Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

The Story So Far

Roan’s time aboard the Warlock ends in disaster, although in fairness it wasn’t his fault. With Henry Dread, on the surface a pirate captain and in actuality an officer in the fledgling Imperial Terran Navy, now dead (by Roan’s hands) and the Warlock having gotten its ass blasted by a Niss ship’s automatic defense system, the survivors are left with Roan as their new leader. He’s not much of a “leading” type. The good news is that while the Niss ships are still about, lingering in the blackness of space, the Niss themselves seem to have gone out to lunch—via the grim reaper. The ship that destroyed the Warlock turned out to be a ghost ship: everybody, both the Niss crew and Terran captives, has long since died. Roan and his crew decide to take a diversion to Tambool, the planet where Roan was born and raised, to gather some info about Our Anti-Hero’s past. Some gaps remain in his backstory, though, and the quest to ITN HQ continues, with Roan impersonating a lieutenant who had died on the Niss ship. This move sounds smart in the short term, but will prove a problem for later.

With some deception and threats, Roan and three of his best men are taken to ITN HQ, a palace that had originally be constructed for some member of the ruling class, now the home of Terran military ghouls and their cronies. And also their slaves. Slavery is not unusual in parts of the galaxy, with some alien cultures treating it less as a means of cheap labor and more a give-and-take practice. Roan himself grew up with an alien slave who lost to Roan’s parents in battle, and thus became a sort of member of their family as dictated by his race’s customs. Commodore Quex and his buddies of the ITN are a lot less caring with their slaves, however, murdering them on sight if they become even so much as a slight inconvenience. Terrans, even though none of them be “purely” human, clearly look down on Gooks and especially Geeks as akin to dogs and horses. Maybe even less. So it’s hard to feel bad when, in the midst of a tense and violent dinner part, Roan kills Quex, even if he does give him an “honorable” death. With this violence, it looks like Roan’s time in the ITN will be short.

Enhancing Image

We finally get answers to the two biggest questions that have been haunting this novel, namely what the Niss have been doing this whole time and what has become of Earth, Roan’s ancestral homeworld. The answers are both interconnected and anticlimactic, maybe by design. It’s true that the Niss formed a blockade around Earth and supplanted the Terrans as the top dog in known space, but that was literally thousands of years ago. We have never seen a Niss prior to this final installment, and when we do finally meet one he is weak and at death’s door, with everyone else already dead. Having replaced humanity as rulers of the galaxy, the Niss apparently diluded themselves over time, to the point of a slow extinction; nowadays they’re treated as a myth, something to be talked about rather than seen. With the highest goals of galactic conquest achieved eons ago, the Niss, having found no greater cause in life, opted for a slow death. Humanity still exists on Earth, it turns out, maybe being better off than their former conquerors; but this too, came with its own price. As with the ITN ghouls, the people on Earth have at least partly fallen to decadence, with there being an “Upper” and “Lower” society. They also have their own form of slavery, keeping mutated “dogs” (which really are more like large and intelligent monkeys, or very hairy humans) as their servants. Like real-world dogs, these “dogs” are loyal to their masters; they enjoy being slaves. This is a fact that disturbs Roan, since, to paraphrase him, at least slaves in alien cultures knew enough to loathe their positions in life. This all feels very wrong.

The final quarter of Earthblood, in which Roan and two of his men (Poion having died in the interim) are on Earth, could’ve justified being a novel on its own, and maybe it should’ve been a novel. Something I’ve mentioned before in passing but which needs reiterating here is that Earthblood is fast as fuck; it’s one of the most lightning-quick SF novels I’ve read in a while, which is sometimes to its detriment. The pacing becomes almost manic at times, with how much Laumer and Brown try to fit in here. The Terran culture Roan comes quickly to hate is layered, in some ways disturbing, and yet we’re not given that much time with it. There are a few new characters introduced in this last stretch of the book, maybe the most memorable of them being Daryl, who serves as Roan’s (and by extension the reader’s) guide to how things work. Daryl is old enough to have birthed a daughter who herself at least appears to be an adult, and yet he’s youthful and rather feminine in appearance. He’s also, not very subtly, a queer man almost of the drag show variety. I’m not sure if Daryl’s effeminate nature and attempts to flirt with Roan are indicative of the authors’ homophobia, because truth be told he’s no worse than some of the human characters we’d met before, but it’s certainly hard to ignore. Speaking of ambiguous queerness, we also have Sostelle, the “dog” who accompanies Roan for much of his stay, who despite having a feminine-sounding name is supposedly male, and who also comes to have a submissive relationship with him. These are things the novel never elaborates on, because it’s already so fast and so much is happening that for better or worse we can’t dwell on them.

