Chrysalis Of Death

Chrysalis Of Death, by Eleanor Robinson

May, 1976  Pocket Books

I’d never heard of this obscure paperback original until I recently came across it on the clearance rack at a local Half Price Books. One dollar, so I figured what the hell. I’ve been watching a lot of ‘70s drive-in movies lately, and the setup for this one seemed really in-line with those, to the extent that I wondered why someone like Roger Corman didn’t option the rights. In a nutshell, Chrysalis Of Death concerns a contagion in the Arizona desert that turns people into Neanderthals. 

But then, the uncredited cover art blows this surprise. Author Eleanor Robinson doesn’t outright state “Neanderthal” or “Cro-Magnon” in the brief, 175-page course of the novel; instead, she goes for a “cinematic” sort of approach, one that does imbue the story with tension and suspense, but one that also robs it of concrete details that allow the reader to understand what is happening. As it turns out, big stuff happens in the course of the novel – like main characters dying – but the reader doesn’t even realize something “big” has happened until later on, given the way Robinson has written the book. 

Also, she jams way too many characters into the novel, but then my impression was she was catering to the disaster obsession of the day. But the effect is, the reader doesn’t really get a grip on who is who, other than a few characters who sort of rise to the top in prominence. Otherwise, the characters loglined on the back cover and first-page preview aren’t given much room to breathe…like the drunkard best-selling novelist, or the Joe Namath-esque football player. Robinson tries to cater to the “large cast of characters” aesthetic of the disaster story, but the effect is limited given how short the novel is. Again, this is what gives the impression that it’s a tie-in for a drive-in movie that never was…the more lurid version of The Poseidon Adventure or something. 

The only problem is…it’s not very lurid! I’ll note the sad fact here that Chrysalis Of Death has zero in the way of sex, and the majority of the violence occurs off-page. Rather it is more of a long-simmer potboiler sort of affair, most reminscent of the contemporary Snowman (which also came off like the novelization of a drive-in movie that never was), with the caveat that Chrysalis Of Death doesn’t even feature a big action finale; the cover art not only blows the surprise of the storyline, but also misleads with the explosions and helicopters circling over the Cro-Magnons. Actually that does all sort of happen, but again it’s a little lost on the reader given the “cinematic” way Eleanor Robinson writes the book. 

By “cinematic” I mean the way Robinson will cut away from action; I did appreciate how she stayed, for the most part, locked in the perspectives of her various characters. This means that the narrative doesn’t jump willy-nilly from the perspective of one character to another, without any line breaks or chapter breaks to alert the reader that such a change is occuring. But this also means that Robinson has a tendency to have something occuring from the perspective of one character, then there will be a break to another character…and we’ll only learn in passing what happened to that previous character, due to the obsfucated way Robinson handles the action scenes. Meaning, characters will die, and we don’t even know it until it’s relayed in dialog later in the book. And these are major characters, too. 

The action begins with a young anthropologist or somesuch named Jeff blasting rocks in the Arizona desert, inadvertently releasing an ancient form of life that will soon infect the residents of nearby small town Lazy Creek  The infection is mostly relayed through the plight of several people staying at an out-of-the-way hotel in Lazy Creek, owned by a new arrival to the area named Henry. How the place stays in business, what with its being off the main road and in the middle of the desert, is something Henry is struggling with, but meanwhile he does have some people staying with him, and Robinson introduces them all without much fanfare, expecting us readers to be able to keep track of all of them. 

The way the contagion works is there are these saclike egg things in the desert, freed from their millennia in the rocks by Jeff’s dynamite, and when torn open little fuzzy caterpillars come out, ones that stink horribly. If you touch them it hurts, and soon your hand will swell, and next thing you know you’ll be puking your guts out for an entire day, in addition to passing out a bunch. Slowly your forehead becomes larger and larger and you become more Neanderthal, with heightened senses and only a modicum of intelligence. Again, Robinson never outright states all of this, just showing the infection first through one particular character as it happens to him, with his of course not even knowing he’s become infected with some super-ancient virus. 

As mentioned Robinson really stuffs the pages with a lot of characters: Henry the owner of the place and his wife; Jeff the scientist (whose wife back home is about to give birth); a young woman who is babysitting for another couple who aren’t even there; a famous novelist gone to seed; a pair of Hispanics who pretend to be brother and sister but are really engaged to be married; an old socialite lady and her minder; a drug courier who is carrying a suitcase filled with money; a sheriff who harbors designs on said suitcase; even if he has to kill to get it; a football player and his entourage, including among them yet another wealthy socialite who has a super-annoying tendency to say “big heap” all the time; and that’s just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. I mean all these characters and more – including I just remembered the people who own and work in the local grocery store – all in the brief span of 175 pages. There are even subplots within the subplots, like the football player’s wife who is miserable (eventually we’ll learn it’s because the famous football player is in the closet, though this is “revealed” so hurriedly it barely registers), or even the friend of the football player’s wife who has secretly been stealing jewelry from her “friend” for the past several years. 

Robinson really has it on the long-simmer, with the book occuring over just a few days, so that the horror of the virus becomes slowly apparent both to the characters and to the reader. Gradually we have yet another new character added to the mix: a somewhat-arrogant young doctor who is flown in and who immediately puts Lazy River in a quarantine. Yes, the parallels to COVID are interesting here, particularly given how the Lazy River people begrudgingly give in to the whims of the government during the quarantine…until slowly coming to their senses and realizing the government people have no idea what the hell they are doing. But even when they do rebel, the impact of their action is lost in the way the narrative is handled. For example, a group of the hotel guests plot to hijack a government helicopter that is coming in with supplies. When the attempted hijacking transpires, however, Robinson doesn’t relay it from the perspective of the hijackers or even the people on the helicopter – she relays it from the perspective of someone infected by the virus, whose intelligence has been so ruined that he doesn’t even fully comprehend what he is seeing. 

It's things like this that ultimately sink Chrysalis Of Death, just one wrong narratorial decision after another. There is a lot of setup and little payoff, particularly for the many subplots. And also, some of the subplots are kind of thrust on us with no warning. Like when the sheriff starts searching for the drug courier, and thinks to himself that he’ll deputize the young anthropologist – so it won’t look as suspicious when the young anthropologist turns up dead. This is almost shocking in how casually it’s relayed to us readers, given that prior to this there was no warning our sheriff character would even be a villain. But no, we will gradually learn his own subplot concerns his determination to get the suitcase of money the drug courier might have hidden in Lazy Creek, and he’ll kill anyone who gets in his way. But this subplot too is totally lost in the narrative, with no payoff. Worse yet is the Spanish guy whose wife and child are killed by someone infected by the virus, and who swears revenge – and then disappears from the novel. 

Robinson does well capture the growing horror of the situation, and also she’s good at planting clues that indicate a person might ultimately become infected by the virus, even though they’re acting fine. But it seems that she loses control of her narrative as it nears its conclusion, with a lot of characters dying off-page, and the drama of it totally unexploited. She earns points though for delivering a ‘70s-mandatory bummer ending, which again aligns with the drive-in movie that’s playing in your mind. 

Overall, Chrysalis Of Death was interesting to find on the clearance rack, but not a book I’d recommend. It’s more sluggish than its short page length would imply, and it was a lot of work to keep track of the various characters. Also, the book really could’ve benefitted from some naughty stuff. The editors at Pocket Books really try to make it seem like the book has naughty stuff in it, though; this is one of those instances where you wish the book was more like the back-cover copy would indicate. As for Eleanor Robinson, it appears that she only published one more novel, The Silverleaf Syndrome, another “biological horror” affair that was published in 1980 by Tower Books.  It was also published that same year by Leisure Books as The Freak.

While researching Eleanor Robinson, I came across this 2009 article that tells how Robinson, who apparently passed away some time ago (in 1985, if my math is correct from the dates given in the article), inspired her granddaughter from beyond the grave.

End Of The Line (The Demu Trilogy #3)

The Demu Trilogy, by F.M. Busby

March, 1980  Pocket Books

The Demu Trilogy wraps up with this final installment, which was only published in this Pocket Books anthology. The book was published seven years after Cage A Man, and whereas originally I wondered if F.M. Busby wrote this trilogy all at once, now I’d say it’s pretty clear that he did not. Indeed, it would seem that he struggled greatly with making this a trilogy in the first place. 

As it turns out, The Proud Enemy would have made for a fine ending for the story that began in Cage A Man. And indeed in many ways it was the ending of the trilogy, as End Of The Line has jack shit to do with the previous two books. Basically it’s a one-off that Busby has shoehorned into the Demu storyline. Except for the fact that there are no Demu in the book…except for the final few pages. Otherwise the only recurring character here is hero Barton, who has become more gabby and emotional as the series has gone on. 

