I usually respond well to editorial criticism, and I invariably take notice of a constructive review. Generally speaking, however, those people who like my stories show great sensitivity and intelligence—those who don’t, don’t.

James White, quoted by Graham Andrews

James White was a Northern Irish science fiction author, who deserves to be better known than he is. He had this to say about himself in the author’s note to the Ace edition of his novel The Escape Orbit.

I first started writing for fan magazines, and wrote my first story partly as a joke and partly because I was fed up with all the atomic doom stories which were current at that time and wanted to write one with a happy ending. Submitted this first story to Ted Carnell of New Worlds who said he liked it and had I any other ideas … I’ve been writing professionally as a hobby ever since.

White continued to “write professionally as a hobby” for the next twenty years, retaining his day job until he was forced to retire through ill-health, and writing in the evenings in his loft conversion—his stories never seem to have made enough money to make a full-time writing career an option. Most of his novels and story collections are now long out of print, and (unlike so many other science-fiction authors of his vintage) he has yet to be granted a second life in e-book form. Which is a shame. In my view the world needs more exposure to White’s gentle humanity, deeply felt pacifism, and wry wit.

He is now mainly remembered for his “Sector General” series of novels, featuring the activities of a huge multi-species hospital on the edge of the galaxy. Most of the early novels in that series were assembled from short stories—at first published in New Worlds magazine, and later in the anthology series New Writings in S.F. And it was in New Writings, which regularly appeared on the shelves of my local public library, that White first came to my attention, with memorable Sector General short stories like “Vertigo” (1968), “Meatball” (1969) and “Spacebird” (1973).

I’m going to write something about Sector General another time^†, but for now I’ve been re-reading four of his (now largely forgotten) stand-alone novels, spanning a decade beginning in the early 1960s. They all manifest the things that people of “great sensitivity and intelligence” like about White’s stories. For one, his characters have vivid internal lives—we share their stress, fear and confusion as White’s intricate plots buffet them around. For another, almost all his stories (Open Prison a partial exception) feature antagonists who mean well—in White’s stories, conflict arises because people misunderstand each other or their situation, and conflict is resolved by good people making their best efforts to reach mutual understanding. And finally, there’s White’s gentle humour, sometimes exquisitely timed to place a beat of relief into a rampingly tense situation. And, interestingly, three of the four feature medics as principal characters, despite the fact the drama comes from something other than medical practice.

Here’s a quick summary of the four novels I recently dug out of the attic. (White, in his loft conversion in the sky, might find that amusing.)

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Open Prison (1965) was original serialized in 1964 in New Worlds. UK publishers retained White’s original title, while in the USA it appeared under the slightly misleading title The Escape Orbit (but with much better cover art). It was nominated for the inaugural Nebula Award in 1966, losing to Frank Herbert’s Dune, so no shame in that.

The premise of the story is that humans have been involved in an inconclusive interstellar war against insectile aliens, predictably called “Bugs”, for sixty years. The chlorine-breathing Bugs have addressed the problem of dealing with thousands of oxygen-breathing prisoners-of-war by simply dumping their prisoners to fend for themselves on an uninhabited planet with an oxygen atmosphere. The story starts with the arrival of a senior officer, Sector Marshal Warren, on the prison planet. He discovers that the humans have divided themselves into two groups—the Committee, who have devoted themselves to formulating some method of escape (which they’ve been working on for decades with little success); and the Civilians, who have simply abandoned all pretext to military organization, and started making the best life for themselves that they can, under the circumstances. Warren aligns himself with the Committee, and starts driving the escape attempt forward towards a definite deadline.

At first, I couldn’t work out why this one had been nominated for a Nebula—the first half of the novel is a very slow burn, largely taken up with political manoeuvring, as well as some breath-takingly blithe sexism which serves as a reminder that even the relatively recent past is a foreign country. But when the escape attempt begins, with the humans luring down and then storming a Bug shuttle-craft, using cross-bows and improvised spacesuits, it really starts to rattle along. And there are two twists in the final few chapters, each of which recasts the context of the narrative, leading to an ending that is simultaneously downbeat and hopeful.

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I kept thinking of other novels while reading The Watch Below (1966). It reminded me in turn of Paul Gallico’s The Poseidon Adventure, then Andy Weir’s The Martian and then Robert Heinlein’s Orphans Of The Sky. (Heinlein’s novel, which predates White’s, gets an acknowledgement in The Watch Below when it is discussed, though not named, by some of the characters.)

The novel has two parallel story strands. The first, which dominates the narrative, involves the fate of five people (three men and two women) trapped below decks on a large oil tanker, the Gulf Trader, when it is torpedoed in 1942. The tanker is being transferred, empty of oil, from the USA to the UK, where it will be refitted for some vaguely hinted-at anti-submarine role. But for now its empty tanks have been crammed with food and equipment to aid Britain’s war effort. So the sunken survivors find themselves two hundred feet underwater, sealed into a very large watertight space that is packed with the necessities of survival. As they await rescue they set up a generator and lights, a still to desalinate water, and plant beans under artificial light to absorb carbon dioxide and replace oxygen. (While they wait for the beans to grow, they have access to cylinders of oxygen from multiple oxy-acetylene welding kits.) But rescue never comes.

The other strand deals with a crew of water-breathing aliens, fleeing the destruction of their home planet in a colony fleet. The flight to a new world will take many of their lifetimes, but the crew will spend most of that time in artificial hibernation, being woken only occasionally to serve watch duty and keep the fleet on course. Except they discover that repeated episodes of hibernation will cause brain damage, rendering the crew unfit to keep watch. Or indeed, feed themselves.

Both narratives then turn into distorted versions of the classic “generation ship gone wrong” science-fictional trope, of which Heinlein’s novel is a fine example. The alien crew decide to stay awake and produce children, who will, generation after generation, be trained to pilot the fleet and its hibernating passengers to their destination. And the five people trapped in the sunken tanker  … well, they start having children, too. And decades pass, and their children have children. (I know, I know. There is a point with this one at which you just need to take a deep breath and go along for the ride.)

The two stories then proceed in a sort of narrative lock-step, with successive generations of aliens and humans encountering progressively worsening problems as each group struggles to survive. Of course the two strands are going to converge eventually, and the rough outline of how they’re going to come together is fairly evident. But White pulls it all off neatly in a couple of chapters, with a fine plot development I didn’t see coming.

