Reviews and Comments

The central argument of this book is that human beings are basically decent people who care for each other and have an urge to co-operate. The author seeks to debunk the ideas like the one presented in the novel "Lord of the Flies", that people are violent and destructive at heart, and that without the restraints of civilisation, we would collapse into conflict and chaos. This misanthropic concept is also put forward by 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who claimed humans are inclined to descend into a "war of all against all".

Instead, Rutger Bregman proposes that our natural, primitive state is dominated by an urge to be social, to please each other, to co-operate. He compares it to the way some domestic animals have evolved to be friendly and playful, and says that this is the driving force behind evolutionary success. His nickname for the loving, caring humanity is "homo puppy". Instead of Hobbes, Bregman champions the ideas of Rousseau, that people are instinctively good, and that it is the ravages of civilisation, militarism, and cruel dictatorship which have brought out the worst in us. Brutish humanity is a false narrative, a zombie claim which refuses to die no matter how many times it is debunked.

I find that I am broadly sympathetic to Bregman's view. I live in an area ravaged by a recent disaster (the black summer bushfires of 2019-20) and the stories people tell of coming together in that time are powerful. I love the idea of getting back to nature. When a fossil fuel oligarch recently argued that climate action would mean humans go "back to the caves", my strong response was that this would actually be a good thing. "Back to the caves" has become one of my personal mottoes. "The caves" are where we are at our best.

This is a book for everyone. Given the times we are in as I write these words, I can't help thinking that the instinctive drive for decency will soon resurface and vanquish the unnatural construct of power and selfishness which has taken over the United States (and elsewhere) under the leadership of Donald Trump. The irresistible force of homo puppy has already started. It never went away.

Sometime around 1971, I saw the dramatised version of "Knock Three Times!" on TV in Australia. It left a big impression on my pre-teen self, but I didn't get around to reading the 1917 book it was based on until now. I think it's a bit of a lost classic, with enough originality and verve to be on the same shelf as "Alice in Wonderland" and "The Wizard of Oz".

Instead of a rabbit hole, wardrobe, or house-launching tornado, the magical land here is accessed via a door in a particular tree in the wood. After (of course) knocking three times, we are granted access to "The Possible World". Our "Impossible" dimension is seen as tainted, and it serves as a sort of dumping ground for evil creatures exiled from the fantasy land to keep it pure. The nomenclature references the concept of "the best of all possible worlds", although thankfully there seems to be no attempt to lean on bogus irrational concepts of theodicy and Christian apologetics.

Other stories have their murderous pirates or a wicked queen, but the fearsome villain in this tale is a giant pumpkin which terrorises the land. It moves by rolling like a wheel, and cruelly attacks its victims by mutilating or transforming them with its evil magic touch. It's a psychedelic and, at first absurd creation, but when The Pumpkin appears stealthily on a stormy night and attacks one of the protagonists, it's hug-your-teddy scary for REAL, kids!

Predatory best-in-show giant vegetables aside, the Possible World is a domain where most people are welcoming and trustworthy, where the denizens all come together to fight the evil which has infected their fair land.

The major exception is the "spies" of the enemy, who derive great glee and satisfaction from deceiving and entrapping anyone who might thwart their dreams of domination. I couldn't help thinking of the disturbing phenomenon of the deluded supporters of malignant despotism infecting the real world as I write. The pumpkin in "Knock Three Times!" is grey, but it doesn't take much to imagine it as an orange would-be dictator. Fuck Trump!

But I digress.

The book is written in a somewhat condescending style typical of children's stories of that era, but it's charming enough. More importantly, it's a refreshing girl power story. Sexist drivel clearly wasn't compulsory in decades past. Now is the time to celebrate feminist triumphs which have been suppressed, even in our supposedly more enlightened times. It sounds naive now even to think the dismal future we find ourselves in is any better than the time this book was written.

"Knock Three Times!" is now in the public domain. I read the Project Gutenberg edition which preserves the illustrations and is very good. The television series seems to have sunk without a trace, with no online clips or DVD release in evidence.

I gave the first three volumes of The Book of the New Sun 5 stars. In reality there are large parts of them which confounded me. Perhaps with more careful re-readings I would dock a star or two. Or maybe I'd like them even more, and defy reality to add to a perfect score. 11 out of 10!

