the actions like moving and talking and whatnot, with Petrovna in the compartment below Gold overseeing all the body’s unconscious needs…like, uh, when it needs to take shit. An incident which is actually relayed in the novel (but again sans any humor). As for when our two heroes need to take a shit, Green has dealt with that in the novel, as well; there’s a toilet in the compartment and the waste will be flushed into the giant alien’s bloodstream, but given how much smaller humans are the waste won’t cause any undue harm and will be expelled via sweat or somesuch. Things happen, though, and the plan changes, and thus it’s Marina, Petrovna’s lovely young assistant, who takes up the unconscious-monitoring duties when the plan goes into action. 

But man it just kept pulling me out of the fictive dream. I mean Gold and Marina get the body back onto Mars (again, the trip relayed in almost casual fashion – but then the idea is that by 2009 travel to and from the planets is no biggie), and it’s discovered by its fellows. And Gold, who doesn’t even know the language, nor any of the customs of the mysterious aliens, has to feign his way through it all. He makes the body nod when he thinks it needs to, making the other aliens think he’s suffering from memory lost. It’s just so bizarre, like this alien doctor visits him and teaches him how to write, Gold manipulating the alien’s hand to pick up a pencil and write questions…just on and on like that, but we’re to buy it because Gold is so superhumanly intelligent that he can pick all this up with only a little bit of info to work from. 

As the novel plods on the reader begins to see Joseph Green’s intentions, and the title of the original British edition makes sense. Periodically we have flashbacks to Green’s youth, where he was raised in a sort of Government care center by technicians who would test him and whatever, and he’d often run away to experience life first-hand. This being a 1970s novel, that “first-hand” stuff would of course entail sex, thus we have a part where teenaged Gold ran away yet again for the express purpose of visiting a whorehouse, where he had a quick and dirty tussle with a small-breasted young black hooker named Lil’ Bit. 

But anyway, as mentioned Gold no longer thinks of himself as a human – or as a “man,” but here he is hiding in the body of a massive alien man, learning the life and customs of an alien world…in other words, learning how to integrate with society. And all the while there is lovely Marina working there with him, and sure enough the interest begins to grow – I forgot to mention, but another thing is that Gold is sterile (we’re told of his screwing hundreds of pretty women in an experiment to get at least one of them pregnant), and another indication of how he’s not a man. And meanwhile the alien he is impersonating has a wife, and kids, and again Gold learns how to value life while masquerading as this alien. 

But it’s all so friggin’ implausible! I mean here Gold and Marina are, light years from Earth – there’s even casual, off-hand interstellar travel, as the aliens take their recovered friend from Mars back to their home planet, off in another star system. How are Gold and Marina even expected to get back to Earth with the intel they’ve uncovered? What happens if someone on the alien planet decides to do a brain scan on their pal and see the two tiny humans hiding in a hollowed-out cavity? And more importantly, how could any of this plausibly work? 

This is why I had to throw in the towel on The Mind Behind The Eye. I just couldn’t bear it anymore. I mean I love far-out plots, but I can only go so far; a plot like this one actually needed a lighter touch to be a little more palatable. Otherwise Joseph Green is a fine writer…I mean he’s certainly invested in the tale, going to pains to make everything seem plausible, but I feel he set the bar too high for himself. At any rate, the book was worth the two bucks I spent on it.

Thursday, November 7, 2019

The Stardroppers


The Stardroppers, by John Brunner 
September, 1972   DAW Books

This is the first John Brunner novel I’ve read, though I’m familiar with him and have several of his books. One of those wildly prolific British sci-fi authors, Brunner first wrote this as a short story in the early ‘60s and then fleshed it out in novel form in the ‘70s, updating the story to tap into the psychedelic era. Kelly Freas’s cool and subtly exploitative cover art (love the strategic placement of that transistor radio!) aptly sums up the theme of the novel – teens (and adults) are tuning in and dropping out thanks to mysterious space signals they’re picking up on special radio-esque gadgets called “Stardroppers.”

