The Winds of Gath by E.C. Tubb
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Compact, Pulpy, Gritty, Philosophical, Political, and Bleak Space Opera Mark Monday’s fun reviews of the early books in E. C. Tubb’s 33-volume (!) Dumarest series made me dive in. The first book, The Winds of Gath (1967), is a compact space opera: pulpy, sexy (a little), tricky, philosophical, political, imaginative, violent, and bleak. The novel starts with Earl Dumarest waking up from being “doped, frozen, ninety per cent dead” in one of the many “coffin-like boxes” in “the steerage for travellers willing to gamble against the fifteen per cent mortality rate.” He learns that he didn’t reach his contracted destination world because a powerful party had the ship rerouted to planet Gath. This is a problem because whereas his target world had a viable economy that would enable him, a “penniless traveler,” to earn the money to go elsewhere, Gath is a tourist planet famed for its winds blowing through mountain caves, rumored to sound like voices from people from your past. Will Dumarest be permanently stuck on Gath? Tubb distinguishes between tourists, who have the money to space “travel High,” which is safer and easier, and sightsee rather than work, and travelers like Dumarest, who have no savings and need to “travel Low,” which is unhealthier and riskier, and work hard wherever they go to scrape together enough money to travel Low to another world. In addition to Dumarest, numerous point of view characters propel the story. There’s Dumarest’s hapless acquaintance Megan (“Man, am I sorry to see you!”) who’s been stranded on Gath for over a year and is on the verge of dying there. There’s the octogenarian Matriarch of Kund, who’s guarded by taciturn, masculine women, rules over a system of worlds, and has diverted Dumarest’s spaceship to Gath because her ward Seena Thoth, a lovely, naïve young lady, has been the target of assassination attempts. The Matriarch’s advisor Dyne is a “Cyber,” ostensibly giving objective and rational counsel because he was modified at an early age: “He was a coldly logical machine of flesh and blood, a detached, dispassionate human robot.” Cybers belong to the Cyclan, a “gestalt” of telepathically linked brains with long-term plans for ruling all inhabited worlds, because, being freed from emotion, they think they’ll do a better job than humans can do. Indeed, the decadent “Prince of Emmened who had ruined a world by his whims and would ruin more unless stopped by an assassin,” is a malign tourist who gets his jollies from ravishing young ladies or watching his trained fighter Moidor (!) kill strangers. Luckily, the Church of Universal Brotherhood sends monks out “striving to turn men from what they were into what they should be,” and one of them, Ely, is humane and shames the slimy authorities of Gath for exploiting travelers. Tubb complicates his “good” figures, though, so the monks travel High and hand out communion-like wafers treated with euphoric drugs whose effects wear off, so Megan regularly attends their services to maintain his wafer high. The plot has Dumarest trying to survive till he can work up the money to get to another planet and other characters preparing for the winds of Gath while tending to murky matters. It proceeds to an apocalyptic climax with sanity compromising wind voices, multiple assassination attempts, a magic mirror, a tricky coffin, a foiled plot, a damsel in distress (with frostbitten feet), and more. Throughout, Tubb’s writing is lean and able, capable of sublime flights and lurid fancies, and endowed with the less-is-more ethos of 1960s and 70s SF. Dynamic description: “It came with a continuous rolling of thunder which tore at the ears and numbed the senses. The lightning was a web of electric fire across the sky, stabbing at the ground, searing wetly into the sea. The rain was a deluge, pounding the ground into mud, turning the air almost solid with its moisture.” Neat SF writing: “With shocking abruptness, the universe slowed down. It hadn’t, of course. It was just that his own metabolism, reflexes and sensory apparatus had suddenly begun operating at almost forty times the normal rate. The danger lay in accepting the illusion of a slowed universe as reality.” Corny dialogue: “You will wear earmuffs at all times. Do you understand? You will not attempt to listen to the noises of Gath. Now go!” Tubb’s characterization is rudimentary, but the Matriarch has depth (e.g., “A man, dust for over eighty years, now talking and breathing at her side, his voice, his beloved voice, soft in her ears”). And in hardboiled Dumarest’s past lurk a beloved father figure and an unidentified lover, though “He was not a man who regretted the past. Not when the future looked so black.” He can kill at a pinch, but although he opines that “In combat there are no rules” and will kick your knee if he can’t reach your groin, he’s no sadist. He helps people in trouble and not only to win favors. He has a goal: rather than aimlessly traveling around from planet to planet, he’s moving “deeper and deeper into the inhabited worlds” as he tries to find Earth, his home. To other people, Earth is a myth, to Dumarest, a “desert, a barren wilderness in which nothing grows. It is scarred with old wounds, littered with the ruins of bygone ages. But there is life, of a kind, and ships come to tend that life.” In addition to the dying Earth, the novel boasts plenty of SF stuff: various worlds of various cultures, including (gasp!) at least two Matriarchies; space travel; the ability to slow down or speed up time for individuals; cybernetic advisors; exotic weapons like vibratory darts. Some of it smacks of hyper 60s western culture, like the many drugs, the great medical care for the rich, the tourism industry, the admen, and the fear of (or attraction to) strong women in charge. So far, much on income gaps: “There was a romance clinging to the concept of slavery which appealed to the rich.” So far, no alien aliens, just a variety of human beings. So far, no people of color or LGBTQ people: Dumarest and Seena are very white hetero. There are interesting moments where characters muse on human nature and life, like the paradox between people being animals but having higher selves, the “perversity in human nature which gloried at the bestialisation of its own kind,” the belief that “Life is a lottery,” and the hope that “the travellers might take a hand in their own destiny.” There are loose ends: vanishing characters, telepathic animals, Dumarest’s past, etc. But you gotta love a space opera that ends: “A gust of wind swept from the mountains and he heard the music of Gath. Deeper now, slower, but quite unmistakable. The empty sound of inane, gargantuan laughter.” If you like Jack Vance and especially Barrington J. Bayley, you should try Tubb. I’m on to book 2 in the series! View all my reviews
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