I mean, Barton is the only recurring main character. There’s still Lumila, the alien gal Barton fell in love with back in Cage A Man. She came on strong (so to speak) in that first volume, throwing herself on Barton moments after meeting him in their communal Demu cell…then she disappeared from the narrative, and when she returned she had been Demu-ized. Then the rest of the book was focused on making her look human again, with a nigh-endless subplot on her plastic surgery. 

This is stuff that only continued in The Proud Enemy, which went into another nigh-endless subplot about Limila getting yet more plastic surgery, this time on her homeworld Tilara, to make her look like her true self – ie, the low-hanging breasts (much is made of these, btw), the double rows of teeth, the extra fingers and toes. Like I said before, she sounds real lovely. Well anyway, now that Limila’s plastic surgery has finally been completed in this final volume…Busby pretty much just brushes her under the narrative carpet! She exits in End Of The Line mostly to just be a sounding board for Barton, or to give him advice he doesn’t heed. 

But then, F.M. Busby doesn’t heed his own advice as author. So the novel opens moments after The Proud Enemy; Barton is lifting off the Demu homeworld in his spaceship, having successfully ended the war with the Demu without really even firing a shot – instead, it was more of a blackmail thing, in that he shamed the Demu with the revelation that all their technology was taken from an earlier, more advanced race. So Barton is flying off, when he’s hailed by a new group of ships from the Earth, and they’re offering to escort him. Only, thanks to a call from a surprise return character who was last seen in Cage A Man, Barton learns that these new Earth ships are really out to get him, and Barton’s in trouble with the military elite. 

It's all backlash from yet another subplot in the previous book: Barton as we’ll recall had a fight with a lowlife scum named ap Fenn, who later met a grisly fate at the hands (or should I say claws) of an incensed Tilaran woman. Now ap Fenn’s dad, an admiral or somesuch in the space force, is here to interrogate Barton and hold him accountable for his kid’s fate. Plus ap Fenn and crew are all in nifty new spaceships that are much faster and more powerful than Barton’s; Busby is never too clear how much time has passed back on Earth since Barton and crew left on their intersteller voyage at the end of Cage A Man. 

Here's where Barton doesn’t heed Limila’s advice – which would’ve made for a better novel than what we get. Limila, who has just revealed she’s 80 in Earth years and has a grown child who lives with her own family on some other planet, says that they have just enough fuel on their ship to ditch ap Fenn and get to her daughter’s planet, where they can hide. But Barton doesn’t listen to her. Oh and I forgot to mention, but we learn here too that Limila is pregnant. Tilaran biology allows her to only become pregnant when she wants to, and since she wants a kid with Barton she is – but this is another subplot that is abruptly canceled, somewhat suprisingly. More is made out of Limila’s age, which is thanks to Tilaran biological technology, and Barton gets his own “surgery” subplot in which this technology is applied to him so he too can become immortal. 

There follows some goofy stuff where Barton tries to get the better of app Fenn…by hosting the first-ever Tilaran beauty pageant. Folks I kid you not. But in the melee that follows the hoodwinkery there is some as mentioned surprising losses, but also it’s all rendered moot because it turns out all Barton needs is the deus ex machina that is the Demu “Sleep Gun,” which has all kinds of uses. Speaking of the Demu, they aren’t even in End Of The Line, at least not until the very end. So anyway, Barton’s back on his ship with Limila and crew, sort of wondering what to do…and then Busby spends thirty pages on the first-person account of some character on the Earth spacefleet, totally new to the series, talking about some troubles he’s having on his ship. 

Here's where one gets the impression End Of The Line was a story idea forced into the Demu Trilogy. Barton flies over to this new ship, where we learn of this whole new alien race, the Others, who are impregnating the human Earth women on this ship…by having them drink a glass of water with some concoction in it. The goal is for the women to breed a new race of Others, and these are highly-gifted super-smart kids with extra arms and legs and whatnot. The strangest thing here is the complacency the victim females have with becoming pregnant…even a few times over. So now the plot’s all about Barton trying to one up the highly advanced Others…actually he doesn’t so much do that as he tries to make it so that everyone is happy. 

At this point, I was ready to chuck the book. I mean it had nothing to do with anything that came before. At least Busby somewhat wraps up the actual storyline in the final pages, with a brief return of Demu boss Hishtoo and Hishtoo’s daughter Eeshta. The trilogy itself wraps up with Barton and Limila ready to search the stars together…and maybe have a kid…who knows. I still prefer my theory, presented in the previous review, that all this is just a “hallucination” of Barton, still trapped in his Demu cage. 

F.M. Busby was nothing if not prolific, so I’m sure I’ll get around to another of his sci-fi novels one of these days. But I would not give The Demu Trilogy much of a recommendation at all.

Digger #1: Smoked Out

Digger #1: Smoked Out, by Warren Murphy

February, 1982  Pocket Books

The prolific Warren Murphy wrote this private eye series for Pocket Books, and ultimately it ran for four volumes, after which Murphy jumped ship to another publisher and changed the series (and protagonist’s) name to Trace. But for this initial series, Pocket followed the same angle as Popular Library did a decade earlier when they packaged the similarly action-free P.I. series Hardy as an “action series.” 

Not to imply that Digger is as bland and boring as Hardy. I mean, at least Julian “Digger” Burroughs does more than watch TV and eat in Smoked Out. He finds time to hook up with a couple women and even get in a fistfight. But otherwise the action is about on the level of The Rockford Files or some other private eye TV show of the era. And if I’m not mistaken, Trace did end up as a TV show, or at least a TV pilot. Anyway, Digger doesn’t even carry a gun; his weapon of choice is a tape recorder, “the size of a pack of cigarettes,” which he usually straps to his chest to surreptitiously record the witnesses he interviews. 

Like the earlier Killinger, Digger is a claims investigator, but unlike Killinger he isn’t a “ruggedly virile” type who lives on a Chinese junk with all the bachelor pad trimmings. Digger is in more of your typical sleazebag private eye mold, and operates out of Las Vegas, where he shares an apartment with a hotstuff Japanese babe named Koko who happens to be a high-class hooker. The Digger-Koko relationship is by far the best thing about Smoked Out, and in truth is a little reminiscent of the Remo-Chiun relationship in The Destroyer, if only for the acidic barbs which are traded back and forth. There’s also the element that the two love each other but cannot admit it (to each other or to themselves), just like Remo and Chiun. 

But, obviously, it’s a romantic love in Digger, instead of the father-son love of The Destroyer. Otherwise as you’ll note, it’s the same setup: smart-ass white protagonist and calm-natured Asian, with all the bickering and bantering Murphy does so well. In fact he does it too well, as ultimately I found that my problem with Smoked Out was the same as with the other Destroyer novels I’ve read: it was all just too glib for its own good. I kept having bad flashbacks to Chevy Chase in Fletch (which I only saw once, in the theater when it came out, and I was just a kid), as it was quite hard to take Digger as a serious character as he spent the entirety of the novel making one glib comment after another. 

As with The Destroyer, there was nothing believable about the character, at least nothing that made his drive to solve the case believable. Digger, like Remo, seems to exist in his own self-impressed world, mocking and laughing at everything, thus it is hard to understand why he even cares about cracking insurance cases. Same as when Remo is suddenly all resolved to stop some bad guy. Why does he even care? What drives him? This must be a recurring gimmick of Warren Murphy protagonists. They’re such glib smart-asses that I personally can’t believe in them when they’re suddenly retconned into determined heroes due to the demands of the plot. 

In other words, if things aren’t serious for the protagonist, how are they supposed to be serious for the reader? But then, we aren’t talking about globe-threatening plots in this series: Digger’s first case has him investigating the death of a wealthy doctor’s wife in Los Angeles. This would be Mrs. Jessalyn Welles, who’s car ran over a cliff while her doctor husband was a few hundred miles away at a conference. Digger gets the job from his company and heads to L.A., where we learn posthaste the method of his investigation: he goes around to a seemingly-endless parade of people who knew Mrs. Welles, introduces himself with a different fake name to each, and then runs his mouth endlessly in the hopes of getting info from them. 

It gets to be confusing – and not just to the reader. Digger gives one new name after another, seemingly coming up with the names on the fly, as well as what his job is. And of course trading glib dialog with the person he’s trying to get info from. Pretty soon he gets confused which name he gave which person. It’s all funny at first but quickly becomes grating. I guess I just have to accept the fact that I’m not a big fan of Warren Murphy’s novels. And the dialog just gets to be grating. He finds a dimwitted babe who is into vitamin pills and trades lots of glib dialog with her about them. Or he concocts the novel scheme of going around and telling people he’s working on a remembrance card for Mrs. Welles and wants input from those who knew her. 