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All Judgement Fled (1967) is a “First Contact” novel—a big mysterious spaceship enters the solar system, and a small band of humans travel out to investigate it and explore its interior. Yup, that is indeed the set-up for Arthur C. Clarke’s later and much more famous novel, Rendezvous With Rama (1973). Mike Resnick once wrote*:

I never knew quite how to describe [All Judgement Fled] until Rendezvous With Rama came out and won the 1974 Hugo. Now, I just tell people that if they want to read Rama done right (sorry, Arthur), pick up All Judgement Fled.

That’s a bit of a false dichotomy, I reckon—it’s possible to do “exploring giant mysterious alien artefact” right in more ways than one. Clarke’s beautiful “sense of wonder” novel won him a well-deserved Hugo award, but left his spacecraft as an open-ended mystery. White’s novel sets a puzzle, puts his characters through an emotional and physical wringer as they try to work out what’s going on, and then reaches a conclusion with the puzzle solved.

White’s astronauts are attacked on entering the alien spaceship, but are uncertain if they’re dealing with vicious alien animals or the builders of the craft, and their situation becomes increasingly perilous as some of their spacesuits are damaged, trapping some members of the exploratory group aboard the ship. They are forced to push deeper into its interior, fighting off repeated attacks with improvised weapons while attempting to understand what they’re dealing with. Meanwhile (in a marvellously prescient version of today’s social-media hate-storms), public opinion back on Earth turns against the astronauts, who are accused of slaughtering the ambassadors of an alien race. White evokes the emotional strain this imposes on the exploratory team very well, as they simultaneously fight for their lives, doubt their own decisions and deal with increasingly fatuous and bullying messages from their controllers on Earth. The whole thing eventually builds to an almost cinematic climax (and I’d certainly pay to see the film adaptation of this novel, if one is ever made).

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Dark Inferno (1972) originally appeared in serial form in the magazine Galaxy Science Fiction, then had its title changed to the more literal Lifeboat when published in the USA by Ballantine. UK publishers retained White’s original (and in my view more pleasing) title.

This one made me think of the film Airport (1970), and I’m pretty sure that’s not merely a coincidence. White’s novel similarly introduces a cast of characters and then loads them aboard a doomed flight—on this occasion, the spaceship Eurydice, bound from Earth to the Jovian moons. (The spacecraft’s name refers to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and, like White’s original title, hints that its passengers are destined for a hellish experience.)

The point-of-view character is Mercer, the ship’s doctor, who mixes freely with both the crew and the passengers, and its through him we experience the gently ramping tension as the Eurydice‘s systems go from nigglingly not-quite-right, to very slightly wrong, to really pretty badly wrong, and then to an acute failure that precipitates the sudden chaotic abandonment of the ship in a tiny fleet of lifeboats. The crew are housed in individual cabins, detached from the body of the ship—Mercer’s “lifeboat” is the original ship’s sick-bay, in which he is tending the severely injured captain of the Eurydice. The passengers are housed in fragile inflatable pods, each designed to keep three people alive for a couple of weeks—but in the chaos of departure, some are overloaded with four passengers, and one contains only a ten-year-old boy.

The lifeboats must first move away from Eurydice while waiting for it to explode, but then turn around and make rendezvous in a group so that they can be picked up by a rescue mission. It’s Mercer’s job to talk the panic-stricken passengers through that complicated process, as well as helping them deal with a succession of emergencies, using a radio that broadcasts on an open channel to all the lifeboats simultaneously. The Eurydice‘s course had taken it inside the orbit of Venus, so the temperature starts to rise in all the lifeboats, particularly the overcrowded ones. And when the Eurydice takes longer to explode than anyone had predicted, resources begin to run low …

Again, White really ramps up the tension in the closing chapters, with a succession of skin-of-the-teeth rescues.

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Although I enjoyed rereading all of these, I was least engaged by Open Prison. The alien Bugs, who serve little other purpose than to be shot, are a serious departure from White’s usual approach. Instead, his trademark “search for mutual understanding” is confined entirely to the opposing human factions on the prison planet. But it’s full of nicely observed moments, like this one:

With gestures which were an improbable combination of salute, cheery wave and thumbs-up sign, Kelso and Sloan disappeared into the mouth of the tunnel heading for Number Two Attack Point

The Watch Below is certainly strange, but oddly compulsive. The human decision to found an informal underwater colony is obviously bonkers, and it wouldn’t actually work, but White manages to usher his readers past all that, and engage them with the dramas that arise from the crazy premise. And in the middle of all the grim stuff, there’s always a little glimpse of humour:

With the passing years the doctor’s hair had gone white, Dickson’s had gone gray, and the lieutenant commander’s had gone completely.

All Judgement Fled is psychologically the most intense, as the humans fight for survival while being undermined by their own Mission Control. White constructs an exponential rise in tension, showing us in a series of cameos that the starfish-like aliens attack from ambush, that they are able to clutch a human being tightly in their tentacles, and that they also possess a central, stabbing horn at the base of those radiating tentacles. So the reader knows exactly what’s going to happen, but not when. The inevitable fatal attack occurs in zero gravity, and White stages it so that it’s almost off-screen, letting his readers draw their own pictures. This reader has had the picture in his head now for thirty years:

There were shouts, curses and a scream that jerked on and off regularly, as if someone was trying to hold a high note while his back was being clapped. McCullough swung round and raised his weapon, but the center of the room was a confused mass of twisting, struggling bodies which were rapidly becoming obscured by a growing red fog and there was nothing he could do.

But Dark Inferno is still my favourite. It has its problems—the organization of the lifeboats into well-appointed crew quarters and marginally equipped passenger compartments is designed to serve the needs of the story and doesn’t bear close examination; and there’s a little problem with conservation of angular momentum that drove me mad on first reading, back when I was a judgemental teenage physics nerd. But it’s beautifully paced and genuinely tense, shot through with memorable moments. The scene in which the doctor, Mercer, listens helplessly on his radio while two men start a murderous fight in one of the lifeboats, sticks in the mind, as does a classic “defuse the tension” moment during the fraught rescue sequence. Here’s the radio exchange between Mercer and one of the other crewmen, who is returning to the rendezvous point after being out of touch for hours while chasing down an errant lifeboat:

‘That was quite a chase, Mercer. It will take me five hours to get back there, but I have them aboard.’
‘Are they all right?’
‘Two of them are doing fine. But the other man, Saddler, is running a bluff with a pair of threes.’

So I’d recommend both All Judgement Fled and Dark Inferno as exciting and well-constructed reads, though a modern reader will wince from time to time at the authorial Male Gaze to which female characters are subjected. The Watch Below is marvellously odd, but probably not for everyone. And Open Prison is really too much of its time—although cleverly constructed and pacey in its second half, it very much shows its age.

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* Resnick was writing in the introduction to NESFA Press’s The White Papers (1996), a celebration of White’s work

.^† I’ve now written about the “Sector General” stories, here.

