"Man Made" (1960) by Albert R. Teichner, with Commentary

"Man Made"

© 1960

by

Albert R. Teichner  

If I listed every trouble I've accumulated in a mere two hundred odd years you might be inclined to laugh. When a tale of woe piles up too many details it looks ridiculous, unreal. So here, at the outset, I want to say my life has not been a tragic one—whose life is in this day of advanced techniques and universal good will?—but that, on the contrary, I have enjoyed this Earth and Solar System and all the abundant interests that it has offered me. If, lying here beneath these great lights, I could only be as sure of joy in the future....


My name is Treb Hawley. As far back as I can remember in my childhood, I was always interested in astronautics. From the age of ten I specialized in that subject, never for a moment regretting the choice. When I was still a child of twenty-four I took part in the Ninth Jupiter Expedition and after that there were many more. I had a precocious marriage at thirty and my boys, Robert and Neil, were born within a few years after Marla and I wed. It was fortunate that I fought for government permission that early; after the accident, despite my high rating, I would have been denied the rare privilege of parenthood.

That accident, the first one, took place when I was fifty. On Planet 12 of the Centauri System I was attacked by a six-limbed primate and was badly mangled on the left side before breaking loose to destroy it. Surgical Corps operated within an hour. Although they did an excellent prosthetic job after removing my left leg and arm, the substituted limbs had their limitations. While they permitted me to do all my jobs, phantom pain was a constant problem. There were new methods of prosthesis to eliminate this weird effect but these were only available back on the home planets.

I had to wait one year for this release. Meanwhile I had plenty of time to contemplate my mysterious affliction; the mystery of it was so great that I had little chance to notice how painful it actually was. There is enough strangeness in feeling with absolute certainty that a limb exists where actually there is nothing, but the strangeness is compounded when you look down and discover that not only is the leg gone but that another, mechanical one has taken its place. Dr. Erics, who had performed the operation, said this difficulty would ultimately prove a blessing but I often had my doubts.


He was right. Upon my return to Earth, the serious operations took place, those giving me plastic limbs that would become living parts of my organic structure. The same outward push of the brain and nervous system that had created phantom pain now made what was artificial seem real. Not only did my own blood course through the protoplastic but I could feel it doing so. The adjustment took less than a week and it was a complete one.

Fortunately the time was already past when protoplast patients were looked upon as something mildly freakish and to be pitied. Artificial noses, ears and limbs were becoming quite common. Whether there was some justification for the earlier reaction of pity, however, still remains to be seen.

My career resumed and I was accepted for the next Centauri Expedition without any questions being asked. As a matter of fact, Planning Center preferred people in my condition; protoplast limbs were more durable than the real—no, let us say the original—thing.

At home and at the beach no one bothered to notice my reconstructed arm and leg. They looked too natural for the idea to occur to people who did not know me. And Marla treated the whole thing like a big joke. "You're better than new," she used to tell me and the kids wanted to know when they could have second matter limbs of their own.

Life was good to me. The one-year periods away from home passed quickly and the five-year layoffs on Earth permitted me to devote myself to my hobbies, music and mathematics, without taking any time away from my family. Eventually, of course, my condition became an extremely common one. Who is there today among my readers who has all the parts with which he was born? If any such person past the childhood sixty years did, he would be the freak.

Then at ninety new difficulties arose. A new Centaurian subvirus attacked my chest marrow. As is still true in this infection, the virus proved to be ineradicable. My ribs weren't, though, and a protoplastic casing, exactly like the thoracic cavity, was substituted. It was discovered that the infection had spread to my right radius and ulna so here too a simple substitution was made. Of course, such a radical infection meant my circulatory system was contaminated and synthetically created living hemoplast was pumped in as soon as all the blood was removed.

This did attract attention. At the time the procedure was still new and some medical people warned it would not take. They were right only to this extent: the old cardioarterial organs occasionally hunted into defective feedback that required systole-diastole adjustments. Protoplastic circulatory substitutes corrected the deficiency and, just to avoid the slight possibility of further complications, the venous system was also replaced. Since the changeover there hasn't been the least trouble in that sector.

By then Marla had a perfect artificial ear and both of my sons had lost their congenitally diseased livers. There was nothing extraordinary about our family; only in my case were replacements somewhat above the world average.

I am proud to say that I was among the first thousand who made the pioneer voyage on hyperdrive to the star group beyond Centaurus. We returned in triumph with our fantastic but true tales of the organic planet Vita and the contemplative humanoids of Nirva who will consciousness into subjectively grasping the life and beauty of subatomic space. The knowledge we brought back assured that the fatal disease of ennui could never again attack man though they lived to Aleph Null.

On the second voyage Marla, Robert and Neil went with me. This took a little political wrangling but it was worth throwing my merit around to see them benefit from Nirvan discoveries even before the rest of humanity. Planetary Council agreed my services entitled me to this special consideration. Truly I could feel among the blessed.

Then I volunteered for the small expeditionary force to the 38th moon that the Nirvans themselves refused to visit. They tried to dissuade us but, being of a much younger species, we were less plagued by caution and went anyway. The mountains of this little moon are up to fifteen miles high, causing a state of instability that is chronic. Walking down those alabaster valleys was a more awesome experience than any galactic vista I have ever encountered. Our aesthetic sense proved stronger than common sense alertness and seven of us were buried in a rock slide.

Fortunately the great rocks formed a cavern above us. After two days we were rescued. The others had suffered such minor injuries that they were repaired before our craft landed on Nirva. I, though, unconscious and feverish, was in serious condition from skin abrasions and a comminuted cranium. Dr. Erics made the only possible prognosis. My skull had to be removed and a completely new protoskin also had to be supplied.


When I came out of coma Marla was standing at my bedside, smiling down at me. "Do you feel," she stumbled, "darling, I mean, do you feel the way you did?"

I was puzzled. "Sure, I'm Treb Hawley, I'm your husband, and I remember an awful fall of rocks but now I feel exactly the way I always have." I did not even realize that further substitutions had been made and did not believe them when they told me about it.

Now I was an object of curiosity. Upon our return to Earth the newsplastics hailed me as one of the most highly reintegrated individuals anywhere. In all the teeming domain of man there were only seven hundred who had gone through as many substitutions as I had. Where, they philosophised in passing, would a man cease to be a man in the sequence of substitutions?

