Ted Nolan <tednolan> <
ted@loft.tnolan.com> wrote:
I have not had the mental energy lately to get up to date with
monthly reviews, but I did spend a good chunk of time a couple of
months ago wrestling wtih Ian Wallace's _Croyd_, and by wrestling,
I mean trying to produce a readable e-text of this very interesting
late 60's book from a very bad one and a so-so PDF. Wallace is
throwing out lots of very Van Vogtian ideas here: Hired governments,
mind transfer, uptime, downtime, free will, imortality, alphas in
love, destroying the galaxy..., and it's a fascinating read. I
believe the final third does bog down a little, but it's well worth
your time, as is the second book _Dr. Orpheus_, for which I could
not find even an awful e-text.
<snip>
REDACTOR'S PREFACE
I know very little about Ian Wallace. Isfdb.org says his real name
was John Wallace Pritchard, that he was born in Chicago on 4 December
1912 and passed on 7 July 1998.
What I do know is that for several years in the late 1960s and the
early 1970s, he was the the most interesting author writing in the
barely populated genre of A. E. van Vogt inspired tales of supermen,
monsters and unreality conditions. Van Vogt himself had largely
retired by this point, though he would return to the genre in the
same time period with his late book The Silkie, and basically nobody
else had taken up his mantle.
I am aware of only one contemporary review of Croyd, from the dean
of SF reviewers, P. Schulyer Miller in his monthly column in Analog
(nee Astounding) magazine: The Reference Library. Here's what he
had to say on pages 175 & 176 of the October 1969 issue of Analog:
Here's a real "sleeper" -- a superman story whose hardcover
sneaked out, practically unnoticed some time in 1967. The
hardback publisher, Putnam, sometimes sends books for review
and sometimes does not. In this case, I didn't even know
it existed . . . so the reprint deserves full treatment.
There is, for some reason, a strong flavor of 'Doc (Skylark)
Smith in the story -- yet it is by no means pure space
opera. You might call it a new generation of the old genre.
Gnurls -- nasties from the Large Magellanic Cloud -- have
by no means occupied their own small galaxy, but they are
determined to take over ours. They can project or inject
their minds into other beings while their bodies lie in
stasis, and the book's anti-heroine, Lurla, does just that.
Pitted against her is the Defender of Mankind, the super-agent
Croyd, who can also get into other people's brains --
including hers. And, just to keep things from getting dull,
there is a sort of New Left revolt of the umpty-umpth century
going on in the wings, which also requires Croyd's talents.
Shuttling back and forth among each other, the protagonists
and antagonists will make you dizzy. It's fun, though.
Surprisingly given that van Vogt was a discovery of Analog's editor
John W. Campbell, and grew to fame in its pages, Miller misses the
van Vogt connection entirely. It's not that he's wrong that bits
of Croyd are Doc Smith crashing-worlds, Space Opera. There is
definitely some of that, but the main story is of a van Vogt-ian
superman confronting large and outre menaces of hand-wavingly
described, but compelling, super-science, undergoing near fatal
reverses but rallying to defeat all as humanely as possible.
Thank you for your mental gymnastics.
Van Vogt ranks as brightest of Campbell's Big Three. The "superman
story" mentioned by Miller may pertain to van Vogt's characterization
rather than pop culture's cartoon character.
Autumn's a good time to re-visit van Vogt and then tackle Wallace for
the first time. Poe and van Vogt both value imaginative intuition over
rote ritualization. Null-A, non-Aristotelian logic, expresses van Vogt's sentiments.
On a nearby shelf sits two volumes of EUCLID'S ELEMENTS. It's facing
pages present the original Greek followed by an English translation. It epitomizes the problem with Aristotelian logic.
ELEMENTS' beautiful logic is self-contained. It lives in its own constrained world where it rules absolutely. Although imaginative
intuition is able to apply ELEMENTS' rules to the wider world, ELEMENTS'
own ontological outlook keeps it circling - creeping and crawling around
in a rut.
Danke,
--
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