Kalian Pendek Solves His Own Murder

Identity Seven
by Robert Lory
p. 1974


First off, I would like to point out that at no time in this novel does a many-tentacled nightmare creature wrestle with a bare-breasted buxom blonde, but such is the way with seventies science fiction covers! On with the review...

Robert Lory’s solo novel, Identity Seven, is a short science fiction/adventure novel that leaves more questions than explanations. It’s called Identity Seven, the codename for the protagonist in the agency he works for, Hunters Associated, but he is addressed throughout the novel by one of his fake identities, Kalian Pendek. Pendek has a real name and identity, but his memory has been wiped and all he knows is his life as a ‘hunter’ for Hunters Associated, where he plays the role of spy, bounty hunter, mercenary, soldier of fortune, etc. 

When the story picks up, Pendek is contracted to investigate the ambush and murder of Identity Six, a carbon copy of himself. He steps into the role vacated by Six, which includes being the subject of several more assassination attempts. Pendek must figure out who among many associates—some friendly, some hostile, any of them deadly—has been trying to kill him, and his search takes him to a bunch of fantastical places and through a number of skirmishes.

Pendek is alright as a hero, and the characters surrounding him—woefully underdeveloped in the style of classic science fiction, wherein the hero and his gal are pretty much the only ones who get any facetime—are more than acceptable for their parts. That is to say, if there had ever been a sequel to Identity Seven, I’d easily believe there was more to them than what little I saw here. One thing that stuck out to me was one of the minor villains (and briefly a suspect in the Pendek assassination plot) was a pirate who was unapologetically female. Lory didn’t give much detail about her, and she was defeated by our hero pretty easily, but in 1974, just to have a formidable foe be a woman was pretty impressive.

I couldn’t find much about Robert Lory. He didn’t specialize in science fiction; it seems he was more notorious for a Dracula series he wrote around the same time as Identity Seven. He seems to still be living and released a book just this year after a long absence. Sadly, he never did anything more with his Identity Seven characters, which is actually a shame because there’s actually a lot of potential in it. Identity Seven picks up seemingly in the middle of Pendek’s journey, and I could easily see more adventures in store, but I suppose they will have to be relegated to one’s imagination.

Misadventures With Time Travel

I have no idea why there is an avalanche of naked people on this cover.

The Great Time Machine Hoax
by Keith Laumer
p. 1964

Chester W. Chester IV is an average guy who finds himself the sole heir of his great grandfather’s vast estate, and with it, a massive computer purported to be a time machine. Chester and his friend Case Mulvihill (ringleader and performer in a failing circus owned by Chester’s family) are skeptical but try it out anyway in an attempt to save the circus (and pay for the overwhelming costs of Chester’s inheritance) by creating a new sideshow that gives the impression of time travel to paying customers.

To their surprise, Chester and Case discover that the machine truly is everything it is rumored to be and accidentally send themselves launching through time in an avalanche of misadventures, along with an android-like representation of the machine, who takes the form of a pretty girl named Genie. The trio keep getting entangled in increasingly absurd situations and are eventually separated. Much of the book focuses on Chester after he lands in a strange reality and is taken captive and used in a sort of social experiment. It’s here where the novel starts to get sidetracked as it becomes less of the farcical, snappy, comedy of errors it was before and delves into philosophy and science of time travel. Chester, previously an unremarkable wuss, was unwittingly (and a little disappointingly) transformed into a science fiction hero. I wasn’t expecting this, and I won’t say it wasn’t interesting, but it certainly wasn’t as entertaining as the first quarter of the novel.

Despite the fact that Laumer seemed to not be able to decide what kind of novel this should be, I very much enjoyed the author’s sense of humor and the witty repartee between Case and Chester. Upon finishing this book—my first encounter with Laumer’s writing—I discovered I had more of his novels, and if I enjoy those, I’m sure I’ll be seeking out more of his rather expansive body of work in the future. His view on sixties sci-fi is refreshingly lighthearted and a lot more fun than the post-apocalyptic stuff I’ve been reading.

Eight Against Who the Hell Cares

Eight Against Utopia
by Douglas R. Mason 
p. 1966

Douglas Mason’s Eight Against Utopia sounded like a really great concept for its time. Eight people, living in a domed city 7000 years in the future, realize their so-called Utopia is not all it seems and embark on an escape mission to the supposedly hostile outside world, not knowing what dangers await.

