review of
John Brunner's The Evil That Men Do & Lin Carter's The Purloined Planet
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 20, 2013

This is a double novella bk - not in the Ace style where the novellas are upside-down in relation to each other. John Brunner, a writer I've only recently begun reading, has once again impressed me enormously. Any creative person who can surprise me w/ a work, who can do something DIFFERENT from what I'm already familiar w/ by them is bound to get more respect from me. Brunner's done that here by having written what's more of a psychological thriller than SF - & done it well.

At the same time, it's still SF tho, insofar as Brunner approaches the subject of mind-control from the POV of an ethical amateur hypnotist who's scientifically-minded. W/o spoiling the plot too much, there're characters who retreat into the same fantasy world who have no apparent connection. & there's a bk by one Duncan Marsh. Marsh's bk is sadistic. There're certainly parallels w/ Marsh & his bk in 'real life' & I suspect that Brunner based Marsh on someone or an amalgam of several someones - de Sade being an obvious 'beginning' but not necessarily the central someone.

Brunner's bk succeeds for me b/c even tho it's 'horrible' it's less 'horror' than it is psychoanalytic. I generally don't find horror very interesting at all - I like the movies, sometimes, b/c they're a popular genre that explores dreamlike 'logic'. I reckon the bks do, too, but that aspect seems less important to me than the way horror uses manipulation techniques that seem more beneficial to the author's bank acct than they do to the sanity of the reader.

A tiny bone to pick is that Brunner has a character remarking on graveyards being in the center of towns. Maybe that's the way it is in England, where Brunner lived, but in the US the graveyards were usually established on the outskirts of towns & the towns grew to envelop them.

Lin Carter surprised me too. I've always associated him w/ fantasy & I'm not very interested in the fantasy genre. I didn't realize or remember that he wrote parodies too. In some sense The Purloined Planet was a standard parody of the egotistical male hero ("Hautley was a gifted scientist as well as a talented linguist, a brilliant tactician, a skillful actor, a superb fighting man, a master of disguise, and the greatest lover of his eon." (p 117)), in other ways it had some more clever twists & turns.

The story begins w/:

"Hautley Quicksilver, the most celebrated, successful and supercompetent Legal Licensed Criminal Agent in the known galaxy, stared with a certain degree of perplexity at his prospective client as they sat talking in the luxurious study of his pink private castle on the asteroid Carvel in the Astarte System one Zenday afternoon.

""Do I understand, your Excellency, to say that your planet, Albazar II, has utterly no crime rate whatsoever? And no police or law enforcement agencies of any description?" Hautley queried." - p 101

The idea of the "Legal Licensed Criminal Agent" is developed: "Indeed, he resolved never to commit a criminal act on Albazar, even though as a Legal and Licensed Criminal his actions were not held liable under law. Still, why take chances?" - p 109

Thus, the reader is set up for a spoof on detective novels in wch the detective is ultimately more honorable than the police but also willing to commit crimes to serve his purpose (as the police usually are too - this just isn't acknowledged in their PR).

"That is—he did not exactly 'smile'. To be precise, he did not smile, nor could he, lacking such necessaries as mouth, jaw, or even a neck. Instead, he flexed his bristling moustache of mandibular spines in a manner expressive of geniality to the peoples of his native world. And, instead of nodding, he undulated his triple eye-stalks to an equivalent gesture which would have been understood as nodlike to his fellow Albazarians." - p 102

All the non-humans are similarly silly, Carter appears to be less concerned w/ any probabilities than he is w/ being funny. I'd say he mostly succeeded for me.. altho I found myself whipping thru this half of the double novella a little more impatient to get it over w/ than I did w/ the Brunner half.

I don't know what the state-of-the-art of storage was in 1975, when this was published, but I know that former mines are used these days (see my movie entitled "Ledger of St Dermain" here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkSSfTcXV2s ), but I find it far-seeing that Carter imagines a whole planet carved out for storage purposes - called here "New Andelsprutz" or "The Archive Planet":

"So voluminous had records become in this distant era, and so pressing a problem had their retention grown into, that in the age of great Quicksilver entire planets were given over to their storage. This was true, even taking into consideration the latest advances in the fine art of microfilming, which had by this time become so sophisticated that it was, incredible as it may seem, quite possible to record the entire literary works of Issac Asimov on the molecules contained within a single flake of mica." - p 134

In the 1990-91 Authors Books-in-Print, Asimov's works are listed in fine print over more than 2 pp. It seems to me that I've seen other editions where they're spread out even more. ( )