Stefan Wul (1922–2003)

BIG SPOILERS AHEAD

On the terraformed Venus biologist Joachim has his research terminated by the science priests for overstepping the bounds of permitted experimentation. He is approached by a mysterious stranger who sells him ancient forbidden science books. Soon the stranger kidnaps Joachim and takes him to Earth. Only Joachim has the scientific knowledge that can save his mistress's daughter from the deadly lizard bite she has received. Earth is a flooded, raining, radioactive wasteland show more and Joachim finds himself in an ancient castle atop one of the islands that used to be the Pyrenees mountains. The only way into the castle is by a funicular railway which is near collapse. The castle is guarded by giant chained spiders which are kept in check by vigorous whippings from a giant deaf mute servant. The only occupant of the castle appears to be Martha, a beautiful young woman mourning the loss of her only daughter who died while Joachim was en route. Martha is in the habit of playing melancholy haunting music on her organ in a distant part of the castle to which Joachim is denied access. But Martha has a plan. She is convinced the two of them can recreate her lost daughter, they can clone her! They set to work and soon have produced 10 identical copies of the lost little girl who mature at an incredible rate and display disturbingly telepathic powers. The girls hang around in naked groups singing odd threatening songs and reading books at a single glance before tossing them on the fire. The little girls are a gestalt creature (though Wul doesn't use that term). The lethal lizard bite has mutated the samples Martha took. Another lizard is caught and milked for its venom and a 'serum' is produced and injected into one of the girls, breaking her from the group mind. The other girls try to kill her because she is no longer one of them. Another wills herself to death rather than be injected. Martha flees with her non-group-mind daughter and the deaf mute is instructed to kill the rest. He shoots some of them with a rifle but there always seem to be more of them. Examining one of the bodies Joachim finds the girls are reproducing by parthenogenetic budding. Soon after Martha comes back - her non-group-mind daughter having died on Mars - a critical mass of weird parthenogenetic group-minded naked teenage girls is achieved and during a thunderstorm they play ring a ring a roses through the castle and out into the radioactive rain and fuse into one huge gelatinous creature and fulfilling a barely decipherable Latin inscription discovered in a secret tunnel - and in the space of a couple of chapters - absorb all the characters... and then all of humanity throughout the Solar Sytem.

The end.

Utterly bonkers. The most amazingly compressed piece of fever-dream SF Gothic (145 or so pages) and it didn't stop for a second.

I like Wul's books.

And so apparently do other people. This one has been republish seven or eight times times over the years and was (liberally) adapted as a BD in 2018 show less

Jâ Benal (I was so tempted to shout "Rasteferi!" every time his name appeared on the page) is condemned to lunar exile by the "World High Court" for negligence that had resulted in the death of thousands of people in a power plant explosion. Well that's the cover story. In reality no one died (but they did blow up the city) and he is being sent on a secret mission to investigate the Moon colony founded by the survivors of all the condemned prisoners exiled there for the past 200 years. show more After his fictional conviction, Jâ Benal "Rasteferi!" is blasted alone into space in a general Moonward direction in a superdooper nuclear powered survival suit that could keep him alive for months.

After a slight course correction that uses up all his suit's fuel reserves Jâ we're jammin' jammin' jammin' and we're jammin' in the name of the Lord! smashes into the Lunar surface. The Lunar authorities fully aware that, not only was he on his way, that he has crashed, AND that he is a spy do not intervene. They have an inviolable law that newly-arrived prisoners must be lucky as well as useful. The rule of the founding fathers of the colony is to leave it to each new arrival to prove his survival skills for a period of fifteen days in a hostile environment before they will accept them into their society.

The lunar surface Jâ get up, stand up, stand up for your rights - (I'll stop now) hits is a very spongy porous material full of bubbles (some meters in diameter) and harbouring a variety of interesting animal life and a thin, but breathable, atmosphere.

