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 - Halcyon Drift

Brian Stableford’s series of six books concerning star-pilot Grainger and his spaceship The Hooded Swan begins with this novel, Halcyon Drift (1972); they’re regarded as classics by the science fiction fraternity. Stableford has written in excess of seventy novels; yes, he’s prolific. I met his mother when she briefly attended a few of my writers’ circle meetings here in Spain. A brief review of his book Young Blood appears here

Stableford is a good writer who presents effective visuals with his prose: ‘Brown clouds move sullenly across the sulky face of the sky, washing the black mountain faces with hazy tears.’ (p7) Other examples from page 128: ‘Alien night is always a bad place to be.’ And ‘The horizon glowed white, surrounding us like a vast silvery ring set with a jewel-like flare at the point where the sun had vanished.’

The story begins with a prologue in the present tense, outlining the fact that Grainger has crashed his spaceship Javelin on an uninhabited rock, killing his partner, Lapthorn. So he’s alone.  The inhospitable place is plagued by winds, always blowing down the grave marker. Through his reminiscences, we get an insight into Grainger’s nomadic life with Lapthorn, trading and dealing from planet to planet, encountering fascinating and intriguing life-forms. Grainger is cynical: ‘A lot of spacemen are like me. Cold, emotionless men who don’t inherit any part of the worlds and the people that they see.’ (p13)  He reminisces about his friend Alachakh, a Khormon trader, whose life he saved once. That’s all he’s got, stranded on this rock for two years, waiting to die.

And then the wind starts to talk to him in his head. He isn’t going nuts: it’s an alien mind-parasite. It’s quite a lengthy prologue, ending with him being rescued by a passing ramrod ship, the Ella Marita. He gets away but he’s stuck with the mind-parasite – for life.

The rest of the tale is told in the usual past historic and it's inventive, in description and the alien life-forms, and in the leaps to a possible future: ‘I dialled through to the Illinois cybernet… a credit card, punched and banded, oozed out of a slot… I tapped out a query on the keyboard, asking how much the card was carrying…’ Bearing in mind this was written in 1972 or earlier: not bad. (I didn’t get my first credit card until 1987, when I was 39!)

There’s also irony and humour, to be enjoyed. Here’s the mind-parasite speaking in Grainger’s head: ‘I’m an expert on you, Grainger, and I’m learning more all the time. I’m right inside you. I’m with you every decision you take. I’m riding your every thought, and feeling everything you feel. This isn’t the most comfortable of minds to live in, my friend. I would appreciate it greatly if you could get it sorted out a little. Come to terms with yourself and the universe.’ (p34)

The nameless mind-parasite isn’t the only great invention in this story. Meet The Hooded Swan, a ship that can fly ‘like a bird. She’s jointed and musculated. She has the most complete and most sensitive nerve-net any mechanical device has ever had.…’ In fact, Grainger the pilot is connected to the nerve-system of the spaceship and feels what the craft feels; his body becomes part of the body of the ship. Grainger literally flies by feel.

One of the several inventions is the quite tragic Khormon race. When these people have filled their memories – nothing is ever forgotten – they have reached their end. As Alachakh says, ‘I wish I could forget a little and create some space, but I cannot. I am stuck in the day before yesterday. There can be no question of a long tomorrow, and I doubt the latter hours of today. Soon even the minute swill become painful to squeeze away into tight corners…” (p89) Another invention is the metamorphic life system Grainger encounters in his quest: ‘Our presence and progress would cause the plants which we touched unbearable pain.’ And: ‘… the feel of the furtive, glutinous chaos through which we moved. Myriads of tiny creatures were accidentally transferred from the plants to me, and I hoped none of them was adapted for chewing tough plastic.’ (p134)  

Grainger is hired to pilot The Hooded Swan and enter the Halcyon Drift in search of a spaceship that was lost in the drift eighty years ago; a distress signal has bleeped since then but due to the awesome peculiarities of the drift it hasn’t been located yet: ‘Drift space casually disobeys principles which are called laws in saner corners of the galaxy.’ (p97)

Perhaps the ending was a little rushed, but he was writing to fit into a specific format. How Grainger resolves his quest is intriguing – and moral, to boot. Needless to say, he survives to fly The Hooded Swan in another novel, and I’ll be reading all of the series.