Krishna
A very short summary : A weird book. And even that not in a good way.
As most science fictions go, this happens far into the future where all habitable planets of the solar system have been colonized by men.
Jaunte, a scientist, had accidentally set fire to himself while in a laboratory and found himself seventy feet removed from the fire – a feat of teleportation in a science lab, a first in history.
His amazed colleagues decided to study this phenomenon in a controlled experiment that could kill Jaunte if it went bad. They tried to drown him in a sealed unbreakable crystal tank and broke the handle so that he could never escape from inside the normal way. Jaunte, when he knew death was certain, teleported out of the tank again!
The story proper starts with Gunther Foyle floating in an airship between Uranus and Venus, with no food and no hopes of surviving.
A spaceship Vorga stops by briefly and while Foyle is dancing for joy at being rescued, it just simply floats away. Foyle now lives only for revenge and gets captured by Luddite planet (created on a giant rock in an asteroid with old rockets. He meets people who are tattooed all over with their names on their foreheads. They name him Nomad and adopt him to their customs but he just gets out of there to be ‘really’ rescued by police of a Saturn satellite. When he sees his face next, he sees that when he was unconscious, he has been tattooed all over with NOMAD in large letters tattooed on his forehead.
Preseign of Preseign, who seems to own the whole city, is intent on capturing Foyle.
The man who is employed to break him is a radioactive scientist (No, not kidding) called Dagenham. He tries all kinds of psychological tricks to find out what happened to the most expensive stash of the mineral called PyRe which he was carrying in his spaceship when he was wandering but he resists all sophisticated mind games they throw at him. They are very frustrated that they cannot break him.
Before we go on, a word on my impressions of the story. Yes, it is science fiction and yes, there are parts that justify the classification but this reads like an adventure story with jaunting and spacecraft thrown in for effect. The fact that even that acton story lacks the narrative power to keep you glued to the story is a pity. At times it feels like work and the two main characters Foyle and the girl he meets, Jisabella, seem to quarrel like children and Jisabella seems to slap him around for fun from time to time. None of this makes great sense.
It looks like Alfred Bester is going for a love hate relationship between them but fails to provide either experience in a way you can feel along.
He manages to break out of the most secure prison called xxx and leaves. He is taken to a doctor who removes all his tattoos – financed by Jisabel (‘Jiz’ for short, in the story; don’t laugh!) But they are followed and manage to barely escape in a spaceship and go back to the asteroid.
Then Dagenham casually admits to a fellow scientist that it was all part of Daeglish’s plan to let them escape – though it did not pan out exactly as he had planned – but now Foyle is being followed to the source of the hidden PyRe. Go figure.
OK, you think. Is this a revenge story? Yes and no. It just wanders. As Foyle is about to escape, he sees Jisabell being surrounded by enemy and he just dumps her in his obsession about revenge.
Leter he becomes super rich and is a clown and a magician. Everyone loves him and his Five Mile Circus. But it just does not last. He follows leads to revenge of the abandonment by Vorga but each has been ‘programmed’ to die the moment they are ready, under torture to reveal the secret. Now he has a new companion whom he abandons instantly when he meets the blind daughter of Preseign named Olivia in a party. So the spurned woman, Robin Wednesbury seeks to betray him.
And on and on. He kisses Olivia but seems to be spurned. She seems to be smitten, though. Is your head spinning yet? Add to that very juvenile dialogs and weird disjointed events, and you get a sense of what this book is about. Definitely not one of the classics or a yarn that makes you want to turn pages as fast as you can. Perhaps a bit yawn inducing, at best.
And the meaningless imagination in the name of science fiction! Why do none of the science fiction authors learn from the great Arthur C Clarke? Try this one for size : a drug gives you the characteristics of the animal you want. If you are a “python” you get superhuman strength to strangle your victim by wrapping yourself around them and crushing them! Wait, what?
And there is more. The most powerful telepath in Mars is an aged baby! Digest that for a minute. Then the evil person Foyle is after takes him to a sect which believes all sensation is evil and so they have severed the spinal chord voluntarily and live with no sight, sound, smell, touch etc. What nonsense!
They also talk totally at cross purposes. When Foyle finds that the person whom he is trying to take revenge on is the person he loves the most and there is a hugely pointless argument between the two. Just a completely pointless story that goes suddenly from place to place, rather like jaunting – and achieves nothing at all.
There is definitely a twist, which comes out when Foyle goes to see Sheffield who he thinks is an independent lawyer who will help him surrender to the authorities – he suddenly regrets how evil he has been (don’t ask why, I don’t know). And Sheffield is supposed to go straight to Preseign but he is not what he seems to be. He wants PyrE and more than that, he wants Foyle himself because Foyle, in his addled state right in the beginning when he was drifting aboard NOMAD did an incredible thing and Sheffield and his masters want to get the secret out of Foyle, even if they have to cut it out of him.
And the meaningless babble! When PyrE (The ‘E’ stands for Energy if you are still paying attention) that escaped in tiny experiments blew up the lab and even metal melted. In the last moment, as the molten copper was pouring around him, Foyle jaunts through space time continuum to ‘elsewhen’ not ‘elsewhere’.
And it gets weirder – he does it by changing ‘i’, the square root of -1 and an imaginary number into a ‘real number’. Wait what? What does it even mean? Who knows? It is absolute babble.
Also, you have so many questions. Why now? If he was experimenting with it before (because Sheffield found him and brought him back to Foyle’s own lab, then why did it not explode before? What the #$?! Is going on? Again, who knows?
Now Sheffield brought him to Foyle’s own lab because that is the ‘last place anyone would look for Foyle’. Fair enough. What happened to him? Conveniently killed in the explosions. The absurdity is at the very limits of tolerance.
And then the absurdity grown in cycles with a supposedly philosophical bent. Having ranted enough, I will spare you the details.
My personal feeling is that I could have safely skipped it and saved the hours invested in reading it, with no great loss.
1/10
— Krishna