Brian Stableford (1948–2024)

In this first novel of the 'Hooded Swan' stories, the space pilot Grainger is rescued from a deserted planet after an accident which left him marooned and his engineer dead. And in the meantime, Grainger has picked up an alien mind parasite who, during the course of the novel, begins to get as sardonic as Grainger is cynical.

After his rescue (which he ends up liable for the costs of), Grainger is manouevered into taking a job piloting a new type of starship on a hazardous mission. Along the show more way, we find out much more about Grainger, the various people who form his small crew, and the interesting - if resolutely Seventies - galaxy they inhabit.

I read this novel as a part of an omnibus edition of all six 'Hooded Swan' novels, 'Swan Songs', from the now defunct UK small press publisher Big Engine. Stableford contributes an introduction which sets the writing of these novels and their publication into context, both with his life at the time and with the SF publishing scene. Nowadays, this novel would probably have been straight to ebook publication; but back in the Seventies, there were some publishers out there with a schedule to meet and a target of books to publish. Those were the days, and there were plenty of writers who got their start in professional writing that way.

As a journeyman work, 'Halcyon Drift' shows promise, as long as you aren't looking for star smashing adventure. Stableford had an interesting line in technobabble - as a biologist turned sociologist, he had a sufficiently broad education in the soft sciences to lace the sciencey talk with terminology that for once did not come out of physics - and his view of the various races in the galaxy is at the same time both hard-boiled but sympathetic. His hero, Grainger ("...we never knew his first name, but then again he wasn't the sort of man to have one", as Peter Tinniswood once said) is a cynical, hard-boiled sociopath with a penchent for dry one-liners, straight out of Central Casting. Still, it made a change from the super-competant heroes of most space operas. And the descriptions of the Drift itself, as well as some of the other worlds encountered, sometimes veer off into the surreal.

It is these things that make 'Halcyon Drift' a most unusual space opera, and these are the things that will keep me reading on into the second novel in the sequence. show less

The third installment in Stableford’s August Dupin series is indeed about bibliomania, the enchantment of print, its ability to put voices in our heads and suggests thing. It’s about a lot of other things too: esoteric and feminist works by Elizabethans and the possible identity of their authors, curses and cursed books, witches, medieval romance, sibling rivalry and sexual awakening, the evolution of literature, and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”.

As Dupin, who show more doesn’t appear in most of this story, says, “Nothing is ever simple . . . Not, at least, when it is subject to proper rational analysis”.

As with all the installments in this series, Stableford has worked to make each one self-contained. You can start anywhere in it except with the last book. (Yes, I’ve read them all and plan to review all of them.)

Our story opens with our still unnamed narrator off to visit his friend in England, Richard Carstairs.

Before he boards the ferry, Comte St. Germain shows up to give him a book. He wants it given to Dupin when the narrator returns to Paris. It’s a peace offering by St. Germain after the events of the preceding book in the series, Valdemar’s Daughter.

The book is The Mad Trist, the book Roderick Usher reads in the Poe story.

Also waylaying the narrator on his trip is one Stephen Coningsby. He’s a Bibliomaniac. It says it right on his card. He wants to buy the book. The narrator refuses. It’s not his, after all, and Coningsby warns him not to read the final chapter.

On the coach to the ferry, the narrator meets the charming and attractive Frenchwoman Madame Poyet. They have a spirited discussion on Gothics and medieval romances. They discuss how a “trist” could be a romantic rendezvous, and it could be a mad one because love was often viewed in the past, including in medieval romances, as a sort of insanity. Spontaneous passion was regarded as disruptive to the social order and marriages arranged for political and economic reasons.

The narrator discusses The Mad Trist with Poyet though he hasn’t read it all yet. The narrator reads the opening chapter of the story to her. There is an innocent damsel in distress who Ethelred the hero wants to save, but there is also her wicked sister who he suspects is a witch bent on sabotaging his efforts and lusting after him. What surprises the narrator, and he mentions this to Poyet, is that Ethelred is conflicted in his feelings and may actually desire the witch. This is unusual for a medieval romance, this portrayal of a hero as less than virtuous. Ethelred slays the witch but Poyet points out that, in fiction, death is not always final. The narrator mentions to Poyet “The Fall of the House of Usher” in this regard and notes Usher’s behavior makes no sense.

Before they depart, the narrator speaks of Burnt Oak Lodge, the house of his friend, and the tree that gave the place its name. Poyet, putting her self-proclaimed ability to predict how stories end, spins a fanciful invention about it being the tree a witch was hung from.

