The Space Machine by Christopher Priest

The Space Machine (January 1976) is a tribute to the genius of H.G. Wells, particularly his novels The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, and includes a cameo appearance by Wells towards the end of the novel. Starting off slowly in Victorian England, it begins with a meeting between the two principal characters, Edward Turnbull and Amelia Fitzgibbon. Indeed, their clandestine meetings in a lodge seem to take forever and lead nowhere, but offer a flavor of the Victorian age. It offers a subtle glimpse of their burgeoning romance.

It all changes when they meet at Sir William Reynold’s laboratory, where waits a machine that does Well’s Time Machine one better. It is, in effect, a TARDIS for fans of Dr. Who as it travels in both time and space. Of course, Amelia would like nothing better than to demonstrate how it works and, of course, on a second try, something goes wrong and the machine whisks them across time and space rather far and, in fact, to Mars. There, the machine automatically returns to where it came from, leaving the two stranded on a strange planet much like John Carter when he first landed on Barsoom.

Not knowing how to get home, if ever that would be possible, the two make the best of it, eating strange plants and trying to fit in with strange people who are sort of like them, but depressed and beaten down. It appears to be a gray downcast communal society until Edward and Amelia realize that all these people are slaves to the overlords, who do battle in giant tripod machines (think Wells’ War of the Worlds). It is a society closer to Burroughs’ Pellucidar than anything John Carter ever found on Barsoom, particularly as the monster-creatures who are the overlords dine on human blood similar to the Mahars dining on human flesh. Eventually, of course, the creature monsters in the tripods come to conquer Earth just like in War of the Worlds.

Despite the fact that the Space Machine is, to some degree, derivative of two of Wells’ science fiction novels, it is such tremendous fun to read and just so hard to put down.

The Stars, Like Dust by Isaac Asimov

The Stars, Like Dust (1951) was an early novel by Asimov, one of the great classic science fiction writers, who was a biochemist professor before writing full time. The story, as many of the genre at the time, is heavy with scientific explanations. This novel is one of three in Asimov’s Galactic Empire series, consisting of Pebble in the Sky (1950), The Stars, Like Dust (1951), and The Currents of Space (1952). These novels are part of the same universe as Asimov’s Foundation series, but taking place thousands of years earlier.

The basic premise of this novel is a universe controlled by the Tyranni, who lorded over fifty planets. The lead character, Biron Farrill, is a college student on old Earth, a planet that has been devastated by atomic wars. With his father, a nobleman known as a Rancher, suddenly villified as a traitor and killed and an attempt on Biron’s life, Biron flees Earth to Rhodia. There, Biron flees again, but with the Director’s daughter, Artemisia, in tow as well as the Director’s brother. They, together with the Autarch, search for a rebellion planet with the Tyranni forces on their trail.

Although one might think this is a Star Trek set-up, the story really is about a chess match and matching wits rather than interstellar phasers and photon torpedoes. Biron is the surprise character, who at first appears young, naive, and gullible, but later either grows into his role or has been playing under for awhile. Aside from the chess match and the out-thinking one’s opponents, he has a schoolboy type romance with Artemisia where they avoid each other for awhile, but still yearn for each other.

The roots of Star Wars and so many other movies and books can be found here decades earlier, particularly with the rebellion planet, the tyrannical empire, the young warrior, and the princess he favors.

This classic science fiction is a bit clunky at the beginning, but stick around because it gets more interesting as it goes on.

The Reassembled Man by Herbert Kastle

The Reassembled Man (1964) (Gold Medal # 1494) is the story of one Edward Berner, mild-mannered beta-male advertising executive with a shrew of a wife at home. His dreams were of average variety as was most everything about him: “So he had the dream of money, and the dream of women, and both were hopeless dreams because he never expected to get real money or the kind of woman who could transport him with delight and make cheating on Edith really worthwhile.”

But he was the dude the interstellar beetles known as Druggishes picked. And when offered a chance to become a real man’s man with bulging muscles, unfailing powers of persuasion, and a giant schlong to boot, Bermer willingly and without any thought to the consequences, immediately chose to betray all of humanity and become a spy for the Druggishes, who then cut him up and pieces him back together, better, stronger, more powerful than before.

Bermer, who lived all his life in fear, now could win any fight, seduce any woman, and win any poker game. Suddenly endowed with superpowers, he doesn’t know his own strength, doesn’t realize he swam halfway across the LI Sound, and doesn’t realize that becoming Don Juan might tear apart his family.

Some of the more interesting scenes are the poker games where he uses his powers to ferret out who’s bluffing and who isn’t and when he wins thousands of dollars, no one can believe he’s not cheating.

