Search the Sky

review of
Frederik Pohl & C. M. Kornbluth's Search the Sky
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - December 28, 2011

Reading this is my idea of a good time. I was most reminded of Gulliver's Travels - a journey to various extraordinary societies, each an exaggeration for satire's sake. A businessman on "Halsey's Planet" notices that the society around him is decaying. He gets thrust into a faster-than-light travel adventure to other planets in other solar systems in search of symptoms of a similar decay elsewhere & in search of a solution.

W/o giving away too much of the plot, I will address the 2nd planet: a matriarchy. I suspect this has been taken as misogynistic by many people but I'd have to disagree. 1st, as an anarchist, I think show more matriarchy is just as reprehensible as patriarchy. Since most people I know seem to think that there're only patriarchies in the world, they also seem to think that matriarchies are a viable alternative. I disagree. Power corrupts. EVERYONE. Kornbluth & Pohl depict the matriarchy as being partially based on the belief that b/c most women are smaller than men, & therefore less capable of hard manual labor, that they are, therefore, natural supervisors. I've met entirely too many women like this who've treated me, personally, as some sort of servant w/o even having any idea of who I am - just b/c I'm a man who fits their stereotype of subhuman.

But keep in mind that this is parody. The protagonist is not particularly intelligent so when he 1st encounters a woman from this matriarchy & thinks: "Not a very attractive woman, for she wore no make-up" he's expressed the sexist bias of the culture he comes from & not necessarily those of the authors. 20pp later when he thinks: "How could any female - no single member of which class had ever painted a great picture, written a great book, composed a great sonata, or discovered a great scientific truth - appreciate the ultimate importance of the F[aster]-T[han]-L[ight] drive?" the joke is ultimately on him (& on the reader) as later events will attest. B/c 12pp later there's "In his snobbishness he never realized that he was guilty of the most frightful arrogance in assuming that what he could do, she could not."

Near the end of the bk, on a planet at 1st mistaken for the legendary "Earth", an ancient text called "Ultra-Jones-Ism, An Infantile Political Disorder" is mentioned in passing. This is, most likely, a parody of Lenin's "Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder: A Popular Essay in Marxian Strategy and Tactics" (see GoodReads reviews of this latter here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/483137.Left_Wing_Communism_an_Infantile_Disor... ). show less

Somewhere in the bowels of this solidly dated novel is an interesting concept having to due with genetics and interstellar colonization. Unfortunately it is lost in the heavy-handed dystopian society building and a clumsy deus ex machina conclusion. Despite an effort to prove that it is not as sexist as you might be expecting (i.e., when Helena confounds Ross’s expectations about a woman’s presumed inability to pilot a spaceship), the book is so profoundly sexist that it will be at least moderately offensive to many contemporary readers.

Yep, I've done it again and not finished another book. Search the Sky started well, and I had high hopes, but they didn't last long. I quickly came to dislike the main character, and the setting was depressing. Then in the second chapter the authors used about four strong blasphemies in a paragraph. This was offensive to me but I pressed on a little longer, not wanting to ditch another book. I'd been listening to the librivox audiobook, which while convenient, doesn't allow you to take a decent peek ahead. So I downloaded the Gutenberg version, flipped through, and noticed more blasphemies. That killed it for me. So it's off to the unfinished shelf for Search the Sky.

Not the best book by these two authors. Very dated. Pohl has written brilliantly but this one may be to early in his career. There are some good ideas in this story but it seems a little unfinished.

Colonies sent from Earth have degenerated due to limited gene pools and resultant drift...satyric about life in the 1950's. Ordinary work for these two.