At Burn Oak Lodge, the narrator notes that Imogen and Esmeralda, 20 and 14 respectively, have grown into attractive girls. They are Carstairs’ wards after the death of their parents. Being of an age to be interested in the opposite sex, they compete for the narrator’s attention.

The narrator had hoped for a nice holiday discussing English Romantic literature with Carstairs, a scholar of it. But Carstairs interest have moved on to the history of his home these days.

The narrator mentions that he has brought The Mad Trist along and Coningsby’s attempt to buy it. Carstairs knows of Coningsby. He’s a devotee of a theory that a great occult conspiracy saved England from the Armada and, convinced of their magical powers, wrote the Black Book. Coningsby thinks The Mad Trist may be the Black Book.

Here things get complicated with numerous real and imaginary books mentioned which may connect a putative cabal of English magicians that included John Dee and the Queen. Or, maybe, those connections really go to Her Protection for Women, a real work of Elizabethan feminism and whoever was behind its pseudonymous author, Jane Anger.

As the narrator reads a chapter of The Mad Trist to the Carstairs every night, things get weirder and Imogen and Esmeralda vie more for the narrator’s attention, echoing the two sisters desiring Ethelred. And the narrator’s dreams – dreams are an important theme and motif running all throughout this series – get more sexual, not only with Poyet appearing in them but the two girls. But the house also begins to speak to him, or, at least, something in the house.

As Dupin notes in the end, literature – printed dreams – can suggest all kinds of things to us. And sometimes the suggestions they make lead to tragic consequences.

Is it a fantasy or realistic tale, a story of curses or suggestibility? As Dupin says, there is “no strict division between the magical and the psychological”.

Of all of Stableford’s Dupin stories, this is probably the most complex and rich in its allusions, one of the high points of the series. It’s a celebration of fiction’s magic but ends on a cautionary note not to let ourselves become possessed by that magic. show less

Don’t ever do that again.

That, speculates Brian Stableford in his “Introduction”, is what Moselli’s usual publisher, Maison Offenstadt, told him after reading this “recklessly ultra-violent” story serialized as La Fin d’Illa in 1925 in Sciences et Voyages. It may, speculates Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier in The Handbook of French Science Fiction, also be one of the reasons the publisher lost a court case in 1925The Frenetic People and Renee Dunan’s The Ultimate Pleasure. show more Unlike those stories, though, Moselli’s novel takes place in the distant past in the lost land of Gondawanaland.

The prologue starts in 1875 with the discovery, on a deserted Pacific Island, of a strange manuscript written on metallic sheets and an odd stone ball. The ship’s captain doesn’t end up selling them for the amount he hoped, and they end up being sold for a pittance to an antique dealer. Eventually, they are bought by a medical doctor, Akinson, in San Francisco who, in 1905, mails his translation of that manuscript to a friend in Washington D.C. Shortly afterwards, Akinson’s housemaid throws that stone balls in the fire – and the San Francisco Earthquake of 1905 results.

That manuscript is the account of one Xié, a general of Illa, one of two cities in the distant past on Gondwanaland. It’s the account of a dying, rather psychopathic, boastful man. He’s not much of a sympathetic character, but he’s determined, in the slim hope his writing will be found, that the future know of the ignoble Rair and that he, Xié, was the savior of Illa. Except, almost right from the beginning, we know he was the destroyer of Illa.

Illa is a city, a massive cylinder with its government on top and the earth beneath the domain of apes and food processing plants. Stableford speculates that this book is a response to Henri Allorge’s The Great Cataclysm from 1922 which may have irked Moselli by its literary acclaim and pacificist message. And there are similarities.

Allorge’s novel, taking up a motif of many French science fiction stories I’ve read, has artificial food in it. Not really food as we know it but liquors and pastes. Moselli’s Illans have gone a step further. They don’t even eat. Rather, massive amounts of pigs and apes are killed and converted into a nourishing radiation that feeds the Illans. Only the brutish head overseer of the apes eats what we would call food.

And those apes aren’t really apes, but Africans. Through “appropriate nourishment and cleverly designed exercises”, their mental abilities have been deliberately degraded while their strength has been increased. They have also been bred to have four hands. In Allorge’s novel, intelligent apes are domestic and tranquil servants who only cause trouble towards the end of that novel. Here they are brutal miners and the enforcers, armed with poison gas grenades and matter disintegrators, for Limm, head of the secret police.

And, like Allorge’s novel, Illa has an enemy, the much larger city of Nour.

Apart from those ape policeman, is Illa a good place to live? Well, Xié tells us the “Queen of the World” is a happy if monotonous place. But Xié is a warrior. We learn almost nothing about Illa’s culture or arts or if it even has any.

