James H. Schmitz The Witches of Karres (1966)
Thanks to Research Alpha, co-written with A.E. van Vogt and which I read back in February, Schmitz was seeming a lot like one of those great, long overlooked etc. etc. authors for a moment there, so it was exciting to have found this so soon after; and then I tried to read it.
In its favour - and it has a lot in its favour - The Witches of Karres is packed with the kind of weird and wonderful ideas which I can see would have appealed to his co-writer on Research Alpha; and Schmitz writes well, with genuine wit, and - taken in isolation - much of what he writes is a delight; yet once past the first couple of chapters, I was bored pretty much solid despite everything. Apparently this novel was formed from a couple of thematically linked short stories bolted together, and my guess would be that they probably worked fine as short stories and maybe didn't require inclusion in this three-but-felt-like-seven-hundred page marathon. The wit and the imagination may remain intact, but reduced to a much smaller fraction of the whole, I guess it all turns to wallpaper.
For anyone still wondering, The Witches of Karres is almost a fairy story transposed to space with a thoroughly Lovecraftian monster waiting at the end of the book. The witches are three little girls from the planet Karres, a world which is able to move around in space to elude its enemies, not least of these being the entity behind the terrifying worm weather, as it is known. As a novel, Witches has no business being quite such a slog given the story it attempts to tell, but a slog it unfortunately is.
While we're here, should anyone have noticed a Goodreads review implying that The Witches of Karres has some sort of paedophile subtext, the detail to which this person refers is specifically that one of the little girls fancies the starship captain who rescues her, thoroughly embarrassing the aforementioned starship captain, which hardly seems significant given all those children's stories I seem to recall wherein little girls develop a crush on some rescuing father figure or some dashing yet unobtainable knight; and which hardly leaves The Witches of Karres looking like the sort of thing you'd expect to find on Gary Glitter's hard drive. I also seem to remember Asterix's dog falling in love with Geriatrix's wife, which doesn't make her the lovely Debbie McGee. It's not that hard to understand, but the implication is about what I'd expect of an individual with a peace symbol and a smiley face in rainbow colours as their avatar. Scratch any one of those tie-dyed crusading new age fuckers and nine times out of ten you'll find Joseph Goebbels somewhere underneath.
Thanks to Research Alpha, co-written with A.E. van Vogt and which I read back in February, Schmitz was seeming a lot like one of those great, long overlooked etc. etc. authors for a moment there, so it was exciting to have found this so soon after; and then I tried to read it.
In its favour - and it has a lot in its favour - The Witches of Karres is packed with the kind of weird and wonderful ideas which I can see would have appealed to his co-writer on Research Alpha; and Schmitz writes well, with genuine wit, and - taken in isolation - much of what he writes is a delight; yet once past the first couple of chapters, I was bored pretty much solid despite everything. Apparently this novel was formed from a couple of thematically linked short stories bolted together, and my guess would be that they probably worked fine as short stories and maybe didn't require inclusion in this three-but-felt-like-seven-hundred page marathon. The wit and the imagination may remain intact, but reduced to a much smaller fraction of the whole, I guess it all turns to wallpaper.
For anyone still wondering, The Witches of Karres is almost a fairy story transposed to space with a thoroughly Lovecraftian monster waiting at the end of the book. The witches are three little girls from the planet Karres, a world which is able to move around in space to elude its enemies, not least of these being the entity behind the terrifying worm weather, as it is known. As a novel, Witches has no business being quite such a slog given the story it attempts to tell, but a slog it unfortunately is.
While we're here, should anyone have noticed a Goodreads review implying that The Witches of Karres has some sort of paedophile subtext, the detail to which this person refers is specifically that one of the little girls fancies the starship captain who rescues her, thoroughly embarrassing the aforementioned starship captain, which hardly seems significant given all those children's stories I seem to recall wherein little girls develop a crush on some rescuing father figure or some dashing yet unobtainable knight; and which hardly leaves The Witches of Karres looking like the sort of thing you'd expect to find on Gary Glitter's hard drive. I also seem to remember Asterix's dog falling in love with Geriatrix's wife, which doesn't make her the lovely Debbie McGee. It's not that hard to understand, but the implication is about what I'd expect of an individual with a peace symbol and a smiley face in rainbow colours as their avatar. Scratch any one of those tie-dyed crusading new age fuckers and nine times out of ten you'll find Joseph Goebbels somewhere underneath.
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