The Psionic Menace – John Brunner (as Keith Woodcott) (1963)
“The S.O.S from beyond the Galactic Frontier
MUST THE UNIVERSE DIE WITH THEM?
The Starfolk, arrogant masters of vast stretches of the cosmos beyond
the Earth’s sphere of influence, were determined to complete the
extermination of the mind-reading mutants on Regnier’s planet.
But to the mutants themselves, the terror of the Starfolk was nothing
compared to the greater dread that gripped their spirits – the
obsession that the universe itself was doomed. This obsession ripped
into their minds, overwhelmed them, and plunged them into horrifying
hysteria.
The message of doom reached the ears of the Starfolk themselves,
forcing them to a fateful decision. They would allow an Earthman,
archaeologist Philip Gascon, to visit Regnier in an attempt to unravel
its secrets. What he found would either contain the key to the ultimate
destiny of the universe – or the date of doomsday.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Philip Gascon
For him the secret of death contained the meaning of life.
Jazey Hine
He could unravel men’s thoughts, but not the mystery buried in his own
soul.
Errida Crowb
She was young in years, but old in the ways of pain.
Gustus Arraken
Proud and ruthless, he used people for toys – and found the game was
for real.
Breckitt
He was his masters’ voice, until they decided to listen to someone else.
Harys Fold
Cunning dictated his every move, but even he couldn’t unfathom the
message of doom.”
Blurbs from the 1963 Ace Doubles F-199 copy
This is quite an intriguing and enjoyable little piece, set at a time when Humanity has settled several worlds and discovered artefacts left by a vanished Elder Race. A spaceborne civilisation, The Starfolk, has emerged with delusions of being a master race, but because their reproductive capabilities are curtailed by the radiation of outer space, they use the planets they service with goods and technology as a gene pool from which to select breeding stock. Since expanding to the stars telepathic humans, the Psions of the title, are being born into human communities.
Recently, the Psions are suffering, because they are all receiving a telepathic message or vision, which warns of the end of everything.
The novel does provide some interesting characters. Harys Fold is some sort of Earth government intelligence officer, with impressive deductive powers. When he hears of a man found in the desert after an encounter with a distressed psion, a man who is not only a cosmoarchaeology student, but a ‘psinul’ (unreadable by psions) he concocts a plan to solve the mystery of the cosmic message of doom, which has a connection with Regnier’s planet, a world controlled by the Starfolk, where Psions are persecuted.
However, one gets the impression that Brunner had written himself into a corner toward the end since the resolution seems somewhat badly contrived. Given a longer format and some time for a decent edit this could well have been a far better novel, set as it is in a quite interesting universe with a decent stab at some characterisation.
It would be interesting to discover if Christopher Evans had ever read this novel since although the premise of ESP-capable humans emerging as an evolutionary development is not a new one, the phrase ‘psinul’ is used in the same context within the TV series he created, ‘The Tomorrow People’ some ten years later than this publication, and the series is based around the idea of ESP-capable humans emerging within the population as the first examples of Homo Superior.
Beggars in Spain – Nancy Kress (1993)
‘Born in 2008, Leisha Camden is beautiful, extraordinarily intelligent… and one of an ever-growing number of human beings who have been genetically modified to never require sleep.
Once she and ‘her kind’ were considered interesting anomalies. Now they are outcasts – victims of blind hatred, political repression and shocking mob violence meant to drive ‘The Sleepless’ from human society… and, ultimately, from the Earth itself.
But Leisha Camden has chosen to remain behind in a world that envies and fears her ‘gift’ – a world marked for destruction in a devastating conspiracy of freedom… and revenge.’
Blurb from the 1999 Avon Eos paperback edition.
One wonders why this is so hard to obtain since Kress’s take on the Homo Superior theme is a cracking piece of work, covering a period of about a hundred years.
Roger Camden, a wealthy and powerful businessman, is determined to have his reluctant wife conceive a genetically-engineered child and has heard of an experimental procedure in which babies have been designed not to need to sleep. Despite their initial refusal the doctors involved are pressured by Camden’s political influence and his wife duly undergoes the procedure. Unexpectedly, twins are conceived, one of them being a Sleepless, Leisha Camden, and the other her ‘normal’ Sleeper sister, Alice.
At first there are only a handful of Sleepless, but as the children show an enthusiastic attitude to work and study, high intelligence, and a tendency to be irritatingly happy, more and more Sleepless are conceived.
By the time Leisha is a teenager however her Sleepless friends begin to have concerns about how the Sleeper majority will treat them, and some of them already realise that they are perceived as a threat.
The Sleepless, having excellent business skills as well as the vast fortune of Sleepless heiress Jennifer Sharifi, decide to set up a home for their community in an orbital satellite called ‘Sanctuary’, having been forced to leave their original ‘Sanctuary’ on Earth.
Leisha is one of the few Sleepless who sees this as a dangerous move and one likely to enlarge the divide between Sleepless and Sleepers.
The tension grows when it is discovered that a side effect of the Sleepless treatment is that they don’t age. With the threat that an immortal ruling class will take over the world, passions rise among the Sleepers.
Over a period of a hundred years, Kress deftly charts the political and social changes through the eyes of her ageless heroine, as well as the progress of the Sleepless society under the dictatorial helm of Jennifer Sharifi, which evolves (or devolves) into a dogmatic inflexible system somewhere between Nazism and the worst aspects of religious fundamentalism.
The scientific aspects are skilfully managed and Kress handles a fairly large cast of characters well, in some cases from the cradle to the grave.
Interestingly, the strongest characters are female, leaving the males (with the possible exception of Leisha’s father) as either weak protagonists or sidelined to minor roles.
Wild Talent – Wilson Tucker (1954)
Wild Talent by Wilson Tucker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
‘What IS Paul Breen?
An ordinary, patriotic American with unusual powers? Or the first, chilling incarnation of a threat that has haunted the mind of Man ever since he first gazed into the heavens – the threat of invasion from another planet?
Certainly, Breen’s mind had extraordinary – some would say terrifying – potential. No wonder the scientists and politicians who examined him were so quick to see devastating political uses for his telepathic powers.
But Breen’s ‘wild talent’ was a double-edged sword: true, he could pierce the hearts of America’s enemies. Bust just as clearly, he could read the guilty secrets of the nation he was born to serve…’
Blurb from the 1980 Coronet paperback edition
Tucker take an interesting look at telepathy in ‘Wild Talent’, a novel which begins in the depression of the 1930s, rushes us through World War II and lands us in the Nineteen Fifties. It is the story of Paul Breen, a young man with gifts which he neither understands nor welcomes.