Speaking of babes, Digger manages to get laid – not that he seems to enjoy it much. Another curious Remo parallel. Anyway, it’s a Scandanavian gal who casually admits she’s had an affair with Dr. Welles, and soon enough Digger’s in bed with her. And thinking of Koko the whole time. That said, Murphy gets fairly explicit here, more so than any of the Destroyer novels I’ve read. But still, Digger doesn’t seem to enjoy it. For one, Murphy’s sarcastic vibe is so perpetuating that any cheap thrills the reader might want are denied; the gal in question is treated so derisively and dismissively by Digger that one would be hard-pressed to understand that she is in fact very attractive and incredibly built. Digger could just as easily be screwing a cardboard cutout, is what I’m trying to say. Also, more focus is placed on Digger’s certainty that the gal is faking it, with his running commentary on how he’d rate her performance. It’s only when Digger himself finally orgasms that he is “Surprised once again at how good it felt.” This is the sort of robotic shit that plagued The Destroyer. 

One difference between Remo and Digger is that Digger isn’t a “superman” (like the old Pinnacle house ads described Remo). Shortly after the lovin’ there’s a part where Digger is ambushed by a few guys; certainly the inspiration for the cover art, as this is pretty much the only “action” scene in the entirety of Smoked Out. Digger gives as good as he gets, but still gets his ass kicked and is only saved by the appearance of another female character. The ambush was due to Digger’s investigation, of course, and true to the template of most all P.I. novels Digger soon discovers that Mrs. Welles was into all kinds of shady stuff, and that her death might not have been so accidental. 

But still, Smoked Out was a chore of a read. The glib protagonist, the glib dialog, hell even the glib author – I could only imagine Warren Murphy smirking to himself the entire time he wrote it. I mean the dude could write, there’s no argument on that. I just don’t like what he wrote. But as the cover of Smoked Out declares, “over 20 million” Warren Murphy novels were in print in 1982, so clearly my sentiments aren’t shared by everyone.

The Creator

The Creator, by William Hegner

June, 1978  Pocket Books

As far as I’m aware, this was the last novel William Hegner published for over twenty years, not returning to the publishing world until 1999’s Razzle Dazzle, which he co-wrote with the actress Stella Stevens.* (And in fact I’m not even sure if this was the same William Hegner.) In my review of The Worshipped And The Damned a commenter named Tex posted an obituary of Hegner from the Sandusky Register, but the link’s no longer valid and not even available on the Wayback Machine. I’m assuming this is Sandusky, Ohio, and some Google searching reveals that a “William (Bill) Hegner” was the sports editor of the Sandusky Register in 1947. Again, no idea if it’s even the same guy; according to Hawk’s Authors’ Pseudonyms, William Hegner was born in 1928, so that’s pretty young for an editor. I can’t recall what else that obituary said, nor even what year Hegner died…it’s curious so little is known about him, with zero in the way of biographical info online; per the cover blurbs of his Pocket Books paperbacks, William Hegner’s novels sold in the “millions,” so he certainly had readers in the day. 

Hegner was also prolific: he published 16 novels in the ‘70s, almost all of them Pocket Books paperback originals. The sole non-Pocket paperback he published that decade was Rainbowland, first published in hardcover in 1977 and then in softcover by Playboy Books. The Creator capped off this productive decade, and would turn out to be Hegner’s last book (perhaps; see the asterisked footnote below). Pocket Books gives no indication of this, again blurbing those “millions” of novels sold; the cover art and layout follows the previous year’s The Bigamist. In fact for a long time I kept confusing these two books due to the similar covers. (All the kids at school would make fun of me!) But what I’m trying to say is that the decision to no longer write must have been Hegner’s, for Pocket was clearly still trying to promote him as a major seller. 

Maybe Hegner was just burned out with writing sleaze, as I theorized before. But if so, the curious thing would be that The Creator also follows The Bigamist in that it’s an actual story, with a plot that develops over the book’s 262 pages. In other words, it isn’t just a random snapshot of depraved sleaze, a la earlier Hegner novels The Ski Lodgers or Stars Cast No Shadows. While there is a good bit of sexual tomfoolery in The Creator, Hegner’s focus is more on telling his tale and bringing his characters to life. To a certain extent, at least. I mean the novel’s basically a roman a clef, obviously based on the relationship between Elvis Presley and Colonel Tom Parker, with the titular “creator” being a silver-haired shyster who calls himself “Dr. Jack Jordan” and the Elvis analog being a hillbilly singer named Orville Tanner. 

As usual with a Hegner novel, I had a hard time figuring out what year this was set in. The opening features the character who will ultimately call himself Dr. Jack Jordan instead posing as a hellfire and damnation-type preacher named Reverend Carter Simpson. He drives a bus around the Appalachians, preaching to poor country folk, and we’re informed he has a fake religious college certificate hanging in his bus that’s dated 1944. So at first I thought we had a period piece, but later we’ll learn that this guy is 53 years old. Also later in the book we’ll learn via an offhand comment that the United States was founded “one hundred and ninety years ago.” So unless my math fails me, this would put us sometime in the 1960s…the mid to late ‘60s in particular, given random mentions of “acid rock.” Otherwise there are no topical references to the ‘60s, and unlike most roman a clefs Hegner doesn’t even mention any real-world celebrities or real-world events to add verisimilitude to the tale. So The Creator is of a piece with other Hegner novels in that it takes place in a cultural vacuum. 

The opening seems to come from a different novel; in it a preacher named Reverend Carter Simpson, of the Church of Hell, Fire, and Damnation, drives around Appalachia preaching to the yokels. He’s got long white hair and it’s all a crock to him, of course, but one night in some tiny town in West Virginia he comes upon Lurleen Raven, a mega-hotstuff babe who reminds the reverend of the brunette beauty in the Lil’ Abner comic strip(!). Immediately “Reverend Simpson” sees a new angle: he takes Lurleen into his entourage and quickly gets a gander of her nude body. With the naïve but not innocent beauty fully on board, Simpson drops his preacher schtick, sells off his church, changes his name to “Dr. Jack Jordan,” and becomes the manager of Lurleen Raven – the hottest thing to hit the burlesque circuit in many a year. As Dr. Jack later thinks of it, a “segue from gospels to G-strings.” 

Now a real curious thing occurred to me as I read this. There was an episode of The Simpsons many years ago that also spoofed the Elvis Presley-Colonel Tom Parker relationship; in it, Homer Simpson acted as the Colonel Tom analog, and he became the talent manager for a hotstuff hillbilly gal named Lurleen Lumpkin, turning her into a country music sensation. And let’s not forget, Dr. Jack Jordan goes by the name “Reverend Carter Simpson” in the first quarter of The Creator. The episode, titled “Colonel Homer,” aired in 1992 (ie the show’s third season), and is credited to Simpsons creator Matt Groening. Surely all this is a total coincidence. And yet, the plot of The Creator features Dr. Jack Jordan, the novel’s Colonel Tom Parker analog, becoming the talent manager for a hillbilly country music sensation. Now in the novel the singing sensation is a man, but still; there’s a “Simpson” and a “Lurleen” in this Elvis Presley roman a clef, so what are the odds? 

Dr. Jack and Lurleen travel around, with Lurleen headlined as “Heavenly Angel;” part of her schtick is that Dr. Jack has used hyrdogen peroxide to dye her pubic hair, so that it’s as platinum as the hair on her head. But the clubs become more tawdry and the bookings fewer, and soon enough Dr. Jack has tired of this latest angle. Also, he and Lurleen grow to hate one another, traveling around the country by bus and sharing rooms. Curiously our author leaves their few sexual dalliances off-page; in fact, Dr. Jack is more attracted to money than he is to women. Even though this section of the novel ultimately has nothing to do with what comes later, Hegner still displays his gift for memorable repartee: one of my favorites in this regard is when Lurleen is spotlighted in an “industry” publication on strip clubs, and Dr. Jack tells her that the magazine is “respected in the field.” To which Lurleen responds, “Yeah, but the whole damn field’s disrespected.” 

Destiny intervenes when the two decide to stop in the little town of Covington, Kentucky one night, pulling in to a cheap diner. There Dr. Jack witnesses a young hillbilly boy with an “outdated pompadour” putting on a show with his guitar, singing country music stuff, and Dr. Jack is riveted. He decides on the spot that the young man, Orville Tanner, will be his new client; to seal the deal, he arranges for Lurleen to spend the night with him. Which leads to another off-page sex scene! As I say, Hegner must’ve really decided to reign in on the sleaze in his later novels; compare to The Ski Lodgers, where the entire plot was the explicit sex scenes. But speaking of Lurleen, Dr. Jack now considers her an obstacle, and goes about trying to get rid of her; ultimately he sells her contract to a mobster who wants to feature “Heavenly Angel” in porn flicks. 