Philosophy had never been an important preoccupation of mine. It was the only discipline no further ahead in its really essential questions than the Greeks of four thousand years ago. Oh certainly, there had been lots of technical improvements that were fascinating but these were peripheral points; the basic issues could not be experimentally tested so they had to remain on the level of accepted or rejected axioms. I wasn't about to devote much time to them when the whole fascinating field of subatomic mirror numbers was just opening up; certainly not because a few sensational journalists were toying with dead-end notions. For that matter the newsplastics weren't either and quickly went back to the regular mathematical reportage they do so well.

A few decades later, however, I wasn't so cocksure. The old Centaurian virus had reappeared in my brain of all places and I started to have a peculiar feeling about where the end point in all this reintegrating routine would lie. Not that the brain operation was a risk; thousands of people had already gone through it and the substitute organisms had made no fundamental change in them. It didn't in my case either. But now I was more second matter than any man in history.

"It's the old question of Achilles' Ship," Dr. Erics told me.

"Never heard of it," I said.

"It's a parable, Treb, about concretised forms of a continuum in its discrete aspects."

"I see the theoretical question but what has Achilles' Ship to do with it?"

He furrowed his protoplast brow that looked as youthful as it had a century ago. "This ship consisted of several hundred planks, most of them forming the hull, some in the form of benches and oars and a mainmast. It served its primitive purpose well but eventually sprang a leak. Some of the hull planks had to be replaced after which it was as good as new. Another year of hard use brought further hull troubles and some more planks were removed for new ones. Then the mast collapsed and a new one was put in. After that the ship was in such good shape that it could outrace most of those just off the ways."

I had an uneasy feeling about where this parable was leading us but my mind shied away from the essential point and Erics went relentlessly on. "As the years passed more repairs were made—first a new set of oars, then some more planks, still newer oars, still more planks. Eventually Achilles, an unthinking man of action who still tried to be aware of what happened to the instruments of action he needed most, realized that not one splinter of the original ship remained. Was this, then, a new ship? At first he was inclined to say yes. But this only evoked the further question: when had it become the new ship? Was it when the last plank was replaced or when half had been? His confidently stated answer collapsed. Yet how could he say it was the old ship when everything about it was a substitution? The question was too much for him. When he came to Athens he turned the problem over to the wise men of that city, refusing ever to think about it again."

My mind was now in turmoil. "What," I demanded, "what did they decide?"

Erics frowned. "Nothing. They could not answer the question. Every available answer was equally right and proved every other right answer wrong. As you know, philosophy does not progress in its essentials. It merely continues to clarify what the problems are."
"
I prefer to die next time!" I shouted. "I want to be a live human being or a dead one, not a machine."

"Maybe you won't be a machine. Nothing exactly like this has happened before to a living organic being."
I knew I had to be on my guard. What peculiar scheme was afoot? "You're trying to say something's still wrong with me. It isn't true. I feel as well as I ever have."

"Your 'feeling' is a dangerous illusion." His face was space-dust grey and I realized with horror that he meant all of it. "I had to tell you the parable and show the possible alternatives clearly. Treb, you're riddled with Centaurian Zed virus. Unless we remove almost all the remaining first growth organisms you will be dead within six months."

I didn't care any more whether he meant it or not; the idea was too ridiculous. Death is too rare and anachronistic a phenomenon today. "You're the one who needs treatment, Doctor. Overwork, too much study, one idea on the brain too much."

Resigned, he shrugged his shoulders. "All the first matter should be removed except for the spinal chord and the vertebrae. You'd still have that."

"Very kind of you," I said, and walked away, determined to have no more of his lectures now or in the future.
Marla wanted to know why I seemed so jumpy. "Seems is just the word," I snapped. "Never felt better in my life."

"That's just what I mean," she said. "Jumpy."

I let her have the last word but determined to be calmer from then on.

I was. And, as the weeks passed, the mask I put on sank deeper and deeper until that was the way I really felt. 'When you can face death serenely you will not have to face it.' That is what Sophilus, one of our leading philosophers, has said. I was living this truth. My work on infinite series went more smoothly and swiftly than any mathematical research I had engaged in before and my senses responded to living with greater zest than ever.

 
Five months later, while walking through Hydroponic Park, I felt the first awful tremor through my body. It was as if the earth beneath my feet were shaking, like that awful afternoon on Nirva's moon. But no rocks fell from this sky and other strollers moved across my vision as if the world of five minutes ago had not collapsed. The horror was only inside me.

I went to another doctor and asked for Stabilizine. "Perhaps you need a checkup," he suggested.

That was the last thing I wanted and I said so. He, too, shrugged resignedly and made out my prescription for the harmless drug. After that the hammer of pain did not strike again but often I could feel it brush by me. Each time my self-administered dosage had to be increased.

Eventually my equations stopped tying together in my mind. I would stare at the calculation sheets for hours at a time, asking myself why x should be here or integral operation there. The truth could not be avoided: my mind could no longer grasp truth.

I went, in grudging defeat, to Erics. "You have to win," I said and described my experiences.

"Some things are inevitable," he nodded solemnly, "and some are not. This may solve all your problems."

"Not all," I hoped aloud.

Marla went with me to hospital. She realized the danger I was in but put the best possible face on it. Her courage and support made all the difference and I went into the second matter chamber, ready for whatever fate awaited me.

Nothing happened. I came out of the chamber all protoplast except for the spinal zone. Yet I was still Treb Hawley. As the coma faded away, the last equation faded in, completely meaningful and soon followed by all the leads I could handle for the next few years.

Psychophysiology was in an uproar over my success. "Man can now be all protoplast," some said. Others as vehemently insisted some tiny but tangible chromosome-organ link to the past must remain. For my part it all sounded very academic; I was well again.

There was one unhappy moment when I applied for the new Centauri Expedition. "Too much of a risk," the Consulting Board told me. "Not that you aren't in perfect condition but there are unknown, untested factors and out in space they might—mind you, we just say might—prove disadvantageous." They all looked embarrassed and kept their eyes off me, preferring to concentrate on the medals lined up across the table that were to be my consolation prize.