While visiting the Chicago World Fair in the 30s, he witnesses the murder of a policeman and, reaching the man just as he is dying, manages to extract from his mind not only the policeman’s name and his call-sign, but the names of his murderers.
Not knowing what to do he writes an anonymous letter to the President about the murder.
Much later, Breen is identified through his fingerprints found on the envelope and is recruited into a government project where he becomes a virtual slave to the system, using his powers to receive information from US agents abroad (though in the main in the USSR) and to follow the thoughts of his colleagues nearer at hand.
The head of the project, Slater, finds Breen to be a useful tool, but is worried that the telepath will uncover his own terrible secret.
It’s an interesting novel to emerge from the Nineteen Fifties, being as much an examination of xenophobia as an attack on the Establishment. If we compare this with ‘The Puppet Masters’ we see Heinlein’s government agency as being immune to corruption, unless of course their minds are controlled by the fiendish alien slugs.
Tucker has no such illusions. At least three government employees are selling secrets to the highest bidder, and a sergeant is exposed by Breen as having fraudulently diverted shipments of coal for sale to his own personal benefit.
The ending, in which Breen is discovered by a secret group of telepaths, clear in their belief that they are the next stage of human evolution, is upbeat and optimistic. However, the implicit secrecy of their existence and their fear of being discovered says much about the paranoia of the time.
Soldier Ask Not – Gordon R Dickson (1967)
Soldier, Ask Not by Gordon R. Dickson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
‘The Hugo Award winning story of a universe splintered into the factions of war.
The black-clad mercenaries of the Friendly planets fought where their employer and their God dictated. On New Earth they pitted their fanaticism against the cold courage of the Dorsai.
And the implacable hatred of one man, Tam Olyn. Olyn saw his brother-in-law shot down before his eyes. His quest for vengeance took him across half the civilized worlds, to Cassida and Frieland, to St Marie and back to new earth. He met men of all the splinter groups into which Mankind had evolved and he used them to bring about his revenge – until Padma the Exotic taught him how to use his special powers… and the frightening knowledge of the Final Encyclopedia.
SOLDIER, ASK NOT is the second of Gordon R Dickson’s epic visions of the future, a concept that ranks alongside Asimov’s Foundation trilogy in its galaxy-spanning scope.’
Blurb from the 1975 Sphere paperback edition.
Tam Olyn is a newsman. He and his sister Esteen have been brought up by their Uncle Mathias after the death of their parents. One day Tam is visiting the new orbital library where one day one will be able to reference connections between all the material collected within its walls.
The guide who is showing them around asks the group to pause for a moment and listen, since sometimes people (but only Earthborn people) have heard something. Tam is sceptical but immediately begins to hear a tumult of unintelligible voices.
He is taken to see Mark Torre who is in charge of the library and who is searching for the rare people who have heard something. He is disappointed to discover that Tam heard nothing intelligible but even so, offers him the chance to take over his position when he dies. Padma, an exotic, who is also present, tells Tam that he is an important human; one who is able to shape the destinies of many, but is set on a path of destruction.
His sister initially wished to marry a soldier from one of the religious fundamentalist ‘Friendly’ worlds but Tam dissuaded her. She later marries someone else and Tam, in an effort to protect his brother-in-law, instead leads him into danger and gets him killed.
Tam has growing powers of psychological insight and persuasion and with access to politicians and high-ranking military officers of both sides of conflicts (being an impartial Newsman) he is able to manipulate people into starting a war which would see the Friendly planets destroyed.
However, Padma the Exotic seems to know more about Tam Olyn than he does himself.
As in ‘Dune’ there is a mixture of science and mysticism, and indeed the concept of human evolution toward a greater being. The Dorsai, in some respects, could also be compared to the Fremen warriors since they are warriors whom none can oppose.
The basic premise is that Earth colonies have evolved away from the Earth paradigm to produce specialised variants such as the soldiers (Dorsai), the mystics (Friendlies) the scientists (Newtonians) and Philosophers (Exotics)
Now has come the time for the splinter races to reintegrate with the Earth species and produce a new evolved species of Man.
Olyn, in his blind quest for destruction, failed to deduce this and finally realises, with the help of Padma, that what he been battling are the various parts of him that make up the splinter races.
Dickson’s work is generally romantic in nature and dosed with a fair bit of mysticism. What science there is within the pages is wrapped up in verbiage and technobabble such as the science of Ontogenetics by which Padma is able to predict where Tam Olyn will be at specific nodal points in his life.
Dick’s strength lies in his desire to create characters and to explore the future of Humanity and what that may entail.
It’s not as strong a novel as ‘Tactics of Mistake’ where Dickson undoubtedly relished the political and military chess-playing of two major characters. Here, the structure is less clear and set in a more complex political arena in which he places a rigidly dogmatic fundamentalist culture. The characters are all admirably fleshed-out but it’s a shame that we did not see more of the lives of ‘The Chosen of God’
Mission to The Stars (vt The Mixed Men) – AE van Vogt (1952)
STAR VOYAGE
‘In the far distant future the spaceship Star Cluster is searching for certain inhabited planets lost somewhere in the teeming wilderness of outer space. The inhabitants of these planets know the ship is searching for them but they refuse to reveal their location.
Why don’t these people want to be found?
What is their secret?
Discover the astounding answers as you read this gripping classic tale of interstellar adventure by AE van Vogt, one of the all time great names in adventurous science fiction.’
Blurb from the 1997 Sphere edition.
Another fix-up novel from van Vogt comprising of ‘Concealment’, ‘The Storm’ and ‘The Mixed Men’, published in Astounding between 1943 and 1945 and telling the tale of adapted ‘Dellian’ humans who left human civilisation fifteen thousand years before and settled (unbeknown to Earth) in the Greater Magellanic cloud.
Now, an Earth warship has stumbled upon one of the weather stations which monitors the interstellar storms which rage in the depths of the cloud. The ship’s captain is determined to bring the Fifty Suns under Earth control. However the Fifty Suns are scattered amongst the fifty million stars of the cloud and Lady Gloria Laurr, Grand Captain of the ‘Star Cluster’ is determined to find them.