[T]he same men who split the terrene atom had also written the theory of contraterrene matter—of atoms inside out, with negative nuclei and orbital positrons. Duplicating every element and property of the matter all men know, that other stuff is entirely stable, the theory shows—until it touches something terrene.
But contact between these two types of matter ignites pure fury. Unlike charges are attracted. Unlike particles collide and cancel out. Einstein calculated the energy released—some twenty-five billion kilowatt hours—for every kilogram of matter consumed.
[…]
Undismayed by that untouchable stuff, the spatial engineers have named it familiarly seetee, and they are reaching daringly to grasp it now.

Jack Williamson, Seetee Shock (1950)

Jack Williamson, one of several writers to rejoice under the informal title of “Dean of Science Fiction”, was born in 1908 in what was then Arizona Territory, and amazingly published works in the fantasy and science fiction genres over a span of nine decades, from the 1920s to the 2000s.

On my shelves I have a smattering of Williamson in paperback. The Legion of Space series is a rollicking bit of space opera, in the 1930s style of E.E. “Doc” Smith, but enhanced by its whining Falstaffian antihero, Giles Habibula. The Legion of Time (1938) took much the same approach to time travel, and gave us the concept of the “Jonbar point”—a critical point in history at which a very slight tweak to a single event will resonate and magnify to produce an entirely different future. And Darker Than You Think (1948) was an innovative take on the werewolf story, in which a journalist discovers a secret history of conflict between Homo sapiens and Homo lycanthropus.

But my hardcover first editions of Seetee Ship and Seetee Shock are not the first copies of these novels that I’ve owned. I first encountered them in the Lancer paperback editions of 1968, and had my eleven-year-old mind blown by Seetee Ship. The impression from that novel is so vivid that I can recall the exact circumstances of the purchase—my mother bought me a bundle of four science fiction paperbacks from a “reduced to clear” bin in what at that time was pretty much the only bookshop in Dundee, a rather pokey little outlet of John Menzies on Whitehall Street. The “Seetee” novels were bundled with a rather nice anthology, An ABC of Science Fiction (1966), and a deeply forgettable item entitled The Throwbacks (1965), by Roger Sarac ( which, as it turns out, was a well-advised but rather transparent pseudonym for the wildlife photographer and conservationist, Roger Caras).

With that bit of personal history out of the way, we now have two puzzles to address: why are the books illustrated at the head of the post authored by “Will Stewart”, and what the heck is “seetee”?

“Will Stewart” was a pseudonym adopted by Williamson, derived from his full name, John Stewart Williamson. The two novels were based on short stories and a serial originally published in the magazine Astounding Science-Fiction, and it was common practice at that time for prolific authors to assume pseudonyms for some of their stories, which gave editors more flexibility in putting together their magazines without having to run two stories under the same byline in a single issue. Seetee, as the quote at the head of this post hints, is a phonetic rendering of “C.T.”, for Contra-Terrene, an old adjective for what we now call antimatter—matter composed of anti-particles which will annihilate with regular (“terrene”) matter, releasing a very large amount of energy.

Williamson (in his guise as Will Stewart) started writing about antimatter in 1942, and was one of the first science-fiction authors to do so. First came three novellas: “Collision Orbit” (July 1942), “Minus Sign” (November 1942) and “Opposites—React!” (January & February 1943). Astounding later published a three-part serial novel, Seetee Shock, in February, March and April 1949. You can read all of these on-line—my links take you to the relevant issues of Astounding held on the Internet Archive. Seetee Shock was picked up in largely unaltered form by Simon and Schuster, and published in 1950. Williamson then mashed up the plots of his three earlier novellas into a coherent novel, which was published by Gnome Press as Seetee Ship in 1951. The novels should therefore be read in reverse order of publication—Seetee Shock is very much a sequel to Seetee Ship.

The stories are set in the late twenty-second century, but much coloured by the politics of the 1940s. Planetary colonies have been founded—the Japanese and Chinese are on Venus, Germans on Mars, and Russians inhabit the larger moons of Jupiter; the latter two referred to as the “German Reich” and the “Jovian Soviet”. The resource-rich asteroid belt, thinly populated by hardy asteroid miners (the asterites), is under the effective control of a mega-corporation called Interplanet, whose exploitation of the asteroid miners is backed up by the military forces of the High Space Mandate. The parallels with the East India Company and the Royal Navy in British colonial America are fairly obvious. Indeed, Williamson was one of the originators of the now well-worn science-fictional trope of asteroid miners as tough-minded, resourceful and oppressed, and therefore ripe for rebellion.

But Williamson introduces two interesting plot elements, which set these stories apart from the works that have followed. The first is the idea of paragravity—a force that is a hybrid of magnetism and gravity. His asteroid colonies sit on top of buried paragravity generators, which give them Earth-like gravity and let them retain an atmosphere. The main asterite city on Pallas sits on a shallowly buried paragravity generator, and Williamson has fun describing how quickly the local gravity vector changes, so that anyone walking away from Pallasport across the flat surrounding terrain finds themselves apparently climbing a progressively steeper slope into thinner and thinner air. He coined the word “terraforming” for this method of giving asteroids Earthlike gravity and air pressure, and the word is now a technical term for proposed methods of converting lifeless planets into Earthlike environments.

But his main narrative innovation is the way he treats antimatter—his version of the asteroid belt is full of antimatter asteroids, which the asterites call “hell in chunks”, as well as orbiting clouds of antimatter dust, the “seetee drift”. I don’t know of any other science-fiction writer who has placed his characters within arm’s length of stonking great lumps of antimatter, and set them the task of controlling and exploiting it. However, in his original stories, Williamson severely underestimated the amount of energy that would be liberated when even the microscopic dust of his seetee drift came into contact with regular matter. In reality, a speck of antimatter weighing about as much as a pollen grain would release the energy of a stick of dynamite, if it annihilated totally with matter. But Williamson seems to have initially imagined something no more energetic than a conventional chemical reaction. In an early short story, for instance, he has a character use a long length of wire to test whether a chunk of metal is matter or antimatter, just by giving it a cautious poke and seeing if there’s a blue flash. But by the time that scene found its way into Seetee Ship, the character uses a seetee detector that fires a single alpha particle at the target and then detects the gamma rays produced by annihilation.

