Five science fiction/fantasy books for you this month ranging from the bottom of the barrel to near the top.  This article is worth your gander to assess the bumper crop of science fiction this month!

by David Levinson

The Children of Llyr, by Evangeline Walton

Art by David Johnston

The Mabinogion is a medieval collection of Welsh legends and mythology. The core of it is four “branches,” each telling several episodes in the life of a different character. Back in 1936, Evangeline Walton published The Virgin and the Swine, based on the Fourth Branch. Last year, Lin Carter reissued the novel under the title The Island of the Mighty as part of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series. When he acquired the rights to it, the author happened to mention that she had more unpublished novels in the same setting. This is the first of those to see print.

Based on the Second Branch of the Mabinogion, it tells the story of Branwen, daughter of Llyr, and her brothers. The oldest, Bran the Blessed, is the high king of Britain. Matholuch, the high king of Ireland, comes to Britain to court Branwen. After much deliberation, Bran and his brothers agree to the match, but they forget to include their half-brother Evnissyen in the discussion.

Always quick to take offense and feeling slighted for being left out, Evnissyen mutilates the horses of Matholuch in an attempt to sabotage the marriage. Bran is able to smooth things over by giving Matholuch new horses and a magical cauldron that can raise the dead. It is a dangerous gift, because those revived are not the men they once were, but rather mindless killing machines.

In Ireland, shortly after Branwen gives birth to a son, the nobles of the country convince Matholuch that he was not properly recompensed for the insult given to him in Britain. At their urging, Branwen is banished to the kitchens, where she is beaten and treated like the lowest servant. Word eventually reaches Bran, and all of Britain rises to invade Ireland and avenge Branwen, with horrible consequences.

Walton as done a masterful job retelling this legend. The narrative voice feels like a folktale or legend, but the characters come across as modern and complex, with realistic motivations and reactions. Ninety percent of the time, that works. Occasionally, there is a discussion of the role of women or the eventual coming of Christianity that doesn’t fit the style, but those moments are quickly forgotten.

This is a wonderful retelling of an ancient tale, and I look forward to seeing more in this series.

Four stars.

The Dancer from Atlantis, by Poul Anderson

Art by Frank Frazetta

Duncan Reid is traveling by ship from Seattle to Japan when he is snatched from the deck and hurled into the past by a malfunctioning time machine. Also caught are an 11th century merchant of the Kievan Rus, a Hun from the 4th century, and a Minoan woman named Erissa, who has been dragged only a couple of decades into her past.

The group eventually make their way to Athens and the court of King Aegeus and Prince Theseus. They manage to work out that in just a few months the island of Thera, known to the Greeks and Minoans as Atlantis, will be destroyed in a volcanic eruption that will also destroy Knossos and break the power of Crete forever. They hatch a plan to be rescued by attracting the attention of any time travelers by creating an obvious anachronism, namely a ship designed by the Kievan trader.

Duncan is the only one allowed to travel to Atlantis to meet the high priestess or Ariadne. There, the young bull dancer Erissa is assigned to show him around, which the older Erissa knew would happen. As the clock ticks down to the destruction of the island and Theseus’s planned attack on Knossos, there is much discussion of fate, and Duncan is torn between his growing love for Erissa and his desire to return to his own time.

Anderson has obviously picked up on the current suggestion that the destruction of Thera (or Santorini) around 1500 B.C. formed part of Plato’s inspiration for his tale of Atlantis. Personally, I don’t find the argument all that compelling, but it does make a reasonable basis for an adventure. And he does make a good story out of it, with lots of time-travel twists and turns.

There are a couple of flaws. Duncan keeps thinking about Mary Renault’s books about Theseus. While it’s reasonable that the character might have read the books, it draws inevitable comparison between what the two authors are doing. In one way, it’s an apples and oranges comparison, since they’re doing very different things. But Anderson also doesn’t fare well; Renault is better at character and description. The other problem is that Duncan isn’t a very sympathetic character. I found it difficult to like him.

This isn’t Poul Anderson at his best. On the other hand, even mediocre Anderson can be pretty good.

Three stars.

By SJ Groenewegen

Battle of Sydney, by John Vader

Artist unknown

John Vader is an Australian-born journalist now working in England. He’s a contributing author to the weekly anthology publication, Purnell’s History of the Second World War. To date, he’s had published Spitfire in 1969, Pacific Hawk in 1970, and this year there’s Anzac, New Guinea: The Tide is Stemmed and The Fleet Without a Friend. During World War II, Vader saw action with the Australian Imperial Forces in Libya, Greece and Syria, and later served with the Royal Australian Air Force in the Pacific flying Spitfires and Wirraway bombers.

Battle of Sydney is billed as Vader’s first novel. It presents a "What if…" in which the Japanese successfully invade Australia during the early 1940s. An intense series of battles and skirmishes ensue, culminating in a bloody showdown in and around Sydney Harbour starting on June 15th, 1942. The Japanese also hit the Pacific coast of the U.S.A. after their attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Vader is at pains to point out that Australia is about the size of the U.S.A. with a population of seven million. Australia’s best troops were all overseas, “its air force small and its navy smaller” (page 21). The Japanese strategy to take Australia is to deny the U.S.A. a land mass from where a counter attack could be launched.

Vader’s book is less a novel and more an account of events that didn’t happen, but could have. Its style is in keeping with Purnell’s History of the Second World War. In that, it differs from Philip K. Dick’s 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle, which is more of a straight narrative (as straight as Dick ever gets, anyway).