I was disconsolate at first and would look longingly up at the stars which were now, perhaps forever, beyond my reach. But my sons were going out there and, for some inexplicable reason, that gave me great solace. Then, too, Earth was still young and beautiful and so was Marla. I still had the full capacity to enjoy these blessings.


Not for long. When we saw the boys off to Centauri I had a dizzy spell and only with the greatest effort hid my distress until the long train of ships had risen out of sight. Then I lay down in the Visitors Lounge from where I could not be moved for several hours. Great waves of pain flashed up and down my spine as if massive voltages were being released within me. The rest of my body stood up well to this assault but every few seconds I had the eerie sensation that I was back in my old body, a ghostly superimposition on the living protoplast, as the spinal chord projected its agony outward. Finally the pain subsided, succeeded by a blank numbness.

I was carried on gravito-cushions to Erics' office. "It had to be," he sighed. "I didn't have the heart to tell you after the last operation. The subvirus is attacking the internuncial neurones."

I knew what that meant but was past caring. "We're not immortal—not yet," I said. "I'm ready for the end."

"We can still try," he said.

I struggled to laugh but even gave up that little gesture. "Another operation? No, it can't make any difference."

"It might. We don't know."

"How could it?"

"Suppose, Treb, just suppose you do come out of it all right. You'd be the first man to be completely of second matter!"

"Erics, it can't work. Forget it."

"I won't forget it. You said we're not immortal but, Treb, your survival would be another step in that direction. The soul's immortality has to be taken on faith now—if it's taken at all. You could be the first scientific proof that the developing soul has the momentum to carry past the body in which it grows. At the least you would represent a step in the direction of soul freed from matter."

I could take no more of such talk. "Go ahead," I said, "do what you want. I give my consent."

The last few days have been the most hectic of my life. Dozens of great physicians, flown in from every sector of the Solar System, have examined me. "I'm leaving my body to science," I told one particularly prodding group, "but you're not giving it a chance to die!" It is easy for me to die now; when you have truly resigned yourself to death nothing in life can disturb you. I have at long last reached that completely stoical moment. That is why I have recorded this history with as much objectivity as continuing vitality can permit.


The operating theatre was crowded for my final performance and several Tri-D video cameras stared down at me. Pupils, lights and lenses, all came to a glittering focus on me. I slowly closed my eyes to blot out the hypnotic horror.

But when I opened them everything was still there as before. Then Erics' head, growing as he inspected my face more closely, covered everything else up.

"When are you going to begin?" I demanded.

"We have finished," he answered in awe that verged upon reverence. "You are the new Adam!"

There was a mounting burst of applause as the viewers learned what I had said. My mind was working more clearly than it had in a long time and, with all the wisdom of hindsight, I wondered how anyone could have ever doubted the outcome. We had known all along that every bit of atomic matter in each cell is replaced many times in one lifetime, electron by electron, without the cell's overall form disappearing. Now, by equally gradual steps, it had happened in the vaster arena of Newtonian living matter.

I sat up slowly, looking with renewed wonder on everything from the magnetic screw in the light above my head to the nail on the wriggling toe of my left foot. I was more than Achilles' Ship. I was a living being at whose center lay a still yet turning point that could neither be new nor old but only immortal.

 END.

===

COMMENTS:  This story makes the point that given a sufficiently-advanced prosthetic technology, humans could become immortal -- and would remain essentially human even if no part of their original body remained.  This notion was not entirely new -- Edgar Allan Poe (sarcastically) played with the idea in "The Man That Was Used Up" (1839), in which John A. B. C. Smith is made almost entirely of prosthetic parts after numerous war injuries (which is similar to the manner in which Treb Hawley becomes wholly mechanical, though of course 19th-century technology is not depicted as being capable of wholly-duplicating the functions of the missing parts.

Jean de la Hire (pen name of the Comte Adolphe d'Espie) wrote the Nyctalope series (starting in 1908), about a man who becomes a cyborg superhero and space adventurer.  In a similar vein is Edmond Hamilton's The Comet Doom (1928) and Neil R. Jones' Zoromes and Professor Jameson.(first story, "The Jameson Satellite," 1931, reprinted here).  The most famous Golden Age science-fictional cyborg has to be Deirdre from C. L. Moore's "No Woman Born" (1944).

What Teichner does here, of considerable conceptual value to the long science-fictional conversation on this issue, is to show how something like this could happen slowly and without originally deliberate intent, as part of a normal process of surgical therapy and life extension.  Treb Hawley does not mean to become entirely machine -- it just happens due to the accumulated injuries from his dangerous occupation as an interstellar explorer.  It is also obvious that Treb is still psychologically human -- his pattern has not changed, merely because of the change in its substrate.  This point is amplified by the fact that the story is told in the first person.

This is an important realization, and one which will be increasingly-important in real life as our prosthetic capabilities continue to develop.  Teichner deserves praise for grasping this, at a time when many writers were still imagining human cyborgs as some sort of monsters.

This is part of the social role of science fiction -- letting us view the strange rationally and unflinchingly, and thus providing us the ability to see ahead as we advance through Time into the Universe.

END.

Retro Review - John Brunner, The Jagged Orbit (1969)

Introduction

A decadent computerized future civilization in which social tensions have torn nations apart and only a computer-savvy reporter, a psychiatrist, a mystic seer and an artificial intelligence stand between the world and overwhelming disaster. 

Cyberpunk?  Too early, but obviously one of cyberpunk's inspirations.

This is the basic premise of The Jagged Orbit (1969) by John Brunner, a book which I had somehow managed to avoid reading until a few days ago.  I found the book fascinating, both in its prescience about particular possibilities and in the ways in which its social concerns were limited by the outlook of the late 1960's left.  It had both many of the strengths of the cyberpunk of the 1980's and 1990's -- and also many of its weaknesses.

Setting

In the year 2014 -- some 45 years in the future of 1969, when the book was written -- the West has become more racially divided than ever before, and governments are collapsing under the stress.  Inspired by South African apartheid, America, Britain (and by implication the rest of the Western world) officially classify people as "blank" (white) or "kneeblank" (non-white), and enforce this distinction at law.  The kneeblanks have actual, formally-recognized enclaves (mostly in the inner cities) in which the blank government's writ cannot run.

