review of
A. Bertram Chandler's Book 3 in the Saga of Commodore John Grimes: "The Dark Dimensions" & "The Rim Gods"
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - December 29, 2016

Go. Here. Now: “Rim Dimensions: The The”: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/518236-rim-dimensions

I enjoy reading Chandler's writing, even when I'm fairly sure that he's cranking out material b/c his publisher thinks he has more to mine in an area he's had popular acclaim w/, wch is the case here. I've read & reviewed 16 other bks of his so far in 2016. Even tho I've made some attempt to read the inter-related ones in order so that I can make some sense of their connections I've mostly read them pell-mell. I didn't find "Book 1" of this series in the store where I found Books 2 & 3 & I intended to at least read Book 2 before read Book 3.. but I accidentally reversed the order. Oh, well..

If I think of Books 2 & 3 of the Saga as containing 2 bks apiece, as I do, that brings my Chandler reading up to 20 of his bks. Of these 20, 16 have Grimes in them. Of these, in addition to the 4 bks of Books 2 & 3 of the Saga, 8 have Grimes as the main character: The Anarch Lords, To Prime the Pump, The Big Black Mark, To Keep the Ship, The Far Traveler, Into the Alternate Universe, The Road to the Rim, & Spartan Planet

Beyond the Galactic Rim is a collection of 4 short stories all of wch feature Grimes to some degree or another & featuring his earliest appearance that I've noted in "Forbidden Planet" (1959).

Nebula Alert & The Ship from Outside have Grimes making cameo appearances.

Kelly Country has the protagonist be named John Grimes but he's in a very different story from those of the Rim Saga.

NOW, just so you have an idea of how much of this Grimes material there is & how complicated it might be to try to read them in chronological order: According to http://www.bertramchandler.com/johngrimes.aspx :

Grimes stories in order (the ones I have in bold are the ones I've read) w/ the info somewhat abridged by me for the purposes of this review:

John Grimes: Survey Service

The Road to the Rim (Nov 1967)
To Prime the Pump (1971)
The Hard Way Up (Oct 1972)
The Broken Cycle (1975)
Spartan Planet (Apr 1969)
The Inheritors (Jun 1972)
The Big Black Mark (Feb 1975)

John Grimes: Far Traveller Couriers

The Far Traveller (1977)
Star Courier (Mar 1977)
To Keep the Ship (1978)
Matilda's Stepchildren (1979)
Star Loot (1980)
The Anarch Lords (Sep 1981)
The Last Amazon (Jun 1984)
The Wild Ones (1984)

John Grimes: Rim Commodore

"Chance Encounter" (ss) New Worlds, Mar 1959
Into The Alternate Universe (Dec 1964)
Contraband from Otherspace (Jan 1967)
"Grimes at Glenrowan" (ss) IASFM, Mar/Apr 1978
"Grimes and the Gaijin Daimyo" (ss) Unpublished
"Grimes and the Great Race" (nv) IASFM, Apr 1980
"Grimes Among the Gourmets" (ss) Other Worlds, ed. Paul Collins, Void, 1978
"Grimes and the Odd Gods" (nv) F&SF, Jun 1983
"Grimes and the Jail Birds" (ss) F&SF, May 1984
The Gateway to Never (Jun 1972)
The Rim Gods (Feb 1969)
Alternate Orbits (May 1971)
"Hall of Fame" (nv) (as "The Kinsolving's Planet Irregulars") Galaxy, Jul 1969
"The Sister Ships" (nv) Galaxy, Sep 1971
"The Man Who Sailed the Sky" (nv)
"The Rub" (nv) Galaxy, Apr 1970
"The Dutchman" (nv) Galaxy, Nov 1972
"The Last Hunt" (ss) Galaxy, Mar 1973
"On the Account" (nv) Galaxy, May 1973
"Rim Change" (na) Galaxy, Aug 1975
"Doggy In The Window" (nv) Amazing, Nov 1978
The Dark Dimensions (May 1971)
The Way Back (1976)

Perhaps you can understand my confusion, Note, for one thing, the absence of Kelly Country. The stories are divided into 3 categories: Survey Service, Far Traveller, Commodore. That's the logical progression & makes sense but note that Into the Alternate Universe is from 1964 so that early bk apparently already has Grimes as a Commodore. The prequels came later. If I were to arrange the novels that I've read (ignoring the short stories) into a narrative chronological order instead of into the order they were published in (&, presumably, written in) we'd have this:

The Road to the Rim
To Prime the Pump
Spartan Planet
The Inheritors
The Big Black Mark
The Far Traveler
To Keep the Ship
The Anarch Lords
Into the Alternate Universe
Gateway to Never
The Rim Gods
The Dark Dimensions

NOW, note that Book 2 of the Saga has The Dark Dimensions followed by The Rim Gods & note that Book 3 (the one that I swear I'm going to eventually review here) starts w/ The Inheritors & ends w/ Gateway to Never.. SO, maybe, just maybe I read them in the order I'd intended to after all.

