Robert Moore Williams The Bell from Infinity (1968)
The plot thickens, as the cliché would have it: another Robert Moore Williams novel lives up to my expectations whilst further cementing an impression of the man as an overlooked visionary, additionally adding a few more of his recurring themes to the list of those I've begun to look out for.
Firstly there's the music heard across the full span of creation, also featured in The Sound of Bugles which I assume to have ended up rewritten as King of the Fourth Planet. Although there's nothing to specifically identify this trope as akin to the trumpet blasts of Revelation, its difficult to miss the parallel - or at least I found it so. Here we have a sound which resonates from within a vast diamond, seemingly the jewel in the crown of our reality, to which the title refers and which possesses both people and objects, causing them to dance uncontrollably; and once again we find ourselves in the tunnels of a labyrinthine underworld, and specifically mines - a setting that I now recall featured in Beachhead Planet. It seems safe to assume that mineworkers are one of his things, possibly combining a subterranean fixation with a tendency to fill his books with blue collar types bordering on frontiersmen, the grizzled characters from westerns who also featured in The Star Wasps. Perry Chapdelaine's 2014 memorial to Williams accordingly describes the writer as an affirmed populist who was quite happy to be labelled a pulp author due to his strong dislike of literary science-fiction, which probably explains the suggestion of these being people you would encounter in a saloon.
Anyway, again we have a distinctly surreal novel which feels profoundly allegorical, even if whatever Williams was scrabbling at was maybe a little too personal, rooted in his own unique psychology, to fully translate into anything more than a general impression of a call for mankind to unite against its own worst tendencies. Williams' prose is occasionally clumsy or awkward, and the narrative twists and winds, seemingly following its own internal logic, yet for a pulp author, this guy weaves a mood seemingly unique to his own books - albeit one which stands some comparison to van Vogt's weirder efforts - and his more ponderous passages can be strikingly beautiful, even poetic. I continue to find myself impressed.
The plot thickens, as the cliché would have it: another Robert Moore Williams novel lives up to my expectations whilst further cementing an impression of the man as an overlooked visionary, additionally adding a few more of his recurring themes to the list of those I've begun to look out for.
Firstly there's the music heard across the full span of creation, also featured in The Sound of Bugles which I assume to have ended up rewritten as King of the Fourth Planet. Although there's nothing to specifically identify this trope as akin to the trumpet blasts of Revelation, its difficult to miss the parallel - or at least I found it so. Here we have a sound which resonates from within a vast diamond, seemingly the jewel in the crown of our reality, to which the title refers and which possesses both people and objects, causing them to dance uncontrollably; and once again we find ourselves in the tunnels of a labyrinthine underworld, and specifically mines - a setting that I now recall featured in Beachhead Planet. It seems safe to assume that mineworkers are one of his things, possibly combining a subterranean fixation with a tendency to fill his books with blue collar types bordering on frontiersmen, the grizzled characters from westerns who also featured in The Star Wasps. Perry Chapdelaine's 2014 memorial to Williams accordingly describes the writer as an affirmed populist who was quite happy to be labelled a pulp author due to his strong dislike of literary science-fiction, which probably explains the suggestion of these being people you would encounter in a saloon.
Anyway, again we have a distinctly surreal novel which feels profoundly allegorical, even if whatever Williams was scrabbling at was maybe a little too personal, rooted in his own unique psychology, to fully translate into anything more than a general impression of a call for mankind to unite against its own worst tendencies. Williams' prose is occasionally clumsy or awkward, and the narrative twists and winds, seemingly following its own internal logic, yet for a pulp author, this guy weaves a mood seemingly unique to his own books - albeit one which stands some comparison to van Vogt's weirder efforts - and his more ponderous passages can be strikingly beautiful, even poetic. I continue to find myself impressed.
No comments:
Post a Comment