Strained both by this system of apartheid and by repeated failed foreign wars, national governments have greatly lost access to talent, loyalty and economic resources, and power is devolving into the hands of corporations and smaller government units.  Religion, faced with the superior success of the socialist states of the East, has also lost its power to persuade, and the people have turned to drugs, psychotherapists and superstitious cults -- some of which command actual psychic powers.

There are almost-regular race riots, which are often murderous and sometimes escalate to the rioters sniping at random passerby with laser rifles and the police levelling whole apartment buildings with attack helicopters.  An Evil Corporation run by the Mafia family of the Gottschalks (yes, that's what they are called in the book!) sells weapons to all sides to encourage tension and hence sell more weapons.  Unsurprisingly, most people want to stay indoors, and increasingly communicate only by videophone and computer terminals.

This immediately raises questions which are never answered in the book, and interestingly these tend to be the same questions which are gaping holes in most cyberpunk settings.  I'll quickly cover them here:

If the Communist countries have both been more economically and militarily successful, why does there seem to be no actual Communist expansion or any societal consequences of same?   If the Communist states have weakened just like the West, then how have they been more successful?  If they haven't weakened just like the West, then what's stopping them from gobbling up the whole rest of the world?  Why, it's almost as if Only the West Is Real, and the rest of the world merely backdrop.

Why couldn't the democracies respond to crisis by electing competent leaders and attracting competent people into the civil and military services?  Whatever possessed the nation-states to do anything as monumentally-stupid as ceding national territory in their heartlands to anti-government racial minorities?  How exactly do these minorities, occupying what are essentially lots and lots of isolated little ghettos, avoid being wiped out by angry majorities following the frequent race riots?

Given that the world is still divided into many Powers, why haven't some of the Powers tried racial equality and benefitted from having sane and integrated societies rather than the nightmare-world of Watts Riots In Perpetua that seems to describe the rest of the world?   Why do the nation-states tolerate the sale of heavy weapons to civilian militias and rebel groups by the Gottschalks?  As in much cyberpunk, national governments seem to be frozen by a strange inertia.

Here's a minor question, but one which annoyed me.  Supposedly, the global privatization of the TV networks have led to a situation in which almost all airtime is devoted to advertising.  There are regulations meant to prevent this, but the "UCC" (a global FCC) is weak and openly despised by the networks, who refuse to obey these regulations.

Ok, but ... how exactly do they force viewers to watch TV shows which are close to 100% advertising?  In-story, it's said that most of the viewers just de-rezz the picture and take lots of drugs to get high to the video melange, but are we seriously supposed to believe that no significant number of people want to watch actual television shows?  What, in Brunner's anarchic future, prevents at least one network, at least some of the time, from actually offering such shows, and hence gaining a greater audience share?

No explanation -- I guess corporations are just United in their Evil.

I mention this because it's actually important to the plot, and because a far more egregious example of cunning corporate stupidity is central to the plot, as it motivates the novel's main villain.

Plot

Matthew Flamen, the world's only remaining "spoolpigeon" (essentially a video blogger with a TV show on a major network)  wants to bring down the Big Bads whom he feels are ruining the world, but he can't even seem to stay on the air.  It seems as if his own network is sabotaging his transmissions, the better to put on more commercials instead of his show.  Matthew's wife Celia has been insane for months, and has been committed to Ginsberg (a mental asylum, and we all get the joke), which is run by the psychiatric guru Dr. Mogshack, whose therapy only seems to be making her worse. 

At Ginsberg, an honest psychiatrist, Dr. James Redeeth, is also growing suspicious of Dr. Mogshack's therapeutic techniques.  Dr. Redeeth faces two major questions in his life:  what to do with a mysterious kneeblank ex-soldier, Harry Madison, who appears to have been committed and remained committed for essentially absurd bureaucratic reasons; and how to convince his lover, Dr. Ariadne Spoelestra, who believes love to be unscientific and unworthy of a psychiatrist, to accept his love in the full, old-fashioned sense in which he means it.

Lyla Clay is a pythoness -- a woman who uses drugs, meditation and her own psychic power to read the people and events around her and utter prophecies.  When Lyla is invited to prophesize at Ginsberg, she realizes that Harry Madison is not only completely sane, but saner than anyone she's ever met.

Pedro Diablo is the propagandist for a neeblank enclave, but he is expelled from the enclave when it is discovered (ironically, by a white South African racialist expert) that he is insufficiently "melanist" by biological heritage to qualify for full kneeblank status.  Pedro Diablo winds up becoming Matthew Flamen's partner on his TV show.  Together, they discover that there is indeed something suspicious going on in high places.  They call in Xavier Conroy, essentially the Last Sane Intellectual, to help them.

Meanwhile, the revolutionary Morton Lenigo has been admitted into the United States under threat of neeblank rioting in Detroit -- source of most of America's military vehicles -- if they refuse to admit him.  Lenigo promptly sparks unusually-widespread and violent race rioting.  This is secretly the fault of Anthony Gottschalk, the up-and-coming new blood of the Gottschalk family, who has an Evil Plan to realize unprecedented arms sales from the ensuing social chaos.  He is also making something called "Robot" Gottschalk in the depths of his fortified bunker.

Lyla Clay's agent/boyfriend is murdered by the rioters, and the police arrest her for no obvious reason other than that they found her with the corpse.  Dr. Redeeth finally releases Harry Madison, who escorts Lyla back to her apartment.  Harry helps her evict a squatter who took over her apartment because the police left the door open (apparently in the Jaggedorbitverse, the police are there to make false arrests but refuse to evict trespassers, to the point where taking over someone's apartment and keeping it by brute force is a viable house-hunting strategy).  Harry, who is well over six feet tall and broadshoulders, displays great strength and fighting prowess, apparently taught him by the army.

Then Lyla goes walking with Harry looking for food, which is futile since no restaurant will serve them both due to being a mixed couple.  They are then kidnapped and taken to a high-rise apartment by the minions of Michaela Baxendale, a poetess who wants to perform some sort of weird drug-erotic ritual with them for inspiration.  The drugs trigger a strange state in Harry Madison, in which he fights off all eight of the kidnappers, injuring many of them, and killing one (who he threw out of a forty-fifth-story window).