Vader’s account narrows in on a series of poor decisions made in Australia by politicians that left the country exposed. Throughout the book are scathing accounts about politicians not paying attention to the speed by which Japanese forces were taking over much of southeast Asia. I wonder if this “novel” is Vader releasing his frustration at not being able to include similar tirades in his non-fiction work.

Alternative histories prompt debate as to whether or not they can be classified as science fiction. In my opinion, it depends on the work concerned. The Man in the High Castle is science fiction, or at least speculative fiction, because of how it explores human reactions to occupation. It also explores more than one alternative history. Besides, it won a Hugo Award.

In contrast, Battle of Sydney is effectively a treatise about military preparedness, or the lack thereof, and the implications that flow from that. There are no protagonists or antagonists, for all there are people quoted and their actions described. It’s all military strategy, tactical decisions, but the reader is left not feeling the impact of all the events.

Three stars for the breadth of knowledge on display, but perhaps skip it if you’re after a science fiction novel with characters and a plot.

[It would make an interesting companion piece to Ketsudan, perhaps! (ed.)]

by Fiona Moore

The Authentic Touch, by Jack Wodhams

Cover of The Authentic Touch

In the far future, humanity has become an interplanetary utopian society: utopian in the sense that everyone seems to be fed, clothed, employed and cared for. However, as a result, they are bored, and so a clever entrepreneur sets up a holiday planet, Anakron, where visitors can live out life in societies which approximate ancient Rome, medieval Europe, the Wild West, the Ancien Regime and the Edwardian period. Our story follows several characters who travel to Anakron seeking adventure. As they break the boundaries between the cultural/historical sections, war breaks out between the groups and chaos reigns.

And… um… that’s it. The story rips along at a cheerful pace, but there really doesn’t seem to be much more to it than that. A holiday world that purports to recreate the past for jaded adventurers is an intriguing concept and one which could be turned to clever satire: for instance on the way in which tourists in our present world impose their ideas of “authenticity” on their destinations.

There might also be something to say about human nature, and the idea that the cost of a leisure society might be boredom, frustration and a loss of self-esteem. One of the conceits of the story is that the characters, early on, mostly find themselves in menial roles, such as foot soldiers in the Roman Army or a blacksmith in a medieval castle keep, and I kept expecting more from this idea: is it that there is dignity in honest labour that our modern, technological society is losing? Is it a recognition that pre-industrial labour was, indeed still is, exploitation and a fairer society should be built? Again, I didn’t see any of that emerging from the narrative, even as the characters decry their lot and escape their roles.

I could also have a few things to say about the fact that Anakron appears to be a White fantasy, but the setup does such violence to the historical facts that we know about Rome, the Middle Ages, etc., that I would shudder to think what it might do to Ancient Egypt or Imperial China. It’s a male fantasy too of course; three of our central characters are women, but one of them is a wife who complains bitterly about her husband’s choice of holiday destination, and two others are pretty young things aiming to have fun and get laid. At least they’re sympathetically treated I suppose?

In better hands, this could have been a much more interesting novel. As it is, it certainly passed the time on a long train journey, but I gave my copy to a student backpacker while changing trains in Vienna and do not regret it.

Two stars.

The Invisibles, by Bernhardt J Hurwood

Cover of The Invisibles

I didn’t have terribly high expectations for this book after reading the back blurb, but I was hoping to be pleasantly surprised. I’m afraid I wasn’t.

University professor Larry Conrad drops acid, but not just any acid—some kind of super, experimental acid. Afterwards he starts to develop powers of astral projection, prophecy, mind-reading, et cetera, et cetera. There’s two places this could go: the Flowers for Algernon one where it all ends in tragedy, or the superhero comic one where it all leads to a marvellous adventure. I was rather hoping for the former.

Through his adventures in psychic-land, Conrad encounters a beautiful woman, Petra, who is also psychic, and who somehow doesn’t regard it as the slightest bit creepy when he spies on her on the astral plane and then shows up on her doorstep. He also discovers evidence of a political conspiracy to effect a fascist coup in the USA and decides to go vigilante on the conspirators, infiltrating them on the mortal plane and gathering extra evidence on their activities on the astral plane.

The idea of drugs as a channel to some kind of psychic enlightenment feels incredibly dated at this point, though it’s also a little confused since there seem to be other people who are perfectly capable of psychic activity without drugs. Petra is a complete wish-fulfilment fantasy: an intelligent, psychically gifted woman who is also a model, of course, and massively into Larry even though he frankly comes across as a bit sleazy to me. The implications of widespread psychic ability in human society, intriguing as they are, are not particularly explored by the novel, which is rather disappointing: we just get Larry, Petra, and a few other talented types using their abilities for their own benefit. Childhood’s End, this isn’t.

I also find stories about fascist takeovers in the USA generally a little implausible: yes, we have to be vigilant, but there are enough safeguards in the Constitution, its Amendments, the governmental structure and the nurturing of an active free press to keep the worst from happening, as Mr McCarthy learned and as Mr Nixon is currently finding out. And while this one isn’t altogether outside of the realms of possibility, without revealing the ending I can say that Larry and Petra’s ideas for foiling the conspiracy don’t strike me as particularly realistic or effective were they to be applied in the real world.

On the positive side, it’s nice to see someone keeping the tradition of the epistolatory novel alive, there’s too little of that nowadays.

One star.

[New to the Journey?  Read this for a brief introduction!]

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