Having finished the fourth and final book, I have a perception that there were fewer mysteries in it. The great adventure of Severian speeds up. He is caught up in war, he encounters time travel anomalies, he achieves the destiny he mentioned in the very first chapter of the saga. There are no stories within stories to perplex the reader, but Severian's philosophical speculations are at times lengthy. He muses in detail about the miracles he has performed, wondering whether the relic he carried, or some power within himself was the cause.

But mostly, there is exciting adventure: battles, conflict, weird creatures, wonders to behold n inner and outer space.

While reading this book, I chanced upon an interview with Gene Wolfe, where he said he didn't believe in the distinction between science fiction and fantasy. A unicorn is fantasy now, he mused, but if we genetically alter a horse to grow a horn, it will enter the realm of science. On a personal level, I find this idea unsatisfactory. I contend there IS a distinction between symbols, myths, metaphors on the one hand, and on the other the reality they illuminate. I see the relationship between the genres (Science Fiction versus Fantasy) in the opposite way to Wolfe: to me the strength of science fiction is that its starting point is things technically classed as scientifically feasible. They can take the place of magic and myth, and become symbols and metaphors, but their grounding in scientific possibility adds some spice. Reality matters.

In Gene Wolfe's universe, myth and reality coexist as if they are the same thing. This is an abhorrent idea in the real world as I have observed it, where charlatans, cultists, conspiracy theorists and fascists are doing so much harm. But we are not in the real world right now, we are reading a work of fiction here. If, while reading, I suspend my disbelief and submit to the fictional rules, I give the books 5 stars. If I hold my ground as a skeptic, a rationalist, an atheist I give them zero.

There were moments of doubt for my atheistic self, when I might have undergone a phase change and given "The Citadel of the Autarch" zero stars. But one passage in particular ended that, when Severian experienced a kind of pantheistic revelation. It reminded me of the many experiences I've had on beaches and in forests, feeling a connection to nature and a kind of joy... albeit an atheist's joy without any reference to a deity such as Severian's Pancreator.

"The thorn was a sacred Claw because all thorns were sacred Claws; the sand in my boots was sacred sand because it came from a beach of sacred sand. The cenobites treasured up the relics of the sannyasins because the sannyasins had approached the Pancreator. But everything had approached and even touched the Pancreator, because everything had dropped from his hand. Everything was a relic. All the world was a relic. I drew off my boots, that had traveled with me so far, and threw them into the waves that I might not walk shod on holy ground."

So you can choose. The new sun which Severian is destined to bring can be a science fiction construct: a super-advanced alien civilisation has been mentoring the Urth, and Severian passes their test. Through a sort of wormhole with its exit point at the centre of the dying sun, the benevolent interstellar engineers extend the life of the solar system.

Or you can favour the religious symbolism: Severian is a Christ figure and as a reward for our spiritual worthiness, the sun-God will grant redemption to us through a new resurrection.

Either way, when you walk barefoot on the sand of an unspoiled beach, you will feel the joy and beauty of creation. My personal take is that the joy of the universe is enhanced by its internal consistency, with no need for a supernatural construct to explain it. It's a beautiful world!

By the time you get to the third volume of "The Book of the New Sun", you should be used to Severian's philosophical digressions. You will have heard him say many times, either directly or obliquely, that there are contradictions, inaccuracies and mysteries in his account of the events which have led him from the Citadel of Nessus to the Northern city of Thrax.

These ponderous diversions continue in "The Sword of the Lictor", but somehow, in this book, they seem more digestible. This could be because the story contains some old-fashioned scary monsters of a most thrilling kind, and a series of battles where Wolfe shows us he can write an exciting action scene just as well as he can weave a confounding tale with multiple interpretations and a web of literary allusions.

I particularly enjoyed the encounter with the Alzabo, a man-eating monster which absorbs the memories of its prey, then speaks with their voices. The glandular excretions of this creature are the source of the drug which allowed Severian to absorb the memories of his beloved Thecla in "The Claw of the Conciliator".

