Odd SF

[shewhomust]

Once in a while, life sends you a book so strange that there's nothing for it but to reach out and pluck another really strange book from the pile. Because it just so happened that right at the top of the to-be-read pile were two pieces of elderly SF, both of which struck me as very odd, and both of whose oddnesses were, when I tried to pin them down, partly due to a strong flavour of something other than SF. And since they also had in common that each had an LJ connection, it seemed only right to tell LJ all about it.

sovay posted about Eleanor Cameron's 'Mushroom Planet' books, and the extract she quoted was so strange and charming that I went straight to Amazon and ordered a copy of The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet. Did anyone ever dream that one aspect of living in the future was that second-hand book dealers would poised night and day to gratify every passing whim? For a payment which seems all the more trivial because it isn't real money, it's all electronic, a 40-year old paperback with an almost-luminous green cover makes its way to your very door...

At the risk of sounding obsessive about genre classifications, one of the things which makes The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet so strange is that it is as much magical fantasy as science fiction. It's Danny Dunn on acid; but it's The Magic Faraway Tree with added science. An adverisement which appears in green ink in the newspaper, which invites a boy, or two boys, to build a spaceship from materials found at hand, and to take it to an address which no-one has previously noticed but which has, of course, been there all along when an adult takes the precaution of checking - this is the stuff of magic. The ease of obtaining parental consent wouldn't puzzle any child who has found a magic talisman, and knows that the first thing you need to wish is that adults won't notice the magic - but it puzzles David and Chuck, because this book isn't about magic, and they haven't taken that precaution.

Mr Bass is an inventor, not a magician. He works in his basement by a light of his own invention which "had the silvery restfulness of moonlight combined with the clarity of sunlight." But "he couldn't, gor the life of him, have told you how he had invented it." He specialises in irreproducible results. (He also, as an inventor, reminds me of Professor Branestawm, though this may have something to do with Robert Henneberger's delightful line drawings). The boys listen to his explanations, and then go away and consult a dictionary for the words they don't recognise. And when they save the day, they do so scientifically - well, they do it by chance, but they find a rational explanation for that chance. There may be an element of lifting themselves up by their own bootstraps about their solution, but they are scientific bootstraps.

Somehow Eleanor Cameron has found a voice which carries this off, which is both matter of fact and itself a littled awed by the adventures it recounts. The mundane and the strange are reported in the same even tone - which means, of course, that you can never be certain whether a detail (like the impressive list of foodstuffs the boys pack to sustain them) has been included for its own sake, or because it will turn out to be significant for the plot. (Then again, I wonder whether some of those details have been planted with an eye to future adventures - and I expect sooner or later I shall have to find out).

I think it was the same convention panel that brought us Delia Sherman's The Porcelain Dove which introduced helenraven to Lindsay Gutteridge's Killer Pine. It's hard, though, to think of two books more different than that female-dominated fantasy of manners and this deeply masculine Cold War action thriller with an SF twist. The twist is that the action heroes have been miniaturised, and stand about half a centimetre tall (one is helpfully depicted, actual size, beneath the book's epigraph, a description of the Lodgepole Pine taken from a publication of the Forestry Commission). Part of the oddness may be explained, I now discover, by the fact that Killer Pine is the second book of a series of three about the same tiny hero, Matthew Dilke: perhaps its predecessor (Cold War in a Country Garden) explains how it was decided that micro-men were a viable kind of secret agent.

Perhaps it even explains why, in a programme which clearly exists to produce men for some unspecified military purpose, just one woman has been miniaturised - and she happens to be Dilke's girlfriend (in the words of the jacket flap, "the delectable Negress Hyacinthe"). For science fiction, this is curiously old-fashioned. Killer Pine was published in 1973, by which time the UK government had passed the Equal Pay Act, and was on its way to accepting that this would not work unless they also legislated against sex discrimination. Like the relegation of the one female character to a purely domestic role, the reliance on the Cold War as a driver of the plot has a flavour of the 50s rather than the 70s: I suppose the Cold War was not over by this time, but surely the thaw had started, and détente was not far off. Yet the Cold War is more than a macguffin, it underpins a major thematic element which I find myself perversely reluctant to spoiler - even though this means I can't quote the book's best line here.

The handling of the practicalities of miniaturisation is uneven. I'm not thinking of the process by which people are reduced in size (as sequence of injections, since you ask), but the details and objects of their daily lives. Some of the detail is vividly imagined: the team's mobile accommodation is disguised as a matchbox, and referred to as 'Brymay'; when they are transported by car, they ride in a gyroscope, to reduce the unevenness of the ride. Yet the paraphenalia of daily life is frequently taken for granted, until you wonder how many factories are involved in producing minute clothes and furniture, whisky glasses and typewriters.

Despite this - or perhaps, in part, because of this - the book is a real page turner. There is a fascination in the challenges that the team meet and overcome, and if there is often something preposterous about this, well, that's fascinating too.

Comments

[sovay]

(Then again, I wonder whether some of those details have been planted with an eye to future adventures - and I expect sooner or later I shall have to find out).

I am so glad you liked!

Also—

Even when stuck up a pear tree surrounded by giant, predatory bits of waste paper, the Professor retains his scientific detachment, wondering if a carpenter's bill would know a saw if it saw one, and if so, whether the gas bill might explode at any moment.

—I must find this book.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I must find this book.

It's mainly remembered now for the Heath Robinson illustrations.

[weegoddess.livejournal.com]

Funny; I read precious little SciFi as a child except for Ray Bradbury. But I had that Mushroom Planet book and remember it so well. And I think of it often when I'm eating hard-boiled eggs.