Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

The Story So Far

John Ramsey is a gifted psychologist on an assignment from Bu-Psych, to play the role of the new electronics officer for the Fenian Ram, a subtug that’s out to raid oil in enemy territory, just off Siberia. This is the 21st century, and not only has the Cold War gotten a bit warmer, but oil has become an increasingly precious resource. The last twenty subtug missions have ended in failure, with the higher-ups suspecting there are “sleepers” aboard these submarines—spies who are sabotaging things from the inside. Ramsey’s job is twofold: to sniff out a possible spy among the Ram‘s small crew, and to evaluate Sparrow, the Ram‘s captain. Sparrow has been shown to be an incredible captain, but he also seems to have a bit of a screw loose, being a Bible-spouting borderline psychotic who expects nothing less than the utmost devotion from his crew. The other crew are Bonnett and Garcia, who’ve been on the Ram for many months by now. Ramsey is an outsider here, which already puts him at a disadvantage, never mind that he has to keep his real profession a secret.

Another problem is that being in a submarine means there’s no such thing as a minor accident, especially when it comes to dealing with enemy patrols. Of course the Ram is totally outmanned and outgunned against the wolf packs that are patrolling the Pacific, so the only option is evasive action. After a close call with the enemy, Sparrow falls ill from radiation sickness for a time, meanwhile the rest of the crew are unsure as to where they stand with each other. There’s the growing sense that somebody here is a spy, and the cards are stacked against Ramsey since he’s fresh meat. For better or worse Garcia has also figured out that Ramsey is a psychologist who has some ulterior motive for hopping aboard the Ram. The two have a kind of mutual respect, if also ambivalence mixed with paranoia. The last installment ended with Bonnett, having misconstrued Ramsey helping with the ship for planting a “spybeam,” jumping the gun and beating Ramsey within an inch of his life. Does this mean Bonnett is really the spy? Is everyone a little too tightly wound with this mission? I would know the answers, considering I’ve read the final installment or else I wouldn’t be here.

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Surprise! Turns out Garcia is the spy, although how this is revealed is a bit odd; I don’t mean this in a bad way. Prior to the actual reveal Garcia implies, in a conversation with Ramsey, that he’s become tired of working for the Soviets, or more accurately he’s become tired of being a spy, but also knows that it’s too late to turn back now. If he’s caught then he would be tried and most likely executed for espionage. Interestingly, Herbert would’ve written Under Pressure in the wake of the Rosenbergs being tried and executed as spies, which in the age of McCarthyism was a major blow to civil liberties in the US. There was a crackdown on those suspected of having Soviet or generally leftist sentiments, and while Herbert was not a leftist at all, he held a long-standing disdain for government. Garcia is technically the closest thing the novel has to a villain, by virtue of being on the Soviets’ payroll, and yet Herbert writes him sympathetically. I’m not totally sure how this flew over John W. Campbell’s head, given that Campbell was a committed hawk during the Cold War and Under Pressure is evidently ambivalent about the conflict. It’s not unusual to find SF from the era that takes a rather neutral or ambivalent stance on the Cold War, but that’s usually reserved for stuff published in other magazines, and there’s a moral greyness here that is not often seen in SF published in Astounding at the time. I have to admit I didn’t expect that from Herbert.

Of course, stuck between either dying in the Ram or being taken back to the States for the gas chamber, Garcia opts for the former, dying from a heavy dose of radiation, with the wish that his family at least be provided for after his death. Sparrow, a man who prays for the souls of his enemies even as he goes up against them in battle, takes Garcia up on this, although we’re told at the end that the government killed two birds with one stone by giving Garcia’s widow a position so that they can keep an eye on her. There’s a touch of cynicism in what is otherwise a happy ending—just enough to satisfy Herbert’s own tendency toward cynicism, but not enough to scare Campbell. As for Sparrow, there’s a curious insight about how he’s psychologically unfit to live on land, but perfectly adapted to life in a submarine, in the sense that he’s married to the job. What counts as being mentally unfit? It’s a matter of perspective. Sparrow is so attached to the Ram that it’s like a second skin, or like his natural environment. I’ve noticed that in the years leading up to the space race escalating, there was some speculation in SF about the psychology of the astronaut, and how an astronaut might be changed mentally by life in a tin can, in zero gravity; but Herbert posits the same question about people who work in submarines, a question that has only become more pertinent with the invention of long-range nuclear subs. You don’t see this specific kind of speculation often in fiction.