In reality, Williamson’s asteroid belt would be a lethal zone of massive explosions and intense radiation—but it’s a marvellous setting for his tales of adventure and engineering derring-do. His asterite heroes seek to control seetee, with the eventual aim of harnessing it as an effectively unlimited source of power. Their plan is to eventually build seetee machines that can process and control a flow of seetee particles, directing them into an annihilation chamber from which power can be extracted. But first they have to find a way to build seetee machines …

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That quest, for a way of building a crude seetee machine that can construct a more complex seetee machine, is one plot strand of Seetee Ship. The “spatial engineers” desperately need a seetee bedplate—some method of safely and securely anchoring a piece of seetee within a workspace made of conventional matter. The other plot strand is the investigation of a damaged alien spaceship, which seems to have simply materialized out of a sudden explosion in the asteroid belt. The two strands come together as the spaceship is explored, with paragravity stirred into the mix for a satisfying conclusion. Oh, and there’s time travel. The novel also introduces what feels like one of the earliest sympathetic and positive depictions of autism, in the form of the socially awkward spaceship pilot, Rob McGee, who has an intuitive understanding of orbital mechanics—the name Rob is in fact a cruel nickname, short for “robot”.

“But please don’t think I’m any sort of robot.” His low voice was suddenly bitter. “I know I’m different. Not smarter—I can see I’m not as smart as lots of ordinary people, in most ways. Just different. And that gets pretty lonely.” He coughed and looked away. “Go ahead and call me Rob, but please forget what it means.”

One of the big changes I see, when comparing Seetee Ship to the short stories on which it is based, is how much Williamson’s writing style changed during the 1940s—Seetee Ship loses a lot of the more purple prose from the short stories, and is a more enjoyable read as a result.

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Seetee Shock starts up a few years after the events of Seetee Ship, and centres on a new character, the spatial engineer Nicol Jenkins. As a result of events described in the previous novel, the asterites are closing in on their goal of harnessing seetee and using it to generate power too cheap to meter. However, the control of seetee brings with it the threat of seetee weapons, too. The analogy with the nascent nuclear arms race at the time Williamson was writing is pretty evident.

After a bit of scene-setting in the first three chapters, Jenkins and about half the cast of characters from the previous novel are exposed to a lethal dose of radiation from the explosion of a seetee bomb. There are forces at work who do not want the asterites to succeed in distributing free power across the solar system. Leaving the other casualties in hospital, Jenkins sets out to complete the project in the short period of time he has left before radiation sickness (the “seetee shock” of the title) incapacitates him.

Jenkins had no time for radiation sickness. Not even time to die. For the traitor Lazarene and the unknown power behind him must be already preparing to spread the deadly venom of seetee war through the Mandate and the planets, and he thought the unfinished Brand transmitter on poisoned Freedonia held the only hope of stopping them.

It turns out to be less exciting than you might think, however. There are betrayals, revelations and narrow escapes, but Williamson also spends a lot of time revealing the detailed history of his imagined future, and having his characters meditate on the desirability (or otherwise) of what he calls the “Fifth Freedom”, free access to electrical power. (His American readers in 1950 would immediately have picked up on the reference to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech of 1941.) And, disappointingly for me at least, Rob McGee’s talents suddenly expand to include telepathy. (Science fiction was at the start of its notorious “psi-boom” at the time, under the influence of editor John W. Campbell.) And another remarkable new attribute for McGee provides the novel’s deus ex machina ending.

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I enjoyed re-reading these. Seetee Ship is a marvellous pile of innovative ideas, and rattles along fast enough that the reader doesn’t have time to wonder at the improbable lapses in curiosity among the major characters, at critical moments during the plot development. As a child, I found Seetee Shock impossibly bleak and too full of exposition, but I enjoy it now both as a glimpse of what preoccupied 1950s science-fiction writers, and for the moral ambiguity of some of its central characters.

Both novels are, it almost goes without saying, available as e-books from Gollancz’s SF Gateway publishing arm.

I suppose that some people might consider it a great convenience to be sharing their skull with another mind, on the grounds that two points of view are better than one. They might even consider it to be especially convenient that the alien mind couldn’t stay alien, but had to organize itself along lines similar to their own—become human, in fact. It means, after all, that one need never be alone. It means that one never need be completely isolated from one’s own kind. It means the everpresence of a friend, which might be necessary in times of dire need […]. It means an extra force with which to oppose the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and illimitable seas of troubles, and an extra chance to end such troubles.
But as well as all that, it is also a bloody nuisance.

Brian Stableford Rhapsody In Black (1973)

Brian Stableford is a British science fiction and fantasy author, also active as a critic, translator and academic commentator. The Hooded Swan series of six novels, published between 1972 and 1975, is how he first caught my attention. According to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, (and certainly more importantly for Stableford) it also marks the point at which he significantly penetrated the American science fiction market. Since then, I’ve also enjoyed some of his fantasy alternate histories: The Empire Of Fear (1988), in which vampires are real; the David Lydyard trilogy (1990-1994), ditto werewolves; and the Empire Of The Necromancers trilogy (2008-2010), ditto Frankenstein’s monster.

But the Hooded Swan books, presented in Pan’s iconic silver-blocked titles with striking cover art by Angus McKie*, still hold a particular place in my memory, persisting across four decades. So it was clearly time I revisited them.

The novels are very much of their era—there are sprawling spaceports, dotted with starships poised for take-off, and rimmed with the inevitable spaceport bars, where arguments end in fist-fights. The aliens are all comfortably humanoid, and there’s that old reliable contrast between the civilized central part of the galaxy, and the Wild West out on the rim.

To this, Stableford brings a noir sensibility via his first-person narrator, a disillusioned and down-on-his-luck pilot called Grainger (no first name), who has a Chandleresque line in weary cynicism. Here he is, telling his aspiring engineer Johnny Socoro how he got into debt after crashing his previous spaceship:

‘An outfit called the Caradoc Company charged me for their services in rescuing me from a rock where I went down. They took me to New Rome and got me clobbered for twenty thousand.’
‘Hell!’ Johnny was suitably impressed. You can judge the social standing of man even now by the sums of money he reacts to.

And here he is assessing the credentials of a group of men who have just abducted him and his companions:

The heavy mob looks the same the universe over. They have never really escaped the influence of the clichés laid down by the earliest exponents of the art of strong-arming. They always have big shoulders and slack features, and a casual swing to their movements deliberately styled to suggest that they can—and maybe do—bend iron bars between their fingers. Our welcoming committee was trying hard—if subconsciously—to give this overall impression, but they weren’t very good at it. Gangsters may be born or made, but these men had had gangsterism thrust upon them.

