On Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:53:20 -0600, Richard R. Horton

Well, that was a disaster ... Here's what I meant to post: (though
mind you I do strongly recommend THE ANTHOLOGIST):

Ace Double Reviews, 86: Endless Shadow, by John Brunner/The Arsenal of
Miracles, by Gardner F. Fox (#F-299, 1964, 40 cents)

Here I continue my exploration of the minor works of John Brunner via
Ace Double. Which is a good way to do it, I think -- Brunner wrote a
lot of short novels, many of them published as Ace Doubles, and they
tend to be entertaining but fairly obviously dashed off quickly.

So, this Ace Double includes Endless Shadow, a very short (about
31,500 words) novel from Brunner. The other side is a novel by Gardner
F. Fox. Fox (1911-1986) is a fairly legendary figure in the history of
comics. He was a lawyer who turned to writing fairly early, and by
1939 was already writing comics, inventing the character the Sandman.
He worked mainly for DC, it seems. He was one of the earliest writers
of Batman stories, and he created the Flash. All that is very well,
but what about Fox the prose writer? Fox wrote a fair amount for pulps
in many genres, but he was an avowed fan of SF (beginning with
Burroughs). My previous experience with him was a story or two for
Planet Stories. I thought them truly awful, among the worst stuff I
read in Planet. The Arsenal of Miracles is the only Ace Double I know
of by him, though he did do some pseudonymous work, so perhaps he
wrote others under different names. It's about 52,000 words long.

Endless Shadow isn't one of the better John Brunner Ace Doubles I've
read, but it is better than the last one, "Keith Woodcott"'s The
Psionic Menace. This novel uses an idea most familiar to me from John
Barnes's Thousand Cultures series: a number of planets have been
colonized using STL methods (or perhaps slowish FTL methods) and have
progressed in isolation over the centuries, but teleportation
technology has been developed (called here the Bridge System) and
slowly authorities on Earth are establishing instantaneous links to
the various colonies. I'm sure I've seen this idea explored elsewhere
than in Brunner or Barnes, but I can't offhand call up examples.
Anyone have any ideas? I suppose in a weird way C. J. Cherryh's early
novels beginning with Gate of Ivrel resemble this idea. (On the other
hand, the notion of STL colonies being united by later-developed FTL
spaceships is fairly common.)

The problem of course is that some of the colonies have developed some
pretty weird, potentially rather vile, cultures. The immediate problem
faced by Bridge System Director Jorgen Thorkild is Riger's World,
which has engendered a cult of snakehandlers which threatens to spread
to Earth. But that problem can be solved ... Thorkild's more serious
issues are personal. He is obsessed with gaining the favors of his
previous boss's mistress, Alida Marquis. But Alida has no interest in
him, even though her lover, and Jorgen's boss, is out of the picture,
having committed suicide.

It turns out Jorgen's real problems are internal -- he, like his
predecessor, is losing his sanity. This particular issue is brought to
a head when a new planet named Azrael is contacted. The chief religion
on Azrael is rather nihilistic -- death is prized as the ultimate
experience, and it is best achieved by murdering another person, which
act is punishable by death. The "programer" (Brunner's spelling of
"programmer" -- I confess I had to pronounce it pro-Gray-mer) in
charge of figuring out Azrael culture is himself murdered. A brilliant
young programer, Hans Demetrios, is assigned to Azrael.

Azrael's representative comes to Earth and quickly rejects Earth's
offer of a link to the Bridge System. This act somehow drives Thorkild
over the edge to insanity. Meanwhile Alida Marquis has fallen in love
with Hans Demetrios, who has gone to Azrael to take a desperate risk
which should bring Azrael into line -- perhaps at the cost of his own
sanity. And Thorkild, in the asylum, meets a naked young woman with
her own problems. Somehow her nakedness signals that Thorkild must
fall for her ... but her dilemma -- how to find meaning in the overly
abundant culture of Earth -- gives him the keys to his own similar
problems.

It all never really makes sense. Brunner is clearly trying to write a
philosophically engaging novel -- at times it reads a little bit like
Ayn Rand -- but the ideas at the center don't ever convince. Perhaps
the book is simply too short -- it is certainly at the beginning very
confusing, and perhaps a chapter or two of backstory would have
helped. It is for an Ace Double oddly free of real action -- it truly
does turn on the philosophical issues, not on action or derring do or
even, really, politics. I didn't dislike it, but neither did I really
like it.

It sometimes seems like Don Wollheim chose the novels paired in Ace
Doubles because he could find links between them. The Arsenal of
Miracles isn't very much like Endless Shadow, but it does have one
slight link: it turns to an extent on the discovery of "gates" between
worlds otherwise only linked by much slower (though in this case still
FTL) spaceships. In this case the gates are a legacy of a long
vanished race. The novel opens with Bran Magannon, the "Wanderer",
losing a dice throw to a mysterious woman on the planet Makkador. His
penalty: she owns his service. She is, naturally, his long lost lover,
Peganna of the Silver Hair. Peganna is the Queen of a humanoid race,
the Lyanirn, that had opposed humanity years before. Bran was the
commander of the human forces, and he figured out how to beat them,
and then worked on a deal to let the two races co-exist -- while he
fell in love with Peganna. But a jealous subordinate purposely
undermined the deal, and the Lyanirn fled to an isolated planet, while
Bran, relegated to a humiliating desk job, resigned and began
"wandering". His secret was the gate system he found, left by the
long-vanished Crenn Lir.

I enjoyed the opening -- it seemed to set up a potentially quite
enjoyable, if very pulpy, story. But things aren't resolve very well
at all. Bran and Peganna, reunited, travel through the gates and soon
stumble on the key to a treasure trove of Crenn Lir technology. But
the bad guys -- Peganna's brother, who wants to be King, and the evil
man who succeeded Bran as head of Earth's space forces -- conspire to
capture the two, and to control the Crenn Lir tech themselves,
relegating the Lyanirn (who it appears are just like humans -- both
descendants of the Crenn Lir). Everything comes to a head with a
trial, at which the two are condemned to death. Until a miracle
happens. In other words, a totally implausible ending saves the day.
It just doesn't work.