But we learn a lot about its intrigues and factions which are reminiscent of real ones that would arise in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

Illa is another argument, like Dunan and Pérochon’s novels, that you don’t want scientists running things. Here, that’s Rair, Illa’s head scientist, inventor of torture devices and also that elaborate process of converting flesh to nourishing radiation.

Like Dunan’s head scientist, Broun, Rair is concerned with matters of health. He’s decided that he can improve his food plants by using humans instead of pigs or apes. That will extend the lifespans of Illans. And he knows just the place to get the food: Nour. And, to prove a point, he’s not even going to bother getting the Supreme Council’s approval to launch a war on Nour to force an annual tribute of suitable foodstock in the form of its citizens.

Xié is asked to lead the military effort. He’s not pleased. He despises Rair, doesn’t like his usurption of authority, and seems to have moral qualms about using Nourans as food.

But Rair has his methods of persuasion, those torture chambers and thorough surveillance of key political figures like Xié and his friends, and Limm is utterly loyal to Rair. In fact, one of his apes stabs Xié’s daughter at the novel’s beginning in a not so subtle intimidation. The daughter is in love with Rair’s grandson, and Xié likes his perspective son-in-law.

But, for not entirely clear reasons, Xié does participate in that attack which brings on the beginning of the end.

Multiple imprisonments, escapes, attack and counterattack, war in the air and underground, a brutal ape revolt, flight, and a whole lot of dead people are the result.

In the violent climax, Xié will ponder if he’s become a bit of a brute himself. But that doesn’t stop him from setting Illa’s ultimate weapon, the zero stone, the very same material that caused an earthquake in 1905, to detonate. That’s the great savior of Illa.

Stableford, in his introduction and, unusually, in an “Afterward”, speculates on Moselli’s motives — boredom or to make a moral or aesthetic point or an extreme example of “melodramatic inflation” – in writing such a violent, brutal, and, (for the time) disgusting story. With unusual caustic irony, Stableford talks about how the story calls into question the morality of the revenge tale, our automatic identification with a first-person narrator (which Mosselli rarely employed), and fiction writers pandering to readers’ love of disgust and danger.

There’s no doubt that Moselli’s short novel is lively, exciting, and has a breakneck pace. No other French writer did anything like it before. And neither Moselli – or anyone else – did something like it again. show less

Poor Brian Stableford. Several 4-star ratings but not a single review by anyone on LT at the time of this writing! Though I've read just a handful of his novels, this seems to be one of his more substantive works, compared to series such as the Daedalus Mission or The Hooded Swan.

A trilogy in the same sense that Lord of the Rings is a trilogy: one story in three parts. The setting is Earth 11,000 years from now, where, like Asimov's Trantor, old Earth has been encased in a shell, because of show more people had ruined the environmental. It took 10,000 years to do this and the help of a visiting immortal alien. Now the Overworld is finished, the population seemingly stable, but somewhat Carl Magner has written a book, called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (acknowledging the origin of this title), based on his nightmares of a life in the Underworld, beneath the shell. This book and those nightmares concern those who rule the Overworld, who aren't even convinced there is life below.

Meanwhile, a few people it turns out do travel below, including two of Magner's sons. One of those sons is promptly killed by the inhabitants but the other, Joth, begins a long journey of learning and change. Along the way he meetings the humans who live there, known as the Men without Souls, and the Children of the Voice, who are evolved rats that consider themselves men as well. (An interesting connection with Doris Piserchia's A Billion Days of Earth which I read just a month ago.) Of the Children, the most important to the story is Camlak, who comes to be the leader of his village at the worst possible time.

There are several weak points. First, Stableford loves to talk. Some chapters are essays on his theories of evolutions. Others read like his notes on the motivations and personalities of various characters. He also loves to have his characters talk, especially in the politicians and the resident alien in the Overworld. Once they get going, several pages will pass before the closing double quote appears. Had the entire book been like this, Realms would still have been readable but not very engaging.

Fortunately the story in the Underworld is another thing entirely. Dialog is short, the Underworld environment is well-described, with echoes of Hodgson's Night Land. Action predominates, though this is not simple adventure. Terrible things happen to characters you come to like and root for, and character arcs don't go where you expect.

The other interesting aspect of the book is a prescient view of the coming internet -- called here the cybernet -- as the dominant source of information and means of communication and influence. True, it's set 11,000 years from now, and when information is found, it's printed before reading. But for a book written around 1974 or so, it's pretty good.

Recommended. show less