Jâ Benal narrowly escapes the 'Goers', froglike animals with a dangerous psychic powers, but find himself carried away by a lava torrent from an erupting volcano. Not sure M. Wul was very up to date with current astronomical thinking on what the Moon was really like, even in the late 1950s this sort of Baron Munchausen type stuff was well past its sell by date but there you go.

With the 15 days of probation having elapsed the Lunar Authorities help dig our hero out.

The Lunar medics discover that one of Jâ Benal's legs has gone green. He is suffering from an incurable 100% fatal lunar disease. Luckily the lab next door to the hospital has just perfected a supper shrink ray which will reduce stuff to a microscopic size - even people. The scientists miniaturise five teams of sword-weilding medical students and inject them into our hero. Very oddly, rather than have the narration follow the teams into the patient, this whole episode is done in dialogue between the scientist tracking the submarines on their minisubtrackerscopes and the teams themselves giving a running commentary on what they are up to. The teams hack away and eventually trigger the hero's immune system to fight the disease.

Cured, Jâ Benal explores life on the Moon. The inhabitants, some of whom were born on the Moon and have never known the Earth, live under vast domes, feed on 'food', a green insipid paste that comes out a tube in the eating room (there is another tube alongside for 'liquid') and wear nothing but a tight, transparent, artificial skin, wetsuit type thing, underpants, and heavy boots to compensate for the low lunar gravity. Why people born on the Moon would need heavy boots to compensate for what to them would be normal gravity is a question - presumably Moon cobblers make little baby ones for children and huge clunking lead-lined moon boots sit bronzed on moonmen's office desks. Women are considered inferior, subject to their husbands' whims and not educated. Most can't even read. Daily, at regular hours, a gong sounds and everyone stops what they are doing to chant a hymn to the glory of the Moon, and the Ancestor (the oldest and baddest of the criminal exiles) the hymn prophesies the imminent destruction of the Earth.

Jâ Benal gets hot totty Nira Slid ("My name is Slid, Nira Slid...") as a roommate. Nira Slid is an agent of the Lunar government and is there to spy on him. Within a couple of chapters however, she has, of course, fallen madly in love with him and becomes his accomplice. Jâ is a wizzo mathematician and his application of some mysterious very important formula enables him to build an infinite number of things replicator - just put something in, and out pops an exact duplicate. Used in conjunction with the superminiaturazation device he soon has millions of really tiny copies of a bomb he pinched from one of the Lunicans' spaceships. He also has knocked up a self-replicating, self-powered, flying PA system which, also miniaturised, spreads through the Moon cities broadcasting pre-recorded, subliminal "Earth is your Friend - Earth GOOOOD!" messages out of their tiny little speakers.

Jâ Benal uses his flying miniaturised PA system to warn of the imminent destruction of the Lunar war machine and gives everyone a chance to escape before he detonates his miniaturized bombs. Panic spreads among the lunar population, they revolt against the tyranny of the Ancestors. The lunar authorities search for Jâ Benal and Nira Slid, but they cunningly escape their pursuers by miniaturising themselves, stealing a rocket and blasting off. The Ancestor is furious that his plans have been thwarted and, believing the Earth forces are on their way - in fact they know nothing of what is happening on the Moon at all. Their plan went as far as 'fire a top scientist up there and wait'. There doesn't seem to have been any thought made as to how he was going to get any information back to them... or... well anything else really. "So your plan to avoid the terrible interplanetary conflict we are certain is about to happen is blow up one of our own cities, blame our top scientific genius then fire him off in the general direction of the Moon and see what happens? What can go wrong? Yeah I'll sign off on that. Good work."