In the course of the fight, Harry uttered a prophecy:

"Even at this relatively late stage it was possible for an unarmed man of sufficient determination to overcome considerable opposition.  It was not until after the Gottschalk coup of 2015 and the concomitant introduction of System C integrated weaponry that hand-to-hand combat became effectively pointless ... The equipment of individuals with armament adequate to level a medium-sized city nonetheless did not immediately put an end to such combats.  For a while, an attempt was made to codify human behavior on a basis analogous to the legandary Code of Chivalry; however, this represented such a radical reversal of current psychological trends that -"

Harry is arrested but promptly released, a fact which amazes everyone because he killed someone.  (Here's the strange thing:  the reason why they expect him to be imprisoned without bail is the killing, not his race.  But the person he killed was a kidnapper who was actively trying to prevent the escape of the victims, and this in a world where mass death in rioting is just shrugged off as unavoidable!  Apparently, in the Jaggedorbitverse, celebrities can kidnap people at will, rioters can kill them at will, but outside of a declared riot the right of self-defense is not honored.  This is odd because given the other details of the society, I wouldn't have been surprised to hear that kneeblanks are not allowed that right against blanks, as was the case in the real-world Old South).

Most of the main characters meet and discuss the situation.  Harry Madison reveals himself to be none other than Robert "Robot" Gottschalk, a cyborg built by Anthony Gottschalk and given the mission to maximize Gottschalk sales.  When the Gottschalks marketed their "System C" weapons system -- essentially, powered armor armed with plasma guns and micronuclear grenade launchers -- to civilians on all sides of the social divides, the fighting which resulted destroyed human civilization.  The Gottschalks survived and continued to supply arms to the increasingly-depleted population, but profits began to decline as the human race approached extinction.

Then, in 2113, Robert realized that it was the very intensity of the fighting caused by the arms sales which was destroying the Gottschalks' own market.  He (somehow) travelled back in time and incarnated himself in the bodies of various combatants throughout history, trying to find a solution to the paradox.  Because the process of his incarnation destroyed the previous personalities resident in the bodies of the combatants, he chose only those whose personalities had already been destroyed by madness.  

He finally incarnated himself in Harry Madison, but was committed to a mental hospital for years.  Now free and having assembled the necessary force of helpers, he is able to inform enough people to stop Anthony Gottschalk and turn the Gottschalks to a slower and less destructive program of arms sales, so that the release of System C in 2015 never happens.  Then Harry returns his superhuman intellect to the time stream, to ensure the survival of humanity in the future -- and hence the Gottschalk arms market.

Happy endings all around.  Matthew and Celia Flamen are reconciled, and Matthew Flamen and Pedro Diablo become media partners..  Lyla Clay reallizes that she can use her powers for more than just entertainment, and dedicates herself to trying to improve the world (though presumably not to complete non-violence, else the arms dealers won't have a market).  Dr. James Redeeth has rescued Dr. Ariadne Spoelestra from death near the novel's climax, and presumably she appreciates him more.  The Jaggedorbitverse goes on its messed-up way.

Theme

John Brunner's clear point is that only by coming together in peace rather than dividing ourselves in war can we know happiness.  He clumsily bookends this with his "Chapters" 1 and 2 and 99 and 100.

Chapter 1:  "I -"
Chapter 2:  "-solationism."
Chapter 99: "You-"
Chapter 100: "-nification."

And I do mean "clumsily."  Though the writing is often good, the moral is handled so anviliciously and with a disregard for basic logic that I'm amazed that anyone not on lots and lots of drugs could have been inspired by it.  I liked the book, but when I saw his bookends I groaned at the atrocious pun.

The Good

Brunner manages to depict a society with advanced computer and commuinications technologies, though like almost every pre-1976 science fiction writer he misses the significance of the personal computing revolution (while, oddly, assuming that every middle-class person has his own videophone/computer, the "comweb," which however may be a terminal to a central unit).  All major organizations and enterprises are utterly dependent upon computers, to the point where "comping" (predicting through analysis and simulation) a proposal is vital to its execution.

In particular, he correctly predicts the importance of blogging, or "spoolpigeoning," as he calls it.  Since that's what I'm doing right here, I have a soft spot for his prediction.  However, since he assumes that one can only make a blog with the resources of a major corporation, and that there is almost no audience for them outside of the audience of a major TV network, he misses just how widespread and influential blogging would actually become.  This failure of prediction is necessary for the plot of his novel.

He even predicts ....  well, I'll let Xavier Conroy take the mike:

"It gets into our families, goddamn it, it gets into our very love-making!  Christ, do you know I had a girl student last year who thought she was having an affair with a boy back home and all they'd ever done was sit in front of the comweb and masturbate at each other?  Twenty miles apart!  They'd never even kissed!"

Though this being Brunner's Crapsack World, this is seen as a bad thing.  It never seems to enter Conroy's head that the emotional relationship described is quite real, and twenty miles is hardly so great a distance that the couple could not eventually manage to meet in person and physically consumnate their romance.

Brunner, in short, managed to predict the Internet and cybersex, but chose to regard this as a distancing rather than unifying technology.

The Bad

Merchants of Death

The Big Bads (and, oddly, also the Big Goods) of The Jagged Orbit are the Gottschalks, arms merchants who encourage and perpetuate a state of slow civil war, the better to sell arms to private citizens.  The threatened end of the world comes from System C, essentially powered armor.

Now this is neither the first nor will it be the last time that arms makers get blamed for the evil that men do with arms.  This is an apparently-irresistible temptation.  States and their populations start a war, everyone marches off enthusiastically to glory.  The war proves less glorious than expected.  After the war, who is to blame?  Certainly not the Enthroned People or their Beloved and Highly-Respectable State!  No, it is the fault of the weapon makers!  Had they not pushed their terrible weapons at us, the world would have remained at peace, as it always had before such weapons were invented -- um, don't think about that.

What's particularly silly about the premise in this book, though, is that System C is so destablizing.  The book has already established that there are man-portable micro-nukes, capable of levelling whole blocks or neighborhoods; and lethal hand-held energy weapons, already on the civilian market.  There's no mention of powered armor, but it must be available if the Gottschalks are able to mass-produce it and market it at a mere $100,000 a unit including the weapons systems to civilians.