In addition to the peaks of action and adventure, Severian's quest leads him across multiple cityscapes and wildlands. Old companions are abandoned and new ones encountered... enemies too. The psychedelic inventiveness of his bizarre future world continues to astound.

The saga which has had such a feeling of epic fantasy then takes a further turn into science fiction, when Severian meets three aliens who have been following the progress of his quest. They treat him like some sort of saviour, but at the same time are dismissive of his belief in the seemingly supernatural powers he ascribes to the ancient relic he carries, the Claw of the Conciliator. Then they zoom away in their spaceship.

During this re-read I have been dipping into some of the essays and analysis written about "The Book of the New Sun". There are countless references I have been oblivious to: religious allusions by way of characters who share names with saints; events paralleling biblical episodes; influences from Proust and others. I am aware of Wolfe's debt to Jack Vance's "Dying Earth". which I read last year.

I'm certainly not the only one to muse on the conflict between the rational and the supernatural, or the skeptical versus the credulous. In "The Sword of the Lictor", Severian is the one who is visited by magic. The mad scientist Baldanders and his alien guides are the ones rejecting the now ex-torturer's claims of witnessing and performing miracles. Again it reminds me of one of my favourite quotes, from "The Shadow of the Torturer":

'Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them.'

As a rationalist, I am on the side of Baldanders and the hierodules (aliens) in opposing base superstition. The world is real, and we are part of it. We can only encounter it and remember it with our minds and our memories... but there are ways we can determine what is all in the mind, and what are the material things our mental images originated from. If we break or falsify the link between the real world and out mental image of it, then we are lost.

Despite the above, I found myself cheering for Severian when it came time for his philosophical dispute with the monstrous Baldanders to be settled by combat.

Gene Wolfe, who came out as an openly Catholic author, would seem to be on the other team - the team believing in magic, miracles, and the divine. But at the end of this volume I continue to feel that he has created a world which reflects my philosophical instincts more vividly.

My five star rating is retained for this volume as it was for the two which preceded it.

Although The Book of the New Sun is unquestionably a single novel published as a tetralogy, its second volume is delineated by narrative structures which set it apart. Severian, the narrator and protagonist, skips over a period of time and resumes his tale without revealing precisely what happened immediately after the events at the end of the first book. He ends this volume, like the first, with the characteristic words "here I pause", followed by a warning that his tale is a difficult one. He will not blame the reader who gives up and does not continue to follow his tale.

In the middle are surreal events of bewildering, even frustrating opacity. At the same time, there are breathtaking imaginary creations which stay with you long after you turn the last page. If you have succumbed to Severian's tale, by now you are addicted. You must keep reading, if only to have the drug-like thrill of further phantasms. You will simultaneously crave explication. But be warned: for every answer you receive, at least one new question will arise. That is the reality Severian's world, and the way he chooses to recount it.

For those who have read Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" books, the parallels (acknowledged by Wolfe) are clear: both sagas tell of a somewhat duplicitous protagonist who carries a powerful gemstone through a perilous and unpredictable earth in its endtimes. Vance's Cugel is a rogue. Wolfe's Severian, as the narrator, does not admit to as many faults, although throughout the course of this second volume, it becomes clear that like Cugel, Severian will fuck anything that moves.

The torturer tells his story as if he is powerless and clueless about the events that take place. But the people he encounters treat him differently... he seems to have protection, he swears allegiance to both sides, he has various gifts and powers and he seems to know how to use them. Severian is the chosen one, but we don't know why, or by whom. Will we ever find out?

One thought that occurs to me, is that there is no logical reason why any character in our myths and fairy tales should be the chosen one, but the stories themselves create a narrative where it SEEMS to make sense. So far, The Book of the New Sun creates the opposite impression - the book itself provides absolutely NO reason why Severian would be the one designated by fate to be such a pivotal figure in the destiny of the earth and its people... unless you the reader, concoct such a reason.

In recounting the events in this second volume, Severian reproduces a story from a book of legends he carries with him. It's a future mutation of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. Later he transcribes a play he performs in as part of a traveling troupe led by the mysterious Doctor Talus. I admit that the play was largely incomprehensible to me. One day I will return and read it more carefully. As it is being performed, Severian overhears members of the audience talking about the play, revealing they derived meaning from it which its author had never intended to express. The same is so for The Book of the New Sun. Your mileage may vary, but it's meant to be that way.

