The Time Tunnel

Murray Leinster The Time Tunnel (1967)
This, as you may recall, was an Irwin Allen television series thus described somewhat harshly by John Clute:

In one of the worst 1960s series, time travellers - trapped in a vortex created by experimenting scientists - carom through cardboard sets, overturn whole societies, and escape again and again.

I remember watching a few episodes as a kid but not much else. The basic premise and title, albeit lacking the definite article, came from Leinster's Time Tunnel of 1964, published a couple of years prior to the series. My guess for how any of this relates would be that Leinster conceded the rights and title to Allen in return for a couple of novelisations more directly tied in to the television series.

I began reading under the assumption of the book most likely expanding on the first couple of episodes, given that it kicks off with more or less the same cast of characters and vaguely scientific furniture - significantly featuring our main guys, Doug and Tony, sent into the time stream so as to demonstrate the validity of the government funded project to a disgruntled Senator Clark who wants to know where all the money has gone. Having myself novelised an episodic television show, I've been surprised at the slender page count which tends to be generated by even a full hour of television drama - as anyone who ever read a Terrance Dicks Who novelisation will probably appreciate - and so a certain quota of padding or treading of extemporary water is usually necessary to avoid the finished thing resembling a pamphlet. There's a lot of that in evidence here, but it turns out that the first episode of the television show sends Doug and Tony to the RMS Titanic just as it's about to make the acquaintance of that iceberg. Leinster instead first sends the boys to Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1889 - site of a catastrophic flood - then to a critical battle at Adobe Walls, Texas in 1874, neither of which correspond to anything we saw on the screen. Given that Leinster was nothing if not quick off the mark, I suspect that either Allen's people gave him license to go his own way, or possibly this book may represent a novelisation of something he proposed for the television show which was deemed to have less potential impact than the Titanic story filmed as Rendezvous with Yesterday, which is probably fair.

With this in mind, what I've read as padding is therefore most likely Leinster doing what seemed right for the story, and so we get a ton of historical detail delivered in large chunks, which is interesting but makes for somewhat chewy reading. We additionally get certain imaginative flourishes and elements which attempt to make sense of what was seen on the screen to some degree - our time travellers each wearing a kind of technological harness which connects them to those operating the Tunnel; and then an additional harness is sent to join them equipped with a poorly defined means of locomotion and a camera - amounting to a remote drone - by which I suppose the reader might rationalise the screening of historical events unfolding on the other side of the next hill, beyond the ken of our travellers; and this remote drone is then developed into a sort of time car by the end of the book, allowing our temporal castaways to whizz around the futuristic city which provides the slightly puzzling setting for the final chapters.

It's a novel which does a lot of telling and not quite enough showing to strike the right balance, which is also true of the 1964 Time Tunnel which, for all its wacky ideas, is really a bit of a mess. This is a shame because Leinster's best is usually wonderful, notably The Greks Bring Gifts and The Wailing Asteroid both of which are just screwy enough to overcome any objections one might harbour regarding the pulpier end of the genre. His greatest strength seems to have been the short story form - or at least sequential short stories welded together into novels - and his short stories mostly appeared in the digest magazines and would thus have been subject to the attention of some fairly astringent editors. His three Time Tunnel novels were, on the other hand, published by Pyramid Books whom I gather were in the business of wacking them out fast and cheap and may therefore have left established writers to their own devices - and the sheer weirdness of those novels they published by Robert Moore Williams seems to support this as a possibility.

All the same, The Time Tunnel is a book which could have been better rather than a bad one. It somehow maintains a heady pace in spite of the infodumping, its ideas are engaging, and my initial concerns about Doug and Tony helping out in the extermination of hostile Indians at Adobe Walls proved mercifully unfounded for the most part, for Leinster achieves a surprising objectivity in his sensitive portrayal of what might not unfairly be described as genocide.

The Man with a Thousand Names

A.E. van Vogt The Man with a Thousand Names (1974)
John Clute reckoned van Vogt's drive had gone by the seventies, and whilst it's probably true that his greatest work had been written a couple of decades earlier - greatest at least in terms of generating an atmosphere so weird as to smooth over instances where the narrative fails to join up - I'd say his success rate remained mostly undiminished. Sure there were a few duds, which was as true in the forties as in the later years. The Man with a Thousand Names kicks off in typically bewildering fashion, so I paid attention and held on tight, skipping back to re-read anything I wasn't too sure about; and for at least the first half it began to feel as though this might even be his greatest work after The Violent Man, possibly due to A.E.'s customarily foggy disregard for cause and effect being written with unusual clarity; meaning that providing one is resigned to the fact that not everything is going to add up, it sort of makes sense.