So, wouldn't the armed and police forces already have such weapons -- if not as good, then only marginally inferior?  And with those weapons, routine defensive technologies and tactics against them?  (System C incorporates both physical supermetal armor and energy shields, which must therefore be proven technologies).

In fact, wouldn't national militaries and security forces be the logical markets for such weapons?  (This is how the arms industry works in the real world:  it sells first to the military, and only as a technology becomes widespread to first the police and then civilian markets).

Sure, that would get in the way of sparking a multilateral global civil war, but then why would Anthony Gottschalk want to do that?    It never seems to occur to Anthony Gottschalk that, once the civil war has leveled everyone else's factories and farms, he won't be able to get goods and foods for his own purposes either; that once everyone else is dead, he'll have no one with whom to trade, and no market on which to spend his profits.  In the Jaggedorbitverse, it apparently takes a super-intelligent time-traveling cyborg warrior to realize that if you destroy the economy, selling anything to anyone becomes an activity of very little purpose and profit.

Deus ex Machina, Deus EST Robota

Harry Madison, while set up as a Man of Mystery from the beginning and with clues dropped about what he really is in at least two places in the novel, still comes off from my POV as a bit of an Ass Pull.  While there are reasons why an arms company might want to build a super-powered cyborg, there is neither any obvious reason nor method by which that cyborg would, a hundred years later, be able to time-travel and somehow possess the bodies of others, turning them into super-powered cyborgs.  I would call this comic-book logic, but comic books are a bit better thought out.

Notice that every other authority figure in the book is monumentally incompetent and irresponsible.  No nation-state, and certainly not the United States of America, seems to see anything problematical with an arms-making corporation starting what amounts to a self-defense cult and selling micro-nuclear weapons on the open market.  None of them seem to be aware that the Gottschalks are building System C, and none of them seem to try to do anything to try to block it in the timeline that led to Robert's first run up to 2113.

Only Robert can save us, and only because Anthony Gottschalk, in a monumental fit of stupidity, ignored the IBM representatives and programmed the robot to be fanatical about maximizing sales, to the point where Robert is able to extend this to a "Zeroth Law" ("I must protect humanity because only humanity can buy Gottschalk weapons").  This is really absurd, and I don't blame Robert the Robot Gottschalk for grasping the concept of "laughter" when he fully realized the purpose of his existence.

Bad Supplier Choices

Why does the entire USA rely on the neeblank enclave of Detroit to build all their motor vehicles, from trucks to their aircar "skimmers," and including their military vehicles?  Since society's been on the verge of a race war for years, with several actual outbreaks of fighting, why hasn't it occurred to anyone that this would leave America vulnerable to a major supply disruption?

Brunner seems to be thinking something along the lines of "The Detroit Automakers are Too Big To Fail, so they're still in business and still have the whole market share, and they're the Detroit Automakers so of course they operate from Detroit."

But jet back.  What exactly has prevented the Detroit Automakers from relocating and becoming the [somewhere-else] Automakers?  Presumably the neeblanks don't own the auto companies -- is there something about working on an auto assembly line that mystically belongs only to black DNA?

Is this the same as the real-world American energy dependence on Mideastern oil?  No, it's more as if all our energy, for all purposes, came from the Islamic Republic of Iran.  Do you think that we'd tolerate such a situation for long?

The Weird

Only Two Races?

Astute readers will have noticed the obvious problem with the "blank-kneeblank" racial system of the Jaggedorbitverse, which is that it segregates whites from blacks.  Ok, what happens to every other racial group on Earth?  Are they blanks?  Neeblanks?  The novel never says, despite the fact that the existence of Middle Easterners and Chinese are mentioned (the former classed as "blanks," the latter never classed as anything but apparently able to live in the blank areas).

What about mixed-race people?  A major plot point (Pedro Diablo's expulsion) hinges on this, yet they appear to be a very tiny group, easily overlooked by the kneeblanks, or incorporated into blank society.  I wonder if Brunner was aware that the vast majority of American blacks have significant white ancestry?  The "one-drop" rule might apply, except that (as Pedro Diablo found out) it doesn't.

This a major failure of vision.  If you're going to have a strictly racialist system in your storyverse, you have to work out the implications for the major ethnic groups.  Brunner's lapse makes it all too evident that his apartheid exists only as a moral foil for the main characters, and that he can't really see how it would work in practice (as South Africa found out, it doesn't really work very well in practice at all).

Magical Negroes

At one point it is mentioned that black people are literally "magical" in the sense that they have a greater affinity for psychic powers than do white people.  This doesn't really bother me so much, but I find it funny -- after all, there are plenty of stereotypes about other ethnic groups on which Brunner could have drawn, some of them even famous in science fiction.  Mystical Celts -- especially those named Kinnison or MacDougall -- I'm looking at you!

Naked and Slutty For Social Awareness

This risible speech comes from the 20-year-old Lyla Clay, who is explaining how she came from a good family but had to go down to the streets in order to activate her psychic talents:

"... I was sent to this very proper school, with uniforms and everything - incredibly Victorian -- and I never had the slightest suspicion that I might be a pythoness until I ran away from it.  I came to New York.  I hadn't any money.  I was sleeping on strangers' floors, I was practically in rags because my clothes were wearing out, and all of a sudden when I was wearing more dirt than cloth, then bang.  There was the talent.  It sort of scared me at first, but I adjusted.  And eventually, after I met Dan, I started to figure out how I could encourage it ...

"You're not a kid, Mr. Flamen.  How the hell do you think someone learns to identify with the maximum number of other people?  You do what they do.  You starve with them, you sleep with them, you eat and drink with them, you let them do to you what they want to do, and you don't pass judgement."

"Bang" indeed.

This has to be seen in the context of the late 1960's, when lots and lots of naive kids from middle- and upper-class backgrounds were doing exactly what Lyla did -- or pretending that they were doing what Lyla did -- in the belief that this was going to lead them to some sort of amazing revolution in personal consciousness.