The good news is that the Niss blockade is no longer an issue for Earth interacting with the rest of known space, but the people on Earth aren’t even aware the blockade had ended a long time ago, due to humanity having become degraded and small-minded. Typically in an old-timey SF novel with this kind of plot, Roan would support the rebuilding of the Terran empire, but not only has he since given up on that, having hared his short time spent with the ITN, but he loves the rather large number of intelligent alien races in the galaxy too much to let mankind put the lot into servitude. He’s still a tough and murderous son of a bitch, but he does in fact have some morals, which Daryl and those like him run afoul of. There’s an unnerving scene in which a dancer named Desiranne, who reminds Roan of Stellaraire, tries to commit ritual suicide as the grand finale of her performance for him—an act she had been trained and even raised to carry out. She almost succeeds. Roan’s one-man rebellion against decadent Earth society is totally justified, if we’re being honest, and it feels earned because the whole novel had been building to this moment. The Terra Roan hoped to find wasn’t there after all; instead, it’s something he and the others will have to build themselves. You could say a kind of cultural revolution is needed, to break down the old way of living and create something new.

A Step Farther Out

I decided to read a couple contemporary reviews of Earthblood, including Algis Budrys’s review in Galaxy, who makes the connection that Laumer and Brown had probably taken inspiration from Robert Heinlein and L. Ron Hubbard. More specifically the brutality and paranoia of Earthblood remind me of Hubbard’s short novel To the Stars, one of the most brutal (and xenophobic—it is Hubbard, after all) SF stories I’ve ever read. I do mean that as a compliment, by the way. What Earthblood lacks in elegance, having a rather shoddy structure that makes it seem like Laumer and Brown wrote it with serialization in mind, it makes up for in a kind of “wow” factor. Like damn, I did not think an SF novel from the ’60s could be this grimy. At the same time it has more of a humanist angle than Heinlein or Hubbard, or at least it’s not as racist or sexist as it could’ve been. I recommend it as a rough but entertaining one-off, the kind of adventure novel that was soon to become outdated thanks to the New Wave. It is, as Baird Searles says in his review of the novel for Asimov’s, a relic from “the tail end of this jolly era” that included such pulpy SF.

See you next time.

Who Goes There?

Now it’s time for an unusual team-up, between two writers who wrote for the same magazines and at the same time, but who otherwise seemed to have little in common. Laumer was from New York (although not NYC} and had a respectable military career, which he retired from to focus on writing. He bought a tiny island in Florida where he could do his work in peace. He made his SF debut in 1959 and spent the next decade or so growing a following with a mix of standalones and a couple series, most famously the episodic Retief series. Laumer was a pioneer of military SF, although that label wouldn’t become “a thing” until later. Unfortunately, Laumer suffered a stroke in 1971, at just 46, which left him unable to write for a time; and when he did return to writing, his work was not of the quality or consistency of his pre-stroke output. It’s hard to blame him for this: such a calamity would’ve ended a lot of authors’ careers. Laumer died in 1993, at a reasonably old age, but it’s his work in the ’60s that’s most remembered, though he’s somewhat obscure now.

Rosel George Brown was from New Orleans, and as far as I can tell she mostly stayed in Louisiana for the rest of her life. She had earned a Master’s in Greek, and did work as a teacher while being married to a college professor, so it’s fair to say she was a highly learned woman. She, like Laumer, made her SF debut in 1959, although she wrote only a few novels and not that many short stories. She may have done more, had she not died from lymphoma at the tragically young age of 41, just one year after Earthblood was published. Despite the small output, Brown was one of the best writers to come about during those awkward years between the end of the ’50s SF boom and the New Wave era.

Placing Coordinates

Serialized in If, April to July 1966. It was published in hardcover by Doubleday later that year. It’s been reprinted on occasion, but the best way to find it now would be the Baen omnibus Earthblood and Other Stories, which comes bundled with stories by Laumer and Brown each writing solo. Why they felt the need to bundle it I’m not sure, given it’s a longish novel by the standards of ’60s SF.

Enhancing Image

Earthblood reads in part like one of Robert Heinlein’s adventure-oriented ’50s novels, with the beginning seeming to pay homage to the memorable start of Citizen of the Galaxy. Raff and his wife Bella are looking to buy a human child, or rather a human embryo. Pure Terran. Raff is a mutant while Bella is a humanoid alien. This is a future in which there was once a human galactic empire, but the empire has long since crumbled, leaving little in the way of pureblood humans. However, mankind was prolific, and there being quite a few humanoid alien races, there are many mixed-race humanoids to be found. But like I said, pure Terrans without mutations are rare, so such an embryo would be expensive. Raff and Bella end up having to sell their passports to afford an embryo that was originally meant for “the Shah,” which makes me think this is a timeline where the Iranian revolution never happened. Now both poor and stranded on some backwater planet, the couple at least have their human boy to raise, although even then their troubles aren’t over. They’re attacked one day by a small gang of Yill, a race with a penchant for viciousness. Raff is wounded in the encounter to the point of being crippled, but since the couple technically win, by Yill custom they take in a survivor as a servant.