A Step Farther Out

Only been, what, a couple weeks since I last posted here? Feels like it hasn’t been that long on my end. Then again, I was posting every few days here up until recently, and since I can look at the numbers, I can tell you that I’ve written a lot for this site. A fair bit of time and effort with relatively few returns, except of course the pleasure of (sometimes) reading fiction that is in itself enjoyable. I’m nothing if not a compulsive reader; in fact while I’ve mostly taken a break this month from writing, I never stopped reading, say, two or three books at a time.

Well, Under Pressure is a pretty decent serial, to the point where I can see how reviewers in 1956 saw it as an impressive debut from Herbert. For his part Herbert wouldn’t properly follow up Under Pressure (or The Dragon in the Sea as it’s also called) for nearly a decade, but when he did it would be the beginning of maybe the single most famous SF book series of all time. I do recommend Under Pressure if you’re into old-school hard SF that has also aged better than a lot of stuff from that time period, although your mileage may vary with regards to Herbert’s writing quirks, some of which are very much present here.

See you next time.

Who Goes There?

Frank Herbert is one of the most famous authors in the whole history of SF, despite the fact that most of his output continues to wallow in obscurity. How did this happen? He was born in 1920 in Washington State, raised Catholic but taking to Buddhism as an adult, served a brief stint (only six months) in the Navy during World War II, this last part being relevant to today’s story. He started out as a journalist and came to writing science fiction relatively late, already being in his thirties when his first SF story was published in 1952. A few years later and we got his first novel, serialized as Under Pressure and published in book form as The Dragon in the Sea. But that’s no what people know Herbert for. When it seemed like he was about to be another second-tier writer, doomed to be forgotten, Herbert struck gold with the serial Dune World, in Analog, which was very popular, along with its sequel serial Prophet of Dune. Both short novels, totaling eight installments, were then fused into one big novel, Dune, which became a bestseller overnight and which took home both the Hugo and the inaugural Nebula for Best Novel. The rest is history.

Of course, it’s not as simple as all that. Herbert had conducted an enormous amount of research for Dune, with this first novel in what would become a wide-spanning series taking years to gestate—unusual for genre SF at the time. Herbert wrote other novels over the next couple decades, but Dune was the thing that kept his name in the papers and on people’s minds, and indeed, even taking its faults into account, Dune was a revolutionary novel for the field. Herbert himself is a figure of some controversy, from his appropriating of Islamic culture to his well-documented homophobia to the question of whether or not he was even a good writer. Did he just happen to get lucky? I have to admit, being a third into Under Pressure, I do think there was at least some talent there.

Placing Coordinates

Serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, November 1955 to January 1956. It was published in book form later in 1956 as The Dragon in the Sea, revised somewhat (the language is a bit saltier, for one) but otherwise the same novel as its magazine counterpart. It’s still in print, I think, although truth be told I’ve never encountered anything Herbert that isn’t Dune-related in the wild. Has anyone seen a copy of this thing?

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I assume most if not everyone reading this has already read Dune, which means we’re already aware of Herbert’s writing quirks, and you’ll be pleased (or maybe not) to know some of them have already manifested in Under Pressure. Well, the good news is that this is a much smaller novel than Dune, in both length and the scope of the action. We’re not given a whole world to play with, but instead the cramped and claustrophobic world of an atomic submarine—as envisioned in the 1950s, of course. Whereas it takes seemingly forever for Paul Atreides to emerge as the “hero” of Dune, we’re immediately met with our protagonist for Under Pressure in the form of John Ramsey. Ramsey is trained as an electronic officer, but his real job and profession is as a psychologist, an ensign from BuPsych (the Bureau of Psychology) assigned to the subtug whose crew is rated as the likeliest to succeed on an upcoming oil raid. This is important for two reasons: first is that in the 21st century (around what is now the present, actually), oil has become an increasingly precious resource, with the Western and Eastern (they never say “Soviets,” but we’re clearly meant to understand the East as the Soviets) fighting for control of this resource; the second is that of the last twenty Hell Diver missions, with these subtug oil raiders, all twenty missions ended in failure. A subtug crew is very small, only four men, and with the three men aboard this one BuPsych suspects there’s a “sleeper” among them—a spy who sabotages the submarine. So you have three highly qualified men, including their captain, but one of them is (probably) a traitor.