It is symptomatic of the era of writing that at no point does Lyla explain, nor does the author nor any of the characters feels that there is any NEED for her to explain, just why this rich teenaged girl decided to run away from her family and school to live as an urban derelict, and stuck to this way of life when she presumably could have gotten out of it at any moment with a single phone call.

There's also a major setting anamoly here.  The rich kids who "dropped out" in the Late Sixties were dropping out into the relatively safe streets of America and Britain of their day.  I would imagine that life would be considerably worse for people trying to drop out into the streets of the Jaggedorbitverse.  If the police are willing to take out whole apartment buildings with airstrikes to get single snipers, killing dozens or hundreds of working people, how do they treat their HOMELESS?  How does the criminal underworld treat them?  Think the Brazilian slums are bad?  What would they be like with the addition of random airstrikes and occasional nuclear terrorism?  Do you really think young Lyla Clay would be likely to survive the experience?

Note also the character-copout here.  Lyla Clay in-story is shown with only two romantic attachments -- her previous manager Dan, who conveniently gets killed at around the time that he stops being so much fun; and Harry Madison, who turns out to be an asexual super-cyborg from an alternate future.  Lyla in this passage implies that it was when she started having sex with Dan that her powers activated.  She also implies (here and in another flashback) that she has had sex with lots of other people, but at no point is this specifically shown.

This is significant, because the exact same character-copout was being displayed toward the rich-kid hippies of the Late Sixties by the Left intellectuals, of whom John Brunner was one.  On the one hand, the hippies were supposed to be seen as sweet lovable Holy Fools who were leading us toward a consciousness revolution.  On the other hand, these were in fact teenage to early-twenties kids who were engaging in all sorts of risky behavior which was in practice destroying them, and which did destroy any and all of them who did not either leave the hippie culture by around 1975, or weren't able to make a lot of money off of said culture, or who simply got unlucky.

The notion that one will emerge from

You starve with them, you sleep with them, you eat and drink with them, you let them do to you what they want to do

with a sense of loving identification with "the masses" is pure Late Sixties fantasy.  Think about real homeless kids you've known.  Are they loving?  Non-judgemental?  The ones who live through it tend to be cynical and mistrustful, even paranoid, and with good reason.  They've experienced how people treat people who have no safe refuges.

Oh, and most of them have at one time or another had to resort to prostitution, whether of the explicit("Wanna date") or implicit ("I'd do anything for a place to sleep.") variety.  Those who haven't have usually had the benefit of at least one utterly-trustworthy friend (often a sibling, boyfriend or girlfriend) and have been very, very lucky -- most notably in not having been homeless for very long before they found a job and housing.

And they left home for reasons more serious than "just because."  Kids who run away "just because" run right back home after a few days or weeks of suffering.  If they don't, it's usually because they were running from something (most often an abusive parent).

The more I think about this, the more Brunner's romanticization of Lyla Clay and her situation really disgusts me.  The more so because it may have led some poor sap to attempt to duplicate the experience.

Conclusion

The Jagged Orbit is an interesting book with some good concepts and a variety of characters, but it ultimately fails because it is too tied to the precise and very unusual situation of the Late Sixties, in which the West was reeling before a campaign of Communist disinformation and the Boomers were just growing up and playing with the idea of revolution, at the same time that racial equality was being born.  Brunner tries to extend this era another 45 years, with the same cultural dynamics, and it just doesn't work.  The situation of the Late Sixties was unstable, and the Jaggedorbitverse was never a very likely outcome from it.

Of course, it was meant as a cautionary tale -- the point being "if this goes on" (computerization and racial segregation) it would lead to a badly-alienated society on the brink of a race war.  But Brunner failed to grasp that computerization, distributed among many individuals, would lead to less alienation  (and failed to grasp it despite including a clear example of social media in his novel!), and that the key victories against racial segregation had already been won at the time of writing.

He also, more seriously, failed to grasp the fundamental strength of the West.  Had the West faced serious racial separatism in the Late Sixties, we would have put it down.  Western governments were not so weak, and the value of "two army corps" is if anything greater than it used to be.

Ironically, since he mentions Islam in passing, he missed the real separatist danger that would menace Europe -- religious separatism.   And still I doubt that this separatism will lead to long-term independent enclaves, simply because sovereign States don't tolerate that sort of thing on theri own national territory.

The world is more robust than John Brunner imagines.  For which we may all be truly thankful. :)

Retro Movie Review - "Queen of Blood" (1966)

Introduction
I turned on this movie a few years ago, expecting it to be MST-able Grade B nonsense. I was very pleasantly surprised with what I found. Though the special effects are lame and its concept of space travel primitive by modern standards, it was actually an intelligent and well-thought-out movie -- one which deserved better treatment than it could get at the time (it was shot for only $56,000, and included stock footage from a totally-different Russian movie).

Characters

Basil Rathbone, as Dr. Farraday, a scientist, who acts as mission controller from Moonbase.
John Saxon, as Allen Brenner, sent on the second rescue mission who is in love with the character of
Judi Meredith, as Laura James, who is sent on the first rescue mission.

Plot

In the year 1990, the human race has numerous atomic rocketships and a moonbase, and is preparing to take the next step and go to Mars. Suddenly, the Earth receives radio messages from an alien civilization. The aliens are more advanced than Mankind and announce their intent to send an embassy.

The alien ship launches for our Solar System. For some reason, instead of landing on the Earth the ship crashes on Mars. The International Space Agency dispatches the rocketship Oceana to Mars with a crew of four to rescue the aliens. The Oceana encounters a solar storm and uses too much of her fuel energizing her shields, and lands on Mars uncertain of when she can return.

The Earth astronauts find the elien ship crewed only by a corpse. There is evidence that a lifeship has been launched from her. Oceania launches satellites and the alien lifeship is discovered on Phobos -- which Oceania does not have the fuel to reach.

A 2-person rocket is sent from Luna to land on Phobos and rescue the aliens. This small ship does not have enough fuel to return, and will have to be rescued later. On Phobos the crew find one unconscious alien, and (leaving 1 crew member on Phobos with enough supplies to await rescue) the other crewman (whose lover is on the Oceana) takes the ship's lander (a Dyna-Soar like craft) and lands on Mars with the alien survivor).