Brunner doesn’t really tell us when the novel takes place, but it would appear to be the ‘80s or thereabouts. The “LSD era” is referred to as years ago, and also we’re informed that Britain decided to “drop out of the arms race” a decade ago and thus has become a sort of hotbed of intrigue and spies. So in other words similar to the US of NYPD 2025. And also our hero, an agent named Dan Cross, is an American who works for “The Agency,” which isn’t the CIA – we’re told that this organization was only formed several years ago. And also that its interests are global; there is a bit of an elitist and condescending tone (redundant description, I know) to the novel, with Cross (and thus Brunner) often putting down populism and having his secret agent protagonist proclaim that he’s “A human being first and an American second. The way it should be!” Cross literally sneers at anyone who doesn’t belive in globalism. Unfortunately he’s a bit of a prick and doesn’t engender much reader empathy.

Well, we learn that Stardropping started fairly recently but has broken out in a major way. It’s not just limited to hippie types but people from all walks of life. India and England are the two main hubs of ‘dropping, and the Brits are going for it because it’s a way to tune out of all the tensions their country has gotten into. Cross has been tasked with researching the phenomenon as America is a bit behind on the fad, and there are rumors that something sinister is afoot, mainly that some Stardroppers have flat-out vanished while tuning in to the cosmos. We meet Cross as he’s just arrived in London, posing as a tourist and toting an expensive custom-made Stardropper he picked up from a Californian specialist.

But what exactly is Stardropping? Honestly folks the slim book is pretty much devoted to that entire question. You won’t find much in the way of action or intrigue here – and you definitely won’t find any lurid elements. Other than a random utterance of “fuck” the book is basically G rated. Anyway back to Stardropping. It was discovered a few years before by a British scientist named Rainshaw. Apparently this device he invented picks up signals from space, and just as with a normal radio there’s a spectrum of “stations” to chose from, with listeners becoming devoted to one or the other. Eventually the proposition was put forth that these signals are actually messages from alien beings. 

Brunner clearly has patterned this new world after the LSD era; “Dropped any good stars lately?” apparently being a common question among enthusiasts. But the novel lacks the psychedelic spark I wanted, which is curious given the publication date. In fact the Stardropper enthusiasts are clean and tidy, complete opposite of grungy hippies. There also isn’t as identifiable a culture, but then the novel’s perhaps too slim for it. The Stardroppers our hero meets are for the most part typical British people who have a tendency to gather together and listen to bizarre bleeps and bloops from space, but otherwise there’s nothing remarkable about them. Save that is for one or two basket cases who have been mentally unhinged by Stardropping; Cross meets one of these immediately upon arrival in London, but it’s the only one we get to see in the novel – and later we find out that there was more to this particular character than suspected.

Cross’s main contact is a Scotland Yard cop named Redvers, who in brief backstory was a young cop when the “LSD problem” was at its height. Now he’s middle aged, cynical, and bitter. There’s a bit of America-bashing when he claims it’s “about time” the Agency started looking into Stardropping, given that America has so far left the topic unexplored. This was a bit hard to buy, but I figured it was Brunner’s attempt at featuring a character who was just as clueless about the situation as the reader. Speaking of which Brunner does a fair job of capturing American speech for Cross – in other words he doesn’t sound just like the British characters in the novel.

Curiously, for a book with a secret agent and a device that might impact the world, The Stardroppers is pretty flat and slow-going. There’s no point where Cross does any “secret agent stuff,” and he operates more like a reporter. He just goes around, pretends to be a Stardropper enthusiast, and picks up what info he can. The only character who really sparks is Lillith, a sixteen year-old runaway whose mother destroyed her Stardropper; she enters the text when she attempts to steal Cross’s Stardropper. After a chase he gets it back, feels sorry for her, and lets her try it out. She also provides an in for another group of Stardroppers, ones who live together in a sort of commune (only it’s clean, of course), and Brunner takes this opportunity to fill up lots of pages with expositional dialog about what the Stardroppers might actually be tapping into.

