Derai by E.C. Tubb
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Dumarest in Love with a Fragile Telepath In Derai (1968), the second book in E. C. Tubb’s 33-volume (!) Dumarest series, E. C. Tubb’s hero Earl Dumarest, a penniless traveler searching for Earth, has made it to Kyle, a tourist world holding a festival celebrating life and death with all these creatures in the sky mating and being fought over and eaten (not unlike krill and larger predators in the sea), while on the ground hucksters tout VR torture and sex: “Hey, you there! Want to know what it’s like to be burned to death? Full-sense feelies give you the thrill of a lifetime! Genuine recordings of impalement, live-burial, flaying, dismemberment and many more. Sixteen different types of torture! You feel it, sense it, know what it’s like. Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” Dumarest is there earning a pittance by fighting people for entertainment. When his sadistic fighter partner Nada suggests pairing up with him, he refuses, quits the business, and runs into a monk of the (possibly benevolent) Universal Brotherhood who arranges for him to escort a strange silver-haired, long-necked aristocratic young woman called Lady Derai of House Caldor to her homeworld, Hive. Dumarest reckons that Derai’s fears that someone is trying to kill her are mere paranoia and takes the job because he wants to go to Hive anyway and because his pay will be two expensive High space travel tickets. He soon discovers that Derai is a telepath (a handy ability for gambling) and that she and he are falling in love. On Hive, Tubb introduces more point of view characters: Derai’s bastard half-brother Blaine (musing about the fate by which their father didn’t marry his mother but did marry hers and about how the suitable motto of their House, “the Grasping Hand”); her uncle Emil (wanting to keep Derai under wraps to exploit her telepathy in the service of the House commerce in a jelly called ambrosaria made by mutated super bees); her cousin Ustar (a real aristo piece of work, sadistic, spoiled, entitled, and reckoning that he’ll marry Derai and control the House); the Old Man (the House patriarch kept alive on ambrosaria as a rotting vegetative bag of guts); and Regor (the House cyber, a creepy robotic man really working for “The power of central intelligence, the tremendous cybernetic complex which was the mind and heart of the Cyclan,” which wants to rule the human galaxy). Oh, and, for the first time in the series, a person of color, Yamay, a shrewd black businessman who’ll help Dumarest as far as it’ll be profitable for him (and maybe a little farther). *Although Tubb has started introducing characters of color into his saga, he still isn’t writing LGBTQ characters (although Blaine perhaps leans a LITTLE that way vis-à-vis Dumarest). The story is a compact, lurid, page turning, fast moving, interesting, unpredictable, pulpy space opera. It will soon have Dumarest et al traveling to a third world to participate in a deadly competition reminiscent of a Hunger Games for adults. Neither young nor old, Dumarest is a tall and handsome loner who’s visited multiple worlds on his quest for his homeworld, the mythical Earth, which he knows is a blasted world with some life surviving underground, while people he asks about it often respond, “Earth? Every world has earth!” He’s not a superman, being capable of making mistakes and getting injured, but he’s fast, ruthless, clever, cool, compassionate, reliable, and aware. Belonging to the less is more ethos of the late 1960s and early 1970s sf publishing world, the novel has some neat sf writing: “He [Regor] became a living part of an organism which stretched across the galaxy in an infinity of crystalline sparkles, each the glowing nexus of naked intelligence. A skein of misty light connected the whole so that it seemed to be a shifting kaleidoscope of brilliance and form. He saw it and at the same time was a part of it, sharing and yet owning the incredible gestalt of minds.” Tubb writes some cool dialogue featuring the dry Dumarest: ‘Finish your wine,’ said Dumarest, ‘and learn something: trouble does not vanish because you run away from it.’ All that said, he can also write some corny and or stilted dialogue: “‘Eat, My Lady,’ he said curtly. Didn’t she realise the importance of food? ‘Eat,’ he said again, his tone more gentle. ‘It will do you good.’ ‘My name is Derai. Yours is Earl. Must we be so formal?’” There is some sixties sexism and too much of the hero (ala James Bond, Conan, and Captain Kirk) being too irresistible to women while not needing to end up tied down: “I like to keep moving.” The fragile Derai is dependent on Earl and given to nightmares and fears. “‘You are a strange man,’ she murmured. ‘I have never met anyone like you before. With you I could be a real woman—you have strength enough for us both.” Earl says brusque things to her like “Stop acting like a child.” She is another woman (like the Matriarch’s ward in the first novel) who lacks experience with the realities of life for the majority of people. Tubb’s bete noirs are cruel aristocrats like Ustar and cybers like Regor. He favors practical, hardworking, smart, outsider types like Yamay and Dumarest. Tubb’s vision is grim. Of the three worlds here, Kyle, Hive, and Folgone, none are any kind of utopia or arcadia. “Folgone was a bleak place, a world of ice and frozen gases, the single planet of a white dwarf star. The surface was sterile; what life existed was buried deep in gigantic caverns lit and warmed by radioactive elements … a sealed prison of a world from which there could be no unauthorised escape.” Of the characters, many are vile, and the relatively decent ones, like a few who get close to Dumarest, are unsafe. And there are plenty of bleak insights into human nature: “‘When are you going to learn that subconscious thoughts have nothing to do with intended action? We are all of us beasts,’ he added. ‘Most of us learn to correctly judge what we see and hear.’ It was a lesson he had tried to teach her during the entire journey. He’d had little success.” I am liking the Dumarest books plenty and will soon forge on to the third-- View all my reviews
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Jefferson Peters
This blog is for book reviews. Please feel free to comment on any of the reviews! Categories
All
Archives
May 2024
Jefferson's books
by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
|
My Fukuoka University