The embryo becomes a baby and the baby become a boy, named Roan, who in his childhood lives apart from mankind. He has his parents, the servant I mentioned, and some birdlike intelligent aliens called the gracyl. His first friend is a gracyl named Clanth, although sadly this friendship will not last too long. The gracyl are prone to cowardness, which is understandable given they’re physically weak and rather small in size. It’s clear (at least from the authors’ point of view) that Roan is meant for bigger and better things. A big part of Roan’s character arc, indeed what gets him started on his quest from a young age, is the notion that humans are in some way inherently superior to other intelligent races—that once upon a time, humanity ruled the whole known galaxy. Roan is a descendant, in biology if not exact bloodline, of rulers. (The sentiment of human supremacy is not helped in its unsavory implications by Roan being vaguely white, even being drawn as your typical square-jawed hero in the interiors.) The conflict is that he grows up in a world (or worlds) where friends are few and most people are either looking to take advantage of him or kill him outright. This is made apparent early on when he survives an attack by a predatory race called the Veed, which leaves several gracyl dead, including Clanth. It’ll be a hot minute before Roan befriends another living soul. His life, from then until the time he reaches adulthood, is an unhappy one.

Implicit racism aside, a quibble I have with this first installment is that we don’t get to spend much time with any one of the races, and there are a handful introduced here. The no-nonsense pacing is for the most part a positive, but it does leave characters who are not Roan on the side of underdeveloped. Granted, we’re only a quarter into the novel. It does seem like we gloss over the time between Roan as a young boy and when he decides to join the circus—and by “decide,” I mean he’s forced into it. He’s captured by a bipedal lobster-like alien named Ithc, but wounds one of Ithc’s hands (or claws) in the process. Gom Bulj, the owner of the “Extravaganzoo,” is mad at Roan for injuring one of his performers, but he makes a deal with Roan that the young man can’t refuse. Pure Terrans are a novelty, and years of living on a rough-and-tumble planet made Roan physically strong and agile. He’ll make a good high-wire performer—or else. Ithc is the villain of this first installment, being Roan’s nemesis, and as you can see with the front cover, their fight is one worth illustrating. Despite being a young adult, Roan has the vocabulary and stubbornness of a five-year-old, which seems to come from the lack of a proper education. He’s immature for his age, which doesn’t stop him from being both a capable fighter and clever in his own way. It also doesn’t stop him from getting a girlfriend, although it’s unclear how romantic their relationship is.

Up to this point Roan made it clear he wanted a romantic companion of his own, but he specifically wanted a human woman, or at least a humanoid alien who appears human enough. Maybe he is a bit of a racist. In Roan’s defense, the circumstances of his upbringing make it so that he has only an idea of what a human woman is like. In the first installment of Earthblood there’s the implicit question of nature versus nurture. The idea is that Roan’s “pure” genetics destine him for greatness, assuming he doesn’t get killed first, but his upbringing in a tough environment by a mixed-race couple who gave up their wealth to raise him means he has something of the scoundrel in him. He’s basically Tarzan IN SPAAAAAAACE, or to make another comparison, he’s like Superman. He was meant to be heir to royalty but ended up in the hands of loving but impoverished parents. Enter Stellaraire, a dancer and fellow “freak” at the circus, who appears human enough to Roan’s liking. Having never been involved with a woman like this before, Roan is curious rather than violently misogynistic like how you might expect—a curiosity Stella is happy to indulge. Something unusual for magazine SF of the time, at least in the US (New Worlds was spicing things up in the UK), is the unequivocal sexual component of Roan and Stella’s bond. One of the first things they do together is Stella teaching Roan how to bathe like a civilized person, involving the shedding of clothes.

There Be Spoilers

Roan discovers before he’s even taken on as a member of the crew that the Extravaganzoo is about as cutthroat as life on the outside, not least because he has to play nice with Ithc. Understandably the two hate each other. The only friends Roan is able to make are Stella and a gentle giant by the name of Iron Robert (well, he came up with the “Iron” part). Shit finally comes to a head when Roan finds Ithc torturing Stella after a show, the torture itself a kind of exhibition, and decides to take matters into his own hands—quite literally. The climax of the first installment is the bloodiest part, with Roan beating Ithc to a pulp, breaking his limbs and choking him before putting the asshole out of his misery. Roan can avoid the short-term consequences of killing a fellow performer, on account of the spectators promising to not rat out on him, but this still raises the question as to how he’s supposed to survive here, and if there’s even a way out. Presumably there is, because I can’t imagine the rest of the novel taking place at the circus. Roan is meant for bigger and better things than this.

A Step Farther Out

It’s problematic and a bit sleazy, but I’m also interested in where Earthblood goes from here. Of course, the mild sleaziness is a breath of fresh air for pre-New Wave SF. There’s sexuality, a good deal of violence, and even some mild swearing (wow). The Heinlein influence is apparent, but then Heinlein had just stopped writing novels of this sort. Also, I think it’s worth mentioning, and it’s probably because of Brown’s contributions (I’m unsure of Laumer’s skill with writing women), but this is not nearly as creepy or misogynistic as Heinlein in writing-for-adults mode. There are other issues, namely regarding race, but I’m willing to see the novel’s treatment of race (or speciesism, rather) unfold over the coming installments.

See you next time.