So with Lurleen out of the way, Hegner moves into the main plot, and belatedly I realized The Creator was actually a rock novel, even if hillbilly Orville Tanner isn’t a rocker. Hegner does mention “acid rock” at times, in particular a new group called The Questions and Answers, which has a weird act where they sing off each other. But Hegner certainly is no expert in this field. For one, he has musicians wielding “electronic guitars,” rather than plain old electric ones. This delivered a humorous mental image. Even more curious is Dr. Jack’s decision that Orville’s music will be a “fusion of jazz and Country-Western.” He ropes in a famous New York producer, one who takes the job precisely because such a thing’s never been done before, and likely for a reason. We’ll have occasional scenes in the studio, as well as a few concerts, but Hegner doesn’t much bring the music to life. Instead, the focus of the novel is on Orville Tanner’s insatiable drive for women, plus his sort-of gay relationship with Skip, Orville’s best friend since childhood and basically his soul mate. 

There’s a lot of stuff with Skip, from the two good ol’ boys drinking beer and shooting the breeze (when Dr. Jack discovers Orville, he and Skip are truck drivers, living out of their rig) to their frequent interractions with the hookers Dr. Jack hires for them. Dr. Jack is your classic control freak, and one of his concerns is that some floozie will take advantage of his prized client, even by the standard gambit of getting knocked up by him. So Orville is only allowed to screw the endless stable of professionals Dr. Jack supplies for him; this entails a meeting with a high-class “modeling” agency that has a brochure of the women available. But again Hegner doesn’t do much to dwell on these scenes, even though they occur frequently. But the craziest thing is that there’s actually a sleazier novel within The Creator, but Hegner ignores it: we get a random cutover to Lurleen, “acting” in her first porno flick, and it calls to mind books like Mafia: Operation Porno and Memoirs Of An Ex-Porno Queen. This is all we get, though, but man it would’ve been fun if Hegner had written a novel soley focused on Lurleen’s descent into mob-financed skin flicks. 

Actually the most explicit sequence is the strangest. Late in the novel, apropos of nothing, Orville and Skip decide to have a jack-off competition. Really! They set up markers in their hotel room, stand with their backs to the wall, and set off upon themselves, to see who can shoot the farthest – with the curious bit that the other guy takes over before climax. In other words, Skip strokes himself up good and proper, and then before the, uh, happy ending, Orville takes hold of Skip’s dick and gives it the last few strokes. So yeah, pretty weird. After this the two good ol’ boys get in a wrestling match during a rehearsal in the studio, much to the dismay and shock of the professional musicians and producer and etc. And yet they’re not truly gay, we’re to understand…at any rate, it’s not something Hegner really puts the spotlight on. He just leaves it as a subtext that the two are clearly in love with each other. 

Regardless, late in the novel Dr. Jack’s worst nightmare comes to life: Orville goes back to Kentucky to visit his beloved mama (another element lifted from the real-life Elvis story) and she sets him up with a local hotstuff chick. One who happens to be sixteen years old. And Orville knocks her up. This sets off a spiral which causes Dr. Jack to question his future – that, and the increasing threat of a lawsuit from his former client Lurleen, who has hired lawyers around the country to set in upon Dr. Jack. Lurleen has become a “sexual cripple” due to that hydrogen peroxide treatment Dr. Jack introduced to her genital area, and she’s out for revenge. However at this point she’s completely disappeared from the narrative; the last we see of her is a random bit, midway through the novel, where Orville and Skip duck into a dingy New York nightclub and “Heavenly Angel” is the featured dancer. Hegner leaves Lurleen in the background of the narrative, only occasionally referring to her descent, with the unstated implication that she is just a poor victim of Dr. Jack, her life destroyed by the con man. 

Overall though I really did enjoy The Creator. One grating thing about it though is that nearly all of the dialog is written in a Southern dialect, life for example “heah” instead of “here” and etc. Literally almost every single character talks like this – Dr. Jack, Lurleen, Orville, Skip, Orville’s mother, etc. This renders long sections of the novel almost indecipherable, as if we were reading a redneck Irvine Welsh. This alone prevents The Creator from being a trashy classic along the lines of Hegner’s earlier The Worshipped And The Damned. Otherwise there’s nothing here to indicate that Hegner was burned out; indeed, stuff like The Ski Lodgers gave the impression that he was burned out with writing “filth.” If that one had been Hegner’s last novel for a few decades, I’d understand it. But it’s curious that what turned out to be William Hegner’s last novel for a few decades was one of his stronger ones. If anything The Creator indicates that Hegner had more novels in him. 

*But then perhaps Hegner did publish one more novel before 1999’s Razzle Dazzle. Above I mentioned Hawk’s Authors’ Pseudonyms. Hegner actually has an entry in it: according to Pat Hawk, William Hegner published a novel titled Nicole under the pseudonym “Morgan Saint Michel.” Hawk gives no further info, so it took a bit of digging for me to figure this out. “Nicole” was a series of erotic paperbacks published by Jove Books in the early ‘80s: Nicole Around The World, Nicole In Flight, Nicole In Captivity, etc. The books were actually credited to “Morgan St. Michel,” ie “Saint” was not spelled out as it is in Hawk’s listing. All of the books featured photo covers of a woman in lingerie, and the series must have had scarce printings given the few, overpriced copies online. From my research, someone named Coleman Stokes served as “Morgan St. Michel” for most of the novels, but Pat Hawk certainly knows more about pseudonyms than I do; thus, I must conclude that Hawk is correct and William Hegner wrote the first novel in the series, simply titled Nicole and published by Jove in 1982. But I have no plans to confirm this by acquiring the book and actually reading it – copies of Nicole are around a hundred bucks.

Bloody Vengeance

Bloody Vengeance, by Jack Ehrlich

September, 1973  Pocket Books

I learned about this Pocket Books PBO via one of the last posts on Bill Crider's blog in 2017 and picked it up soon after, when I was on another of my frequent ‘70s crime kicks. I put it aside when I discovered that it was in first-person, though. I know it sounds lame, but I just prefer my pulp to be in third-person. Bill didn’t provide much of a review for Bloody Vengeance, just stating that it concerned cops taking the law into their own hands and that this turned into a national political movement. He concluded that “the book is very well done and pretty dang scary. You can tell yourself that it can’t happen here, but don’t you have to wonder a little?” To which a commenter named Jeff Myerson responded, “This sounds almost Trumpian.” 

It's interesting to read comments like this in 2022. Since 2017 we’ve had George Floyd and Botham Jean, cops arresting the parents of sexually-assaulted children at PTA meetings, cops arresting soccer moms for taking their kids to playgrounds that were closed due to Covid, cops arresting paddleboarders for being out on the water (alone!) during quarantine. We’ve watched as cops have choked unarmed women for the heinous crime of not wearing a mask outdoors, as they’ve trampled underfoot anti-mandate protesters in Canada. 

But then, cops haven’t had it easy. This past year 62 police officers were killed by guns, and crime is rampant in cities across the United States. Not so coincidentally, the current administration ran on a “defund the police” program. They’ve made some laughable attempts at walking this back recently, even lying that they never even said they wanted to defund the police, but…well, here’s a seven-minute montage of Democrat politicians saying they want to defund the police. 

So yeah, I guess an army of cops who go rogue to take down violent criminals could be considered “Trumpian,” but to tell the truth I like the idea better than the jackboot aggression we’ve seen directed toward citizens. But really my main issue with Bloody Vengeance is that it isn’t so much a “vigilante cop” novel as it is a political novel set in DC. While it starts off delivering on the setup promised on the back cover – frustrated cops finally deciding to make violent criminals pay – it ultimately derails into more of a “corrupt politics” yarn as the narrator, Lt. Rob Royce, finds himself spearheading a national movement…and being referred to as a new Hitler by the press. All this is indeed very “Trumpian,” particularly given that Royce is constantly accused by his left-leaning detractors of doing a bunch of Hitlerian stuff. 

Things begin a lot more smallscale, though, with Royce deciding at novel’s start to dish out some off-the-book justice in his Cape Cod domain. From there ultimately it will become a politicial movement, but the issue is that author Jack Ehrlich doesn’t go in the progression you might think. The helluva it is, Royce and his colleagues only ever take out violent criminals: murderers, wife-killers, even a hippie terrorist who has been trained by the KGB. The novel never goes into the darker realms one might suspect, with Royce’s movement becoming a fascist army taking out anyone who opposes them, not just criminals. So Bill Crider’s remark that the novel is “pretty dang scary” seems a bit hollow today…I mean personally, I think cops trampling anti-mandate protesters and siccing attack dogs on them is pretty dang scary. But killing off violent criminals who are back on the streets thanks to liberal judges? Not so much. 