Will they all make it out? How will they pass the barriers? Will the traitor in their midst endanger their secret mission? And what dangers will they encounter outside the dome?

To answer those questions: Yes. Easily. No. And nothing.

Okay, so maybe it’s not that straightforward, but still, I was expecting a lot more from Mason’s book, based on the premise. What I got instead was a dry, monotonous, misogynist novella that is 90% action writing yet somehow, nothing really happens.

Having read more than a fair share of sixties and seventies science fiction, I know these stories tend to be more about the concept than about the characters. They were written in a time when possibilities seemed endless, and there wasn’t the pervasive sense that everything had been done before. The intelligent, masculine, alpha male hero was very much ‘in’ at the time, and women tended towards the passive, supportive, smart but weak types. These are things I’ve accepted about this niche genre, but they are not things I look for in a good story. Knowing what to expect and accepting it regardless are two entirely different things. Some times I am able to look past it because the concept is so well done, but this is not the case in Eight Against Utopia.

For starters, in a story where the basic plot is rebelling against Utopia, the Utopia you’re fleeing should be a character in and of itself. It was about halfway through this itty bitty book that I realized I’d completely forgotten what the domed city was even called. I had to flip back to the beginning where my eyes had glazed over at the routine descriptions and futuristic names thrown at us to remind myself that it was called Carthage. The only real hint we get that Carthage isn’t quite as ideal as it appears to be is that it directly monitors the thoughts of its citizens.

Okay. I mean, yeah, that totally sucks, but I’m gonna need more than that to go on. I mean, we didn’t even get to know what exactly Carthage does with its detractors, only vague implications that they are reprogrammed. If I’m going to invest myself in a story about fleeing a false Utopia, I want to know exactly why, dammit.

Thanks to the aforementioned thought monitoring, every single character is dull as a mayo sandwich on white bread. I thought this might go away when they finally escaped the city and their thoughts were free, but it didn’t. They were still all boring and indistinguishable, and none more so than the central hero, Gaul Kalmar, who spent half the novella being trailed by two women who—of course—ended up inexplicably competing for him.

What the story lacked in characterization, it should have made up for in concept execution and philosophy, but it utterly failed to deliver on these fronts as well. As I’d said before, 90% of the book is describing people’s actions escaping from the city, and no one really seems to talk about why they are doing it, or how they feel, or whether they regret it, or what they expected to find on the outside to aid in their survival. In 158 pages of novel, Mason spends more time talking about how comparatively attractive the women are than he does about why Gaul conceived of this mission of self-exile and how he convinced the others to come along.

Oh, and there are totally nine people who escape, not eight, so this was a stupid title as well. I hope it was the publisher’s idea to change the title from its original (From Carthage Then I Came) and not Mason’s, but I really don’t know. I wouldn’t really be surprised if Mason just rattled off the title as carelessly as he did the rest of this novel so he could move on to something better.

Victory At Any Cost

Triumph
by Philip Wylie
p. 1963

Something about Triumph feels really familiar to me... and I don’t think it’s because I just happen to read a lot of Cold War era post-apocalyptic fiction. The basic plot of Philip Wylie’s Triumph is almost exactly that of Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7, the book that initially sparked my interest in this very specific genre some years back, so the comparisons in this review are inescapable. Both novels feature protagonists sequestered in a secure, deep, underground base following worldwide nuclear holocaust and their struggle to survive in a world they destroyed in an instant.

Triumph’s chief protagonist is Dr. Ben Bernman, a scientist who happens to be spending a weekend at Sachem’s Watch, the estate of millionaire, Vance Farr, when the world’s arsenal of nuclear technology is unleashed. Luckily for Ben, Vance Farr is The Man Who Thought of Everything, so when the sirens go off, Farr and his friends and family retreat to his vast underground shelter, where anything they could possibly need to survive a long nuclear winter awaits. Not much of import happens in the two years they spend underground; despite a lot of attractive young people of various races congregating in limited space, a few extramarital attractions, and one character’s rampant alcoholism, nothing really dramatic takes place amongst the ranks of the survivors of Sachem’s Watch. People learn to cooperate pretty quickly and—with the exception of one moment of insanity near the end of their internment—jealousy and racism are miraculously not issues.