The Ancestor decides to end his reign by destroying the Moon. Boy is he one BAD loser. He climbs into his coffin and Kaboom! - the Moon just explodes. Jâ Benal and Nira Slid notice the Moon has exploded and take evasive action. Bits of the Moon hit the Earth. This causes vast climatic changes and whacks the rotational axis out of skew on t' treadle; the poles end up near the equator (and vice versa) and just about all terrestrial life bigger than a hamster is killed. Because of who knows what reasons Nira and Jâ don't revert to their full pre-miniturisational size and, at a towering ten centimetres, go to Tahiti - which for some reason is still a tropical paradise - where they do that looking out into the sunset, promise of a new dawn for human kind; a new Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden thing that crops up with monotonous regularity in bad SF of the period.

FIN

Stefan Wul's first novel. It's a break-neck paced, page turning pulp adventure romp. Nowhere as weird as his later stuff but everyone has to start somewhere. And by 'later stuff' I mean the rest of the books he wrote in his productive three year novel writing phase. Between 1956 and 1959 he wrote 11 novels - then, apart from some poetry and a few short stories, nothing till 1977. show less

An undercover agent, Michel (male), on his way to the planet Emeraude to investigate a series of mysterious disappearances, bumps into, and instantly falls in love with, a beautiful young poet, Ines (female) when she accidentally spills her drink on him.
Because she is frightened by the presence of an alien onboard, he moves into the empty cabin next next to hers. The alien is one of the inhabitants of Emeraude, a four legged octopus-like thing which, with the aid of an exoskeleton and some show more suitably humanoid clothing, walks amongst the human population.

There are two sentient species on Emeraude; the Cepodes - the four legged octopuses with whom the human race had fought and won a war, and 'the Grey Dwarfs', a humanoid species the Cepodes had enslaved and who the humans had only discovered towards the end of the war working in labour camps on a remote continent. These days the Gray Dwarfs are an essential and ever present part of the human's colonial structure while the Cepodes are distrusted and kept at a distance...

During the night a bomb in Michel's old cabin explodes. Suspecting his cover blown, Michel's Emeraude-based handler remodels Michel's face, supplies him with false papers - and two extremely heavy suitcases. On the journey from the spaceport his handler informs him the suitcases contain the unconscious bodies of the two cepodes responsible for the assassination attempt lifted from the ship by other agents and clandestinely smuggled off for interrogation.

In a clifftop safe house Michel opens the suitcases and finds a dead Cephode in one and the other is empty with a neatly sliced hole in the back. Playing a hunch Michel sits on the beach for a bit and watches as the clifftop safe house is attacked my a swarm of Cephods which emerge from the sea. His cover yet again compromised Michel assumes yet another identity... (This book cracks along like a good old page turning spy thriller - with aliens.) Ines - who is a bit of a celebrity - vanishes and Michel sets out to find her. Outside the house of the Grey Dwarf taxi driver, the last person known to have seen Ines, he finds one of her bracelets. He forces his way into the house. Punches the dwarf unconscious and searches the place. He finds nothing. Returning to the dwarf in search of answers he discovers he has killed the small humanoid by punching him too hard. While examining the body he is curious to find a Earth Forces identification tattoo on the body. He's just about to go full autopsy on the alien when he is - in true spy/detective novel fashion - whacked on the back of the head - fade to black...

He wakes up. It's still black.

Suddenly he can see - but only because a white-coated Cepode lab assistant has plugged in a camera. Michel's brain has been removed from his body and is now sitting in a jar with electrodes and circuitry plugged into it. The white-coated lab assistant helpfully moves the camera to show Michel his brain in a jar, his empty head in another, and his body laid out on a slab. The head and body will be used to house a human mad scientist in league with the Cepodes. Using Michel's secret agent status they will soon be able to rid the planet of the hated humans mwahahahaha!

With an astounding bit of plot-resolving introspection, Michel realises the Grey Dwarfs are not really a species of humanoid but, in fact Cepodes transplanted into dead human bodies which have been cut down a bit to make them a better fit! He also remembers he has minor telepathic powers which, unencumbered by any kind of cranial matter getting in the way, allow him to hypothingy the lab assistant into swapping his disembodied brain in a jar for the disembodied brain in a jar next to his on the shelf; the jar containing the disembodied brain of the mad scientist! Soon Michel wakes up again back in his own body but having to pretend he is someone else....