The Cloud was settled by Dellians and Non-Dellians, but what Captain Laurr does not know is that a mating of Dellian and Non-Dellians has produced a third group, the Mixed Men, more powerful and intelligent than either of its parents and possessed of the power to control human minds.
The Mixed Men have developed their own culture and civilisation, but their nominal and hereditary leader is Maltby, brought up – after being captured as a child – in the Dellian/Non-Dellian society and now forced to lie to both communities in order to save his civilisation and his race.
There are echoes of ‘Slan’ in this although it lacks the rich texture and background. Like the Slans, the Mixed Men once attempted a coup in order to take over the reins of power, but failed.
We have humans, Dellians and Mixed men, compared to the humans, Slans and tendrilless Slans.
The Mixed men, like Slans, have hidden within human society.
One has to question whether van Vogt is consciously repeating a successful or familiar formula or exploring a variation on the same theme. What seems to interest van Vogt most is the rational scientist/leader whose intellect brings change to political systems without the use of violence. This does not however, preclude the ‘‘control’’ and manipulation of others which we might see today as a subtler form of violence. Maltby, at one point, takes mental control of Grand Captain Gloria and forces her to kiss him, which perhaps says more about the society of the Nineteen Forties when this was written than about van Vogt’s super-being.
Like Gilbert Gosseyn in ‘The World of Null-A’, Maltby has two brains, one of which is mostly dormant but can be brought into service to produce an IQ of 900 or more.
There are some interesting ‘nodes of consequence’ in this book such as the Fifty Suns deciding to attack just as the ‘Star Cluster’ was about to leave the galaxy for good. Later, if the chairman of the Kaider III government hadn’t mistrusted Maltby so much he would have told him that a supernova had now become an equation in the storm into which Maltby had sent the ‘Star Cluster’ in order to destroy it. Had he known he would have been forced to confess and would not have been shipwrecked on S Doradus. For van Vogt this is interesting and shows a more structured approach than some of his stream-of-consciousness pieces.
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said – Philip K Dick (1974)
‘Jason Taverner, idol of thirty million TV viewers, wakes up one morning in a sleazy hotel bedroom and finds himself a complete unknown (with no direction home) – the ultimate unidentified walking object. And that’s just the start of his nightmare adventures in an American police state of the terrifyingly near future that makes 1984 look like the Age of Enlightenment…
Philip K Dick has created the most stunningly scarifying novel of the day after tomorrow. This brilliant but disturbing story is one of the most authentically chilling books of the century’
Blurb from the 1976 Panther Edition
Jason Taverner, world famous singer and entertainer, familiar to an audience of thirty billion, is one night attacked by his psychotic mistress who impregnates him with an alien organism. He awakens to find himself a non-person, unrecognised and devoid of any proof of his identity.
We are in familiar Dick territory here from the outset, a successful if somewhat insecure male central figure, baffled and sometimes bullied by women whose motivations seem illogical or incomprehensible to him.
As is common to many Dick novels the female characters seem far more complex and fully fleshed out than their male counterparts. In this book, three of the female characters have alliterative names; Marilyn Mason, Heather Hart, and Ruth Rae, although apart from providing a tenuous link to the Superman comics in which many women had alliterative initial, usually LL, it seems hard to imagine why Dick should have chosen to do this.
Of the women in this novel, there is his wife, Heather Hart, as successful a star as himself, and like Taverner, rather jaded by the privileged life they live.
There is his mistress, Marilyn Mason who is psychotic and possessive.
And then there is the nineteen year old forger Kathy Nelson to whom he is taken to purchase a new identity in this world that does not recognise him. Deliberately or not she weaves him into a web of dependence which also includes the corrupt police officer McNulty who is using her to imprint imperceptible microtransmitters onto illegal documents.
She too, turns out to be as psychotic as the other two women in his life, believing that her long-imprisoned Jack is to be released from prison as a reward for the work she does for the cops, bringing in holders of illegal IDs. Jack, however, is long dead, something which she knows but refuses to accept.
The final woman in Taverner’s nightmare journey is Mary Anne Dominic, a potter, and perhaps the only character with no real personality disorders. She enjoys her work, makes a decent living at it, and although offered the chance by Taverner to have her ceramics showcased on his TV show, refuses. In the epilogue to the book it is noted that ultimately, although Taverner died moderately wealthy, he died a virtual unknown, while Mary Anne enjoyed a lasting modest fame and success.
Having been given a temporary pass by the police, Taverner determines to seduce a rich woman in order to find a place to hide, and thus encounters the next woman in the novel, Ruth Rae, an old lover from his other life who of course does not recognise him, but agrees to take him back to her apartment.
The police, or rather General Felix Buckman, McNulty’s superior, have now become very interested in Taverner.
Upon leaving the police station he is picked up by Buckman’s sister, Alys, an SM dominatrix lesbian and also Felix Buckman’s ‘wife’ and mother of their child.
Of all the people in this new world Alys knows who Taverner really is and has two of his albums in her vehicle. She takes him back to the home she shares with her brother and gives him some mescaline, after which Taverner finds her body, reduced to a skeleton, but still dressed in its S&M trappings, in the bathroom.
As the novel progresses we slowly learn about this future Police State and the Second American Civil war in which students have been under siege within their universities and black couples are only allowed one child each in order that the black population halves with every generation. Interracial marriage, we presume, is illegal.
Dick obviously intended the background to this novel as an (admittedly caricatured) extrapolation of Richard Nixon’s philosophies and [political] policies into the future. Within the book Nixon by this time has become a quasi-religious figure which we discover from the design on a carpet which the police see when they raid an apartment, hunting for Taverner.
He trod across the wall-to-wall carpet, which depicted in gold Richard M Nixon’s final ascent into heaven amid joyous singing above the wails of misery from below. At the far door he trod on God, who was smiling a lot as He received His Second Only Begotten Son back into His bosom, and pushed open the bedroom door. [p 108]
Criminals and apprehended students are sent to forced labour camps, and pol checkpoints are set up at frequent intervals.
Taverner himself, like his wife, is a six. He is a kind of genetically engineered Homo Superior, the result of a eugenics experiment which was not altogether successful. The subjects of the experiment were indeed successful in that the Sixes are more attractive, intelligent and prosperous than ‘ordinaries’, but they find it difficult to tolerate each other’s company which is why Taverner’s relationship with his wife is a strained one.