More dialog comes courtesy the studious group of Stardroppers who meet at Cosmica, a store that sells Stardroppers. The sequence where Cross tours Cosmica is pretty cool, and was presented almost like an audiophile visiting a well-stocked record store. A guy named Watson runs the place, and there’s also an attractive young woman named Angel whose rationality about Stardropping appeals to Cross. Brunner doesn’t go the expected “romantic subplot” route but instead introduces more suspense here, as Angel was engaged to Robin Rainshaw, young Stardropper afficionado – and son of Dr. Rainshaw, Stardropper discover – who happens to be one of those who vanished.

We get to see two characters vanish while Stardropping, but the scenes are too goofy to have any impact. People sit there with their headphone – and Freas’s cover illustration is accurate because Brunner specifies that only one headphone is used with Stardroppers – listening to the cosmos (alternately described as white noise, surf, or even animalistic screams), and then suddenly zap away into thin air. It seems that they’ve become so attuned to a particular station that it beams them right into the great yonder; Robin Rainshaw was the first of these to vanish, and Cross’s assignment is to ensure something nefarious isn’t zapping these people away.

The climax solves the mystery, but in a way that detracts a bit from the suspense that’s gone before. Cross for once uses some secret agent skills and sneaks into Watson’s home. There he bumps into none other than Robin Rainshaw, who is wearing a space suit and seems to have just appeared. Long story short – and spoiler warning for the rest of the paragraph – the Stardroppers who have vanished are beaming out into space, and all of them are working with Watson on a secret project. The ones who zap and don’t come back “weren’t good enough,” per Watson. It gets a little goofy here when Cross himself beams momentarily into space, displaying a skill he of course didn’t know he had, and by novel’s end it’s implied he’ll be part of Watson’s venture, which happens to be the removal of weapons of mass destruction from the various military bases of Earth and depositing them in space. 

Since Brunner’s a “real” sci-fi writer and not a pulp sci-fi writer (guess which of the two I prefer), there’s a lot of print devoted to theories of how Stardropping works and how real-time exists with the space-time of the Stardroppers and other stuff I skimmed through because I just didn’t give a damn. I wanted a fun, fast-moving story with pschedelic overtones, and unfortunately that’s not what I got with The Stardroppers. And if that’s what you want, I still highly recommend After The Good War.

Thursday, December 21, 2017

The Valley Where Time Stood Still and The Martian El Dorado Of Parker Wintley


The Valley Where Time Stood Still, by Lin Carter
February, 1976  Popular Library
(Original Doubleday hardcover edition, 1974)

Between 1973 and 1984, Lin Carter published a “sequence” of four novels and one short story that was inspired by and dedicated to  Leigh Brackett. Carter, in his afterward to the final book, Down To A Sunless Sea (DAW, 1984), stated that as a teenager he’d been a fan of Brackett’s pulp sci-fi novels, and wanted to pay tribute to her version of “legendary Mars.” Carter’s novels were not published in chronological order (the first to be published, 1973’s The Man Who Loved Mars, actually takes place last chronologically – and was also the only one to be written in first-person), and they did not feature any recurring characters – other than Mars itself, which as in Brackett’s stories is a dying, dessicated world, home to an impossibly ancient race.

I’d never really thought much of Carter, other than I always remembered his name from the Conan books I read as a kid. But then when I met with Len Levinson last year, my interest in Carter was piqued – Len and Lin were friends from the early ‘60s until Carter’s death in 1988. Len told me some crazy stuff about the guy, who sounded like quite a memorable character – indeed, like a character in one of Len’s novels. Len himself has only read two of Carter’s novels (the first two Thongor installments), but he still thinks fondly of Carter, mostly because of the inspiration he gave Len to get started on his own novels.

Lin Carter was incredibly prolific, and outside of the Conan stuff maybe he’s most remembered for his Callisto series, which was greatly indebted to Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter of Mars books. Carter appears to have been a pastiche sort of author, maybe even a fan fiction author; at least he appears to be as such in The Valley Where Time Stood Still, as for the most part he does an effective job of capturing Leigh Brackett’s style. Carter’s pastiching certainly isn’t as evocative or poetic, but it does at time attain the ring of a Brackett original – to wit, “If ever a dead city had ghosts, thought M’Cord, it was Ygnarh dreaming of her lost empire in the golden twilight…” He also tries his hand at various Brackettisms, like “[M’Cord] cudgeled his memory.”

