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.

A for Angsty Adolescent Assholes

A for Anything
by Damon Knight
p. 1961

A lot of fifties and sixties science fiction often revolved around ‘what if’ questions and Damon Knight’s A for Anything poses the question: what if you had a machine that produced duplicates of any physical object—even people? It’s a question that sets up Knight’s world and a whole slew of philosophical questions; the only drawback is that Knight does not really answer any of them.

I suppose there is a thin line between writing a book that compels the reader to examine these philosophies and one that just posits the questions without ever intending to answer them, so as to let the reader do all the work. You could argue that Knight’s intention was the former, or perhaps he got lazy and it’s the latter. I guess it doesn’t really matter in the end.

A for Anything’s first 3 chapters (comprised of 33 pages) hint at a very different type of novel, one that details the immediate aftermath of such an invention—referred to only as a ‘gismo’—falling into the average person’s hands. In chapter one, some random guy gets the first gismo in the mail anonymously. In chapter two, we learn everyone is talking about them and wants one but no one knows where they came from and chapter three hints at a changed world as the darker nature of man’s insatiable materialism takes hold.

Then you get to chapter four and everything is different. We have jumped in time to the ‘present’ world of the story being told. My book says it’s the year 2049; Wikipedia says 2149. I really hope that my book had a typo and it actually is supposed to be 2149 because less than a century seems way too short for life to have changed so dramatically, especially since characters refer to pre-gismo times as ‘ancient’ several times, and tell stories of their ancestors as if they were speaking about knights of the round table.

Thanks to the advent of the gismo, the world has evolved (or devolved, depending on if you view this world as a Utopia or Dystopia) into a society divided by powerful clans, dependent on slave labor, provided by ‘duped’ humans. It’s not quite clear which humans are being duped; I suppose we can assume that everyone who isn’t related to someone who has a gismo is a slave. In any case, slaves outnumber the ruling families fifty to one but inconceivably, revolt has never been an issue before.

Our ‘hero’ is the sixteen-year-old privileged heir to his clan, Dick Jones, and his name is... stunningly appropriate. I kept waiting for the part where Dick grows up, learns to control his anger, gets a few lessons in impulse control and possibly, gradually, learns the error of treating humans (even duped ones) like slaves and joins them in overturning society... but that doesn’t happen. Dick remains, well... a dick.

A for Anything caught me off guard with its stylistic choices. With such a powerful ‘what if’ guiding the story, a world of the future so changed from our own, and a host of philosophical and ethical questions raised about the issues of of slavery, one would assume this book would include a lot of talking but instead we are treated to a surprising amount of action. Dick’s tale starts with a lethal duel with his cousin and he continues to feud with people he meets at ‘Eagles,’ the militaristic base he is sent to for his secondary schooling. The ending seems kind of tacked on, as Dick somehow becomes involved with an uprising completely unrelated to the slaves, which is quickly squashed when the actual slave revolt sneaks in first and ruins everyone else’s plans. Dick, despite being exposed to plenty of ethical debates, never chooses a side on anything (apart from his own, of course), and yet his actions and opinions seem to be highly regarded. Weird.

I can’t say I disliked A for Anything. I felt more engaged in the action than in other old sci-fi novels I’ve delved into. It is a bit of a departure from what I’ve been reading lately—namely post-apocalyptic fiction that deal with the everyman. Knight’s story takes place in an established world, long after the so-called ‘apocalyptic’ event, and is not necessarily suggesting that the world is all that bad. I’ve spent a long time since I put the book down wondering if Knight was suggesting the world was a Utopia.

I guess I just expected more from the story than I got. The most interesting characters are quickly discarded, often unceremoniously, and their motivations are never clear. Furthermore, with all the debates on morality and Dick’s impulsiveness and anger—not to mention the novel’s traditional set up as a coming of age story—I really expected Dick to be the first to learn the error of his society’s ways and rise up with the slaves but the slave leader of the revolt is portrayed as being a bit villainous. Yet, I still sided with the slaves, because I was more invested in their fate than Dick’s teenage angst. In spite of the promise of its premise, A for Anything is a story about growing older, but not necessarily about growing up.