Kalin by E.C. Tubb
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Witch Hunting and Spaceship Jacking, the Brotherhood and the Cyclan, Zardles and Zerds, Vendettas and Symbiotes Kalin (1969), the fourth entry in E. C. Tubb’s LONG Earl Dumarest series of pulpy space opera with teeth starts with a bang: Earl Dumarest is stopping over on a planet celebrating Bloodnight, an annual festival where everyone tries to kill their foes, rivals, enemies, and victims, and he and some other fellow passengers are safely watching from behind the guarded fence around the spaceport, when they see this red-haired, green-eyed, long-legged “girl” running from a rabid mob shouting “Kill the witch!” so Dumarest (naturally) intervenes: “‘Do we have to kill you to get her?’ ‘You could try,’ said Dumarest.” Ever chivalrous, he pays for her passage on his spaceship, soon discovering that Kalin (her name) is indeed a witch, having the ability to see the future, albeit somewhat vaguely. One of the interesting things about Kalin is that she fears seeing bad things that will happen and yet can’t help morbidly looking at them, despite Dumarest repeatedly asking her not to because seeing future calamities upsets her and because he doesn’t want to know what’s going to happen: “The temptation to use it, to be sure, against the temptation not to use, to retain hope. And how long could the desire simply to hope last against the desire to know for certain?” The short novel packs a lot into its story: an aged mercenary and his aged lover planning to hijack a spaceship so he can buy an army to rule a world and she can pay for an expensive operation to transplant her brain into a nubile body; a miraculous rescue in deep space; a trip to a dead-end slave-mining planet where the only hope to earn enough to buy passage off world is “by hunting a zardle and hoping to find a zerd” (!); the altruistic machinations of the Brotherhood of the Universal Church, whose monks want to help humanity by teaching us that “The pain of one is the pain of all,” and the malevolent machinations of the Cyclan, whose cyborgs think that without emotions they’re better equipped to run the galaxy than us; a vendetta world’s half-metal survivor of a five-year war between two families, looking for his daughter to carry on the family line; a pastoral planet’s House whose brothers’ horse breeding business is threatened by winged predators and a comatose sister’s medical care; a blinding and an eye operation; a stunning revelation featuring a symbiote that connects back thematically to the opening of the novel; and a genuinely unnerving and moving kiss. How Earl Dumarest connects all these plot strands (on five different worlds!) is exciting, surprising, poignant, tragic, and neat. And compact! People sure don’t write such punchy and concise less is more novels nowadays. Four novels into the series, we know that Earl Dumarest ain’t gonna end up with a lover, ‘cause he has to keep going on his Big Mission via countless spaceship rides to countless worlds, “Travelling, always travelling, always looking for Earth. For the planet which seemed to have become forgotten. The world no one knew. Home!” Frustratingly, most people he meets in the galaxy think Earth is a legend or a piece of nonsense: what planet would be called “earth”? And how could the myriad human beings on myriad worlds ever have come from a single planet of origin? I’m getting used to him meeting a new “girl” near the start of a novel, getting involved with her in the middle, and then losing her somehow in the end so he can go on to his next world/adventure/girl. He doesn’t want to love ‘em and leave ‘em! He really falls in love: ‘You are you,’ he said slowly. ‘If you were to have an accident, lose your beauty in some way, it would make no difference to the way I feel. I didn’t fall in love with a pair of green eyes, some white skin and red hair. I fell in love with a woman.’ In addition to his endless search for home, we learn a bit more about Earl in this book, like his traumatic childhood on Earth, as well as confirm his formerly established traits: speedy and ruthless fighting, loyalty to friends, chivalry to women, laconic speech, natural leadership, and resourceful and indefatigable survival skills. Tubb had a fertile imagination for SF devices: --Bank funds accessed by inserting your forearm into a device to read subcutaneous tattoos. --Dream Helmets that give you dreams while you sleep. --Books with animated pages (especially useful for porn). --Quick-time hypos to slow you down so time passes faster and slow-time hypos for the opposite. --Symbiotes that give you your desired dreams in return for a little nutrition from you. --Cyborgs. *But so far he has no interest in aliens. It’s not high literature, but Tubb wrote vivid, tight, pointed sf prose, like: “His eyes looked like holes punched in snow.” And “There was a head, bald, shining, creased like a mass of crumpled crepe, swollen to twice normal size. The eyes were thin glittering slits, the mouth a lipless gash and the chin was a part of the composite whole which was the neck. A sheet covered the body with its strange and alien protuberances. Pipes ran from beneath it and connected to quietly humming machines. Tanks and instruments completed the life-support installation. ‘Nice, isn’t it?’” Yes, there is neat stuff here about bodies (aged, diseased, injured, scarred, repaired, cybernetic, etc.). What happens to our mind/soul/relationships when our bodies are damaged or changed? There is alas late 60s sexism, like “Woman-like, she was indifferent to the comfort of others when a problem filled her mind,” but otherwise, Tubb’s novels seem rather timeless. I’m looking forward to the next novel in the series, wanting to find out what kind of trouble Earl and his new love interest get into. View all my reviews
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