Carter considered these novels to be part of a “sequence” he referred to as The Mysteries of Mars, each of them taking place “about two hundred years” in the future. Chronologically The Valley Where Time Stood Still takes place second, I think, though note that in 1969 Carter published a novella titled The Flame of Iridar that was part of a Belmont Books Double which was also set on Mars, and also dedicated to Brackett (as well as her husband, Edmond Hamilton), but that one took place millions of years in Mars’s past and was more of a fantasy story – indeed, somewhat similar to Brackett’s The Sword Of Rhiannon in setting and fantasy vibe.

This one was the only novel in the sequence to be published in hardcover; Carter dedicates it to Brackett, “because it’s her kind of story.” He doubtless means this both ways – it’s Brackett’s kind of story in that it’s something she herself would probably enjoy reading, but also because Carter has done his best to retain her style and to set his novel on her Mars. Even the names of the various Martian cities are similar – ie Carter’s Tharsis to Brackett’s Valkis. And his Martians have that same vibe of decayed nobility; Carter’s have “coppery-red” skin and yellow eyes, and the men sport “furcaps” which are styled according to their status. The native women are generally topless and wear bells in their hair, just as in Brackett.

One difference is that Carter seems to go for more of a Western vibe than Brackett did. It would be easy to transpose the plot and characters of The Valley Where Time Stood Still from the deserts of Mars to the deserts of the Midwest, with his “lean and ragy” human protagonist M’Cord coming off just like a cowboy hero, even down to the dual “energy guns” he wears on his “lean hips.” (And those energy guns are made by General Electric, folks!) Likewise, Carter’s main Martian progatonist, Thaklar, is basically the Indian of Western yarns, abiding by his own code of nobility.

M’Cord himself is gruff and taciturn; he’s a desert prospector, having spent the past decade scouring the desert wastes of Mars for uranium, which is valueless to the Martians themselves. Instead of a horse he rides a slidar, one of the “ungainly, long-legged scarlet reptiles” which Martians use as “riding beasts.” (As we’ll recall, Brackett’s were described as “lizardlike mounts.”) An interesting detour from Brackett is that the humans of Carter’s books have undergone surgery to survive on Mars without the aid of a “respirator;” thanks to the “Mishubi-Yakamoto treatments” he received years before, M’Cord needs less oxygen. However like other “Earthsiders” on Mars, he wears a “thermalsuit” against the harsh elements.

Our hero comes upon a native stuck beneath a dead slidar. This turns out to be Thaklar, a former prince of the “Dragon Hawk clan.” It takes a long time to eke the info out of the injured warrior, but long story short: Thaklar is the latest in a line of fathers and sons who protect the secret location of Ophar, the so-called Valley of Lost Time, a sort of mythical Eden that also has a Fountain of Youth. The place, known as “The Holy,” is forbidden to Martians, and only Thaklar’s people know where it is. But he recently gave away the secret for a piece of ass: a hot native dancer-babe named Zerild, she of the “shallow pointed breasts” and “long, slim, coltish legs,” with hair like “a banner of black silk.” But the “wicked slut” took the sacred info and ran – without even giving poor old Thaklar that promised piece of ass!

Thaklar only relates his sad tale to M’Cord because the two have become “brothers,” following the ancient Martian tradition of sharing water – this after M’Cord is nearly killed by an attacking “sandcat.” Given that M’Cord himself saved Thaklar’s life, the Martian feels indebted to him, even if he is a “f’yagh,” or “hated one,” as the Martians refer to Earthmen. Thaklar gives water to an unconscious M’Cord, whose leg has been torn open from hip to knee, and this sharing of water is a holy and sacred thing, as water on dessicated Mars is more precious than life.

