Book review - Swan Song

The sixth and final book in the Hooded Swan series by Brian Stableford (1975) neatly ties up space pilot Grainger’s relationship with employer Titus Charlot and the mind parasite he calls ‘the wind’.

As before, it’s first person narrative; a narrator we’ve got to know over the series. And as he must survive to tell the tale, Grainger can occasionally telegraph events to come: ‘Though I didn’t know it, a fragment of darkness from the long shadow of my past was waiting for me in the clearing-house. It just hadn’t caught up with me, it was already ahead of me.’ (p14)

In Grainger’s absence (jail, idling, that sort of thing), Charlot had sent off the sister vessel crewed by Eve and Captain Nick to investigate the mysterious Nightingale nebula. They were feared lost… Grainger realised that he might love Eve so he has to take the Hooded Swan into the nebula to track down the Sister Swan.

The Nightingale nebula is another of Stableford’s fascinating creations, but it would be unfair to reveal more about it. Not a nebula as we know it, a bit like a lens, but knowledge concerning its existence might further scientific knowledge, or so Charlot believed. Grainger thought: It could kill me. And the wind replied, ‘Time is killing everybody. Everybody dies.’ Not much comfort there, then.

At last, more is revealed about ‘the mind’. It has been worth waiting for. ‘I have no name’, it says… ‘We possess no shape, no form to be labelled. We live within. What we have, and what we are, we share… I came to you on the wind, and you think of me still as a wind that talked, not as a being that was only a part of the wind.’ (p129)

It’s a poignant, fitting ending. About loss, life, love, hate… and everything.

Book review - The Fenris Device

The Fenris Device is fifth in the Hooded Swan series (1974) by Brian Stableford.   

Spaceman Grainger is still shackled to the Swan and employ of its owner Charlot. He has been talked into taking the Swan into the hell of planet Leucifer V, the world the Gallacellans called Mormyr. It’s tricky, treacherous and his attempt fails. Plenty of fascinating convincing techno-gobbledegook as Grainger makes the attempt, his body and mind merged with the Swan’s controls. ‘I was really pounding the flux, because I needed all the shields up. Leucifer was a matter-dense system and you can’t go making tachyonic transfers in bad vacuum without a full complement of shields. As it was, we were bound to lose power when I went transcee…’ Transcee means going through the light barrier.

Why venture there?  Some Gallacellans want to recover a spaceship that was abandoned over a thousand years ago.

Stableford gives us another extra-terrestrial race: ‘the average Gallecellan is about seven feet tall, but he looks taller because he has big ears which stick upward from his head. At least rumour has it they are ears. After several hundred years, we still don’t know for sure. He has a face which might be yellow or brown, sometimes striped or blotched, the texture of wax. He has eyes in the back of his head as well as the front, he also has a mouth in the back of his head, but somewhat modified… One is for eating, the other is for talking. A Gallacellan usually turns his back on you to talk to you, but if you are another Gallecellan you have your back turned as well, so it doesn’t seem rude…’ (p19)

The current antipathy towards ‘globalisation’ has its pre-echoes here. ‘Worlds like Pallant were the only places where they could make a safe living now that the companies were steadily absorbing everything exploitable.’ (p21)

And: ‘The expansion of the companies was devouring the galaxy… War was coming. War between the companies and the law, war between the companies and each other. War between human and alien…’ (p139)

Fenris stems from the Old Norse/Icelandic – wolf, eater of the moon in the twilight of the gods. There’s a villain, a dwarf with a massive chip on his shoulder, who also happens to be deranged.

Yet again Grainger is aided by ‘the wave’ ensconced in his head, a symbiotic creature who has been around for a long time, and still has a few surprises for the host. 

Grainger tells us – and all and sundry – that he is no hero. Yet he tends to do heroic things. His endeavours to rescue friends stranded on the inhospitable planet vouch for that in some tense imaginative writing. Why put himself at risk? Maybe he can negotiate his freedom from his debt to Charlot, finally...

The final book in the series is Swan Song.