The tale is Kafka-esque, in that it explores the nature of identity from two angles. Firstly Dick explores the nature of celebrity and the freedom that being recognised by everyone gives one within a repressive police regime. Without an official identity Taverner does not exist, he has become an unperson.
At the same time he contrasts this with a world in which Taverner is recognised by no one, a world where identity is not a question of recognition but one of possession of various ID documents and presence on a database which covers not only Earth but colonies elsewhere on the Solar System.
The Wonder – JD Beresford (1911)
‘Nothing will ever mystify or challenge the Wonder. He masters entire libraries and language with little effort. No equation, no problem is too difficult to solve.
His casual conversations with ministers and philosophers decimate their vaunted beliefs and crush their cherished intellectual ambitions. the Wonder compels obedience and silence with a glance. His mother idolizes him as a god. yet no one is more hated and alone than the Wonder.
This is the chilling tale of Victor Stott, an English boy born thousands of years ahead of his time. Raised in the village of Hampdenshire, the strangely proportioned young Victor possesses mental abilities vastly superior to those of his fellow villagers. The incomprehensible intellect and powers of the Wonder inspire awe, provoke horror, and eventually threat to rip art Hampdenshire.
Long recognised as a classic of speculative fiction but never before widely available, The Wonder is one of the first novels about a ‘superman’. JD Beresford’s subtle and intriguing story of a boy with superhuman abilities paved the way for such noted works as Philip Wylie’s ‘Gladiator’ and AE van Vogt’s ‘Slan’’
Blurb from the 1999 Bison Books paperback edition
Presaging an entire century of novels featuring the ‘superman’ or ‘Homo Superior’ is JD Beresford’s ‘the Wonder’. Beresford is possibly the first writer to explore the concept in a full length novel, although I am almost certainly wrong on that point as someone will no doubt point out to me in due course.
‘The Wonder’ of the title is a child, Victor Stott, the son of Ginger Stott, a celebrated cricketer.
Ginger’s life story is told in rather too much detail in the initial section of the novel, and there seems to be interminable pages devoted to cricket, but once past this rather self-indulgent scene-setting, the novel comes into its own, painting not only a sinister portrait of a boy whose aura of intelligence intimidates all around him, but also of the society of the time.
The local squire, a dedicated anthropologist, is the first to recognise at least a portion of the truth regarding Victor’s intellect and invites the boy to use his library where Victor digests books at a prodigious rate.
Beresford cleverly paints Victor as a creature who, although able to assimilate philosophical and scientific principles seems uninterested in the primitive social rules of the people among whom he is living. Thus his demeanour seems brusque, even rude and arrogant, and he soon makes an enemy of the local vicar since the boy treats religious scripture with the same disdain he holds for some of the other books in the library.
Finding no one whom he considers an equal, the boy is reluctant to speak to many people. His father considers him to be a freak and soon leaves him in the care of his mother who, conversely, veritably worships him.
Occasionally, however, he confides in his benefactor and these rare sections have a beauty of writing which is deeply moving. Victor sees Humanity objectively, and himself as a tragic victim, a creature of the future born perhaps hundreds of thousands of years before his time, doomed to live alone amongst these slow-thinking savages, savages who think him a freak who should have died at birth.
Although Victor has the power to intimidate almost anyone with the force of his stare, he is powerless against one person, an idiot boy who seems to see something of kinship in Victor’s diminutive frame and over-large cranium. The gabbling ‘idiot’ often hangs around Victor’s house and has to be chased away.
One day, Victor goes missing somewhere between the Squire’s library and his home, and is later found drowned in a local pond.
The mystery of Victor’s death is never solved, although it is determined that the boy must have been held underwater until he drowned. Was it ‘The Idiot’ who killed Victor as part of some game, or could it have been the vicar, long offended by the existence of the genius abomination who refused accept Christian teachings?
For its time, ‘The Wonder’ is undoubtedly a groundbreaking piece of work and, one suspects, a controversial one. Rather like ‘The Elephant Man’, Victor is portrayed as more human, despite his failings, than many of the people in his community. He seems, although it is only implied in the novel, to conform to a theory of Evolution, albeit not exactly a Darwinian one, and he is, to all intents and purposes, Godless.
Unlike many works of the time, it has not dated that badly and is an unjustifiably neglected and important piece of literature.
More Than Human – Theodore Sturgeon (1953)
‘All alone – an idiot boy, a runaway girl, a severely retarded baby and twin girls with a vocabulary of two words between them. Yet once they are mysteriously drawn together this collection of misfits becomes something very, very different from the rest of humanity. Add to the group an embittered orphan and it acquires limitless potential – both for good and for evil.
Hailed on first publication as daring and original, this intensely written and moving novel is an extraordinary vision of mankind’s next step.’
Blurb from the Gollancz Classic SF 1986 paperback
It is indeed a daring and original novel, and still stands up – despite an occasional maudlin moment of sentimentality – as one of the classics of SF.
Sturgeon’s poetic and pastoral novel of the emergence of a gestalt Homo Superior (or Homo Gestalt as they term themselves) is redolent of the whimsical and nostalgic novels of Clifford Simak in its depiction of a rural Midwest America.
Sturgeon, however, does not paint so romantic a vision as Simak normally does. He looks behind the picket fences and chintz curtains to expose the nasty underbelly which lies beneath, such as the religious extremist Mr Kew who teaches his daughters that their bodies are intrinsically evil, while secretly reading (as we discover much later) Von Masoch’s ‘Venus in Furs’. Then there is Janie’s mother, a woman who admits quite openly that she hates her own daughter and apologises to her ‘gentleman callers’ for Janie having shamed her by bringing ‘niggers’ into the house.
The characterisation of these grotesques is actually quite subtle and is a beautiful contrast to the ‘freak’ children and adults who come together to form the gestalt.
Structurally the novel is divided into three very different sections, which link to and reference each other in surprising and revealing ways.
‘The Idiot’ tells the story of how Lone first ‘bleshed’ (as the members of the gestalt call the experience of melding into a unit) with another individual, the girl Mary Kew, murdered by her own father whom Lone subsequently compels to commit suicide. Lone is subsequently taken in by a farming couple who give birth to Baby, the mongoloid idiot savant who functions as the gestalt’s memory and processing unit.
The fantastic nature of the related events, however, is never at odds with the all-too human characters and the tragedies in their lives. The huge irony at the heart of this first section is that the Gestalt designs and creates an anti-gravity device simply in order to help Lone’s employer, Mr Prodd, to stop his truck getting stuck in the mud.
