Conference noted::sf

1182.0. "John Boyd" by VERGA::KLAES (Quo vadimus?) Thu Oct 21 1993 19:01

Article: 404
From: dani@netcom.com (Dani Zweig)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews
Subject: REPOST: Belated Reviews PS#14: John Boyd
Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services (408-241-9760 login: guest)
Date: 18 Oct 93 22:50:26 GMT
 
		Belated Reviews PS#14: John Boyd
 
John Boyd made an impressive debut in the late sixties, wrote a
succession of witty and sometimes brilliant books in the early
seventies, and then seems to have sputtered out.  Most of his science
fiction is lightly macabre. Boyd would take a premise -- sometimes
horrifying, sometimes merely whimsical -- and, without quite sinking
to parody or farce, have fun with it. The actual gravity of the
situation was rarely allowed to get in the way of his brilliant but
offbeat characters' preoccupations.  At its best, the result is clever
and entertaining.  At its less-than-best, there's something about
Boyd's writing which reminds one of a little boy peaking into the
girls' bathroom.  Among Boyd's books: 
 
"The Last Starship from Earth" (***+) is the impressive debut to which
I referred -- his first and best book.  Even it falls short of being
an "sf classic", but it's fun to read.  The story is prefaced by an
excerpt from Lincoln's Johannesburg Address -- the part where he
points out that "Acceleration of light quanta, while sweeping aside
old boundaries of physical science, issues grave warnings to the
social sciences."  So the reader has fair warning that the future
described in this book is an 'alternate future'.  It's a future in
which Haldane IV, being a fourth-generation mathematician, is
expected to marry another mathematician, and has no chance of being
allowed to marry the poet he loves.  Haldane comes up with a fairly
interesting, if unsentimental, solution to the problem -- computerize
the poetry department, forcing a merger of the poetry department into
math.  (It's not that unreasonable, in a world where the Pope is
already solid-state.)  Before he can pull it off he is caught (Helix,
his love, turns up pregnant), identified as a potential revolutionary,
and sentenced to the planet known as Hell.  Hell turns out to be
*full* of potential revolutionaries, and some of them have identified
a key point in history where a time-travelling mathematician might
bring down this Earth's society. 
 
	"What says the prosecution?" Malak asked.
 
	Flaxon turned to shield his signal from the bench and held
	up one finger on one hand and four on the other.  Haldane
	quickly deciphered the code to the prosecuting attorney: if
	he granted the indulgence, Franz saw the first race; if he
	didn't, Flaxon would stall the hearing into the fourth race.
 
	"Franz promptly intoned, "Indulgence agreed to."
 
"The Gorgon Festival" (***) is Boyd's skewed look at the sixties.  The
book begins with Alexander Ward's discovery of a youth serum.  It
appears that he has nothing to do but wait for the Nobel committee to
call -- until Ruth Gordon, an unintentionally-insulted friend, makes
off with a quantity of the serum, frames him for her murder, and
disappears to combine three of her own interests:  money, gerontology,
and population reduction.  Ward perforce gives himself the youth
treatment and gives chase -- a chase which ends at a "love festival"
in which Ward and Gordon both have an opportunity to put their
theories to a test. 
 
	"Ester were you grieving
	 When you hear my cycle leaving..."
	...
 
	Glamorgen was studying the script.
	"...Why don't we use 'Mary'?  That's an honest name....or
	 even Margaret."
 
	"Not Margaret," Ward interjected.
 
"The Organ Bank Farm" (***) begins a few years after a plague has
reduced the world's population from eleven billion to a more
manageable three.  Which may or may not have anything to do with the
recruitment of James Galloway, by his former Chemical-and-Biological-
Warfare superior, to a psychiatric research facility.  Psychiatric 
research really does go on there -- with few controls on the researchers' 
methods -- but it begins to appear that the less successful patients 
are doubling as spare parts.  Galloway fits right in.  This is one of 
Boyd's more macabre efforts. 
 
Honorable mentions go to "The IQ Merchants" (***), in which a small
research laboratory develops a drug that greatly increases the
intelligence of those subjects it doesn't kill, and to "Sex and the
High Command" (***-), in which a cabal of women, having developed a
drug which renders men superfluous, goes to work on the problem of
rendering them extinct.  (Do you begin to sense a pattern?) 
Dishonorable mentions go to "Andromeda Gun" (*), a bad western with a
science fictional element, and to "The Rakehells of Heaven" (*+), in
which a scoutship is sent out to look for worlds to conquer -- i.e.,
any worlds not meeting stringent technological, biological, and sexual
criteria. 
 
As I've indicated, I have mixed feelings about Boyd.  (He was more fun
to read when I was in my teens.)  If you haven't read any of his books, 
you could do worse than to give "The Last Starship From Earth" a try. 
 
%A  Boyd, John
%T  The Last Starship From Earth
%T  The Gorgon Festival
%T  The Organ Bank Farm
 
=============================================================================
 
The postscripts to Belated Reviews cover authors of earlier decades who
didn't fit into the original format -- whether because the author seemed
an inappropriate subject, or because I was unfamiliar with too much of the
author's work, or whatever -- or sometimes just isolated works of such
authors.  The emphasis will continue to be on guiding newer readers
towards books or authors worth trying out, rather than on discussing them
comprehensively or in depth.  I'll retain the rating scheme of ****
(recommended), *** (an old favorite that hasn't aged well), ** (a solid
lesser work), and * (nothing special). 
 
-----
Dani Zweig
dani@netcom.com
 
  The surface of the strange, forbidden planet was roughly textured and green,
  much like cottage cheese gets way after the date on the lid says it is all 
  right to buy it.--Scott Jones