Of course, eventually, Bermer realizes there are consequences to being Superman, but the well-written tale does a great job of showing how he quickly rose and fell in accordance with the bargain he struck.

City by Clifford Simak

“City” by Clifford Simak is a science fiction classic whose echoes can be heard in numerous books and movies over the years. Originally published as short stories in science fiction magazines, it was later bundled together with introductions to each chapter with talking dogs literally sitting around a campfire and debating whether man or cities ever really existed or if the stories were simply allegories not to be taken too literally. An epilogue was eventually added. The novel, as you could now call it, was published and republished countless times with numerous book covers.

Although it falls into the category of science fiction with robots and space travel, it is primarily thoughtful and philosophical in outlook.

The story starts out with people now living in the countryside, taking private planes and helicopters to work if need be. The cities have been largely abandoned and the decaying buildings are housing squatters. Little by little, people, now served by automatic machines and eventually robots have less and less to do with each other. The result, of course, is agoraphobia where people are unable to leave their homes even if the future of civilization is at stake.

Moreover, people have been leaving Earth for Jupiter where they are transformed into Lopers, who have no desire to ever return, having found satisfaction in the new beings they have become. Left behind are the dogs, who have been taught to talk and can communicate with each other and who teach other animals. Also left behind are the robots and some are wild robots. And the ants who, since their heated anthills no longer cause them to hibernate, are growing in intellectual ability and piece by piece building a building that threatens to cover the world.

But the main story is the question of whether the human race has stagnated and been surpassed by all manner of creatures whose intellectual curiosity has not been sated.

Picnic on Nearside by John Varley

Picnic on Nearside (previously published as the Barbie Murders) is a collection of nine short stories by Hugo-award winning science fiction author John Varley. Stories in this volume include:

(1) Bagatelle (originally published in Galaxy, August 1976) is a fascinating experiment whereby a cyborg arrives at a city on the moon and announces that he has a fifty to neutron bomb and that no one can approach any closer. Naturally, you need a hostage negotiator to talk to the cyborg and figure out why he wants to blow everyone up. Part of that is, of course, figuring out that there’s a human operator in there somewhere and he’s really enjoy a birthday party. But notice as you read this one that all the characters are goofy like the bomb expert who tries to fondle the police chief while waiting for the train car to move. It’s as if even in a science fiction environment, you still end up with flawed people who act in surprising and illogical ways.

(2) The Funhouse Effect (orig. published in Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Dec. 1976) is a crazy off-kilter exploration where at first you the reader are told that the voyage is on a comet hollowed out and filled with engines. But, it’s the last voyage and everything is being stripped off the ship including the engines and the lifeboats. Of course, the only natural reaction is mutinies and space aliens.

(3) The Barbie Murders (orig. published in Issac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Feb. 1978), which was the original title of the collection, is a top-notch, thought-provoking murder mystery set on the Moon. More particularly, it is set in the Barbie colony cult, named because all 7,000 inhabitants look like Barbie (down to the absence of genitalia), but what’s more they given up individuality and think alike, having adopted the “we” pronoun in place of the “I.” How do you solve a murder when all identical inhabitants have the same hive memories and randomly pick one to confess, not caring whether it was those particular hands did the deed? What’s remarkable about the story is how well it captures that longing for conformity and groupthink and how vividly it captures what a society would look like where everyone looked and thought the same.

(4) Equinoctial (org. pubd. in Ascents of Wonder, 1977) is set on one of Saturn’s rings. It’s subject matter is a humanoid who has experimented with body modifications leading up to symbiosis with a tentacled artificial intelligence that enveloped her from head to toe.

(5) “Manikins” (org. pubd. in Amazing Stories, Jan. 1976) is one of the shorter pieces in this collection and is set in a psych facility.

(6) Beatnik Bayou (org. pubd. in New Voices III, 1980) is a science fiction tale about another world where if you are rich enough you can recreate a bayou and gender can be fluid and subject to change.

(7) Good-bye, Robinson Crusoe” (org. pubd. in Issac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (Spring 1977)) is a story about a tropical resort on another world, but if you are really going to stay and enjoy it, you better get some gills and fins.

(8) Lollipop and the Tar Baby (originally published in Orbit 19, 1977) is a brilliant piece of writing about the time Xanthia, who by the way is a clone, heard a black hole talk to her. She doubts her sanity because it couldn’t possibly have happened but it did. The black hole feeds on all kinds of energy, gobbling it up, just like what would happen to the hole if Xanthia reported in with what took place. Everyone needs power!

(9) the title piece, Picnic on Nearside (originally pub in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1974) has literally a picnic scene on the mostly deserted nearside (as opposed to the farside) but mostly it focuses on gender switching (something quite novel for 1974), but more common nowadays.