In a dramatic change of style and viewpoint, the second section, ‘Baby Is Three’, is told in flashback within the confines of a psychiatrist’s consulting-room. Gerry, who has replaced Lone as ‘the Head’ of the Gestalt since Lone was killed accidentally in the woods, is telling his story.
It’s an interesting device, used later in Frederik Pohl’s ‘Gateway’ to great effect and arguably in Anne Rice’s ‘Interview With The Vampire’; half-narrative, half-confession.
Gerry, like Lone, has the power to influence the minds of others and is seeking to understand himself. We slowly discover that he has murdered Alicia Kew, sister of the girl with whom Lone first bleshed all those years ago. The gestalt, or at least Gerry, has begun to learn that it possesses incredible potential and few restraints.
The restraint finally arrives in the form of Hip, introduced as a child in the first section of the novel and now a disgraced ex-serviceman, jailed and emotionally crippled. He is released into the care of Janie who slowly nurses him back to sanity, piecing his memory together. From this we learn gradually that he has spent his life in search of Lone and the anti-gravity device. We also learn that Janie is now in hiding from Gerry after the murder and fears that if she is discovered, that Hip will be killed.
It’s a daring turn of events, not least because it shows for its time an unusual fallibility and weakness in Homo Superior/ Homo Gestalt. For the gestalt to make mistakes might be expected. For this new human of the future to kill and then have its individual units turn against each other is a surprising and refreshing move.
Despite its perhaps sometimes over-sentimental passages it is a wonderful denouement to a masterful piece of literature, rich with poetic imagery and deft minimal brushstrokes of characterisation.
‘Outside an oriole made a long slender note, broke it, and let the fragments fall through the shining air. A stake-bed truck idled past, busily shaking the string of cowbells on its back, while one hoarse man and one with a viola voice flanked it afoot, chanting. In one window came a spherical sound with a fly at its heart and at the other appeared a white kitten. Out by the kitten went the fly and the kitten reared up and batted at it, twisted and sprang down out of sight as if it had meant all along to leave; only a fool would have thought it had lost its balance.’
The ending is transcendent and optimistic, for Hip, after a showdown with Gerry, becomes in effect the gestalt’s conscience; the architect of its personal ethos. At that moment the group discovers it is not alone and is welcomed into a community of Gestaltia who had been observing the unit to see if it emerged as an ethical gestalt.
Like van Vogt’s ‘Slan’ it is a wish-fulfilment fantasy for those who believe themselves outcast, but it is also a sharply observed portrait of small-town America at a certain point in time.
Dune – Frank Herbert (1965)
A novel which broke the mould, reinvented the concept of Space Opera and begot a minor cult, as groundbreaking novels are wont to do.
It’s rather spooky to look at Dune again in the light of the events of September 11, since we have in this book a situation where a desert people are militarily outclassed and dominated by a Superpower which wishes to retain control over the desert’s vital resource.
It’s not a realistic comparison, since in no way can I compare the revolt of Herbert’s Fremen with the cowardly actions of certain terrorists, but there are no doubt conspiracy theorists who will find the comparisons attractive. In this case it isn’t oil which is being fought over, but the melange spice of Arrakis, just as vital to transportation between stars as oil is for transportation between cities.
One could possibly compare the USA with the Evil Empire of Shaddam (even that name has a spooky resonance, but with the wrong side) and the planet Arrakis with the Middle East, but one would have to examine Arab-American relations in the Nineteen Sixties to get much mileage from that.
Undeniably, the Fremen are essentially Arabic in flavour, but the rest of Galactic Society is based around a feudal aristocratic system of powerful Houses, presided over by the Emperor Shaddam. It is an aggressive and brutal system in which assassination and treachery are rife.
Interlacing this network of families is the Sisterhood of the Bene Gesserit, an organisation which has its own reasons for an intense interest in the melange spice, a strange organic substance which can endow its users with a form of prescience and telepathy.
Another major player in the politics of the galaxy is the Spacer’s Guild, a professional group of mutated humans who use the properties of the spice to sense changes in space and steer ships through hyperspace across the galaxy. They are also bound into the political web which is battling for control of Arrakis, since without the spice, which can only be found on Arrakis, the guildsmen would be useless, and traffic throughout the galaxy would come to a halt.
Herbert skilfully stage-manages the political manoeuvring and chicanery which may or may not be being controlled from behind the scenes by the Sisterhood. Thus it seems as though politics itself conspires to set in motion the events leading to the fulfilment of a Bene Gesserit prophesy.
Ironically, the religion which is integral to Fremen life contains elements implanted centuries before by the Bene Gesserit in order that the Sisterhood would be welcomed by their society. Thus, the Fremen, like the Sisterhood themselves, also know of the prophecy of the Kwisatz Hadderach.
It’s a clever trick on Herbert’s part, as the coming of the Superior Being can be seen simultaneously as the unexpected culmination of a long term Bene Gesserit plan and the true fulfilment of a long religious expectation on the part of the Fremen.
It’s not by any means an anti-religious book, although it is realistic about the nature of organised religion. It shows that religious systems are, by their very nature, political systems, or at least are tied into the political structures within which they exist.
Herbert’s universe of techno-feudalism is so well realised the reader feels quite at ease with the absurd and anachronistic ideas of Dukes and Barons wielding power over dominions of planets. There is a pervasive atmosphere of decadence and unhealthy opulence (particularly with regard to the House Harkonnen whose Baron is a corpulent gay monster who revels in the sexual gratification derived from the dying throes of his young victims) which is contrasted with the simple yet disciplined lives of the Fremen.
Gorgeous, complex, multi-layered. It’s a work of genius.
Wild Seed – Octavia E Butler (1980)
‘HE COULD NOT DIE:
Doro was a mind force who changed bodies like clothes, killing his hosts by reflex – or design. He roamed Earth, gathering the genetic Wild Seed: the tormented, mad thought-readers, seers, and witches. Some he helped. Some he destroyed. But Doro bred, ruled, owned them all. He feared no one – until he met Anyanwu.
SHE COULD NOT BE KILLED:
Anyanwu was an old woman, a young woman, a man, a leopard, an eagle, a dolphin – a shapeshifter. She could absorb bullets and make medicine with a kiss. She gave birth to tribes, she nurtured and healed – but Anyanwu would savage any who threatened those she loved. She feared no one – until she met Doro.