The thing is that Chandler's always writing something about the Rim like 'where the fabric of space-time is stretched thin' & then he overliteralizes the metaphor & turns it into an analogy & has Grimes meet himself when parallel time-tracks cross paths, etc, etc.. SO in one bk we read about such a meeting from one perspective & in another from the other perspective. SOO, as I was reading these, I was trying to piece it all together from my sometimes vague memories of the bks that I've read so far.

E.G.: Maggie Lazenby appears in The Inheritors, the 1st bk of Book 2 of the Saga. She'd previously appeared in Spartan Planet. Uh, but back to Book 3, the one I'm ostensibly reviewing:

The Dark Dimensions: My 1st reaction was: 'Have I read this? Or does it intertwine w/ 1 I have read?' to wch I answered myself w/ YES (meaning YES to the latter question). On p 2 as Commodore Grimes is getting his orders from the Admiral I picked this brief passage to quote:

""But it's not Kinsolving's Planet again, is it?"

"The Admiral laughed. "I can understand your being more than somewhat allergic to that peculiar world.""

SOOO, then I 'had' to think: wch bk had Kinsolving in it? In my review of Beyond the Galactic Rim ( https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/459244-i-like-a-bertram-chandler-s-stories ) I wrote:

"The 2nd story, "Wet Paint", begins thusly:

""In all probability you've never heard of Kinsolving—most people, and that includes the majority of spacemen, have not. It's one of the Rim Worlds, which means that it's well off the beaten track even for the Commission's Epsilon Class tramps. It's an Earth-type planet, but not sufficiently similar to Earth to make it attractive to colonists. The gravity is a little too heavy and the air is a little too thin and a little too rich in carbon dioxide. Its sun is hot enough, but not very bright, and its light is so blue as to convey the impression of chilliness. Then, of course, there is that aching emptiness of the night sky for six months of the year without even a moon to take the curse off it.

""Kinsolving, then, is just a name in the Survey Commission's files—just a name and a few lines of relevant data. Discovered and charted by Commodore Pearson of the Survey Ship Magellan, named after his second-in-command." - p 29"

&, then, in the accompanying review of The Ship from Outside I quote:

""["]It was mainly a rehash of all the old legends about the Outsiders and it contained the statement , alleged to have been made by Maudsley, which I'll quote: 'Put Macbeth and Kinsolvings' Sun in line, and keep them so. That's the way that we came back. Fifty light years, and all hands choking on the stink of frying oil from the Mannscheen Drive . . .'""

The short story, "Wet Paint", has a 1st person narrator who I take to be Grimes but who's never specified as such as far as I can tell by superficially skimming over it again now. The narrator & co go to Kinsolving & investigate a report by a previous visitor named Captain Spence that apparently ancient cave paintings were discovered that still had wet paint. They find a caveman. &, yes, this ties in w/ The Dark Dimensions insofar as Clarisse Mayhew, one of Grimes's crew for THIS story, is the daughter of that caveman who has inherited some special psychic properties from him. Righto.

Grimes's mission is to investigate the Outsider spaceship, an enigma that's been previously investigated, usually w/ destructive results for those-who-dare.

""Is that all?" asked Grimes.

""For the time being, yes. Oh, personnel for Faraway Quest. . . . You've a free hand. Make up the crew you think you'll need from whatever officers are available, Regulars or Reservists. The Federation has intimated that it'd like an observeer along. I think I'm right in saying that Commodore Verrill still holds a reserve commission in the Intelligence Branch of their Survey Service. . . ."

""She does, sir. And she'd be very annoyed if she wasn't allowed to come along for the ride."" - p 4

I 1st remember encountering the Sonya Verrill spy character when she seduced Derek Calver in The Ship from Outside. Chandler's bks are hotbeds of inters(t)ex(t)uality. I quote from my The Ship from Outside review ( https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/459244-i-like-a-bertram-chandler-s-stories )

"A one-night-stand can lead to jealousy can lead to serious mental collapse can lead to interruptions to the quest. Now that's realism.