This book is superb and unique, the first volume in a fantasy saga of deep beauty and horror. It is set on a far future earth, where alien life has blended with native species under an ageing sun which will soon fail and deprive the planet of life-sustaining light. In the southern hemisphere, a "Commonwealth" is ruled by a supreme leader called the Autarch. Punishments under the law include torture and execution, to be carried out with utmost precision by members of the guild of torturers. The protagonist and narrator, Severian, is kicked out of his guild for malpractice, and begins a journey which leads to him becoming the new Autarch.

That summary of the setting and the basic plot doesn't explain the dreamlike mysteries of this future world. Severian is narrating his story after gaining almost supernatural insights into the earth and its history. But the events he recounts begin at a time when he was clueless, living as an apprentice in the cloistered world of the torturers. Strange, inexplicable things happen, and the young Severian seems as bewildered to encounter them as we the readers are. But Severian the narrator knows more. He's always holding out on us as he rations out his story. Later explanations of events produce twice as many mysteries.

Narrator Severian repeatedly interjects in his own tale, with philosophical musings on the nature of the reality he describes. At one stage he compares his storytelling to his work as an executioner, staging the events to satisfy the varying demands of a bloodthirsty crowd, an exacting judicial system, and victims of crime demanding justice. He admits that there is a bit of theatre and manipulation in the processes of both execution and storytelling, trying to keep everyone happy. Severian is also apologetic at times for presenting a story filled with so many paradoxes and complexities.

The moral dimension of the story is also unsettling. Clearly a system involving brutal torture and public execution is abhorrent. But Severian's loyalty is to the guild, and his greatest shame is betraying his vow to practice its brutal arts to perfection. He never seems to waver in this, even as he feels love and sympathy, outside his profession, for people and even animals he is not required to torment with detachment and exactitude.

I've yet to encounter any analysis of the book which provides an overarching theory to make sense of this saga. On one level, it's not supposed to make sense. If you accept that, then you enter a dimension where the book makes perfect sense, on its own terms.

The tale is loaded with religious references and theological musings, arising, it would seem, from Gene Wolfe's own Catholicism. Severian is imbued with some of the traits of a Christ figure... yet his unflinching role as a torturer belies this description. The book is explicitly written to have a different meaning for every reader. I find it hard to see how a broader Christian morality can be extracted from it. Then again I am a rabid atheist, so it shows how successful Wolfe has been at creating a book which generates a different response in every reader.

The Scarlett and Browne series is like a mash-up. The setting is similar to John Wyndham's "The Chrysalids", but Stroud's mutant outcasts struggle against religious tyranny in a very British post-apocalyptic world, rather than Wyndham's north American nightmare future. There's also a bit of the flavour of "His Dark Materials", "Riddley Walker" and "The Prince in Waiting" in Stroud's latest trilogy... all very good quality ingredients, blending to create a dish with a flavour of its own.

A not-so secret ingredient is the influence of the western, as the sharpshooting, gunslinging outlaw Scarlett McCain faces off at high noon against various adversaries. Hilariously, she and Albert Browne roam the wildlands astride bicycles , rather than horses.

And so we come to this conclusion of the trilogy. I re-read the first two books to get back in the groove, and perhaps I overdosed a bit, because I found this third installment lost a bit of the spark. The villains aren't as delectably evil, the laugh-out-loud sardonic humour is a bit less frequent, and somehow the competent Albert Browne is less appealing than the innocent neophyte of the earlier books.

But "Legendary" retains the explosive action and deadly cliffhangers of the rest of the series. Stroud is a master storyteller and his writing unfolds with deceptive simplicity. The monstrous beasts and deadly buried labyrinths of the post-apocalyptic future are vivid and beautifully imagined. The relationship between the titular characters remains nicely balanced.

These books are such fun to read, but they contain an element of gravitas. The ecumenical theological-industrial tyranny Stroud conjures up provides exactly the sort of consciousness-raising we need young readers to be exposed to right now. We are already battling the ever-present threat of cults, terrorists, theocrats and clerical abusers here in the proto-apocalyptic world where we find ourselves in 2025.

