The Silkie by A.E Van Vogt

Years ago there was a shop called Lazy Daze in Penrith. It sold second-hand CDs and books and I loved it. The owner had a terrible head for business though, whenever I bought things he'd do a rough adding up then round it down, sometimes quite a lot. I guess he hated giving change. And the stock was under-priced to start with. But he had some good stock, I got a lot of stuff from Lazy Daze.

One such find was The Silkie, one of A.E Van Vogt's short novels, it cost me $2. At the time I'd buy pretty much any Van Vogt novel Lazy Daze had. I read most of them years ago, The Weapon Makers, The Moon Beast, The Voyage of the Space Beagle ... but when I tried The Silkie, for some reason I just didn't get into it. I stopped reading it not long after the prologue I think. So, I finally got around to reading the whole thing (all 156 pages).

I'm not surprised the prologue put me off, for one thing there doesn't seem much point to it. We have this character who has a quest, it seems like that quest is about to start when she meets a new character. End the prologue, flash forward a couple of centuries ... never go back besides some historical references the actual main character makes. I suspect it shows a change in idea or something like that as this reads like one of Van Vogt's stitch-ups. He was very good at taking a number of short works on a theme or centred on a character and putting them into novel form. And The Silkie reads like three short stories put together, so I presume it really is.

In this case the stories follow the life of Nat-Cemp, a Silkie, which is a species which can shapeshift to human-like being, underwater breather or the space dwelling Silkie shape which can live in the vacuum of space and has hugely advanced mental powers and perceptions. The three episodes set Cemp up against three beings of even higher abilities, thus escalating the risks but also the ideas Van Vogt is throwing around.

In that respect it reminded me of The Voyage of the Space Beagle, which is a series of encounters made by the scientific exploratory ship whereby the hero can demonstrate the wonders of his super-science which bridges every field of science into one. That may not sound terribly exciting the way I've put it but it actually is an enjoyable read with some intriguing situations thrown up. The Silkie however didn't, in my estimation, come close to succeeding on the same level.

While the episodes see some escalation they still seem somewhat same-same, although the history of the silkie species makes for a diversion in one of them. Moreover, the ideas being explored are very hard to connect with. It's all a question of higher perceptions beyond the human and the mental 'weapon' of 'logic of levels', where a mentally planted suggestion causes the body to follow through the logical succession of events to that suggestion/perception. It's airy-fairy and treated in a somewhat rambling way. And Cemp is so unemotional himself it's impossible to really care about him - which is the main issue with Space Beagle, but here it's worse.

Not A.E Van Vogt's best by a long shot.

Keep dreaming!

After a Long Hiatus ...

It's been far, far too long since I wrote here and I've read a lot in that time and written a fair bit too. I'll try to do some catch-up entries about some of the things I read, particularly Algernon Blackwood's short stories and a couple of trilogies I got through.

The last book I finished was Across the Wall, which is a short story anthology by Garth Nix, an Australian fantasy author. I hadn't read any of his work before but I heard him in a seminar at Supanova one year and bought this volume afterward and got it signed, of course. I'm happy to say it the whole collection was delightful. The stories were a good mix but he has a distinctive style which I enjoy. They tend to action with a dark side with flashes of humour. It's also very readable and entertaining so I'll look into the Abhorsen cycle when I get a chance.

Keeping on a signed at Supanova theme, I also read Kate Forsyth's Bitter Greens. This was a combination fantasy and historical fiction, and was simply sumptuous. Reading a story about an author hearing a story she will write down and make famous is a bit meta-fiction but the way Kate Forsyth wrote it isn't very meta, for which I'm glad (not that there's anything wrong with meta-fiction per se). The court of Louis IV comes to life through a side character who's probably more interesting than Louis ever was himself, and we hear a retelling of Rapunzel in the bargain. Kate's writing is rich without being overladen, and really brings the scenes to vivid life. And, for the record, whoever wrote the review quoted on the front cover about the high number of sex scenes in the book was overstating things. Yes, there are a few sex scenes and a lot of 'adult themes' but not as many as the quote suggests.

That's your lot for now. I'll do my best to keep posting more often. In the meantime,

Keep dreaming!