The two stop off to rest in Ygnarh, an incalculably ancient city that is “the first stop on the road” to Ophar. Thaklar’s own leg has healed, but M’Cord is in a bad way, but luckily here in this deserted “first city” of Mars they find other people – a Martian outlaw with the face of a wolf named Chastar, a “little priestling” named Phuun, and none other than Zerild herself. Chastar, who leads the group, keeps prisoner two Earthlings: a brother and sister from Sweden named Karl and Ingrid Nordgren. Of course, Ingrid is a hotstuff, stacked blonde, but she tries to hide it, and more so serves as an obedient servant to her brother. She helps to heal M’Cord with lots of high-tech equipment.

Thaklar has bargained for their lives with the revelation that he didn’t give Zerild all the details on the path to Ophar, so if the three want to go there – for whatever reason – they’ll need Thaklar’s help. And he demands safe passage for his “brother” M’Cord as well. Thus the group stays in Ygnarh for like…well, for like forever. The novel hits a holding pattern here for what seems to be endless chapters as M’Cord heals (I swear the phrase “His leg healed” appears like every other page, even though we’re informed he’s still healing). Carter strives for Brackett-style word painting as the humans muse over how ancient the city is, the first marble of which was set down while dinosaurs walked on the earth, but it does go on.

It’s a bunch of padding and slows the novel right on down, which is a shame, as prior to this it moves at a snappy pace. Finally though M’Cord has healed, for real this time, though we’re also informed he now has a “game leg” that he’ll forever have to drag along behind him. He can still ride a slidar, so off they head for fabled Ophar. But even here the novel is slow-going at best, Carter constantly stalling all forward momentum wth inordinate padding; repetitive padding, at that. It is clear he is having a hard time of filling up an entire novel – which isn’t even too long, coming in at 222 pages. Carter keeps stalling, ending most chapters on lame “what might happen next?” cliffhangers.

Ophar, when it is finally reached after arduous (and page-filling) journeying, is an Edenic paradise hidden in a valley at the bottom of a massive crater. An artificial crater-floor serves as a mirage to hide the place; Thaklar leads them down the stairs cut into the thousand-foot drop of the crater, and on through the mirage-like portal into Ophar. The cover painting of this Popular Library edition* pretty faithfully captures how Carter describes Ophar, even down to the big-eyed cat – which M’Cord theorizes might be the “mammal-like cat” from which the Martians themselves descended. Strangely, despite trying to invest the tale with “science,” Carter has it that his version of Martians might have a feline heritage…yet they’re still “humans.”

For Ophar is truly the place where time stood still – there are all manner of flora and fauna here that went extinct so long ago that no fossils even remain of them. The biggest surprise is the giant scarlet telepathic reptile that greets them – a kindly Guardian, and just one of several that still live here in the Valley. Even here though Carter shamelessly pads out the pages; it seems like every other page M’Cord pauses to worry over what might happen next. At any rate the Guardian fixes his game leg while he’s asleep; Carter works up a somewhat-lamely delivered reveal that the Valley heals those who have good hearts, but curses those who have come here for evil.

Here also Carter develops an 11th hour love between M’Cord and Ingrid, who it turns out is sometimes whipped by her brother…and might just enjoy it. After a lot of padding and exposition on this or that element of the Valley, the climax goes down quick, with Chastar and Phuun revealing their (incredibly lame) plan to conquer Mars – threaten destruction of the Valley itself! They’re going to bottle up water from the Pool and show it to people around Mars, or something…it’s pretty dumb. Oh, and the Pool gives off “bubbles” which, if they touch you, instantly zap your mind back to childhood and remove all stain from your heart, etc. But too much of it and you permanently regress, as evidenced by the flocks of nude young people running around, most of whom have been here for millennia.

The finale features various bizarre send-offs: one character is turned into a babe by the Pool, another is strangled by a tree that comes to life, like it just walked out of The Lord Of The Rings. Another is cast back into a bestial mode. Dancing “slut” Zerild (who might actually be a virgin – and by the way there’s zero sex in the book) freaks out and decides she loves Thaklar after all, devoting herself to him if he will accept her. And meanwhile Ingrid’s in danger of becoming one of those brainless Valley kids, thanks to an errant bubble, but M’Cord finds her…and conveniently enough she’s forgotten about practically everything except her love for him!