Two of the most famous works by Capek are collected in this SF Masterworks edition. I greatly enjoyed both of them. R.U.R. is, unusually, a play. It tells of the creation of synthetic humans and the disastrous consequences. It is famous for coining the term "robot", and it is as relevant as ever in this technological age, more than a century after it was written.

"War With the Newts" is more overtly satirical, darkly comic in places. It is a novel about the discovery of an intelligent amphibious species, which proves itself adept at using many aspects of human technology, while being incapable of adopting other elements of our culture. The book is loaded with references to the political and military calamity into which the world was careering at the time it was written, 1936.

I feel further enriched to learn about Capek. He was Czech, and his homeland features prominently. He was a critic of both communism and nazism. He died in 1938, months before the nazi invasion. His brother Josef was also an artist. He was captured by the nazis and died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

At a time when neo-nazis and other fascist killer clowns are on the rise (some of them are also adherents of weird AI beliefs), the Capeks, and "War With the Newts" deserve to be celebrated.

The existence of the "bubblegum fiction" genre and the claim that this book is a high point in it are both assertions by me, unsupported by anyone else to my knowledge. My enjoyment of "The Case of the Missing Message" is strongly influenced by nostalgia. Your mileage may vary.

I borrowed the "bubblegum" concept from the pop music phenomenon which flowered in the 1960s, where producers and faceless session musicians would make records. THey would then sign up a band of ambitious puppets to be the face of the synthetic creation, lip-synching in TV appearances and posing for cover photos, promoting someone else's music, but putting up with it while enjoying the fringe benefits of fame.

The literary equivalent of this commercial exploitation model was pioneered by the Stratemeyer Syndicate. I am impressed to read that it began pumping out product in the 19th century, but its more famous output came later: The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and Tom Swift were among its hot properties. Each series was attributed to a pseudonymous author, but the books were all ghostwritten by staff hacks or freelancers, following a format dictated by the publisher. Also in this vein, Robert Arthur's "Three Investigators" series was a favourite of mine in the 1970s. The commercial innovation here was to leave out the author's name and replace it with the film director Alfred Hitchcock, who "presents" the books rather than writes them. It is notable that Arthur's creation has some strong similarities to the Brains Benton mysteries which preceded it by several years.

The marketing model was paralleled by actual authors in the conventional publishing system. Enid Blyton springs to mind as a prominent exponent of formulaic fiction. Charles Spain Verral seems to sit somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, in terms of facelessness versus fame.

"The Case of the Missing Message" was written in 1959. I have a particular fondness for this book because it was one of my very earliest reading pleasures. My childhood copy was the "Golden Press" edition, with illustrations by the French artist Jacques Pecnard. I was too young to read it in the 60s, but at some stage in the early 1970s I devoured it. I didn't know the author's name. Only later research would reveal it: Charles Spain Verral. On this modern re-reading, I have the Whitman edition which does credit the author, but not on the cover.

The book is a lively and engaging story of two boy detectives who stumble upon a plot by a villainous cove to kidnap the heir to a successful traveling circus, and steal his birthright. The two main characters are an interesting period study... Jimmy Carson is the narrator, an average fifties boy who likes sport and has a paper round. He is a wide-eyed innocent, the type who would say "gee whiz", although his catchphrase when expressing surprise is "creeps!" Jimmy's best friend is Brains Benton, a teenage uber nerd, cross-bred in a literary test tube with Sherlock Holmes.

Brains really is the star of the show, although he's not allowed to have much personality, especially compared to Jimmy, whose narrator's voice rings out clearly. Modern readers might detect a hint of the autism spectrum about Brains, but it seems highly unlikely the author would have had such intent. Happily, Brains is also courageous, moral, and most definitely the leader to whom all other characters defer. I find myself ruefully comparing this to the 21st century, when expertise is derided, science is denied, and a worldwide plague of ignorance, cruelty and greed has broken out in seats of government and state houses around the world.

By contrast, in 1959, in the middle of the nuclear age, and at the dawn of the space age, there was a better class of geek, and they were afforded an appropriate level of deference. In Verral's depiction of the repressed 1950s, there isn't much affection... relationsips are based on loyalty and established modes of behaviour, including rather strict adherence to gender roles and the exclusion of girls and women from the action. Soon, though, the young denizens of this idyllic period would come of age and learn that all you need is love. Or so I like to believe.