""Calver kept to his own quarters, seeing nobody unless required to do so on ship's business. He was thinking too much and he was drinking too much. He hoped that the drinking would inhibit his thought processes, but it did not. He was thinking too much and he was remembering too much, harking back to the old days before the skein of his life became so hopelessly tangled. He could not blame Jane for this, but neither could he blame Sonya. he tried to blame himself, but even this he found difficult." [p 74]

& in Into the Alternate Universe, Sonya picks Grimes as her future husband. I quote from yet another review of mine ( https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1706944345 ):

"Sonya, the spy, is no longer w/ Calver & is lookin' to settle down:

""You know that there have only been two men, real men, in my life. Bill Maudsley, who found the Outsiders' quarantine station, and who paid for the discovery with his life. And Derek Calver, whose first loyalties were, after all, to Jane . . . Damn it all, John, O'm no chicken. I'm rather tired of playing the part of a lone wolf—or a lone bitch, if you like. I want me a man—but the right man—and I want to settle down." - p 12"

Does that help put things into a more linear narrative flow? But who cares?, right? I'm just creating this continuity for my own scholarly amusement & satisfaction. Then again, Chandler provides these recaps too - in this case about what was learned from Calver's expedition to the Outsider:

""The test . . . yes, it's ingenious, and amazingly simple. It's a mirror that's held up to you in which you see . . . everything. Yes, everything. Things that you've forgotten, and things that you've wished for years you could forget. After all, a man can meet any alien monster without fear, without hate, after he has met the most horrible monster of all. . . ."

""Himself."" - pp 12-13

Chandler loves throwing in vernacular & often repeats particular expressions:

"Part of his luck, perhaps, was in having a really outstanding navigator aboard his ship. Carnaby's last captain had said of him, "He could find a black cat in a coal mine at midnight in three seconds flat."" - p 47

What took you so long? Chandler's future of space exploration has English as still the dominant language. That, of course, makes it easier for him as an English language writer:

"Yes, he could hear a whisper, no more than a faint, faraway muttering, even though the volume control was turned full on. He could not distinguish the words. He did not think that the speaker was using Standard English. He regretted, as he had done before, that he was and always had been so distressingly monolingual." - p 51

"Mayhew grinned. "I rather think, Commander Verrill, that wee shall shortly experience the pleasure of renewing out acquaintance with the ex-Empress Irene, and Captain Trafford, and all the rest of Wanderer's people."" - p 53

To wch I note to myself: wch bk? In other words, yeah, I've read whatever story is being referred to here but they're all muddled together in my mind. Welp, Trafford was in Nebula Alert & in Empress of Outer Space where Empress Irene becomes ex-Empress Irene when she marries Trafford. Gawrsh. Somebody cd write, or may already have written, an intertextual guidebk to these Chandler stories that wd be fascinating.. but not as fascinating as the connections between real live human beings in the wild & wacky cultural conspiracies of this here Planet Earth. I wdn't write the Chandler (I've already somewhat written the cultural conspiracies one).. but I might read it.

""A few years ago," Grimes continued, "I was instructed to take Faraway Quest out to investigate some strange, drifting wreckage—wreckage that, obviously, had not originated in this universe.["]"" - p 57

&, yeah, again, I asked myself: wch bk? Not surprisingly, the answer to that one is drum roll please, The Far Traveler. An ongoing interest of mine is Cockney Rhyming Slang so I'm delighted to see that make an appearance:

""I've got here in the telescope," drawled Williams, "Odd looking bitch . . . she's on the screen now, if you care to take a butcher's."

"Grimes took a "butcher's hook," reflecting that life was already sufficiently complicated without his second-in-command's rhyming slang." - pp 62 -63

The meaning of this is PFO (Pretty Fucking Obvious) but let's take a little etymological digression, shall we?

"butcher's hook Look. Late 19 C. Generally reduced to butcher's, it is frequently heard. In Australia, where the usage is the same, it has the additional meaning, crook (angry)." - p 45, Julian Franklyn's A Dictionary of Rhyming Slang

Instead of reviewing the next 170pp of The Dark Dimensions, let's just say that I was pleased w/ the way Chandler wove together so many other threads of the space-time fabric-stretched-thin but I don't want to spoil it for you.

The Rim Gods are up next on our menu. This one, as the title might lead the perspicacious to speculate (or speculum) has some poking fun at the little nipper of religion.

"Piety . . . Rector. . . . That ship's name, and that title of rank, had an archaic ring to them." - p 208

""I've visited Francisco," he told her. "A pleasant world in many ways. But an odd one."

""Odd? How, sir?"

