Who Goes There?

Everyone who makes it big has had to start somewhere, and the same can be said for John D. MacDonald, who became famous for his crime novels, be it standalones like Cape Fear (originally titled The Executioners) or his long-running Travis McGee series, about a detective who lives on a house boat. But before all those novels, MacDonald wrote a fair amount of SF in the late ’40s and early ’50s—a past he did not seem to be ashamed of, considering he also authorized a collection of his short SF in the ’70s, well after he had made it as a crime writer. Wine of the Dreamers would be either MacDonald’s first or second novel, and it’s certainly the first of a few SF novels he wrote. Why he started out with SF before soon moving to crime is unclear, but I would have to guess it has something to do with the bubble that was the market for SF in the few years right before and after 1950. If you’re a young writer looking to cut your teeth, like MacDonald was at the time, you could do much worse than writing SF, even at short lengths, since there was no shortage of outlets that took short SF. Aside from maybe catching a short story or two of his in passing this is the first thing by MacDonald I’ve read, which is not a typical starting point.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the May 1950 issue of Startling Stories. I got a PDF of the book version, and skimming through some sections quickly reveals that the magazine and book versions are rather different, with the former being abridged, although ISFDB and the SF Encyclopedia make no mention of this difference. Aside from an ebook edition the book version has not seen print in a couple decades.

Enhancing Image

I don’t have that much to say about Wine of the Dreamers, so I’ll put down my thoughts in note form and see where that takes us. My thoughts were a bit scattered as I was reading it and unfortunately, now that I’ve technically finished reading it and the dust has settled, I’m still struggling to process fully what MacDonald did here.

1. The premise is simple enough, although it’s given a smokescreen of complexity by virtue of there being two sets of protagonists for the price of one. Firstly we have Dr. Bard Lane and the psychologist Sharan Inly on Earth, in a quasi-dystopian near future where the space race (which mind you we were only starting to see the first glimmers of in 1950) is still a matter of national concern. Sensational news media dominates print and radio, with horrors like murder, theft, and scandal seemingly around every corner. Gambling has also become more of a concern, which is prescient on MacDonald’s part considering we in the year 2025 have a huge gambling problem—albeit more in the form of sports betting and video game micro-transactions than casinos. Divorce is also on the rise, because of course it is.
2. MacDonald has things to say about what were then society’s ills, or rather middle-class white America’s ills, without actually taking much of a political position. Like I couldn’t tell you if he was a Republican or Democrat at the time, although given this was before the late ’60s switching of the parties it wouldn’t have been much help anyway. In fairness to him, America really was in a liminal point in its cultural development: World War II had recently ended, leaving the US and Russia as the only really functioning international powers as far as Europe was concerned. The Allies had partitioned Germany, and even split Berlin in two, which itself turned out to be a humanitarian crisis. When MacDonald wrote Wine of the Dreamers circa 1949 it also would’ve been before the Korean War. TV was also only just starting to become commercially viable. If the scenes set on Earth do a good job at anything it’s capturing the uncertainty and paranoia of the immediate post-war years, without much room for so-called prosperity. It’s an America not too unlike ours.
3. The secondary plot follows the titular dreamers, or the Watchers as they’re called, a small and closed-off society of humanity in the stars that can barely be considered a society, being on its last legs and so decadent. Raul Kinson and his sister Leesa are young and rebellious members of a culture that has long since given up on progress and excellence, with the Watchers spending much of their time in dream machines, where they imagine themselves as other intelligent beings on other planets—one of these planets being Earth. Of course, the problem is that the “dreams” the Watchers have are not dreams at all, but rather the Watchers telepathically take over the minds of unwilling and unsuspecting hosts, only the Watchers don’t know this. The novel’s central dilemma is what might happen to such a society if it became aware of the evils it casually indulges. Philip K. Dick could’ve done a mean job with such a premise, but MacDonald is a very different writer from Dick and so isn’t as interested in the philosophical or religious implications of the dream machines. MacDonald illustrates the loneliness and creepiness of the Watchers’ society well, but he doesn’t go far enough for my liking.
4. So, the big thing that dates this novel, aside from it being very post-WWII, is the fixation with mental illness, or more specifically a neurotypical person’s conception of mental illness. This is gonna sound like it was done in bad taste, but the idea (I’m not kidding) is that the reason there have been so many freak incidents throughout modern history, with people seemingly going postal at random or being “possessed by devils,” is because of the Watchers abusing their powers and having way too much fun with the bodies they possess. Obviously we know this to not be true, and MacDonald would’ve known as well, but that didn’t stop him from coming up with a nonsense SFnal explanation for severe mental illness that shifts the blame away from capitalist society’s consistent demonizing of those with mental illness and puts it on a made-up outside force. As someone with a history of depression, this is hard for me to take. In the years immediately following the end of WWII there was evidently a resurgence of interest in psychology in middle-class America, and how people with mental aberrations might be treated. Wine of the Dreamers sees MacDonald hopping on that bandwagon.
5. Of the two plots, which get more or less the same amount of attention, the one focusing on the Watchers is easily superior. This might be because I’m indifferent to the Earth plot involving a rocket launch that goes horribly wrong (because I’ve become increasingly indifferent to space flight and the prospect of colonizing other worlds), but I’m more interested in fictionalized societies that say something about our own, by way of allegory. From what little MacDonald had to say about this novel we know he intended it to have symbolic meaning. The Watchers are humans who have been away from Earth for thousands of years, and the culture they’ve built up has been mostly forgotten and degraded to the point where they’re basically a dying race. As MacDonald says, “when original purposes are forgotten, the uses of ritual can be destructive.” The dream machines were not meant for sadistic fun, but as a teaching mechanism for the isolated Watchers. It’s a shame then that at least in the magazine version we only get the bare-bones version of this conflict. I will say, at least as an advertisement for the book version (although that didn’t come out until a year later), the magazine version of Wine of the Dreamers does its job.

There Be Spoilers Here

Of course all’s well that ends well, although it was indeed the ending of the magazine version that made me raise an eyebrow and wonder if there was more to the story. Turns out I was right. There’s a kind of romantic square going on between our four main characters, with Raul and Leesa taking over Lane and Inly’s bodies respectively, with Raul falling for Inly and Leesa falling for Lane. This hint of romance is only that: a hint. (By the way, something we learn about the dream machines is that the “dreamer” can only occupy the mind of a host who’s of the same sex, which makes you wonder what would happen if a cisgender Watcher took over a trans person’s body. Just food for thought.) In the magazine version we’re told, as really an afterthought of an epilogue, that Our Heroes™ will be having a double wedding, which is incredible considering they haven’t known each other that long. Skimming through the book version this epilogue at least feels less thrown-together, since it gets a whole chapter to itself as opposed to a couple paragraphs. Either way the ending is weak, smacking of either MacDonald not knowing how else to end his story or of editorial interference that would not have been unusual for the time.

A Step Farther Out

It’s competent, although somehow I felt like I was only getting part of the picture with it. It could be that the book version, being longer, is the better experience, but that’s a question to ask the three living people who have read the book version of Wine of the Dreamers. What’s funny is that looking up reviews on Goodreads, at least one major review implied to have read the magazine version, which is considerably shorter. Had I known about the difference in advance I might not have chosen this novel for review. I’m not sure if MacDonald had written the magazine version first and then expanded it or what have you, since despite being a popular writer in mystery/crime circles we actually don’t have much in terms of interviews and essays from MacDonald; he was not that much of a public figure. At some point I’ll tackle his short SF, which might be more indicative of his talent. If you’re gonna read Wine of the Dreamers then I suggest seeking out the book version, although it’s very out of print.

See you next time.