You guys really must tell me if my trips back into the memory lane of science fiction bore you to death. I’ll continue making them, and probably keep notes — because I’m old and have hit my head a bunch of times — but not inflict them on you.
For those who are not aware of what I’m doing, this is the initial post.
The short version is that I was introduced to science fiction via a friend of my much older brother’s. His friend had a real library and all the books of the only dedicated Portuguese science fiction imprint, the storied Argonauta. This imprint was so formative for me that when I established my own press I looked to see if I could name it Argonaut. Unfortunately at least at the time there was a gun/war oriented imprint by that name in Colorado, and I couldn’t use the name.
However I didn’t read the books in order, and might never have read all of them (again, having been hit on the head once too many times my memory is no longer eidetic so I don’t actually remember.) In Portugal the print runs were always too small and there were no reprints. This meant that finding the books after the initial distro depended on luck: someone else’s library, used bookstores or the spinner rack in some tiny tobacconist in a forgotten village. (Where I found a treasure trove of Heinlein’s in the 70s.)
Having found the listing online back in 2016, I decided I would read it from the beginning and blog it, and then…. Well, by the time I got around to it it was 2018, we were in severe financial distress, our older kid was getting married, I got ill and and and–
Now here we are. And now I don’t have any more kids to marry off, so the time has come to do this, unless you guys say I’m putting you to sleep, in which case I’ll still do it but not inflict it on you.
Today’s victim is Edmond Hamilton’s The City At World’s End. Next Week’s is Murray Leinster’s The Last Spaceship. (If you buy through these links I get a tiny commission. Just so you know.)
So, the City At The World’s End: first, what a lovely evocative name, isn’t it? It just gives you shivers, like science fiction was supposed to.
Second, I loved the writing style in this book. That probably sounds strange. But I absolutely loved it. It’s spare and tight and stark and beautiful. Reminded me a lot of Clifford Simak when he was on his game. In fact it reminded me so much that when I looked up Edmond Hamilton I was shocked that he was not a journalist. But no, he seems to be one of those rare science fiction writers — then or now — who was just a writer and didn’t have an arm’s long resume of weirdness to lean back on.
The book itself is weird. I enjoyed it a lot, but it could be argued and other reviewers have argued that it’s fractured, and seems not to cohalesce front to end.
I kind of understand them, because it’s a deeply philosophical book (also reminding me of Simak) but the question it explores is not the same it begins with. And yet… And yet, the book is almost a collection of the fears, the mind set of the mid-twentieth-century. It might at that have resonated more with me because I’m a cold war baby. Born too late for anyone to believe in duck and cover, I was told someday the hammer would fall out of a clear blue sky and then our choices were die or die. (Rest assured privately I’d decided I was not going to die, just to spite them. Which is, basically, the story of my life.) Honestly, it’s a wonder any of us, the kids from that time, grew up to be sane. Those of us who did, it’s like we blocked out the doom and gloom and just decided we’d do well and that was that.
Anyway, the book opens with our nightmare back then. John Kenniston, (Ken) works in a laboratory in a small town on the prairie (Middletown) where he does war-related research of some sort. The locals think it’s just an industrial laboratory. These locals include his girlfriend/fiance, Carol.
On a fine morning, Ken is on his way to work when a Super-Atomic-Bomb blows up above the town. This is told in an absolutely passionless way.
In the aftermath, people are shocked to find that they are alive, there is no radiation. But their entire town has been moved millions of years into the future to a time when the sun has become a red dwarf and the Earth is barren and frozen.
They find a domed city on the plains, an abandoned city of their future which allows them to survive. But they’re obsessed with the idea they’re the last of the humans of Earth. So, they blast out a call “Middletown calling”.
Eventually they are answered from the stars, where humans have gone and found other sentients too.
From that point on we are exposed to the overweening might of a Star Federation which decrees the stranded humans must leave the Earth, since it’s dying. They have autocratically moved other populations before. It is not well received by the people of Middletown, who’d rather die on their own terms than be ordered around by distant, faceless authority.
Enter a genius, who has some process–
I will be honest, I’d much prefer if this were a process someone from Middletown — preferably our hero — comes up with. Yes, it would be more implausible, but also would make for tighter and more satisfying plot. But this might be just me making a critique as another word slinger. It’s probably not valid, really, because “I would do it this way” doesn’t mean it’s how it should be done.
But there’s a trip to Vega, there’s a blond from the stars, Varn Allan, there’s weasely bureaucratic scheming, and the romance isn’t even forced, really, even if it’s truly embryonic as it ends, and the “Because you were warmongers” isn’t overloaded and no one really acts like we humans of the 20th (well, I was made then) are inferior. Not really.
I really liked the way the Americans of the plains of the US tell the Star Federation and their incontrovertible laws and commands to put it in their pipes and smoke it. I liked that the rebellion isn’t looked down on.
Because to me, ultimately, this was a collection of the knotty problems of the 20th century. I think the novel escaped the author, as his subconscious decided to work through some stuff. This is so much how my own best work happens, that I’m not going to throw stones.
The fear of the bomb collides with the then popular idea of world-government, only this time on a larger scale, with the peacenick idea that war is primitive, with a lot of ideas that festered then and that we now are fairly sure were always bokum.
Oh, yeah, and in the end, improbably, the individualists of the small town USA win which is just perfect.
I will add this was probably more bittersweet to me, because I have been in love with small town USA in the mid twentieth century long before I came to the US, having fallen hard for it through the stories of Clifford Simak.
And though the cities we lived in were larger than that, Colorado Springs when we moved in still retained the small town feel and the small town occasions.
This was particularly bittersweet as for most of my time in the US these cities have been dying. Now? I don’t know. It’s entirely possible the seismic (“world revolutionary”) changes of the last few years and the next few will change that.
I hope so. There is a dignity, a strength, a community that doesn’t crush the individualism characteristic of America, in these small towns. I’d love to see them flourish.
Anyway — Despite its possible flaws, or maybe because of them, I greatly enjoyed The City At World’s end, and will be looking for more for Edmond Hamilton. I’m sure I read him before, but weirdly, I didn’t remember his name at all.
Next week, onward to The Last Spaceship.
According To Hoyt 