donn@sdchema.UUCP (04/20/84)
Even more book reviews. Again, '*' marks a collection or anthology.
Presenting:
CHRISTINE. Stephen King.
DANSE MACABRE. Stephen King.
PET SEMATARY. Stephen King.
COURTSHIP RITE. Donald Kingsbury.
THE MAN IN THE TREE. Damon Knight.
HIS MASTER'S VOICE. Stanislaw Lem.
*MORE TALES OF PIRX THE PILOT. Stanislaw Lem.
TEA WITH THE BLACK DRAGON. Roberta A. MacAvoy.
CHRISTINE. Stephen King. Signet, c1983. The original idea of this
novel: Christine is a haunted car. Not just any car, of course, but a
1958 Plymouth Fury. Painted red, of course. The car is possessed by
the ghost of its first owner, Roland LeBay, Jr., a man of unbelievably
petty, scheming evil who reminds you of every asshole you ever met.
LeBay lives just long enough to sell the car to young Arnie
Cunningham. Arnie's best friend, Dennis Guilder, is forced to watch as
the car slowly takes over the mind of its young owner, first
transforming him from a luckless nerd into the boyfriend of the
prettiest girl in high school, then turning him into a... well, that
would give it away. The characterization and setting in this novel are
more engrossing and effective than the horror; I think the book is weak
but not unlikeable. While King never manages to overcome the intrinsic
silliness of the idea of a car that drives around by itself killing
people, the victims are nicely drawn and feel like human beings, the
kids you knew (or wanted to know) in high school.
DANSE MACABRE. Stephen King. Berkley, c1981, minor revisions 1983.
This book is King's affectionate tribute to horror movies and horror
literature, covering everything up until 1980; the minor revisions are
due to some help from Dennis Etchison to correct some of the goofs in
the original hardcover edition. The style is King's usual down-home
tone, breezy and conversational, even when the subject matter is
serious. The book first discusses the traditional horror themes ('and
there, hanging from the doorhandle is this razor-sharp hook!'), then it
sees how they apply to the genres of early radio shows, horror movies
('The Horror Movie as Junk Food'), television ('The Glass Teat, or,
This Monster Was Brought to You by Gainesburgers'), and literature.
King reviews some classic books and movies and tries to explain why
they work; these reviews are punctuated with lots of anecdotes and
trivia which will please many horror buffs. If dry literary analyses
bore you then you shouldn't be afraid of this book, but if they are
your stock in trade then beware because King has boundless contempt for
that sort of thing. On the other hand, King's taste is not as low as
he likes to claim it is, so it's hard to be offended.
PET SEMATARY. Stephen King. Doubleday, c1983 (hardcover). I borrowed
this book since according to LOCUS the paperback edition won't be out
until September... This should excuse the vagueness about the details,
since I can't look them up. This novel was originally written in 1979,
and from the plot it might have been written in 1879 -- it follows a
classic horror plot. A doctor and his family move to Maine where the
doctor takes up a practice as an on-duty physician at a small college.
Their house is built on a noisy main road, but it is only a short walk
over the hill before one reaches impenetrably deep woods. At the end
of the trail, just before the woods start, there is a small pet
cemetery (the sign has been misspelled by the children who erected
it). Despite a disquieting incident on the doctor's first day on his
job, the family has a pleasant time, until the family cat is run over
by one of the trucks which run down the road to the cement plant day
and night. The old man who lives across the road persuades the doctor
to come with him at midnight and bury the cat in the REAL pet cemetery,
which lies in the heart of the woods and is protected by monstrous
Indian ghosts and demons. The next day, the cat is alive again...
although it is not quite the same as it was. Then something happens to
one of the man's children... I don't want to give too much away, but
this would make a great B movie, one of those little flicks which you
don't see except late at night on channel 44, and only you have seen it
often enough to sing its praises. It would be an ordinary B movie
except for what happens on the last page, nay, the last few LINES,
of the book, so if you are in the (filthy) habit of reading the last
pages of a book first, you are not likely to enjoy PET SEMATARY. Buy
the paperback.
COURTSHIP RITE. Donald Kingsbury. Pocket, c1982. This book was
originally serialized in Analog, and it really fits the Analog mold
despite the apparent 'soft' subject matter. The planet Geta is
beautiful but deadly: it has a breathable atmosphere, plenty of water
and a biosphere at the level of grasses and insects, but all of the
native animals and plants are toxic to human beings. Only a few Earth
biota can survive such as bees and wheat, which enable human beings to
eke out a marginal existence, subsisting on Earth plants, Earth insects
and the only Earth mammal that exists -- man. Children are raised for
food. Those who are destined to become meals are selected by
elimination in contests of intelligence and aggression, thereby
improving the gene pool. If you can stomach this premise, the rest of
the book is quite entertaining. The basic story is about the group
marriage of the maran-Kaiel, who are forced by the head of the Kaiel
clan to accept a different woman in place of the one whom they had
selected to fill out their 6th position. The 'courtship rite' of the
title is the game which is played between the group-marriage and its
'fiancee' -- if she survives it, she is deemed eligible for marriage.
The poor woman is totally unprepared for the suit of the family, as she
is both a vegetarian (i.e. a non-cannibal, an oddity) and an atheist
(someone who does not believe that the orbiting colony spaceship is
God). Much of the complicated plot is concerned with the technological
renaissance of the Getans and with their devious political dealings.