 

Book review - The Paradise Game

Fourth in the six-book Hooded Swan sequence by Brian Stableford, The Paradise Game (1974) is another intriguing space opera offering an alien planetary puzzle.

Space-pilot Grainger, still lumbered with the mind-parasite or symbiote ‘the wind’ has landed on Pharos, a planet that appears to be paradise. Unpolluted, with no large predators, no disease, indeed no death, it seems truly ideal. That’s why the Caradoc Company wants to take over the planet, to make money, of course; future wealth is in the service industry. The only indigenous natives are quite obliging about the project. However, conservationists in the guise of the Aegis group object strongly, even resorting to explosive sabotage. Charlot, Grainger’s boss, has been tasked with the job of arbitrating and determining if the Caradoc claim can succeed.

Yet again, Stableford has created interesting aliens and a planetary life-system. The natives ‘were humanoid, curious, gullible and all female… Her skin was covered in light gray fur. Her face reminded me of an owl, with huge large-lidded eyes. The eyelids moved slowly up and down, so that one moment the whole of the eyes were exposed, the next only a half or three-quarters. She had a sort of mane of lighter fur or hair descending down her back from the crown of her head, starting off in between her small pointed ears. Her arms were thin and short, and she walked with her legs permanently crooked. She was naked, but thick hair covered her loins.’ (pp9/10)

The natives have ‘no generic name for themselves, and they have no word for death.’ (p42)

Of course, no paradise can be perfect. Eden had its snake. Grainger wondered what lingered in the verdant vegetation of Pharos. ‘It’s always darkest before it gets even darker.’ (p45)

Stableford likes word-play and one of the lawmen on Pharos is Keith Just. He goes further, ‘Four of them. And Just.’(p113)  Four Just Men, no less? Edgar Wallace would smile, I suspect. And his final two words in the story hit the right note, too!

As in earlier adventures, ‘the wind’ is instrumental in resolving the puzzle for Grainger. There’s also a good assessment of his relationship with the symbiote: ‘my relationship with the wind became a matter of vital necessity…’ (p133) ‘In a way, he was more me than I was.’ (p134).

Inventive, as usual, and worth reading for that reason.

Editor’s hat on:

On more than one occasion, characters speak without interruption for over two pages. This is unrealistic (pp 151-153, for instance).

Repetitive use of some words. ‘Back’, for instance, written seven times in 10 lines (p77) And ‘lot’, another one of those echo words: 5 times in 10 lines (p153).

There’s a great visual description of a mother spaceship launching an invasion fleet of smaller craft: ‘the battleship was beginning to shrink as she accelerated and climbed, while the infant fleet grew as it descended, changing appearance momentarily as our prospective adjusted, so that it was first a swarm of bees, then locusts, and then black butterflies. (p94) Pity ‘prospective’ was used instead of ‘perspective’.

Book review - Promised Land

Third in the Hooded Swan saga by Brian Stableford, Promised Land (1974) briefly recapitulates some of the events in book two (Rhapsody in Black) as it is dead time for Grainger on New Alexandria. While sightseeing in the countryside, he spots a ‘girl’ being chased by two men. He’s the first to admit he’s no hero, but he intervenes, coming to her aid. The ‘girl’ wasn’t human ‘but she was very humanoid… Her skin was golden-brown and looked moist. Her eyes were big and orange. Her hands seemed to be very contortive – her fingers were tentacular and retractable. Beneath her clothing there looked to be some kind of ridge pattern on her back. She had no hair.’ (p11)

It seems this ‘child’ is one of the indigenous species, the Anacaona of the planet Chao Phrya. (Of interest, perhaps, Anacaona was a princess of Hispaniola, 1474-1504). Shortly after Grainger’s encounter with her, the girl was kidnapped and en route to that planet. Charlot, Grainger’s boss, tells him to fire up the Swan and follow. It’s vital, though he doesn’t give any really valid reason.

The people of Chao Phrya are ‘neurotic isolationists’, according to Charlot. They landed on the spaceship Zodiac and declared the planet the Promised Land.