Only when he’s talking about his ship, the Hooded Swan, does Grainger allow himself to approve of anything. Here, he describes how it feels to fly a spacecraft to which he is neurological linked:

We climbed and we circled and we fell and we zoomed in a gigantic arc. Slowly, almost languidly, I began to tighten the arc, to reduce the radius of the spiral. My body bent and my wings billowed, and I could feel in the tenure of my bones and the texture of my skin and the tonus of my muscles exactly how much she could take. I knew beyond all doubt what my ship could do, because I was she and she was me. My ship, was the Hooded Swan. Mine.
I could fly faster than light.
I could fly higher than the stars.
I could fly through clouds and through rainbows.

So that’s almost all the set-up you need to know. Grainger is in debt. In order to pay off his debt, he is contracted to fly a starship that he falls in love with.

Oh. And then there’s the alien mind parasite. While shipwrecked alone for two years, Grainger begins to believe the wind is talking to him. After a while, he realizes that the voice in his head is real. He has been infected with an entity that uses his brain’s processing power to run in parallel with his own consciousness. It knows everything that Grainger knows, and it cannot help but adopt Grainger’s world-weary attitude. So that’s what’s going on in the quotation at the head of this post. The story arc, across six novels, is about how Grainger reaches a grudging modus vivendi with the nagging voice in his head, and how the “mind parasite” (actually, we’re told in the second novel, a commensal organism^†) slowly proves its usefulness to Grainger.

So, to the novels. The first, Halcyon Drift (1972), is largely concerned with establishing the structure for the later stories—Grainger’s shipwreck, the mind parasite, the rescue, the incurred debt, and the resulting indenture to his new boss, Titus Charlot, who is a sort of prefiguration of what we’d now recognize as a manipulative and amoral tech millionaire. The supporting characters are assembled, in the form of the Hooded Swan and her crew, and Grainger flies his first mission, to retrieve the cargo of a lost starship, wrecked somewhere in a dangerous region of space called (you guessed it) the Halcyon Drift.

With Rhapsody In Black (1973), Stableford begins to use his two areas of expertise (a degree in biology and a doctorate in sociology) to good effect. Grainger’s next mission takes him the planet Rhapsody, where an isolationist religious cult, who live underground in near-permanent darkness, have stumbled on a piece of exotic biology with dangerous implications for the whole of galactic civilization. Grainger’s hostile relationship with his mind parasite, whom he refers to as “the wind”, slowly develops into a sort of brittle interior banter. And he begins to realize that the wind can do more with Grainger’s nervous system than merely inhabit it.

Promised Land (1974) finds Grainger in the rainforest of Chao Phrya, trying to find an abducted alien child. The human colonists of Chao Phrya view the planet as their Promised Land, and have marginalized the native alien Anacaona, imposing human culture upon them—there are clear resonances here with the way European colonists dealt with indigenous peoples, historically, but Stableford is too good a writer to have his characters explain all that to the reader. As Grainger and his little party push into the rainforest, and the mission descends into chaos, he slowly discovers how alien the thought process of the Anacaona are. There’s a genuinely tense finale featuring two-ton spiders, in which Grainger’s relationship with the wind changes permanently.

The Paradise Game (1974) takes Grainger to Pharos, a planet with a very strange biosphere, where he finds himself in the middle of a three-way stand-off between law enforcement, a mega-corporation intent on developing the planet for its own use, and an environmental activist group who are using ecotage to thwart the proposed development. (Given the advent of Greenpeace a few years previously, the conflict was a topical one at the time of writing.) As Grainger pieces together the nature of Pharos’s ecology, an unexpected crisis point is reached, and he again has to rely on the wind’s subtle ability to tweak his physiology.

In The Fenris Device (1974), Grainger must attempt to recover an ancient alien spacecraft from the dangerous surface of a storm-wracked planet. The spacecraft’s original purpose is mysterious, but it is rumoured to carry a weapon capable of destroying moons (the “Fenris device” of the title). The already hazardous process is complicated by the presence of several competing factions, including a hijacker, and Grainger’s reliance on the aid of his mind parasite reaches a whole new level. By the end of it all, Grainger is ready to quit his job.

Finally, in Swan Song (1975), Stableford deploys the “called out of retirement for one last mission” trope. But he does it knowingly and gleefully. Here’s Grainger, summarizing the situation to a friend:

“Intrepid rush into danger. Old man on brink of death. Mock-heroic space pilot and aging crony. Youngster in the engine room. Seemingly impossible rescue attempt set against a background of cosmic concepts sufficient to make the mind boggle. Isn’t quite what it was in Planet Stories, though, is it?”

The action takes Grainger and the Hooded Swan on a rescue mission into a bizarre pocket universe, and Stableford manages to weave together multiple interpretation of the phrase “swan song” while bringing the series to a satisfactory, if melancholy, conclusion.

What I liked about these novels, and still enjoy on re-reading, is how well Stableford mashes up the narrative furniture of 1970s planetary romance with the sensibilities of noir fiction from the 1940s. In my head, Grainger raps out his lines in the rapid-fire clipped manner of a cynical private investigator in a black-and-white movie. The novels are all short (150 pages of mass-market paperback), so the individual stories are necessarily quite simply constructed, but there’s a well-planned story arc that spans all the books, and Grainger is an engaging anti-hero. I’m not sure about some of Stableford’s more purple prose, and some of his word choices seem a little odd (see “the tenure of my bones” above), but overall I greatly enjoyed revisiting them.

And, as seems to be the case for most of my obscure-but-classic science fiction reviews these days, they’re all currently available as e-books from Gollancz’s Gateway collection.

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* McKie’s interpretation of the spaceship Hooded Swan as an actual swan-shaped vehicle was inspired. It aligns perfectly with the spirit of Stableford’s writing, in which the Swan swoops and soars like no other spacecraft, under the control of its ecstatic pilot. But the physical descriptions in the novels suggest that the Hooded Swan has a rather stereotypical upright “rocketship” design, with fins and engines at the bottom and a control station at the top. And, as the first novel makes clear, the name of the ship derives from a direct translation of the Latin binomial Cygnus cucullatus, once applied to (of all things) the dodo. So we must all bless Angus McKie for his feat of imagination.

^† Stableford, who has a degree in biology, was of course aware of the difference between a parasite, which harms its host, and a commensal, which does not. But, oddly, he also used the word symbiote for the commensal state. Symbiote was an accidental coining by Hal Clement, in his 1950 novel Needle, which subsequently achieved a certain currency in science fiction, but the standard term in biology is symbiont.

“Are you seriously proposing,” the Minister spoke slowly, choosing his words carefully, as though they were chocolates out of an assorted box, “that some other beings, in some distant part of the galaxy, who have never had any contact with us before, have now conveniently sent us the design and programme for the kind of electronic machine—”
“Yes,” said Fleming. The Minister sailed on: “Which we happen to possess on this earth?”
“We don’t possess one.”
“We possess the type, if not the model. Is it likely?”
“It’s what happened.”