All told, not much really happens in The Valley Where Time Stood Still; as mentioned, it was more like a novella that was padded out to excess. The blood and thunder of vintage Leigh Brackett is nowhere to be found in this novel. The characters are not very interesting; the late reveals and turnarounds are so carelessly delivered as to almost be an insult to the reader. But I did enjoy the vibe of the novel, or at least the opening of it, which implies that The Valley Where Time Stood Still is going to be a lot better than it actually is.

Carter does an okay job of capturing Brackett’s style, though he does have an unfortunate tendency to lecture the reader, breaking the narrative flow. This is usually in regard to background on Mars, and thus isn’t too egregious, but sometimes it can be, with stuff like, “But that is one of the best things about living – one of the most precious gifts ever given to us by Those who shaped our being: We cannot ever know what is to come.” He does stuff like this throughout the novel and it isn’t very “Brackettian” at all; she was much more of a “show rather than tell” kind of author, and would’ve shoehorned such philosophies into action or dialog. But these things mark the difference between a good author and a great one.

*Every time I looked at that funky cover painting on this Popular Library edition, I kept thinking of Shea and Wilson’s almighty Illuminatus! trilogy – in particular, the similarly-funky cover paintings of the original Dell Books editions. I puzzled over the signature on this The Valley Where Time Stood Still painting, researched online, and at length discovered that it is indeed by the same dude: Carlos Ochagavia! Though he just went as “Carlos Victor” for the three Illuminatus! covers.

As mentioned above, The Valley Where Time Stood Still chronologically takes place second in the sequence. In 1976 Carter published a short story in the DAW Science Fiction Reader which would take the first chronological spot. It is titled “The Martian El Dorado of Parker Wintley.” Here’s the cover of the anthology, which is dated July, 1976:


The story takes place in “’67,” which I wager means 2167; in the afterward to Down To A Sunless Sea, Carter states that the Mysteries Of Mars sequence takes place about 200 years in the future. Or as Carter puts it in this story, “This was rugged, Colonialist Mars of the frontier,” further referencing the global revolution which apparently serves as the climax of The Man Who Loved Mars. But anyone hoping for a Brackett-esque short story about “legendary Mars” will be disappointed. Rather, Lin Carter apparently wants to do a comedy…one written in an annoyingly omniscient tone at that. 

Our “hero” is Parker Wintley, a self-involved lothario who has come to Mars after running into some female troubles on Earth. His plan is to get rich quick, capitalizing on the diamond rush currently dominating the red planet; while hard to find, diamonds are not much valued by the natives. Parker’s figured he can find some in the south regions of the planet, whereas everyone else is up north. He uses his charm to score a free “sand crawler” from the pretty lady who runs the rental place, and sets off on his trip.

But the majority of the 10-page tale is given over to “comedy” about the inordinate customs and rituals of the Martians, who we are informed perfected their culture millennia ago, so that there is no new art or entertainment or etc. So instead they enjoy talking floridly and endlessly beating around the bush. To this end Parker, when he meets a tribe of “yellow-faced natives in their loose brown robes,” spends five days haggling with them, most of it composed of days-long words of welcome from the Martians. Luckily, none of this crap is in The Valley Where Time Stood Still, and one hopes it only exists in this short story – the Martians seen in that novel, and hopefully the other three, aren’t so bound by ridiculous formality.

Worse yet, the story winds up to a lame comedy climax; after all this haggling, Parker makes off with what he believes are cannisters of diamonds. But then his sand crawler breaks down and only then does he look inside – the Martians have given him water, thanks to a mistake on Parker’s part in the Martian words he used. He referred to a “precious thing” he wanted in exchange for the salt he was bartering with the Martians – salt being incredibly rare and desirable here – and to the Martians there is nothing more precious than water.

But the water keeps Parker alive for the long walk back to civilization, and the story ends with him figuring he’ll go shack up with the pretty sand crawler rental babe. And that’s it for the story, which I guess can be considered part of the Mysteries of Mars sequence due to the reference to The Man Who Loved Mars. Otherwise I’d say this one could be skipped; it doesn’t even have a Brackett vibe, as the novels do.

FYI, only one post next week, on account of the holidays; it will be on Wednesday. Merry Christmas!