They are permitted to land and Grainger and his captain Eve are escorted by Zodiac crew members into the forest, led by ‘tame’ Anacaona. This is where the story gets interesting, where Stableford indulges himself and the reader with the flora and fauna of an alien world. Illness and disease could be a problem, too, for Grainger was loathe to administer  human antiseptics and bug-killing drugs to the Anacaona, since there was no telling how their metabolism would react. The Zodiac people didn’t seem interested in studying the indigenous humanoids.

The dense jungle is almost like a character in the story, pervasive, intrusive and glutinous. Perhaps the most threatening creatures are the crypto-arachnids – ‘about the size of black bears, except that their legs were longer and made them look more spread out. They were furred like black bears too’, moving ‘with sinuous serial scuttling movements…’ One of their Anacaona guides is a spider-hunter; he plays a flute that immobilises them, ready for the kill. When the guide is overcome with illness, and a half-dozen or so crypto-arachnids close in on Grainger, we’re subject to a few tense pages!

Since the first adventure (Halcyon Drift), Grainger is host to a symbiote, which he calls ‘the wind’; though here he calls it a ‘parasite’.  (p18) Their relationship is closer, the bonding now being two-sided, each seeing the benefit of helping the other. This aspect is one of the attractive features of the series; yet again, I felt that ‘the wave’ was neglected for too long in the story.

There are some anachronistic oddities, for example: ‘He was interrupted by the bleeping of his desk phone.’ Not a vid-phone, just simple voice. Others include references to a ‘jeep’ a ‘train’, a ‘hovercraft’ and ‘helicopters’ and a reference to the ‘Mafia’. I suspect more futuristic alternatives could have been used.

The first-person narrative by Grainger is unchanged, with wit and irony and he’s still the anti-hero.  A fast, interesting read with a mystery at its core.

Book review - Rhapsody in Black

Second in Brian Stableford's sequence of six Hooded Swan novels, Rhapsody in Black (1973) doesn’t quite work for me, though it’s still worth reading for the humorous aspects, the banter between ‘the wind’ and the anti-hero Grainger, and to continue his adventures. Clever titles like this are music to my ears...

Stableford jumps into the action at once, Grainger on the run from miners on the planet Rhapsody. We don’t know why he’s in this predicament, but it will be revealed in flashback. Rhapsody is one of ‘God’s Nine Splinters’, isolated worlds with a religious bent, the others being: Ecstacy, Modesty, Felicity, Fidelity, Sanctity, Harmony, Serenity, and Vitality. Life on Rhapsody is lived underground, the denizens only comfortable in darkness or semi-darkness; hence the title. They’re constrained by their leaders who are strict; as one stated, ‘There’s a lot of life in the old dogma yet.’ As a pun, it’s not bad, I suppose.

Why is Grainger here? As the indentured pilot to the owner of the Hooded Swan, he goes where he’s told. The owner, Charlot has heard there’s something valuable on the planet, and he wants to negotiate for it. To further his aim, he has co-opted some exiled people from the planet to help. Unfortunately, on arrival the religious indigents imprison them all.

They escape and then the chase goes on through the mine shafts.

The characters from Halcyon Drift, Eve, Johnny and Nick hardly enter the story. Grainger’s mind-parasite – which is a symbiote, it insists – does not figure greatly either, though he comes to the fore when needed. The Hooded Swan isn’t in the story much, either.

I don’t know at what point Grainger the pilot became an expert on biological forms, but he spends three pages giving a breakdown on three interlinked types of organism. Of course, Stableford has a degree in biology and lectured in sociology – both treated in the closed society of the book. As the Tribune review stated in a review, ‘Stableford… has one of the best lines around in exobiology.’

He misuses ‘he hissed’, one of my pet hates since it was pointed out to me decades ago by sci-fi author Ken Bulmer, but he’s not alone there among popular authors.

There’s a twist at the end. The series obviously survived through popularity, so I’m sticking with it. 

Pan books maintained the cover design for the six books, which must have gladdened the author's heart. At the time, all Pan sci-fi featured the same silver oblong box; this boldly identified the author and the genre, though I'm sure it created visual issues for the artists!