I found this novel a bit dry, especially in comparison to Level 7, which is strange when you consider that Triumph focused on fourteen civilian survivors (including a billionaire who built a miracle bomb shelter, his alcoholic wife, his Italian-Irish mistress, and a wunderkind Japanese technowhiz, among others) whereas Level 7 was a vague narrative focusing on military personnel who lacked even first names. I think this is because where Level 7 maintained an air of mystery by being so stingy with the details, Triumph tended to overload us with facts, particularly with dry interludes on the remaining American military and their vengeful attempts to bring down the ‘Russkies.' If Vance Farr is The Man Who Thought of Everything in regards to bunker life (he even thought of providing roller skates for entertainment!) then Philip Wylie is The Author Who Thought of Everything in regards to surviving nuclear holocaust. However, I thought the most engaging parts of Triumph were the sporadic diary entries of one survivor describing daily bunker life in her words, and not the 'scientific' or philosophical rambling of the men. I tended to zone out when Ben and Farr were talking tech.

Then there were the jarring segments where the violence of the surviving outside world were described in shocking detail that was atypical of the rest of the book. I feel these were done for shock value and added very little to the story.

naïve.

My initial feeling towards Triumph was dislike. When I read Level 7, I was impressed by its progressiveness. The language was vague and provided no indicators of whose point of view we were getting; it could be ‘us’ or ‘them’ and in the end, neither side mattered because everyone perished at their own folly. Triumph, on the other hand, was not so subtle in their ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’ attitude. The constant references to ‘Reds’ and ‘Russkies’ getting ‘what they deserved,’ the revenge-driven interludes with the military, and the obsession with being the ‘winners’ or the last men standing all left a bad taste in my mouth, as it seemed terribly naive.

However, I am willing to lend Wylie the benefit of the doubt and say that this opinion was presented solely as a contrast to the progressive peaceful stance taken by the survivors of Sachem’s Watch. Many times throughout the book, the characters discuss racial relations and how interesting it is that the survivors are so amalgamated—white, black, Japanese, Chinese, Jewish, Italian, rich, poor—it’s a real 'We Are the World' down there. The attitudes presented may seem dated by today’s politically correct standards, but at the time, they were progressive. Everyone gets along and race is rarely, if ever, a matter of contention, so it seems fitting that in the end the fortunate, well-meaning survivors of Farr’s estate—and not the men whose revenge drove them to the inevitable murder-suicide of the entire northern hemisphere—seem to be the only living things to escape the ruins of America unscathed.

 

More Fun With Theodore Cogswell

The Third Eye
A collection of short stories
by Theodore Cogswell
p. 1968







[There is absolutely no story in this book that includes a giant, green, glob with one eye... God I love sixties sci-fi covers.]

Last summer I read a collection of short stories under the title The Wall Around the World, the first collection by science fiction author, Theodore Cogswell, and was so unexpectedly charmed by his sense of humor and style that I couldn’t possibly pass up an opportunity to get my hands on more of his work. When his second short story anthology, The Third Eye, presented itself to me, I was eager to read it.

In The Third Eye, Cogswell employed that same sly, playful attitude he used to delightful effect in The Wall Around the World. I was expecting it this time, but it did not disappoint. Cogswell strikes me as the kind of guy who would have been really a real hoot to hang out with, as he never seems to take things too seriously. Even the most serious stories of Cogswell’s aren’t without their hint of the absurd. It's refreshing to read something like this from a sixties science fiction writer, because so many of those I read tend to take themselves very seriously, and it's nice to see someone poke fun at the genre every now and then.

My favorite stories are probably “Machine Record,” in which a mad scientist carries on a comedic dialogue with his assistant as he struggles with his chosen line of work, and “A Spudget for Thwilbert,” a lighthearted tale of unexpected fortune when two swindlers try to screw over a hapless galactic traveler by foisting their unusable diet product on him.

My only complaint about this copy of The Third Eye is that it was horribly edited. I personally noticed several typos, and on at least two occasions, the wrong name was used, possibly because Cogswell initially had another name lined up for a character then changed it later, only to miss one. It didn’t ruin my enjoyment of the stories, but it did take me out of them for a bit.

Post perusal of this second piece of work by what I had hoped would be my new favorite sci-fi author, I was disappointed to discover that Cogswell only ever released two collections. Aside from a random “Star Trek” novel which I have no interest in delving into, the only work I will be able to find by Cogswell now will be individual, unreleased short stories among the forty or so he has supposedly written. At this point I must have read half of his legacy and as Cogswell passed away in 1987, there won’t be any more. It’s a shame he has never written a full length novel, as I would very much like to see that. I suppose I’ll just have to find comparable authors to enjoy instead.