TOGETHER THEY WERE LOCKED IN A WAR OF WILLS.
From the African jungles to the colonies of America, Doro and Anyanwu were the father, mother and gods of an awesome unborn race. And their love and hate wove a Pattern of destiny that not even immortals could imagine…’
Blurb from the 1988 Popular Library/Questar paperback edition.
From Butler’s debut with ‘Patternmaster’ in 1976 one would never have suspected that she would produce a novel – a prequel at that – of such power and intensity as this.
perhaps of all Butler’s work, this is the novel that best explores the concept of slavery, the theme that runs through nearly all of her work like a dark thread.
The story begins in the late eighteenth century, in Africa, where Anyanwu has already lived for three hundred years. Anyanwu is a shape shifter, a talent which Butler cleverly explains in Anyanwu’s frustrated attempts to describe her own powers, a description which makes a satisfyingly logical sense to readers familiar with the concept of DNA. Anyanwu can taste the flesh of a creature and is able to transfer her DNA into theirs. She can also repair her own body and so has become virtually immortal, as well as being able to analyse poisons and diseases and produce cures and antidotes.
It is here she is discovered by Doro, a creature far older than herself. Doro is a human life-force able to move from body to body, killing each one in the process.
For over three thousand years he has been seeking out those humans with special gifts: telepathy, telekinesis, psychometry, the whole panoply of psychic abilities, and bringing them together to breed. They have become both his children and his slaves, in some cases quite literally since Doro has become heavily involved in the slave trade, using it as a cover to bring the residents of his ‘seed villages’ to America.
For Doro, Anyanwu is a very valuable find, mentally stable, unlike many of his people, terrifyingly strong and able to change sex at will, or into a leopard, eagle or dolphin.
Anyanwu has become a combination of priestess and goddess to the local people, many of whom are her descendants.
Realising her emotional attachment to them, Doro promises not to harm any of her people if she will return to America with him. However, as Anyanwu discovers, Doro considers her to be ‘Wild Seed’ and plans to kill her once she has served her usefulness by providing children for his people.
This book certainly deserves its place in Pringle’s ‘100 Best SF Novels’ since, like all the best SF novels it employs the conventions of SF to explore the depths of human nature. Butler understands, more than many writers, the capacity for humans not only to enslave others in various ways, but to willingly submit to that slavery in some cases. She is not hesitant about pointing out that the Africans themselves were complicit in selling their own people, and chillingly portrays the way in which Doro’s people love him as a combination of God and Father even though he breeds them like animals and regularly kills them when they are of no further use to him.
There is also a bleak savagery about the people and society that Anyanwu is thrown into. Indeed, it is Anyanwu who shines throughout the novel as a healer, a person full of compassion and love, despite the fact that even she is forced to kill occasionally to protect herself and her children.
Butler uses the device of longevity to take her two main characters through a period of over a century. It’s a common device, used notably in Kress’s ‘Beggars in Spain’ and Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, but here it’s employed not only to have a character observe a changing society but to accentuate the transient nature of individual human lives. Doro adopts bodies like new clothes and disposes of them just as easily. Anyanwu has seen at least ten husbands grow old and die, as well as countless children. There are many deaths in ‘Wild Seed’ and yet, each one is keenly painful to those who have to deal with the grief or other consequences.
Above all, Butler writes characters with all the flaws, warts and all. This makes for a novel not, as one might expect, doomful and depressing, but one that is full of power and fury, mining gold from the depths of the human soul.
Tactics Of Mistake (Dorsai Trilogy #1) – Gordon R Dickson (1971)
‘Planets were the pawns in their quest for power.
The men of the Dorsai were the finest fighting soldiers in the universe, mercenary troops without equal.
Their talents were devastatingly employed on Kultis, where a bloody little war raged between the Western Alliance and the Eastern Coalition. But not even the Dorsai could anticipate the dramatic effect of Cletus Grahame’s brilliant mind and the galaxy-shaking theory he called ‘the Tactics of Mistake’.
The story of how Cletus Grahame risked his life, the fate of three worlds, and ultimately the whole of the Dorsai to prove that a mistake may remake worlds is a classic of science fiction.’
Blurb from the 1976 Sphere paperback edition
Slightly Asimovian in its technique of presenting problems to be solved with ingenious tactical solutions, Dickson’s Dorsai novels are set in a galaxy where the burgeoning Earth colonies are being fought over by the Coalition and the Alliance.
When tactical expert Cletus Grahame is sent to the planet Kultis to assist the Alliance it sets in motion an inevitable sequence of events, orchestrated by Grahame, designed to break the stranglehold that Earth has on the colony worlds via the Alliance and the Coalition, and also to transform the mercenary Dorsai into an elite fighting force.
Grahame’s nemesis is the coldly ambitious Dow De Castries, whom Grahame meets in the first chapter while on his way to Kultis. The entire novel, in fact, is a kind of elaborate game of chess, with Grahame employing his theory of ‘Tactics of Mistake’ to goad De Castries into retaliating against his every calculated move, making bigger and bigger mistakes until he ultimately destroys himself.
This novel at least stands the test of time very well and is interesting in that there is (as in ‘Dune’) an oddly mystical slant to proceedings.
Kultis is one of the colonies of the Exotics, a quasi-mystical community who are both scientifically and philosophically advanced. They wear blue robes and are dedicated to the ongoing evolution of Humanity. There seems to be a slight Buddhist element to their beliefs and it is suggested that they have powers above and beyond the normal range of human capabilities.
Mondar, a high-ranking Exotic who becomes friends with Grahame, recognises something within the mercenary and invites him to join the Exotics. There is an odd yet powerful scene where Grahame, arriving at the Exotic’s private office, appears to go into a trance and sees various possible other universes with alternate versions of himself and Mondar.
Later, Grahame employs various hypnotic meditation techniques to train his Dorsais to exploit their bodies to their maximum potential (reminiscent of Paul Atreides and the Fremen of Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’) and they subsequently become in demand among the indigenous populations of worlds where the Alliance and Coalition are in control. Grahame’s elaborate chess game with De Castries is masterfully plotted and leads logically and inevitably (if not necessarily predictably) to a satisfying endgame.
Intervention – Julian May (1987)
‘For 60,000 years the five races of the Galactic Milieu have watched and waited for the time when human mental development on Earth is ready for the Intervention…
As the twentieth century draws to its end, phenomenal mental powers are displayed by ‘operants’ all across our planet… They can ‘farspeak’ one another telepathically, they can build mental shields and they are capable of coercion by power of mind.