It’s here that we’re introduced to the crew, that being Captain Sparrow and his men Garcia and Bonnett. Sparrow is sort of an Ahab or maybe Nemo figure, whom BuPsych suspects of having a screw loose, but he’s also shown to be a highly capable skipper. Garcia is a Hispanic Catholic, which is curious because I would’ve expected the subtug’s crew to be all white Americans instead of mostly. Then there’s Bonnett, whom Ramsey nails as having an inferiority complex due to being raised in an orphanage. I should mention at this point that Ramsey is a psychologist of the sort you’d expect to see in pop culture in the post-war years, which is to say he’s clearly read a ton of Freud and Jung. Under Pressure is not nearly as aggressively Freudian as some other SF works from the era, at least not yet, although I’m not sure how much of that boils down to censorship from being printed in Astounding. Magazines at the time were generally more prudish than book publishers, but this was doubly the case with magazines John W. Campbell edited. Looking at the magazine and book texts of Under Pressure, there are immediately some small but still noticeable differences. For example, at the beginning in the magazine version, Ramsey calls a snooty secretary a snob, while in the book version he calls her a bitch. Maybe if Under Pressure had been serialized in Galaxy the mildly salty language would’ve stayed, but Herbert’s brand of SF is maybe a bit too hard-nosed for that magazine. Indeed the most impressive part of this novel, aside from Herbert’s estbablishing a setting that is suffocating both physically and mentally, it’s that Under Pressure reads more as speculative fiction than science fiction. Granted that I’m not even slightly an expert on submarines and have only an elementary knowledge of nautical terminology, it’s impressive that Herbert is able to make the reader feel as if they’re learning about subs while at the same time reading a psychologically gripping adventure story.

So Under Pressure is what might be called edutainment, which is a lable I don’t see used often nowadays, but back in the pre-internet days (and indeed in the early days of the internet, i.e., my childhood) there was a whole school of pop science that worked to educate the layman while also being entertainment. Hard SF is arguably a kind of edutainment, with the caviat that hard SF, being still a kind of SF, must out of necessity work on the basis of at least One Big Lie™. The author has to fudge the numbers or put their thumb on the scales to make something SFnal. Hal Clement admitted this much in an essay that accompanied the serialization of Mission of Gravity. Incidentally, a big reason Herbert’s novel works as edutainment is that Ramsey, who for much of this is our eyes and ears, has to learn about the minutia of the subtug at the same time as the reader. He’s given a five-week crash course in being an electronics officer aboard a sub with only four crewmen, all the while reading up on his shipmates so that he can better figure out if one of them is about to crack, or if one of them is the spy the government’s looking for. Not only does Ramsey have to sniff out the spy, but he’s keeping his job as psychologist a secret from the crew. Thus we’re introduced to a game of cat and mouse, made more intense because Sparrow and Garcia are religious men and Sparrow even more so is prone to episodes of Bible-quoting religious mania.

There Be Spoilers Here

The crew discover the tucked-away corpse of the former electronics officer, who may or may not have committed suicide, but otherwise there’s not too much action in this installment. The big realization Ramsey comes to by the end is that he is quite likely to die on this mission, either through sabotage with the subtug or one of the crew killing him outright. The problem with being in a submarine is that you’re hundreds of leagues below the ocean’s surface, so that there’s no such thing as a “small” mishap aboard ship. If you’ve watched Das Boot then you have an idea as to the mortality rates of submarine crews during WWII, and while the future war of Under Pressure is clearly based off the Cold War instead, the risk has not gone down much. This first installment ends with a kind of bewildering nightmare sequence, in which Ramsey’s fears of dying in the dephs of the ocean come to the surface. It’s a reminder that Herbert can be a creepy bastard, and also that despite his tendency to jump between characters’ heads, namely Ramsey and Sparrow’s he understands psychological drama.

A Step Farther Out

As someone who is a bit of a Herbert skeptic, I have to say I’ve been enjoying this quite a bit. We’ll see where it goes.

See you next time.