The first half of Bloody Vengeance is pretty cool and delivers on the violent ‘70s crime vibe I wanted. We meet Royce, a veteran of Korea with fifteen years on the force, as he comes upon the mutilated remains of a woman who has been raped and killed – a “mass of breathing meat and bone.” The killer is easily captured and booked, but he gets off on a technicality thanks to one of those aforementioned liberal lawyers. When the creep flaunts his freedom as he waltzes past Royce in the courtroom, our narrator decides on the spur of the moment to get some bloody vengeance. Royce’s partner, Sgt. Willis (who himself has twenty years on the force), is game. The two men chase down the killer and execute him moments after he’s left the courtroom, dropping the body and car off at the junkyard to be smashed. 

This introduces what will become a trend: next Willis comes to Royce – who by the way is terrified his partner is going to turn him in, or that the Internal Affairs guys will easily deduce that he killed the perp – and proposes some bloody vengeance he wants to sow. This would be a “wife garroter” who we learn, via long flashback, killed his wife and again got off due to a liberal judge, despite the overwhelming evidence against him. Again Royce and Willis execute the creep and then head on over to the junkyard for corpse disposal. But as it develops, Internal Affairs never checks in on anything, and indeed no one cares that these violent killers are getting their just desserts. Royce realizes he’s tapped into something when the captain calls Royce in and basically gives him carte blanche to go off the books and kill the killers. Royce is even given his own department to do so. 

So already from the first quarter Bloody Vengeance is headed for something grander than just a “killer cops” angle. Soon enough Royce is reporting directly to the Commisioner, who not only support’s Royce’s extracurricular activities but gives him a “hate list” to work from. Royce begins putting together his team, from a “living computer” type who stores all the department’s details in his head so nothing is on the books, to a guy called “Super Jew” who was so violent when he was walking the beat that he got moved to a desk job. Of course, Royce puts him right back on the street. The team first goes into action against a gang of black criminals, taking out the leaders who have constantly gone free due to those goddamn liberal judges. Next up is a bloody melee against a biker gang, Royce memorably wearing “dusters,” ie brass knuckles that look like “gentleman’s gloves.” Royce doesn’t always kill, though; sometimes the vengeance is more poetic, like crippling the biker leader who himself crippled an innocent victim. 

Gradually though the story develops more into a political angle. Operating under the guise of the “International Police Benevolent Association,” Royce and his colleagues throw charity balls and make speeches, donating the proceeds to widows and families of downed cops. Through various connections they also meet up with a wealthy older man who “wants to give America back to Americans” and sets up the rogue force with its own massive country estate, a helicopter, and even a jet. Meanwhile Royce fears the FBI is onto him…but soon enough learns that the Feds too are approving of his methods. If anything in Bloody Vengeance shows its age, this sequence would be it. But as you can see, Ehrlich doesn’t seem to have any hidden theme; yes, every law agency supports Royce’s killing of criminals…but that’s all they’re looking for. They’re just sick of violent criminals constantly going free. Just compare to the Keller novel Death Squad; author Nelson De Mille handled this much better, delivering not only more action thrills but also working in the “deeper implications” stuff, with those rogue cops also killing off liberal judges and the like. 

Royce is so focused on telling us about his exploits that he doesn’t bother much with personal stuff. In fact we don’t even learn until page 35 that the dude’s married and has a kid, but he comes home one day to find that his wife’s left him and taken the kid with her. Royce shrugs it off, already feeling more free to pursue his goal of killing crooks! He isn’t the most likable of protagonists, though, which I’m assuming was Ehrlich’s intention. His narrative voice is also kind of annoying; the narrative itself is relayed in perfect diction, but when Royce speaks via dialog he says “ain’t” a bunch. It just comes off a little awkward. And for that matter, a lot of Bloody Vengeance is told via summary, with Royce thinking back to how all this started and then detailing moment by moment as the movement grew. He’s also very shy with the sleazy details; Royce seems almost suspiciously disinterested in women, but then late in the novel starts hooking up with a few of them, including most notably the hotstuff wife of a senator who is out to get Royce’s force. But in all cases the sexual tomfoolery is totally off-page. Boo! 

And yes, the senator – at this point we are into the “DC politics” stuff, with a senator being the lone man who wants to bring down Royce’s killer-cop force. Royce starts working behind the scenes to frame the guy, and as this goes on Bloody Vengeance loses its pulpish conceit and trades more on “realistic” political manuevering. I mean when it gets right down to it, the novel’s kind of a failure if what you are looking for is a pulpy action novel that rips off Magnum Force. I mean these rogue cops have a mansion outside the city, a helicopter, a jet, and unlimited funds, but Ehrlich instead wants to focus on backroom politicking in Washington. Occasionally we’ll get some action scenes, like when they’re called in to handle activists who have taken over a college campus for social justice reasons having to do with a domestic terrorist. Despite TV coverage Royce and crew perpetrate the “Grace College Massacre,” as the media soon dubs the ensuing carnage. Once again the book shows its age here; it’s hard to imagine a college so willing to violently purge social justice activists today. 

But then, Bloody Vengeance was published in a more rational era. Royce finds himself becoming more of a celebrity due to his frequent appearances on TV. While the media rakes him over the coals, the people respond incredibly favorably to him. (Hmm…this somehow sounds familiar…) Gradually Royce begins to understand his own cult of personality, and uses it to expound on the benefits of his force. There’s a great part, very resonant today. where he gives a speech on TV and turns it into a rallying cry for the silent majority, which per his argument is sick to death of the increasing crime and lawlessness of the land, and of course this only wins him more support.

Ehrlich takes the novel in an unexpected direction when Royce, chagrined over the increasing hatred directed at him by the media, calls up a certain reporter and asks him for his advice on how Royce could appear non-Hitlerian. Predicatbly, the reporter – who has become the chief voice against Royce – initially believes it’s all a put-on, before refusing to help Royce and then hanging up on him. This I felt was nicely-handled commentary by Ehrlich. However our author leaves Royce’s future a big question mark; the novel climaxes on another major speech, where Royce considers disbanding his group. At this point they’ve even done jobs for the President himself, heading over to London to take out that aforementioned hippie terrorist. But after a surprising late action scene Royce changes his mind on disbanding, and by novel’s end it seems that his association is about to become more powerful than ever. 

At 220 pages, Bloody Vengeance aspires to be something “more” than just a violent cop thriller…but at the same time, I wanted a violent cop thriller. I wasn’t interested in the politics stuff, and I thought the novel could’ve benefited from more sex and violence. But then I say that about most every book I read. What I found most interesting was how our modern world is so similar to the one depicted here; indeed, Royce tells us at one point that “The entire national crime rate was up.” But whereas this leads to a cop army in Bloody Vengeance, here in the real world we, uh, defund the police. But then that’s clown world in a nutshell.

Colony

Colony, by Ben Bova

July, 1978  Pocket Books

As a science fiction-reading kid in the ‘80s, I knew Ben Bova’s name but never read any of his books; he was one of those wildly prolific authors and I had no idea where to start. Also it was my impression he was a “hard science” author, ie of the type who went more for technical minutiae than the world-building escapism I usually want from sci-fi. But then last year I came across this book on the clearance shelf of a Half Price Books store; the typically-awesome Boris Valejo cover grabbed my attention, and the back cover (below) only strengthened the hold. 

Indeed, here was sci-fi just as I love it: from the ‘70s, set in a future that is now in the past, filled with the space-faring, mind-expanding optimism of the era. I then checked the first-page preview, which proclaimed the novel “A bold, sweeping saga of one man against the world,” with the hero referred to as an “Adonis.” I thumbed through the book: thick as a doorstop, 470 pages of small, dense print. My quick appraisal was that it was along the lines of John Brunner’s Stand On Zanzibar, only with more of a “bestselling fiction” approach than an “experimental” one. In fact, I very much got the impression that what I had in my hands was what I had been long seeking: a science fiction novel told in that ‘70s “blockbuster” style I so love, with all the requisite sex and drugs the era demanded. And the suckers only wanted two bucks for it! This was another of those Cindy On Fire moments; I was on the way to the checkout line within two minutes of discovering the book. 

As usual though it took me a while to get around to actually reading it; despite my initial excitement I put the book aside and took almost a year to start it. But when on page 14 I came to a part where a British beauty with a “full, ripe kind of figure” was about to work herself over with a vibrator, on her first night on a massive space colony orbiting the Earth, I knew I’d found the “sci-fi meets trashy ‘70s popular fiction” novel I’d been seeking for years. Now to be clear, the vibrator in question was really a bathroom fixture that used “sonic vibrations” for cleaning, water conservation being important to the space colony, but why split hairs. I barrelled on through the novel and soon realized that it didn’t just capture that groovy ‘70s sci-fi vibe I so love (complete with jumpsuits and “contoured chairs” and all those other swank details), but that it was a great novel to boot, and that Ben Bova had clearly put his heart and soul into it. This was one of those instances like Boy Wonder, where I read the novel and couldn’t understand why it wasn’t a bestseller in its day, why it was consigned to oblivion. 