The book is dedicated "To Charlie and Randy, for inspiration". Charlie is the author's son, and Randy was his school friend. I take this to be a sign that Verral was perhaps more attached to the story than the "bubblegum" model would suggest. An online anecdote I read tells that the sequels to this book were written by other authors, but Verral thought they weren't good enough, and rewrote them to his own satisfaction. They were then published under the name "George Wyatt", presumably to avoid crediting any one author with the collaborative outcome.

A deserted alien transport hub is discovered on an asteroid, and humans get to use the ships to explore the galaxy, despite not really understanding how they achieve faster-than-light travel. It's incredibly dangerous. The company which runs it creates a nightmare of late-stage capitalism. It's a bit like "Squid Game", where the economy is so bad, you risk everything by getting on one of the Gateway ships. The setting also reminded me of "The Expanse". That's the good bit.

The parallel plot is about the protagonist dealing with the trauma of his experiences on Gateway, as he takes part in therapy with a computer psychoanalyst called Sigfrid. This section let it down for me. Like Pohl's "Man Plus", the tortured masculinity he portrays is annoying, at best. Towards the end of the book, the protagonist Rob launches a vicious assault on his girlfriend, who somehow still decides to come back to him. Pohl makes a feeble attempt to redeem the character with a bit of guilt and remorse, but it's not enough. He doesn't deserve a happy ending. The exploration of Rob's bisexuality is also cringeworthy. Pohl seems to be well-meaning, but he just regurgitates Freudian nonsense in fictional form.

Disappointing.

Post-apocalypse science fiction is flourishing at the moment, but "Earth Abides" is the one that really established its modern form. I've read it many times, but in 2024 it had a different impact on me, and I think it has grown in stature over the years.

The plot takes a now familiar path: a plague wipes out most of humanity; the survivors must come together and work out how to repopulate the empty world, to overcome the psychological and physical impediments they now face. As the story unfolds, it reveals truths about all humanity: our morals and failings and strengths are exposed by the thought experiment of stripping the species back to its barest remnants.

There are no triffids here, no zombies, not even any crazed marauding gangs to provide conflict. Much of the plot tension comes through the protagonist, Isherwood Williams, a young intellectual who judges himself the only survivor capable of rekindling all the earth's knowledge, passing it on to future generations who will rebuild civilisation.

Ish is a solitary, geeky sort of man. He's a nature lover who survives the plague because he's on one of his frequent wilderness camping trips. He considers his solitary tendency a strength at first, judging that he can survive the shock, as so much human companionship vanishes from the face of the earth. It turns out to be a hindrance too, and he has to turn to his newly found companions, especially Em, a black woman whom he loves and comes to depend on for wisdom and courage even as he sees his education and intellectual acumen are a burden as well as a gift.

There's a kind of tragedy as Ish is forced to accept that his dream of reviving technology and rebuilding civilisation is an impossible one. He must also come to recognise the value of the community and the way it finds its strengths existing in harmony with the environment; humanity is no longer the technological master it was before the great disaster.

The hammer which is Ish's talisman is with him always, but the former symbol of industry turns into a religious icon, and Ish as its wielder is like the last of a race of Titans or demigods to his wild young descendants.

On previous readings, I remember feeling the loss, the failure, as Ish downgrades his expectations. Now, as we contemplate the impending impacts of climate change, my reaction is different. I can see from the very beginning that Stewart paints Ish as a flawed, almost a deluded character, whose belief in civilisation and quest to revive it are misguided from the start.

In our 21st century reality, our trust in technology and industry to provide solutions to the climate crisis seems just as flawed. To lose civilisation would be a tragedy, but we would also be losing a lot of the malign structures which destroyed so much of what is precious on our small planet.

"Earth Abides" is further elevated by its multiple themes: the role of the state, of religion, morality, gender, race and law. It is full of references to the cultural and scientific heritage to which Ish clings. It is generously spiced with powerful symbolism and biblical references... at times it reads like an old testament book in itself.