Fred Hoyle & John Elliot A For Andromeda (1962)

I’ve already reviewed some of Fred Hoyle’s solo novels. But he worked most often with coauthors—two novels with screenwriter John Elliot; thirteen works of various lengths with his son, Geoffrey Hoyle. In all these collaborations, the narrative voice is quite different from Hoyle’s own writing style, and it appears that Hoyle provided some scientific aspects of the plot, while the co-authors did the writing.

His first collaboration was with Elliot, who was then working at the BBC. Hoyle provided Elliot with the plot for a science fiction television serial, which Elliot developed into scripts for the eight episodes of A For Andromeda, broadcast in 1961 and starring a young Julie Christie. This is one the BBC’s many “lost” dramas from that era—the tapes were subsequently reused, and only one episode survives. Elliot went on to write the tie-in novel, also entitled A For Andromeda and published in 1962, with Hoyle’s name above Elliot’s. A TV sequel, The Andromeda Breakthrough followed in 1962, and another tie-in novel with the same title appeared in 1964. Both novels have now been re-released under one cover, entitled The Andromeda Anthology, as part of Gollancz’s “SF Masterworks” series, in paperback and e-book formats.

The plot hook of A For Andromeda is more or less summarized in the quote at the head of this post. British radio astronomers detect a repeating signal coming from the direction of the constellation Andromeda. After much analysis, it appears to contain instructions for the design, program and data of a huge and complex computer. So they decide to build it. (What’s the worst that could happen?) This being in the midst of the Cold War, they build it secretly under the auspices of the Ministry of Defence, with oversight from the American military, in a remote research establishment at the fictional Thorness in Scotland. Once activated, the computer begins a dialogue with its builders, establishing the chemical and genetic basis of life on Earth. After a few plot elements that need not detain us, it then provides the genetic code for a (slightly tweaked) human—a young woman (the Julie Christie character) whom the scientists name Andromeda. Andromeda is the computer’s agent in the world—and the computer’s motives prove to be less than entirely benevolent.

The “construction manual in a radio signal from space” plot has been reused many times since—Carl Sagan used it in his novel Contact (1985); Donald Moffitt neatly inverted the idea in The Genesis Quest (1986); and the set-up for the 1995 film Species was essentially an uncredited retread of A For Andromeda.

Elliot’s writing is a little more evocative than Hoyle’s—I enjoyed his characterizations of languid British civil servants contending with a bullying American military presence. The description of a politician “choosing his words carefully, as though they were chocolates out of an assorted box” is typical of Elliot’s style. And there’s an extended metaphor involving the weather—the bleakly deteriorating situation in Scotland is reflected in the bleakly deteriorating Scottish weather.

Which makes me wonder how much of the sequel Elliot had in mind as he wrote A For Andromeda. Because quite early in Andromeda Breakthrough he has his male protagonist articulate the weather metaphor for us:

It was a day of abnormally high temperature for so early in the year. The air was saturated with moisture and the mist turned to a steady rain over the land. Out at sea visibility went from bad to worse. Even for Western Scotland, the weather was breaking every kind of record. Fleming normally ignored the climate, but now he found it oddly in tune with the melodrama of the crisis at Thorness.

And we notice that all the chapter titles make meteorological references: “Outlook Unsettled”, “Depression”, “Vortex”, and so on. It’s only in the second half of the book that we find the relevance of all that unseasonable and unsettled weather to the plot.

The sequel also picks up a number of plot elements from the first novel that were left hanging in an unsatisfactory way, and weaves them into a new narrative. So it all looks rather promising, as the action shifts from Scotland to a fictional Arab oil state which has built a copy of the alien computer, after which an end-of-the-world disaster starts to unfold. But for me, it all rather foozles after that. The motives of the Andromeda computer are muddied by an unconvincing piece of ret-conning, in a contrived twist that seems to have been put in place to deliver a moral message about science and scientists, rather than a convincing narrative. (Elliot is quite clearly not entirely on board with Hoyle’s idea that the world would be a better place if scientists ran the show.)

In summary, I’d say that A For Andromeda is a classic that still makes an interesting read today, despite its dated technology and dodgy biology; Andromeda Breakthrough, on the other hand, is a classic example of the “disappointing sequel”.

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In 1963 Hoyle teamed up with his son, Geoffrey, to produce the novel Fifth Planet. Most of his fiction output over the next two decades was coauthored with Geoffrey Hoyle—seven novels, two novellas, and four short books for children. The novels and novellas are all now available as e-books from the ever-reliable Gollancz Gateway.

For reasons of symmetry, as much as anything, I’ve chosen to discuss the only series in their output—Rockets In Ursa Major (1969) and its direct sequel Into Deepest Space (1974). The closing paragraphs of the first novel are a cliff-hanger which forms the prologue to the second.

The first is based on a play for children that Hoyle père had written a few years earlier, and which was performed at the Mermaid Theatre in April 1962. A review in The Stage opened with:

With no less a personage than Professor Fred Hoyle as author, one assumes that the scientific side is beyond reproach, but theatrically “Rockets In Ursa Major” is considerably less advanced than, say, “Treasure Island”, and a great deal less exciting.

It goes downhill from there.

The plot of the novel largely follows that of the play. After being lost for thirty years, an exploratory ship returns to Earth unmanned, but with a warning message scratched into a metal surface:

If this ship returns to Earth, then mankind is in deadly peril—God help you—Fanshawe

(The expedition, being British and of a certain vintage, was commanded by a man known as Tubby Fanshawe.)

This is an excellent start, but during the course of the two novels it goes nowhere. We never get to hear what happened to Fanshawe and his crew, or why Fanshawe chose to be so non-specific with his warning. What happens instead is that the Earth in general, England in particular, and radar engineer Dr Richard Warboys especially, become embroiled in a galactic-scale war. A malignant group of aliens called the Yela are moving through the galaxy, destroying life-bearing planets, for reasons that are not adequately explained. Fleeing from the Yela are a small group of humanoid aliens who have come to warn Earth of the Yela’s approach, who rescue Warboys from the aftermath of a space battle in which Earth forces are roundly defeated by the Yela, and who subsequently land in England to advise the political establishment on how to deal with the Yela threat. Their advice can be summed up in a single word: “Flee!”

The Brits are, of course, not inclined to such a wimpish course of action. Warboys, with the help of the friendly aliens, finds a way to drive off the Yela threat … temporarily. At which point the first novel ends.