My only conclusion is that Colony was a paperback original, and this hampered its success. I personally prefer PBOs to hardcovers, but at the same I was puzzled why there was only a PBO for Colony. Bova has always seemed to me a “hardcover author,” and indeed it seems that the vast majority of his novels were published first in that format before getting paperback editions. And yet Colony was not. I can only assume that this was due to the energy crisis of the time; per Michael Newton in How To Write Action-Adventure Novels, publishers were very affected by the energy crisis, cancelling entire series and re-jiggering their publication schedules. I’m guessing, with absolutely no basis, that Colony would’ve come out in hardcover otherwise. And the hell of it is, without that hardcover edition and the ensuing industry coverage, Colony appears to have slipped through the cracks. Because as it turns out, Colony was one of the best books I’ve read in years, and certainly gave me everything I hoped for. 

That first page didn’t lie; this is indeed a sweeping saga, encompassing a huge cast of characters and occurring over several months of the “future year” of 2008. Now one thing the back cover didn’t mention, and which I only learned later, was that Colony was a sort-of sequel to an earlier Boval novel, Millennium (1976). Which itself was a sequel to Bova’s later Kinsman (1983, but comprised of short stories originally published in the ‘70s). I have not read either of those books, but at no point in Colony did I feel like I was missing out on anything. It appears that those two novels are more connected to each other than Colony is connected to either of them: Colony merely occurs in the same “world” as Millennium and Kinsman, with the only recurring characters being very minor ones in Colony. I wouldn’t even say that reading those two books would enrich the experience of reading Colony, as neither book is mentioned, and the only recurring bit here comes from Millennium, in that there’s a colony on the moon that’s now its own independent nation, and also that there’s a World Government that unites all the nations on the Earth. 

So yes, Colony takes place in a year that’s now 14 years past, but in no way does that detract from the reading experience. And besides, I’m not one who judges a sci-fi novel by what it got “right” or not. But to be clear, Colony is of a piece with other sci-fi novels of its day in that it is optimistic about the future of space exploration; wildly optimistic, in fact. I personally think it’s so cool that an author could publish a novel in 1978 that took place a mere thirty years in the future and fill it with moon colonies, space stations, orbiting colonies, and routine travel to and from all these places. Thirty years! But then, it only took ten years to get to the moon during the Space Race, so no doubt it only seemed logical at the time that expanded space travel would follow just as quickly. 

I’ve always looked at science fiction more as a reflection of the era in which it was written, and in that area too Colony is very ‘70s. Not just in its “bestselling fiction” approach, but also in the topics it focuses on. Overpopulation is a big one, as is weather control. But the space colony stuff is in-line with the speculations of the time. Many years ago I was really into the books of Robert Anton Wilson, and through him I learned about the “SMIILE” concept of Timothy Leary as well as the space colonies envisioned by Gerard O’Neil. In the mid to late ‘70s, it seemed to be commonly accepted among such visionairies that man would soon begin leaving the planet, to live in space. Leary’s stuff (for a project he never completed) in particular was about expanding consciousness as the next step on the path to outer space life. Back then the goal was leaving the Earth. Today it’s saving the Earth. 

So Bova, like a true sci-fi visionary of his day, projects a future that is really just the 1970s with a greatly expanded space program and a world government. The sentiments of the characters who live in this world are much more “1970s” than any people who lived in the actual 2008, and in this regard Colony is similar to another “future 70s” work, The Savage Report. But this isn’t a complaint. I much prefer these futures that didn’t happen to the one we actually got. I mean, if only the real 2008 had a space station where zero-g sex was one of the favorite activities of vacationers, not to mention an orbiting space colony filled with women in form-fitting jumpsuits. And Bova does get some stuff correct – he predicts video teleconferencing, which has become standard now in the era of Covid. Also the internet and quick digital transfers of money factor into the book, and are treated as commonly as such things are today. 

But Bova’s biggest miss is that in his projected future the left-leaning World Government is at odds with the multinational corporations. While the World Government wants global unification, a socialist utopia of equity in which world peace and harmony is maintained at the expense of independence, the multinationals want to practice pure capitalism, the poor and the planet itself be damned. This is pure Ayn Rand, of course, but how could Bova or Rand or any of the sci-fi visionaries of the day have predicted that in the real future the billionaires would be aligned with a leftist new world order? In the era of “get woke, go broke,” corporations no longer make a secret of their ideology. Even charity organizations have gone down the self-destructive path of wokeism. 

But this “World Government vs the multinationals” setup comprises the central plot of Colony. Certainly in Bova’s day it made sense; it would be easy to imagine the cigar-chomping billionaires of the 1970s united against the capital-diminishing aims of a socialist World Government. This though is just another indication of what I like about sci-fi; it takes contemporary reality and exposits on what the ensuing world might be like in a few years, decades, or centuries. And as mentioned Bova’s big concern is the growing population, per Stand On Zanzibar and so many other books of the era. Bova has the global population at near 8 billion in his 2008, which is pretty much where we are now. However he also has the black population of the US (or what was formerly the US) at 80%, just a tad off from the 13% of the actual 2008. 

I mention race because one of the many subplots Bova works into Colony is a race war, one that goes hand-in-hand with the people’s movement that is united against the World Government. That 80% figure is actually delivered by one of the black terrorists, a hulking mass of muscle named Leo who was once a pro footballer, but who now has carved out his own Escape From New York-esque fiefdom in Manhattan. Sadly, one of Bova’s biggest successes on the prediction front is that he envisions a 9/11 sort of attack on New York, late in the novel, but this one is carried out by an army of black terrorists who declare war on the “white asses.” One curious tidbit Bova introduces – one that would certainly trigger sensitive readers of today – is that the darker one’s skin is, the higher his authority is in the black resistance; Leo, we’re informed, regularly takes drugs to ensure his skin stays as dark as possible. He is in fact the only character who indulges in that ‘70s sci-fi mainstay: weird drugs. But Leo’s are some sort of super-steroids that affect his metabolism and keep him in hulking shape; without them, as we eventually learn, he’ll literally fall apart. 

But this too is more of a indication of Bova’s own time than our own; this 2008 is still run by men, however we are told that the US representative for the former US in the World Government is a black man, and obviously the World Government reps from the various former countries are not all white. But there are no women in positions of power, something that occurs to the otherwise-progressive head of the World Government, the 80-something year old De Paolo. One of the few characters returning from Millennium (which took place 9 years before this novel), De Paolo heads up the World Government from the HQ in Messina, Sicily(!), a loyal “Ethiopian” at his side. This bit, of the ancient leader of the world who confides solely in his Ethiopian aide, so mirrors the relationship of Premiere Vassily (the ancient ruler of his world) and Rahallah (Vassily’s Ethiopian aide) in the Doomsday Warrior series that I don’t think it could be a coincidence; I think Ryder Syvertsen certainly read Colony. 

So this is the world of Colony: The World Government controls the planet, while the independent nation of Selene is built beneath the surface of the moon (its formation chronicled in Millennium). Meanwhile there is Space Station Alpha, which acts as a waystation between the Earth and the moon, and most notably there is also Island One, a massive orbiting colony in which ten thousand people live. Bova clearly seems to be aligned with the World Government; his world is the one we seem to be lurching toward, in which gas-guzzling cars and other pollutants have been replaced, and all energy on the Earth is derived from solar energy beamed down by Island One. The colony is essential to the planet’s survival, but only the rich and the elite live up there in a green wonderland of open spaces with spectacular cosmic views from various massive windows; this much dismays the poor, starving people eking out a miserable existence on the overpopulated Earth. 

Things are becoming increasingly bad on Earth, with mass starvation and suffering and a huge disparity between the poor and the super-rich CEOs of the multinationals. Meanwhile the People’s Revolutionary Underground (PRU) is fighting against the World Government all across the globe; there’s also “El Liberator,” a Castro-esque revolutionary who is causing lots of trouble in Argentina. Curiously, all these revolutionary movements appear to be socialist, as is the World Government itself; I mean, socialists versus socialists – everyone’s a loser. Another interesting thing is that in Bova’s 2008 the Middle East has not been consumed by radical fundamentalism, and in fact Baghdad is what amounts to a tourist trap, where reps from the World Government work to recreate the wonders of the ancient world. The main terrorists of the PRU we meet in Colony are from the Middle East, however…and they’re a helluva lot less violent than the ones we got in reality. Several times Hamoud, or “Tiger,” the leader of the Iraqi section of the PRU, states that “suicide missions are stupid” and he and his fellow terrorists go out of their way not to get themselves killed…as well as not to kill any of their victims. 