(Luckily for our hero the white-coated Cepode lab assistant dropped the other jar so no one will ever find out that they got the wrong brain.)

Over the next few days Michel discovers that though Ines was indeed captured by the Cephods, she has not yet been de-brained (for lusty mad scientist reasons). Feigning partial amnesia, and disorientation (an understandable side-effect of brain transplanting) he gets to wander about the secret Cepode base and amass and secrete a hefty amount of useful escaping gear. Then he slips up and reveals to the Cepodes some detail that Michel knew but the mad scientist had no way of knowing and he has to push his escape plans forward. He and Ines flee through underground tunnels, survive an attack by a giant spider monster with a human face grafted on, and just make it to the jungle before the bomb Michel planted explodes and blows the Cepode base to smithereens.

For weeks the intrepid couple fight their way through the dense swampy jungle fighting off giant carnivorous river-dwelling reptiles and carnivorous trees with eyes. Reaching drier ground they are forced to take refuge as a stampede of bizarre creatures charges past startled into flight by hitherto unmentioned tank-driving, blue-skinned humanoid aliens who capture them and who, after a struggle, are about to execute them when Huzzah! the equally hitherto unmentioned Terran Space Navy comes charging to the rescue over the horizon like the Seventh Cavalry in a John Ford western. Our hero gets whacked on the head and...

...he is on his way to the planet Emeraude aboard a space liner. He is on his way to investigate a series of mysterious disappearances, with an increasing feeling of deja vu, he bumps into, and instantly falls in love with, a beautiful young poet, Ines when she accidentally spills her drink on him....

Meanwhile Ines wakes up and has the dream therapy machine removed from her head by white coated technicians. She and Michel's marriage it turns out had been getting a little dull so they had gone on a joint adventure to rekindle their love.

They go to see Michel. His machine has broken and they can't switch it off - the whole cycle is starting all over again! The boss doctor throws the emergency override and leaves his minions to nurse Michel back to reality before telling his secretary to prepare their bill and to send in the next couple...

Fin

I don't know how well used the trope of deliberately planting false reality narratives into people's heads was in 1959 but this story predates Dick's I can Remember it for you Wholesale by a good five years. And a jolly silly romp it is too. The pulp adventure absurdities just keep on piling up and getting more and more ludicrous before the twist resolution explains them away in an almost very satisfactory manner. One of the better uses of Fleuve Noir's house style of 'have the hero knocked out just before last chapter and get the plot resolution explained to him in his hospital bed'. show less

I got this graphic novel through the Amazon Vine program for review. This was an impressive graphic novel set on a post-apocalyptic earth. It follows a boy named Dark Child as he struggles to survive and, through a strange set of circumstance, gains superhero like abilities.

The illustration is very well done. It is beautifully detailed with full color and is easy to follow. The story is epic in breadth. We follow Dark Child from his humble beginnings, eking out a living on the edge of a show more caveman-like human tribe, to his ascension to godlike power.

I enjoyed the breadth of the story and how we get to see the whole cycle of Dark Child’s life. Things do get a bit strange and tough to follow in the end; but there are a lot of interesting ideas and themes introduced throughout.

My 10 year old was begging to read this and I decided to let him. There is some swearing and some vague nudity (the cave people don’t wear much for clothing) and I was worried some of the concepts might be kind of advanced for him. However, he absolutely loved the story and we ended up sitting down and discussing some of the concepts he didn’t quite get. This was kind of mind-blowing for him and he’s been reading it over and over.

Overall I was very impressed with this graphic novel. The illustration is very well done and the story is amazing. There are some parts that are a bit confusing to follow, but in the end I would recommend. This is very well done; I am happy that I read this and excited that this is finally available in English. show less