The alien survivor is female. She has green skin, an oddly-shaped pointed head (think of a beehive hairdo but with skull under the hair) and a sinister smile. When she regains consciousness, she does not talk, is willing to drink water but recoils from solid food, and appears terrified of needles. She does not like the only female on the Earth crew.

The Oceania blasts off from Mars for Earth. Along the way, they discover what the alien survivor eats. She is a vampire, and takes enough blood at a time to kill a human. She kills one crew member -- the one who was most sympathetic toward her -- before the three remaining astronauts realize what is happening. After feeding, she is glutted with blood and sleeps for days -- the condition in which they originally found her.

The crew have a dilemna. The alien is clearly a deadly threat, but their orders are to bring her back alive. So they tie her up and use up their stores of blood plasma feeding her. When given blood plasma, she is apparently uninterested in attacking humans.

But before they can reach Earth, the blood plasma runs out. The captain plans to use blood donations from the crew to keep the alien alive, but before they can do this, she uses her hypnotic power (as she had done before, unbeknownst to the astronauts) to immobilize him so that she could drain his blood.

The two survivors -- Allen Brenner and Laura James-- tie her up while she's in her glutted state and discuss what to do. Allen wants to kill her, orders or no orders. Laura persuades Allen to keep her alive.

Unfortunately, the alien has another mind-trick left, pyrokinesis. She can focus her will strongly enough to burn through her bonds. She attempts to kill Allen, but Laura springs furiously upon the alien and scratches her slightly in a fight. The alien screams, runs back into her cabin, and collapses.

They discover to their suprise that this minor wound has actually killed her. Apparently, her species is very vulnerable to any injury that breaks the skin.

Allen discovers something else, though. The ship is full of eggs the alien has laid and concealed. The astronauts contact Moonbase and Dr. Farraday orders them to preserve the eggs for study. Allen thinks this is a terrible idea but obeys the direct order. They land on Earth and step out into the sunlight, but Allen worries if the human race will not regret keeping the alien eggs alive.

Comments

Given the incredible cheesiness of the special effects (save for the spaceship exterior shots, which were stock footage from a 1959 Russian movie), my pleasant surprise was just how good were the basic science-fictional concepts, and their exploration. Let me go through them, point by point.

(1) - Slingshot Maneuver

I do not know whether or not this was a happy accident, but the movie strongly implies that Oceania gets to Mars by executing a gravitational slingshot around the Sun -- the likeliest reason why a ship headed for Mars from Luna would pass close to the Sun in the first place, which was necessary for the plot-important solar flare. If so, this was prescient, as interplanetary slingshot maneuvers were in 1966 purely theoretical.

(2) - Gravity

The movie suffers a fail on its depiction of gravity. The astronauts appear to be under a 1G field through the entire film. This is remotely possible if the ships are fusion torch vessels under continuous acceleration (but this would be very advanced tech for 1990, even from a 1966 POV), but of course in that case they wouldn't be doing gravitational slingshots. And of course, on Mars and even more so on Phobos there's no way they'd be in a 1G field (on Phobos, they'd be under microgravity).

OTOH, given the tiny budget there is no way that the film could have simulated zero-gee, since back then it would have had to have been done with complex wire arrangements and carefully-angled shots (the way it was done for 2001: A Space Odyssey two years later). So I'll forgive it this failing, because there's no way they could have avoided the situation.

(3) - Solar Storm

The movie calls it by some hokey term, but the Oceania encounters a solar flare on the way to Mars. This is quite plausible and is indeed one of the major problems facing modern astronautical engineers planning such a mission. Damage to equipment would be possible with an intense flare. Pain to the crew would not -- that degree of radiation sickness coming that quickly would be fatal -- but I'll cut it a pass for that because the health effects of solar radiation were not well understood at the time, not even by NASA.

(4) - Electromagnetic Shield

The Oceania's crew survives the solar storm by raising an electromagnetic shield which, unfortunately, greatly reduces their energy (which is why they have trouble on the return flight). This is absolutely plausible -- in fact, electromagnetic shielding is one of the measures being contemplated in the design of real interplanetary spacecraft. (The movie misses the simpler solution, which is a metal-and-water-shielded "storm shelter," but then I'm not sure that even NASA had by 1966 come up with this alternative).

(5) - Limited Fuel

Though used as a plot device, the movie is quite correct that even high-capability atomic rockets of the sort presented would be very much limited in terms of fuel supplies. It's quite plausible that a ship might have enough fuel to take off from Mars for Earth but not stop at Phobos.

(6) - Mysterious Aliens

Even though this film could have taken the easy way out and said "The aliens are evil and their goal is conquest," given that it features an alien vampire who murders three people on a ship sent to rescue her, it didn't. We get the very strong impression from the limited depiction of the aliens in their own culture (they are absolutely silent and move stiffly) and from the behavior of the "Queen of Blood" that they are eusocial telepaths, probably with a reproductive caste, and that the alien survivor is a literal "queen" in the sense of a eusocial insect colony -- in other words, she is of their reproductive caste.

We never find out what the aliens originally wanted, however, and there is no proof that their original intentions were hostile. Something went wrong (we never find out what) which led to the aliens crashing on Mars instead of landing on Earth. On Earth, there would have been an effectively infinite supply of animal blood from the POV of a small alien group (probably no more than one drone and one queen), with absolutely no need to attack humans. It is fairly likely that the aliens ran out of supplies, and that the queen slew the drone, which is why they find his corpse on Mars.

An obvious interpretation of the QOB's actions is that she interpreted the situation on Oceania as a colony similar to her own eusocial structure. There was one Earth female and three Earth males -- what else would she assume but that the female was a queen or potential queen, and the males merely her servants / reserve food supply? She may have never realized that she was doing anything more aggressive or hostile than sneaking food from the icebox would be in our culture. Note that she never attacks or even threatens Laura, even though she obviously dislikes her.

In the end, you are left wondering. Was this all a tragic mutual misunderstanding? Are the aliens really hostile? Will saving the eggs turn out to be a boon or a curse for Mankind?

And that unanswered question, which so easily could have been given a glib answer in one or the other direction, makes this a better movie.



Conclusion

This movie is well worth seeing. Get past the crappy special effects, and enjoy a film which is not merely horror with science-fictional trappings, but true science fiction.