Befitting the bestseller fiction approach, one man will be able to fix all the world’s problems: David Abrams, that “Adonis” mentioned on the first-page preview. David is a rather special character; apparently in his early to mid 20s, a good-looking blond-haired guy with a lean muscular build and etc. He is also the first “test tube baby,” grown and born on Island One, outside the legal domain of the Earth. This means that the Island One scientists, free to chase their every whim, made David a sort of super-being. He’s impervious to most all diseases, with an immune system that can quickly shake off viruses that would kill ordinary people. He’s also incredibly quick thinking and proficient at most forms of self-defense. In a bit that predicts cyberpunk, he also has a computer link wired into him, so that by tapping a molar with his tongue he can access computers and retrieve data which is “whispered” to him via “the microscopic receiver implanted behind his ear.” What I most appreciated though is that Bova shows us all this instead of just telling us about it; David’s gifts are demonstrated through his actions and quick thoughts, and Bova doesn’t beat us over the head reminding us that he was designed to be gifted. 

David Adams (note the Biblical connotations of the name) is the central character of Colony, and he’s a very memorable one. His origin is a bit of a mystery; his father is unknown, and his mother, one of the designers of Island One, died before David was born, and thus the fetus was removed and kept alive, those scientists going to work on all their genetic improvements. David has spent his entire life on Island One, and the crux of the novel concerns his learning of the plight of the Earth, and how Island One is central to the planet’s survival. I kept wondering why Bova titled the novel “Colony” instead of “Island One,” as the latter name is used much more often in the text. It is a massive space colony of the type envisioned by Gerard O’Neil in The High Frontier (1977), two “cylinders” that could easily hold at least a million people. But, as roving young British reporter Evelyn Hall soon learns, the second cylinder is completely empty: a flora-rich paradise that goes on as far as the eye can see, while people are running out of room down on Earth. 

The multinationals own Island One, though, in particular the few men who make up the Board. Chief among them is T. Hunter Garrison, Texas-based codger and all around old-fashioned billionaire type, of the kind seen in the trashy paperbacks of the day. Completely without conscience, devoted to money and power; Garrison is in his way one of the villains of the piece, particularly given how he is the main architect of the race war. As the novel progresses, we see that the Board intends to forment total civil war on the planet, secretly backing the PRU and other rebels in their war against the World Government. And while the planet is in flames, the Board will ride it out in that empty cylinder on Island One – which, of course, has been designed for them alone. Another of the board members is Sheihk Al-Hashimi of Iraq, who also secretly funds the PRU. 

What Al-Hashimi does not know (but the reader soon does) is that his beautiful daughter Bahjat is actually the infamous PRU leader Scheherazade. In fact, Bahjat is the true ruler of the Middle Eastern wing of the PRU, as Hamoud is devoted to her and does what she says, even though he pretends he alone is in power. Again though, we must not view Bahjat with modern eyes: she is not the suicidal and radical Islamic terrorist of the ISIS type. But then, neither is Hamoud and the others, though we are often told how “cruel” Hamoud is. These people rarely kill in their objectives, and Bahjat and Hamoud will carry out a few strikes in the course of Colony, either knocking out or merely holding their victims captive. In this regard they are much more comparable to the terrorists of Bova’s era than to the ones of today. The PRU indeed is presented as having a noble purpose; Bova is properly unbiased in his narrative, so that, when focusing on each group, he does not make them come off as good or bad. Even Garrison is given a bit of a heroic nature, late in the novel. Only Hamoud is presented as being truly evil, but again for the most part we are only told of this. 

This is a big novel, a sweeping epic, and like any epic there are many, many memorable sequences in it. What I really appreciated was how Bova had this large canvas of seemingly-unrelated characters, and then gradually brought them together. Being the star of the piece, David is usually the person who meets them, often in inventive ways. His meeting of Bahjat, for example – which we know is bound to happen given the first-page preview – is cleverly carried out in unexpected fashion. Through Beverly (whom David, per the trash fiction approach, beds early in the book) David learns of the dire plight of the Earth, and vows to get down there. However Dr. Cyrus Cobb, elderly founder and now head honcho of Island One (my assumption was he was based on Dr. Gerard O’Neil), refuses to let David go. After all, Cobb explains, David is technically owned by the Board of Directors. Cobb is another memorable character in a novel stuffed with them, a visionary in line with O’Neill and Leary and those other ‘70s visionaries, and he’s raised David as the son he never had. 

But as mentioned our hero is made of sterner stuff than common men, thus David concocts a scheme to get off Island One. This is a great sequence, involving David constructing a “womb” for himself to be placed on the hull of one of the ferries that go to the moon, with David in a self-induced sleep to conserve oxygen and heat. (The self-induced sleep is very ‘70s in vibe, involving a theta-level program David downloads via his comptuer linkup.) Bova doesn’t spend much time on the moon, but this part might be meaningful for those who read Millennium, at least in that we see how the colony of Selene has fared in the near-decade since that book. But ultimately David’s only on the moon for a few pages. There’s a sequence here that I found reminiscent of one in Moon Zero Two, where David commandeers a buggy and drives it solo across the harsh terrain, his oxygen levels running dangerously low. From the moon David heads to Space Station Alpha, where he awaits the next shuttle to Earth. Bova wonderfully caters to those ‘70s excesses when we are told – regretably without any detail – about the “zero-g orgy rooms” where David, off-friggin’ page, dallies with “several willing partners.” That’s right, folks: our virile hero does a bit of zero-g orgying and the author leaves it all off-page. 

Anyway, David excitedly boards the shuttle for Earth, and before entering the atmosphere the craft is hijacked – by Bahjat’s PRU cell. The way Bova combined these two plot threads really impressed me, and there are more instances throughout the novel. Bahjat’s people use a “knockout spray” on their victims, and in fact this is how Bahjat meets David. The PRU diverts the Shuttle to Argentina, where Bahjat hopes to win the confidence of El Liberator. Things will not go as she hopes for, though. We know, again per the first page, that David and Bahjat are destined for one another, but Bova also skillfully plays this out through the text, developing a very believable connection between the two. When meeting each other, both are in love with someone else: Bahjat still pining over a guy whose loss has set her on the terrorist path, and David here on Earth looking for Evelyn (who was most mysteriously spirited away from Island One; David is certain Cobb got rid of her). Instead David and Bahjat find each other, and this is almost a novel in itself. First David, who discovers that here on Earth he cannot access any computer linkups, abducts Bahjat so as to escape the PRU, and soon the two are stuck together in a cross-continent escape as they try to make their way to America, both of them on the run for separate reasons. 

A minor character nearly steals the novel here; David and Bahjat manage to get money from the PRU and pay for an illicit flight into Peru, as part of their escape plan to get into the US. The pilot of the small turbo-prop is a paunched, gray-haired local who gabs on about his days smuggling heroin in the ‘90s and how he’s been flying since he was a kid. He’s only in the book for a few pages but he’s the most colorful personality we meet. But then like any truly great novel, Colony has many such instances and characters that get stuck in your mind. Like The Right Stuff, this is a book I’d read in the morning while my kid was playing (the benefits of working from home!), and it took me so long to read that I almost felt as if I was experiencing something instead of just reading a book. I mean if you haven’t picked it up by now, I really enjoyed the novel. 

I especially dug how Bova gave us a piece of ‘70s blockbuster fiction with sci-fi trimmings; there are a lot of groovy details in the novel, with even the décor sounding at times like the swank interiors of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s UFO or Space: 1999. David Adams’s place on Island One is a literal space age bachelor’s pad, complete with a waterbed and “thick carpeting of reddish gold.” And in true ‘70s bestseller form, there’s a bit of sex in Colony. Nothing too egregious or explicit, but it’s certainly not tame in that regard. Befitting a ‘70s protagonist, David Abrams scores with both of the main female characters: Evelyn and Bahjat. Interestingly, so too does Hamoud, the villain. This is a curious subtext Bova leaves for the reader to notice, but in many ways Hamoud is presented as David’s dark reflection, and this is just another component of that. These sex scenes are usually over and done with in a few sentences, and Bova doesn’t much exploit the women. In other trashy touches there’s a part where T. Hunter Garrison dallies in a pool with a pair of Japanese girls who have been trained in underwater talents – talents which they also demonstrate for Garrison’s busty redheaded assistant-slash-bodyguard. The only “dirty” bit is the off-hand mention of Evelyn’s “anal” adventures with Hamoud. Good grief! 