One of these is Rogatien Remillard, a dealer in secondhand books, whose memoirs – written a century on – form the core of this chronicle. They tell of a world where the mind has become a weapon; and of two brothers, each possessed of extraordinary powers – one a peace-bringer, the other an advocate of evil…’
Blurb from the 1988 Pan paperback edition
This rather massive book stands as both a connecting work between the Saga of the Exiles and the concluding three volumes of the series, and a history of the metapsychic community on Earth. It is told through the eyes of Rogi Remillard, a minor relative of the Remillard dynasty who is prompted by an entity known as ‘the Family Ghost’ to write his memoirs.
This is at a time after the Exiles have returned from the Pliocene and Earth is now a tourist attraction for the other psychic races of the Galactic Milieu.
And so, Uncle Rogi, from the comfort of the room above his shop where he sells antique Science Fiction novels, begins the tale of how isolated metapsychic communities, in Ireland, Scotland, Russia and America, began to form and eventually come together, occasionally with the help of Rogi himself, prompted by the Family Ghost.
It’s a wonderful, engrossing, rambling novel, full of May’s love and passion for her characters who are not, in some cases, very nice people. Many of the metapsychics were using their powers to control others, or to gain political power, and so the future of Humanity in Galactic Society was in the balance.
There are references in the book to the saga of the Exiles. Rogi, as a young man, is given a strange jewel by the ghost, a red stone which seems to gleam with an inner light and which Rogi has made into a key fob and calls ‘The Great Carbuncle’. Could this be what remains of Felice and Culluket after six million years? And in the addendum, a family tree is provided which shows that Aiken Drum (via banked sperm) is related to the great metapsychic families.
It’s these small touches that gives May’s work such a verisimilitude.
Eventually, as most readers will suspect, the Family Ghost, who is also the leader of the Lylmik contingent of Earth observers (The Lylmik being the oldest and most mysterious race in the galaxy) is actually Marc Remillard, still extant after six million years.
Patternmaster – Octavia Butler (1976)
‘The Patternmaster is dying. He rules his own race of selectively-bred, psionically powerful Patternists, who in turn dominate the non-telepathic servile ‘mutes’. A hostile third race – the mutant cannibal Clayarks – preys on the waste between the cities.
Now a successor must come forward to rule the Pattern and carry on the ruthless war against the Clayarks. In a savagely hierarchical, brutal society where all power is absolute and emotion is weakness Coransee and Teray, sons of the Patternmaster, must begin a psychic duel for the succession. A devious, drawn-out and cruel battle of wits and psionic power – to the death.’
The blurb from the 1978 Sphere edition.
Octavia Butler was a black American writer who, in her later novels, managed to successfully combine feminism, Black issues and SF into some brilliant work.
‘Patternmaster’ is her first novel, and though it doesn’t have the power and depth of her later work it’s an excellent exercise in creating a realistic society in which these post-humans have evolved advanced paranormal powers.
Homo Superior is most often depicted as a powerful but benign species, above the petty squabbling of us mere sapiens, and mostly used as a device with which to hold a mirror to ourselves.
Butler’s Patternists have no advanced moral sensibilities to accompany their formidable powers and are locked not only into the ‘Pattern’ of linked psychic energy which binds them but also a hierarchical slave culture based on mental power.
The system is brutal, controlled from the summit by the dying Rayal while his children battle murderously to succeed him.
The novel is set in some unspecified future and suffers in this respect from no real contact with our present.
Butler’s subsequent novels, including the far superior prequels, ‘Wild Seed’ and ‘Mind of My Mind’ are set either in the past or in contemporary USA, and go far deeper into examining the dynamics of power between individuals. The issue of slavery recurs again and again in Butler’s work, as it does here when Teray – one of two powerful candidates for the position of Patternmaster – is forced into a choice between accepting a benign form of slavery to his brother or losing his wife.
Understandably perhaps, the richest characterisations are those of the women, who are for the most part frustrated and exasperated by the patriarchal system which has evolved within the constraints of The Pattern, but nonetheless attempt to find ways to use the system to their advantage.
It’s a short, deceptively simple novel, but one which still manages to explore the human capacity for exploiting its own species, a theme which is later more extensively developed in ‘Wild Seed’ and indeed, in most of her work since.
Linked novels: ‘Wild Seed’ (1980) ‘Mind of My Mind’ (1978) ‘Clays’ Ark’.
Darwin’s Radio – Greg Bear (1999)
‘Darwin’s Radio: the missing link thriller
The discovery of a mass grave of mutated villagers in the Caucusus; a mummified prehistoric family revealed by ice-thaw high in the Alps; a mysterious new disease that strikes only pregnant women, resulting in miscarriage – three disparate facts that will converge into one science-shattering truth.
So-called junk genes that have slept in our DNA for millions of years are waking up; the women who miscarry become spontaneously pregnant again without sexual activity.
The new babies are not normal.
Governments exact emergency measures: segregation of the sexes, abortion of all foetuses. Only three scientists in the world believe it isn’t a plague: famous biologist Kaye Lang, disgraced palaeontologist Mitch Rafelson and the government’s ‘virus hunter’ Christopher Dicken. Can their leap of faith overcome mass panic and superstition?’
Blurb to the 2000 harpercollins paperback edition.
The subject of Homo Superior or indeed Human Evolution has been a rare theme in SF of late, but Bear has taken the concept and reinvented it anew in an ingenious and compelling novel.
Bear is an established writer of Hard SF which I prefer to categorise better as Big Science. His work is always solidly based on extrapolation of real science and as such produces incredibly plausible works in which huge ideas are dealt with. More importantly Bear is always guaranteed to provide solid characters and societies which are impacted and changed by discoveries or events in a logical and realistic way.
Darwin’s Radio builds its premise around contemporary research on redundant genetic material in the human genome and on phages, beneficial viruses which can be employed in place of antibiotics to fight bacterial infection.
The central idea is that human DNA contains and ancient HERV (Human Endogenous Retrovirus) which is not only capable of converting the DNA within the ovaries of a human foetus, but also of infection throughout the human population.
Three people gradually come to the conclusion that SHEVA (as the virus is named) has been instrumental in leaps of human evolution and in particular, causing Neanderthal Man (or rather woman) to give birth to Homo Sapiens.