Our main guy is the thoroughly obnoxious heir to a private fortune, an amoral playboy who is used to getting what he wants without having to care less about the consequences. This seemingly presents a problem for Goodreads types who expect relatable characters, but never mind. Our guy pilots a spaceship to Mittend, our nearest habitable planet, then instantaneously finds himself back on Earth inhabiting the body and life of Mark Broehm, a bartender he once wronged. This occurs a few more times, zapping his brain into the bodies of others he's screwed over, with no real explanation as to why it's happening, and it doesn't even seem to be karma catching up with our boy who remains a heel regardless, even committing rape at one point, suggesting - at least to me - that he's probably not supposed to be relatable. Eventually we learn that this is something to do with Mother, a sort of psychic gestalt representing the first wave of an invasion from another galaxy, by which point I was lost despite my best intentions.

The narrative zips about at least as much as that of Null-A and presumably for similarly non-Aristotelian reasons, and is accordingly dreamlike, albeit a dream reported with the hard-boiled pragmatism of detective fiction; and the whole somehow reminds me of David Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus in so much as that it feels heavily allegorical, even symbolic to the point of meaning eclipsing the demands of linear progress from one part of the story to another. I still don't know what it's about beyond that it's obviously about something, but as exercise for my brain, it felt good and was mostly gripping.

Renaissance

A.E. van Vogt Renaissance (1979)
In reference to his later novels, John Clute apparently described van Vogt as a man who awoke from a dream but could not remember the glories of the night - which Mark Ricard drew to my attention as I don't actually have a copy of Clute's book. Anyway, it's certainly true of this one.

As I've noticed in a few of his seventies novels, Alfred Elton seemingly became preoccupied with the inequality of the sexes, although it should be noted that his model of inequality was massively subjective and somewhat screwy. On the surface of it, it looked a lot like an old dude resenting that he hadn't been getting much action of late, and rationalising this as a power imbalance with all the cards being in the hands of those accursed sexy women with their big ol' titties having it off as much and as often as they like, the fuckin' bitches. I say on the surface because that's how it looks from the viewpoint of someone reading in 2018, and when I say someone I mean me, obviously; and I also say on the surface because such a judgement probably isn't entirely fair on van Vogt and any resemblance of Renaissance to The Worm that Turned - as serialised on The Two Ronnies way back whenever - shouldn't be taken too seriously.

Anyway, this is one of those future worlds invaded by an alien species, in this case called the Utt, and the Utt have come because they saw something wrong with human society and thought they should put it right; and because the wrongness stems from male human sexuality, the Utt have changed everything so that women are the dominant sex and men must wear chemically treated glasses. Either the precise point of these glasses isn't mentioned in detail, or else I missed that paragraph, but I'm guessing it's so that men don't go on a rampage, having been driven to distraction by women's tits wobbling around like big sexy jellies on plates. For such a mannered society, there seems to be quite a lot which A.E. prefers to imply rather than state - which is probably a mercy - although the world of Renaissance seems so riddled with half baked contradictions that I suspect it may simply be that he hadn't fully worked it out himself, or that he had but wasn't entirely comfortable with his own conclusions.

The woman of Renaissance are polarised as Mila, the unhappy punishing wife, or on the other hand, your stereotypical young, unavailable lovelies, and we're never quite sure whether this latter group should be considered angels or whores, and if whores, whether that's a bad thing. I'd say Freud would have had a field day, but it probably wouldn't have taken much more than a couple of minutes.

The Utt and the new laws they impose upon their human subjects therefore read a little like political correctness gone mad, although that probably wasn't quite the author's intention, at least not exactly. My apologist take on this is that his views seem so personal - and not a little messed up - that there's not much point in mistaking any of it for a manifesto.

It occurred to him for the first time in their long business life together that she had a most excellent figure.

As the door closed, he jumped a little. And realised that he had had a forbidden male-type feeling; and that he should be experiencing a strong guilt reaction.

But what he actually felt was a fear of being found out.

As is fairly common with later van Vogt novels, our man chances upon a rebel group, in this case, men who dress as women so as to go undetected, and the general tone made it difficult for me to read on without visualising scenes from the Dick Emery Show or the aforementioned Worm That Turned.

The great shame is that if one is able to get past van Vogt failing to get to grips with his own forbidden male-type feelings, Renaissance isn't actually a bad book; or if it is, then it's at least bad in an interesting way. The narrative is unusually coherent and clearly-defined, despite all of the sexual elephants in rooms we're not going to talk about in 1979; and when our man encounters the extraterrestrial Orsolite at the very end, everything suddenly comes into focus and we remember what made van Vogt so great in the first place. It's probably best not to remember him this way, but even for all the faults of Renaissance, A.E. still looks marginally less of a pillock than Pat Mills after Sex Warrior.