While David proves to be instrumental not only in the solving of the novel’s central crisis but also the future of humanity itself, it’s to Bova’s credit that he gives full subplots for the majority of his characters, with storylines that pan out regardless of whether they’ve encountered David or not. What I mean to say is that these characters come off as very realized, with their own goals and plans. Colony features a large cast of characters, and Bova is for the most part pretty good in that he focuses on these characters individually, either via chapter breaks or white spaces. But at times he is guilty of terrible POV-hopping, by which I mean he’ll switch perspectives without warning the reader via a line or chapter break. Here is the worst example in the novel; note that this paragraph is part of a long sequence from the perspective of black terrorist Leo, but abruptly switches perspective to David – who Leo doesn’t even know yet at this point of the book! – without proper warning: 

Ironically Bova published a book titled The Craft Of Writing Fiction That Sells in 1994, in which he prided himself on how he handled perspective changes in Colony, even using similar excerpts as an example of how to do it! I was like, dude – no, it’s not! Give the reader a little white space or something before you switch perspective! But this is a minor quibble, and might not even bother most readers. I read Gary Provost’s Make Your Words Work (1990) a little over twenty years ago, and have never been able to ignore POV-hopping since. Otherwise Bova very skillfully juggles this large cast, and does such a good job of it that at no point was a I confused as to who was who. And the way he brought so many of them together really appealed to me. I’ve always been a fan of that sort of tesseract approach in fiction, where multiple storylines and characters converge in unexpected ways, and Colony featured a lot of that. 

The saga takes place over a few months, and David Adams certainly grows as a character, from the naïve young man on Island One to a visionary who orchestrates mankind’s next step in the stars. This journey encompasses so many memorable incidents, Bahjat at David’s side for many of them. There’s a great part where they get to Manhattan just as Leo and his soldiers start their war on “the white asses,” and Bahjat and David head underground to bypass the savagery above, navigating through rat-filled tunnels with a failing flashlight. Bova develops a sort of “enemies in love” setup; first David is Bahjat’s prisoner on the shuttle, and then he takes her prisoner when he escapes the PRU in Argentina. After this they become unlikely allies, Bahjat using her PRU contacts to fund their long travel by land up into the US, but once they get into PRU-controlled New York David is once again Bahjat’s prisoner. Not that this stops them, finally, from a bit of good lovin’, Bova delivering the long-awaited sequence more from a romantic perspective than a sleazy one. 

The various plot threads eventually tie around Island One, and Bova plays out the finale there. He brings the place to life; in particular I liked the bizarre aspect that, when looking up at the “sky,” you can actually see more houses and communities “above” you. This gives Evelyn the expected vertigo on her first night in Island One. David however is used to it, having grown up here, but there’s another nice character moment where, on his first night on the Earth later in the novel, he sits outside all night to watch the sun rise. Bova fills the novel with memorable sequences and touches. He also brings his various locales to life without the “hard science” technical detail I feared; Selene, Space Station Alpha, the World Government headquarters in Messina: all these places are captured with just a few effective sentences of word painting. And again I liked how we saw David’s superhuman makeup in action, rather than it being exposited to us; this superhuman makeup factors into David’s plot in the finale in a way that was very interesting in our Covid era. 

In fact, Bova strives for a sentimental finale along the lines of what Harold Robbins would regularly dole out for his characters, no matter how depraved they may be; even T. Hunter Garrison, who orchestrates a veritable holocaust in the US, is given a heroic makeover in the climax. I won’t spoil anything, but one issue I had with Colony was that there was little comeuppance for most of the villains in the finale. For example, Bahjat’s PRU cel manages to stop Island One’s solar energy from reaching the Earth, and we learn that over seven thousand people die as a result – areas that are in the midst of heavy snowstorms and such have no access to power, and many die. (On second thought these PRU terrorists are as bad as the real thing…) But the “love triumphs over all” finale Bova delivers undermines this atrocity. James Nicoll, in his review of Colony, scoffs not at this, but that Bahjat “becomes David’s reward at the end of the book, like a slave girl awarded to a victorious warrior.” He overlooks that Bahjat deserves much worse, given that she’s killed over seven thousand people. Modern reviewers are so hung up on identity politics that they ignore actual story elements.

This is indicative of the sea change that has occurred in Western society over just a few decades, and is another thing neither Bova nor any other sci-fi writer of his day could have predicted. And this is not intended as a slight against Nicoll, who is clearly knowledgeable about sci-fi. But his review title, “Soaked in 1970s-style sexism like a hopeful swinger reeking of Hai Karate,” is the epitome of what I’m talking about, as it gives a dismissive impression of a worthy book. (And also, you shouldn’t be surprised to know, his description sounds exactly like the type of novel I’d like to read!) Clearly readers of the actual era would not have seen things through the nauseating “woke” filter of today. I’ve only found one contemporary review of Colony: download Science Fiction Review #28 from November 1978, go to page 28, and there you will find a review of Colony by none other than Orson Scott Card. He raves about the novel and his only real complaint isn’t about the race or “women without agency” stuff, but that Bahjat falls in love after one night in the sack (with the man who sets her on the path to PRU activism). Card also sees that Bova was clearly going for the “science fiction meets bestseller” approach, and pointedly brings up Niven and Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer, of the year before, as comparison. That book certainly did better than Colony, which seems to have been forgotten, so I’m curious if Bova attempted this blockbuster fiction approach in any further novels. 

The Stand On Zanzibar similarities I noticed when I first spotted Colony in the bookstore is that periodically the text is broken up with communiques, journal entries, or “tapes for an unauthorized biography” of Cyrus Cobb. This is Bova’s way of opening up his world while also advancing the narrative, but at the same time it occurred to me that it was another interesting comparison between Bova’s 2008 and the future we actually got. Because, despite the overbearing World Government, those news communiques are true, in that they reflect the actual “truth” of what is happening in the narrative. In other words, if there is rioting in Argentina or whatever, or people have been abucted on Island One, the communiques state that. What I mean to say is, there is no fake news in Colony, and it’s another indication of how Bova’s world is less complicated than ours.

As I mentioned above, Bova’s 2008 is basically the world we are lurching toward. In his projected future the carbon footprint has mostly been erased, with people driving electric bikes and etc. And all nations are united in a World Government which solely gets its power from solar energy. Bova, despite not playing sides in his fictional world, does clearly seem to think this is the way to go, yet he doesn’t seem to grasp that his novel makes the case that countries should not unite, and that it would be dangerous to put all your energy eggs in one basket, so to speak. I mean, those seven thousand who die when the Island One solar energy is stopped. Did the people in those countries no longer have access to gas-powered furnaces or the like? It seems ridiculous, but again it also seems like an indication of where we are going. Just over a year ago the United States was energy independent, gas was cheap and empty shelves at the grocery store wasn’t even a concern. Now, after a few policy changes by a new administration, gas prices have skyrocketed and global starvation looms on the horizon…all due to policies that are driven by a climate change agenda. Bova doesn’t dwell on the birth pangs his world would have gone through to become a solar energy-dependent new world order, but certainly we now in the present are going through something very similar to those birth pangs. 

This is a novel that took me on a journey, and it was the pure escapism that I wanted. And yet it clearly made me speculate about things in our own world, and I can think of no further indication of what makes for a great novel. Well, I can think of one other thing: I didn’t want Colony to end. I’m sure I will read it again someday. I’m also wondering if any of Bova’s other novels are along the same lines. Maybe someday I will read Kinsman or Millennium; Bova combined the two in 1988 as The Kinsman Saga, rewriting a portion of each novel so that they would flow more smoothly together as one story. But I’d more than likely read the originals, for fear that the ’88 edition might remove the swanky ‘70s details I demand. However so far as this sequence goes, Colony was the last novel; curiously though in 1985 Bova published Privateers, which concerns the mining of asteroids in our solar system. This is exactly what David Adams plans to do in the climax of Colony, however Privateers does not occur in the same world as Kinsman, Milennium, or Colony, featuring as it does a Soviet Union that’s still running in the early 21st century. 

So in conclusion I give Colony my highest recommendation, not just as a sci-fi novel but as a novel, and if any of you can suggest any other “sci-fi meets popular fiction” novels from the era I’d greatly appreciate it. Per above Orson Scott Card specifically compared Colony to Lucifer’s Hammer, but that one sounds like a post-nuke pulp with its apocalyptic setting – I’m looking for something more like mini-skirts on Mars or the like, with that “full ‘70s flavor” in space. Something that Colony delivers in spades. And finally here’s the back cover (the cover portrait of Bahjat is repeated on the spine of the book, by the way, and this was what initially captured my eye on the bookshelf when I first discovered the book):