Bear makes this scenario horribly believable and concentrates on the frantic race for a vaccine while the world, experiencing an epidemic of miscarriages, erupts into chaos.
As is typical for Bear, politics on many levels provides a stumbling block toward common sense and the need to face the truth about the true nature of SHEVA.
The true horrors of the novel, such as the mob violence, the mass-killings of pregnant women and the outbreaks of religious fundamentalism and human sacrifice are for the most part kept in the background while Bear revels in his mastery of focusing on individual characters and through them disseminating the scientific research as it develops, hindered by the agendas of individuals and political systems and indeed by political divisions within the scientific community itself.
The ending is atypical of Bear, who previously tended to bring his novels to a grand climax such as in ‘Moving Mars’ where again, politics and science collide to produce a denouement where the planet Mars is transported across the galaxy to a new home.
The understated ending here is downbeat but optimistic, showing the new ‘Homo Sapiens Novus’ children either living in reservations or existing (like Van Vogt’s Slans) secretly within human communities.
Wisely perhaps, Bear only gives us fleeting glimpses of what these children may grow into. Equipped with organs capable of discharging a range of pheromones; chameleonesque colour changing facial skin cells and additional vocal skills, the super-children seem destined to be masters of communication and persuasion.
Skills, in fact, vital for survival in contemporary society.
Slan – AE van Vogt (1940)
Classic Pulp Fiction from one of the masters of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. I have to confess that ‘Slan’ has to be my all-time favourite Science Fiction novel if only for the fact that it is probably the one book which got me hooked on SF back in the early Nineteen Seventies.
AE Van Vogt, partly due to the quality of his later work and his involvement with Dianetics and the Scientology movement was, to a certain extent discredited by the SF community. Thus he was never really given the credit he should be due for his contribution to SF as a whole and the influence he subsequently had on the genre.
It’s high time that Van Vogt’s work was reassessed and I’m surprised that this novel at least has not been republished by one of the companies who tend to reprint classic works of SF.
‘Slan’ is the story of Jommy Cross, one of a race of telepathic superhumans – recognisable only by the tendrils on their foreheads – living in hiding within human society, a race which ordinary humans seem determined to exterminate. The novel begins when the nine-year old Jommy’s mother assists his escape from the police just before she herself is captured and murdered. Jommy survives to grow and slowly learn the secret of who and what Slans really are.
Obviously this is a novel which is bound to appeal to anyone who feels they have suffered persecution for their minority status. Certainly, as a gay teenager, I found many parallels with Jommy, who was forced to hide his true nature from the community around him and spent much of his waking time attempting to find others like himself, fearful of the repercussions should the truth emerge of what he really was.
It also says a lot about ignorance, misinformation and propaganda. There are chilling echoes of Nazi Germany in the cold and casual way in which John Petty and his Police Organisation (and indeed, seemingly ordinary and intelligent members of the human public) talk of killing the Slans, in terms of solutions and statistics.
It’s interesting that Van Vogt does not present this as a one-sided issue. The Slans themselves are a mysterious race who have allegedly been responsible for attacks upon the tendril-less Slans (a non-telepathic variant race), while the TL Slans themselves are building their forces on Mars in preparation for an invasion of Earth.
‘Slan’ also makes some very good points about the fallibility of history, and our tendency to accept myth as fact, something which both humans and the TL Slans seem to be guilty of in this novel.
It’s a flawed novel in many ways. Jommy himself, in contrast to the implicit idea of the Slan’s philanthropic nature, at one point imposes a form of mental slavery on the humans in the community in which he settles. His proposed ‘solution’ to the human problem is mass-hypnosis of the human race to remove their hatred of the superior species. One could argue he has little choice as the alternative would undoubtedly be inter-species war when humanity eventually discovers that the human race is becoming sterile and doomed to extinction. It’s a shame that Van Vogt never took the time to explore the ethics of either potentiality.
Overall, the novel – which covers a period of about fifteen years, following Jommy’s development from a nine-year old to an adult – is fast-paced, inventive and full of Van Vogt’s emotive imagery. One always feels that Van Vogt writes in Technicolor.
There’s his trademark futuristic city at the centre of which is the Slan Palace, built by the telepaths during their brief moment of ascendancy, and now occupied by the human regime.
The building is, of course, bigger and more beautiful than anything humans could build, and stands as a symbol of both human jealousy and impotence (the fifteen hundred foot central spire may or may not have phallic implications) since human researchers know that whatever they discover has probably already been discovered and developed by Slan super-scientists.
The novel also features some of Van Vogt’s idiosyncratic machines (something which, I think may have influenced Dick’s writing) such as the Porgrave Transmitters and receivers, a kind of thought recording and playback device.
The transmitters are used to direct telepaths to safe-houses and hideouts, while the receivers are used by their non-telepath cousins to guard the Martian cities against telepath infiltrators, whom they term ‘Snakes’. (Maybe it might be an idea for someone to examine the use of phallic symbols in the work of Van Vogt at some point)
Eventually, through unfailing faith in the essential ‘good nature’ of Slans, Jommy wins the trust of one of the leaders of the non-telepaths, and through her, finally gains access to the Slan Palace, where all is revealed.
The importance of this novel to me is in its emphasis on a society which blindly accepts rumour and unfounded belief as fact, something which is just as relevant, perhaps even more so, today than it was in the 1940s.
In the 1930s propaganda was used to turn public opinion against Jews in Austria and Germany, usually by having the media stating unfounded allegations as fact.
One only has to listen to a speech in The House of Lords to realise that little has changed. In order to try and scupper the abolition of Thatcher’s Section 28 (which prohibits local authorities from ‘promoting homosexuality’ in education) people such as Baroness Young and Thatcher have attempted to promulgate the idea that homosexuality is something one catches, like a disease, or else is a condition one is bullied into. Russia is, at the time of posting, promulgating a similar ideology.
Sadly, these arcane notions are seldom challenged.
In ‘Slan’ there is a general belief that the telepaths are somehow experimenting on human babies, attempting to create more of their own kind. This often results in malformed or mutated children. It is later discovered that that this is a natural process of evolution, a process which has produced the Slans, and one which spells an end for Homo Sapiens.
One might argue that the parents in the novel would see the illogic of such beliefs, but then, one only has to look at the real-life parallels to see that such absurd convictions are all too common, even at the highest levels.
Death Robots From Mars 
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