The second novel starts with the return of the Yela, and an abortive attempt to destroy the Earth. Warboys and his alien allies set out to investigate the Yela spacecraft, and through a series of largely unexplained (and largely inexplicable) incidents end up making a relativistic journey across millions of light-years to visit a quasar. When they arrive at the quasar, the reader braces for the Big Reveal, explaining all that has gone before—and the authors seem simply to run out of inventive steam and, in effect, A Miracle Happens.

I remember Into Deepest Space fondly because when it was first published it introduced me to the visual effects that appear when travelling at relativistic velocities, which I’ve written about here in my series of posts entitled The Celestial View From A Relativistic Starship. But I also remember being largely bemused by everything else in the book, and that sensation recurred on re-reading.

The hand of the older Hoyle is detectable in these two books in the discussions of radio technology, astronomy and relativity, which sometimes veer into excessive detail. But the writing and plot exposition seems to have been in the hands of the younger Hoyle—the style is certainly very different from Hoyle’s solo novels. Although the “about the authors” section of my copies of these novels suggest that Geoffrey “contributed the more ‘human’ side of their co-authored novels”, the characterizations are actually much less effective than those achieved by Fred working alone. Characters have long conversations about inconsequential things—every last word spoken to a taxi driver or a waiter is dutifully relayed—and then skip lightly over the massively consequential. Here’s Warboys returning to Earth after having triggered a massive solar flare in order to repel the Yela:

‘How’s everything here?’ I said.
‘Fine, but a little dangerous if you’re out and about. It’s been raining non-stop with tongues of flame darting through the clouds from time to time.’
‘And the radiation level?’
‘It’s been constantly above danger level, but most of the population is underground somewhere.’
‘Let’s get back to the main building. The world’s top brass will be coming to celebrate,’ Sir John Fielding said.
We all got into the lift.

And here, the characters realize there’s just a teeny-tiny problem with their journey to the quasar:

Betelgeuse began his pacing backward and forward again. Then he held up an arm in his characteristic dramatic gesture. “So it is like this, is it? Although we shall never see our own people again …”
“Why should that be?” broke in Alcyone.
“Because of the time dilatation again,” I explained. “Even if we manage to return, everybody on Earth, and everybody in your space fleet, will have aged by millions of years. Perhaps by hundreds of millions of years. In fact the human species will have evolved by that time into something else. Or become extinct!” I concluded, without too much enthusiasm.
“It is all this relativity. I do not like it,” Alcyone announced decisively.

The whole quasar journey ticks along like this—what could have been a real “sense of wonder” science-fictional outing is constantly undermined by the bathetic utterances of the characters.

The plot is problematic, too. It’s largely driven by unexplained actions and attributes of the mysterious Yela, and by contrived restraints on the actions of the protagonists. The Yela suddenly does some odd thing that endangers the lives of Warboys and his compatriots, and their problem is then compounded by some oddly random bit of engineering in their own spaceship. After a suitable pause to allow the protagonists to escape their near-death predicament, the Yela does some new odd thing, and the cycle repeats.

Given the marvellous things that were going on in science fiction writing during the late ’60s and early ’70s, these stories feel like they’ve been imported from a pulp magazine of 1930s. One does wonder if they would ever have been published at all, without Fred Hoyle’s name on the cover.

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Note: The covers of the 1975 Corgi “SF Collectors Library” editions of the Andromeda novels (displayed at the head of this post) were something of a visual puzzle, which has undoubtedly become more puzzling with the passing years. Early, uncredited paintings by Patrick Woodroffe, they show a young woman (presumably Andromeda) in front of a complex background, apparently peering through a round window past some sort of odd pendulum. Or so it seemed to me at the time. It wasn’t until I looked at the covers again recently that I realized the “round windows and pendulums” are actually depictions of the old half-inch open reel magnetic tape drives used for data storage by mainframe computers in the ’60s and ’70s. Placing the two book covers side-by-side produces an image of the standard paired reels, with the tape running through a reading head between them, and Andromeda enigmatically superimposed.

Now the Home Secretary made a mistake.
‘My dear Professor Kingsley, I fear you underestimate us. You may rest assured that when we make our plans we shall prepare for the very worst that can possibly overtake us.’
Kingsley leaped.
‘Then I fear you will be preparing for a situation in which every man, woman, and child will meet their death, in which not an animal, nor any plant will remain alive. May I ask just what form such a policy will take?’

Fred Hoyle The Black Cloud (1957)

Fred Hoyle was an astronomer, one of the first people to work out how nuclear fusion in stars worked. He was also a great champion of the now-discarded Steady State Theory of cosmology, which he preferred to the “Big Bang” Theory, which is now the standard model. (Hoyle famously coined the evocative name “Big Bang” during a radio interview.) In later life, he began to veer into eccentric byways—suggesting that viruses originated in passing comets, and that the Natural History Museum’s fossil Archaeopteryx was a fake. He is also produced a famously flawed argument against abiogenesis (the spontaneous origin of life from unliving chemicals), which is sometimes called Hoyle’s Fallacy, and sometimes the “Tornado In The Junkyard Argument”.

And he wrote science fiction novels. Sometimes alone, but more often with co-authors. In this post I’m going to deal with three of his solo works.

I’ll start with his first novel, The Black Cloud (1957), in which Hoyle used his astronomical knowledge to produce what starts off as a straightforward “disaster novel”, and then takes an intriguingly philosophical turn in its final few chapters. A cloud of interstellar gas is detected on the outskirts of the solar system, heading straight towards the Sun. It is dense enough to cut off all sunlight to the Earth during its passage, which will have disastrous consequences. And then the Cloud starts to decelerate, coming to a halt surrounding the Sun. It’s probably not giving too much away, sixty years on, to reveal that the Cloud eventually proves to be an intelligent life-form, of a sort common in the galaxy, who views planet-based life as rare and strange. (This is the germ of the idea that would eventually lead Hoyle to develop his own variant of panspermia, in which life originated in space and seeded the Earth from comets.)

The science, as you might expect, is well worked out, and Hoyle gives us a fairly realistic view of a group of scientists (the obvious heroes of the story) feverishly working towards an understanding of the Cloud, despite the interference of anxious politicians (the obvious villains of the story). This was a recurring theme in Hoyle’s writing—politicians are just too dumb to deal with the modern scientific age, and therefore scientists should immediately be put in charge of the world. Hoyle does award himself a “get out of jail free” card in his preface, declaring:

It is commonplace to identify opinions forcibly expressed by a character with the author’s own. At the risk of triviality, I would add that this association may be unwarranted.

But he returned so frequently to this theme in later novels, one can’t help but notice that little weasel-word, “may”.