""I hope I'm not treading on any of your corns, Miss Walton, but the whole planet's not more than a breeding ground for fancy religions."

""I'm a Latter Day Reformed Methodist myself, sir," she told him severely. "And that's not fancy."" - p 211

"["]We of the Skarsten Institute are Neo-Calvinists. We deplore the godlessness, the heresy that is ever more prevalent throughout the galaxy—yes, even upon our own planet. We feel that Mankind is in sore need of a new Revelation, a new Sinai. . . ."" - p 214

"According to the Book of Exodus, Mount Sinai (Hebrew: הר סיני, Har Sinai) is the mountain at which the Ten Commandments were given to Moses by God. In the Book of Deuteronomy, these events are described as having transpired at Mount Horeb. "Sinai" and "Horeb" are generally considered to refer to the same place, although there is a small body of opinion that the two names may refer to different locations." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_Mount_Sinai

I, on the 3rd leg, am sure that it was Mount Helen & that it was the 1st 10 Positions of the Kama Sutra. I cd be wrong tho.. Let Clarisse de(i)cide:

""And just how, Mr. Commodore Grimes, do you propose to call a warship to your aid?" asked the woman.

""Easily, Deaconess, easily," said Clarisse Lane. "Have you forgotten that I am a telepath—and a good one? While this ship was on Lorn I made contact with Mr. Mayhew, Senior Psionic Radio Officer of the Rim World Navy. Even though we never met physically we became close friends. He is an old friend and shipmate of the Commodore, and asked me to keep in touch to let him know if Commodore Grimes was in any key danger."" - p 232

NOW, in keeping w/ all the placing my duckies in a row that happened in pt 1 of this review, I call to the reader's attn that Clarisse Mayhew was a character in The Dark Dimensions - the bk that precedes this one in Book 3 of the Saga. Note that Clarisse Lane isn't married yet in this bk that follows The Dark Dimensions here but precedes it in terms of original publication date.

Anyway, just in case it might be the END TIMES we might as well prepare to meet our maker, eh? Our Maker's Mark:

"["]Life is not a game. Life, death and the hereafter are not a game. We are not playing. We are working. Is it not written, "Work, for the night is coming? And you, sir, and I, as spacemen, know that the night is coming—the inevitable heat death of the Universe. . . ." He gulped more of his drink." - p 237

Some people worry about the littlest things.

"Grimes said reasonably enough, "But you people believe in predestination, don't you? Either we're damned or we aren't, an nothing we do makes any difference."

""I have learned by bitter experience," Smith told him, "that it is impossible to argue with a heretic—especially one who is foredoomed to eternal damnation. But even you must see that if the Commandments are given anew to Man then we, the Elect, shall be elevated to our rightful place in the Universe."

""Then God save us all," said Grimes." - p 238

W/o spoiling it, I think I can risk quoting this tasty little pieceage next:

"Grimes realized that he was laughing uncontrollably and saying, over and over to himself, "Not Sinai, but Olympus! Not Sinai, but Olympus!"" - p 251

But then I get back to that dagnabbitted-all-to-heck question again: wch bk?:

"But it was easier for them than it had been for him, when he made his own first landing on Tharn—how many years ago? Too many."

[..]

"his robot probes had told him that the culture of the planet was roughly analogous to that of Earth's Middle Ages. Even so, he had been lucky in that he had set Faraway Quest down near a city controlled by the priesthood rather than an area under the sway of one of the robber barons." - p 258

Oh, goodie! I get to correct Wikipedia:

"Tharn is a fictional planet and a comic book location in titles published by DC Comics. It first appeared in Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 #3 (January 1990), and was created by Keith Giffen, Al Gordon, Tom Bierbaum and Mary Bierbaum." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tharn

The fictional planet Tharn is in The Rim Gods & that's from 1969, 21 yrs earlier than its supposed invention as cited above. Even earlier (can you feel my pulse quicken?) Tharn appeared in The Rim of Space but Derek Calver's the hero in that one. As I've pointed out, over & over (don't you ever listen to me?) Calver is close enuf to Grimes to BE Grimes:

""Mphm," grunted Calver noncommittally." - p 55, The Rim of Space ( )

'Rim Gods' is not really a novel, but four separate stories. Not the best entry in the 'Grimes' series either, but it's okay.

ACE has a habit of pairing together Grimes books out of sequence for their Double Editions. Really 'Rim Gods' should be paired with 'Alternate Orbits' which is the next book in the timeline. Instead they stuck it with 'The Dark Dimensions', which is the book after next.

3 Stars. Average to Middling :-)Review is only for 'Rim Gods' ( )