Some of the book is utopian philosophy as well. I didn't feel bad
about the philosophy (although I think it is unrealistic) but others
may have trouble with it. Definitely worth reading.
THE MAN IN THE TREE. Damon Knight. Berkley, c1984. The title of this
book of course refers to Jesus Christ, but perhaps in a different way
than you might expect. Damon Knight postulates a man who is born with
the ability to work miracles, and asks the question, 'What would this
man's life be like?' Gene Anderson is born in the tiny village of Dog
River, Oregon, and comes to realize at the age of four that other
children cannot find the place where a beetle might have turned left
instead of right and make two beetles. No one believes him when he
claims this ability, and out of shame he conceals it. At the age of
nine he is falsely accused of killing the son of the village police
chief and he runs away. By this time he realizes that he is going to
grow up to be outrageously tall, and he stands out so easily in a crowd
that when the police chief comes for his revenge he finds it difficult
to hide. Eventually he joins a carnival, but the police chief
continues to chase him. In the end Gene is forced to confront his
tormentor and in doing so confronts his peculiar power. The resolution
is not entirely satisfying (a friend of mine complained that he
expected a tragic end and was disappointed, in a curious way) but the
book as a whole is still very good.
HIS MASTER'S VOICE. Stanislaw Lem. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich,
c1968, English translation by Michael Kandel c1983 (hardcover -- I
understand the paperback is out now). Faren Miller in LOCUS called
this book 'more a readable meditation than a novel' and after reading
the book I would have to add my qualified agreement. The book is a
philosophical retrospection by one of the key members of the 'His
Master's Voice' project, the mathematician Peter Hogarth. The HMV
project was secretly founded by the US government to analyze and (if
possible) translate a signal discovered in modulated neutrino emissions
from deep space. The military hoped to extract technology which could
be used for new weapons against the Russians. Hogarth and the other
scientists held the military in contempt, and sought instead to
interpret the message and find a way to understand the Senders.
Several strange results came from the study of the signal. One result
was a peculiar protoplasm-like material created by irradiating a
chemical soup with the signal. This goo had the peculiar
characteristic of sustaining itself not through normal biological
energy cycles, but through atomic reactions. Hogarth and friends then
discovered that the material had the capacity for causing remote
nuclear reactions: an explosion near it released its energy at a
distance. The possibility arose that detonating a hydrogen bomb in a
roomful of the protoplasm in Nevada might cause Moscow to be
destroyed. Hogarth and his colleagues had to decide: what should they
tell the military? Besides this ethical problem, Hogarth also
considers the question of whether there really were any Senders...
This novel is very difficult but I found it to be rewarding.
*MORE TALES OF PIRX THE PILOT. Stanislaw Lem. HBJ, English
translations by Louis Iribarne and Michael Kandel, c1976, c1982. The
Pirx stories are much more playful than HMV, but still show a serious
undercurrent. Pirx is a spaceship pilot at a time when the solar
system is well explored enough to be routine and other systems are just
becoming known, but there are still plenty of surprises at home. The
first story, 'Pirx's Tale', is a fish story about finding and losing
the only alien spaceship ever seen. All the remaining stories deal
with robots, a continuing preoccupation of Lem's, and in particular
they deal with malfunctions of robots as seen from a human (Pirx's)
viewpoint. 'The Accident' occurs on an Earthlike planet that is just
being opened for exploration; the exploration party's robot disappears
and Pirx must determine why it left as well as where it went. 'The
Hunt' occurs on the moon when a mining robot goes insane and begins
attacking transport vehicles and communications lines as well as lunar
ore; Pirx is recruited to help track it down and destroy it, but in the
process discovers that even a mere mining robot can be more intelligent
than a human being. 'The Inquest' takes Pirx to Saturn on a trip with
six crewmen, some of which are androids being tested as replacements
for human crew -- but Pirx doesn't know which are which. An accident
occurs: who is responsible? The answer is surprising. In 'Ananke' a
robot-controlled spacecraft causes a disaster on Mars when it suddenly
reverses thrust during a landing approach because its meteorite-detection
algorithm determined that Mars was a meteorite and hence it must take
evasive action; Pirx must figure out how the programming error occurred.
I liked these stories better than the original TALES OF PIRX THE PILOT.
TEA WITH THE BLACK DRAGON. Roberta A. MacAvoy. Bantam, c1983. This
book is MacAvoy's first published novel, but she had written more than
a dozen novels prior to this one without getting them published. TEA
WITH THE BLACK DRAGON still reads like a first novel, however. A
slightly dotty woman comes to San Francisco to look for her daughter,
who is in some sort of trouble and has disappeared. She meets a
reclusive Chinese man who lives in the penthouse of her hotel, and
enlists his help in searching for her daughter. It turns out that the
daughter is a CS graduate from Stanford who has gotten into murky
dealings involving the penetration of security on bank computers. The
fantasy element is that the Chinese man may (or may not) be a Black
Dragon in human form, who is searching for a human who can show him the
Tao. This curious pair travels around Palo Alto and San Francisco doing
detective work and getting into the usual thriller situations, and
falling in love. The reviews on the cover of TEA WITH THE BLACK DRAGON
are overkill for a book that is nice but not very substantial.
Donn Seeley UCSD Chemistry Dept. ucbvax!sdcsvax!sdchema!donn
32 52' 30"N 117 14' 25"W (619) 452-4016 sdcsvax!sdchema!donn@nosc.ARPA