The disasters as Earth first overheats and then cools very much happen “off stage”. We hear of millions dying elsewhere, but the story stays firmly with the team of scientists working around the clock in their haven on the estate of Nortonstowe, England—there are definite resonances with the codebreakers at Bletchley Park during the Second World War.

And the characterization is well done—the brilliant (but irascible) Professor Chris Kingsley, who leads the Nortonstowe team, stays well away from the obvious cartoonish excesses, as does the brilliant (but taciturn and profane) Russian scientist Alexis Alexandrov.

My favourite passage in the whole book, and one that shows the subtlety of Hoyle’s narrative, occurs after the scientists have established radio contact with the Cloud. As they gradually impart the nature of life on Earth, there comes a point at which they introduce the Cloud to music—Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 29, to be exact. The Cloud immediately asks for the music to be transmitted again, but with the first movement increased in tempo by 30%. After its first “hearing” of this work, the Cloud is instinctively restoring the tempo stipulated by Beethoven in one of his notoriously “impossible” tempo markings, largely ignored by modern performers.* This tells us something about the nature of the Cloud’s intelligence in a way that no amount of scientific discourse could have. (And also hints that Beethoven had some access to a deep musical truth lost on lesser mortals.)

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The successor to The Black Cloud was Ossian’s Ride (1959). The title is a reference to the legendary adventures of the Irish bard Oisin—but unless you already know about Oisin’s trip to Tir na nOg, the relevance to the book’s ending will shoot right by you. The science fiction element is slight—it’s essentially a spy thriller with a science-fictional McGuffin, albeit one that Hoyle liked enough to make the theme of a later novel. It has been compared to the work of John Buchan, and it certainly has a Buchanesque theme, with a resourceful and mystified protagonist being pursued across country. But I can’t help but feel that it was also Hoyle’s response to the then-growing popularity of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books—there’s also a shadowy organization bent on world domination, an off-beat villain, and an exotic henchman stirred into the mix.

The story is set in 1970, a decade in the future at time of writing. Hoyle’s first-person narrator is a young mathematician, Thomas Sherwood, who is recruited by the British Secret Service to discover the secrets of ICE, the Industrial Corporation of Éire, which has set up its headquarters in County Kerry, in the southwest of the Republic of Ireland. ICE is what we’d now call a tech giant, except they’re churning out pharmaceuticals and engineering projects, rather than information technology. The Republic of Ireland is newly prosperous, funded by the technological outpourings of ICE, but has evolved into something of a police state. Sherwood must make his way across Ireland, opposed at every turn by enigmatic antagonists, to reach and penetrate the Barrier^†—the fortified border that surrounds ICE territory.

The novel is also something of a dig at CS Lewis, who had recorded his disagreement with Hoyle’s outspoken atheism and scientism. Hoyle’s ICE is clearly a nod to NICE, the shadowy scientific organization that provided the villainy in Lewis’s novel That Hideous Strength (1945)—but as Hoyle’s story unfolds it becomes evident that his sympathies lie with ICE.

The plot rattles along. There are frequent chases (one of which memorably involves caterpillar tractors and bicycles), captures, escapes, death-defying adventures at sea and in the mountains, and a constant atmosphere of anxiety as the improbably resourceful Sherwood tries to puzzle out what is actually going on, while staying one step ahead of those who seek to thwart him.

On the down side, Hoyle cultivates his monstrously complicated plot by leaving many plot holes along the way. More than once the reader is left asking, “But why don’t they just kill him?” In the closing chapters of the novel the focus of puzzlement shifts to “But why would he do that?” and “Surely someone would have mentioned this earlier!” and “Hang on a minute, who is this person again?” And it’s not helped by the fact that Sherwood is as smugly unlikeable as any hero of a later Robert Heinlein novel. (Which is to say, very smugly unlikeable indeed.) So a mixed bag—fun and frustrating in equal measure.

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Hoyle’s next solo novel (and the last I’m going to talk about here) was October The First Is Too Late (1966). In the five years since Ossian’s Ride, he had collaborated on three other novels—one with his son, Geoffrey Hoyle, and two with TV screenwriter John Elliot.

This one is a sort of unconventional time-travel novel—the Earth, for reasons not explained, suddenly becomes divided into regions which are each at a different stage of history. Britain in 1966 is contemporaneous with a 1917 Europe in which the First World War still rages. Greece is enjoying the ascendancy of Periclean Athens. Most of Asia is a vast plain of glass, dating from Earth’s far future, while most of North America has suddenly become depopulated wilderness. The first-person narrator is a professional musician who meets up with an old friend, mathematician John Sinclair, for a week’s walking in the Scottish Highlands. Mysterious events occur, and our narrator ends up trailing after Sinclair as he, and a group of scientists based in Hawaii, attempt to unravel what has gone wrong with the world. The plot allows Hoyle to indulge two of his great passions—hillwalking and music. I am too ignorant to comment on the musical part, but I do feel certain that the slightly dodgy day out on Bidean nam Bian, narrated near the start of the book, must be based on a real-life experience of Hoyle’s.

The sense of growing unease is well done. Sinclair goes missing for much of a day, and returns without memory of where he has been … and without the birthmark on his back. There is a haunting sequence in which scientists from Hawaii fly over North America, to discover that the continental United States has simply disappeared, to be replaced by thinly inhabited forest and grassland. Meanwhile, the British government is faced with trying to stop the trench-warfare slaughter taking place in Western Europe.

There also a philosophical discussion of quantum mechanics and the nature of consciousness, which turns into a life-or-death dilemma at the end of the book. And here I parted company with Hoyle. I didn’t mind that there was never more than a tenuous connection drawn between unusual solar activity at the start of the book, and the temporally fragmented Earth that ensued. But I did mind when a bit of baseless speculation sketched out by the character Sinclair was suddenly transformed into certain knowledge of the Nature of Reality a hundred pages later, without so much as a by-your-leave. So—as with much of Hoyle’s writing—there is a definite sense that several good ideas have been lightly cobbled together into a slightly incoherent whole, and with no clear idea of how to wrap it all up at the end.

Of these three, I’d say Black Cloud was the best thought-out; Ossian’s Ride was the most fun; and October The First was the most atmospheric.

• Go to review of four novels co-authored by Hoyle

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* For more on Beethoven’s strange tempo directions, take a look at “Was Something Wrong With Beethoven’s Metronome?” (Forsen et al. Notices of the American Mathematical Society 2013 60(9): 1146-53.)
^† The Barrier protecting ICE’s Irish territory inspired a splendid pun from the anonymous writer of the back-cover text for the 1961 Berkley edition, who referred to it as the “Erin Curtain”. Reviewers and commentators have been stealing it ever since.