Tuesday, February 08
(This is my first book review for the Fifty Book Challenge.)
Dan and I were doing one of our wallet-thinning sweeps through used bookstores when he dropped The Goblin Reservation on my pile. "You'll read this," he said. It was not a question.
So I did. I'm not sorry.
Goblin Reservation was written by Clifford Simak in 1968, making it classic - if obscure - sf. It's a peculiar mix of science fiction and fantasy. People travel between planets via "transmitter", essentially instantaneous travel; the novel opens as the protaganist, Peter Maxwell, returns to Earth after ending up at the wrong destination to find that he wasn't redirected but duplicated... and his duplicate had returned six weeks earlier only to be murdered. Very science fiction indeed, save that Maxwell's purpose for making the journey was to hunt dragons. He's a professor of Supernatural Phenomena and has for his closest friends a Neanderthal, a goblin, and a ghost.
The book continues in the same fashion, mixing time travel, fairies, aliens, and, yes, dragons, in with an appealing account of a man who's been offered the deal of a lifetime, if he can only get past the red tape. It's a funny book, and also a sad one, and not in the least what I was expecting. The 1960s fiction that I've read was either doom-and-gloom, hurrah for the apocolypse stuff or that frentic fantastic all-hail-the-god-of-technology style that's usually referred to as "Golden Age." Goblin Reservation is a neither/nor. It's too fanciful for science fiction and too prosaic for fantasy; too pleasant to be dystopian but too mixed to be utopian. One of the main hurdles the protaganist must overcome is a lack of departmental funding, for heaven's sake, an everyday sort of problem that both ends of the science fiction spectrum, happy and sad, would have turned up their noses at.
The thing that appealed to me the most about the story, in the end, wasn't the characters - workmanlike but hardly spectacular - or the plot, or even the fairies and aliens. It was the sense of play. All this technology, all these marvels, and what do people do? They bioengineer a sabretooth tiger for a pet. They use time travel to snatch a Neanderthal, or to borrow Will Shakespeare and make him give lectures to bored college students. They transport themselves halfway across the galaxy to hunt down a rumor of dragons.
It's not a serious book, but a whimsical one, fanciful and prosaic and touching because it's true. We won't do wonderful things with technology. We'll make pet tigers. It's what's wonderful and horrible about humanity, all at once, and something that science fiction is often reluctant to admit to.
Thanks for putting this in my stack, Dan.
Dan and I were doing one of our wallet-thinning sweeps through used bookstores when he dropped The Goblin Reservation on my pile. "You'll read this," he said. It was not a question.
So I did. I'm not sorry.
Goblin Reservation was written by Clifford Simak in 1968, making it classic - if obscure - sf. It's a peculiar mix of science fiction and fantasy. People travel between planets via "transmitter", essentially instantaneous travel; the novel opens as the protaganist, Peter Maxwell, returns to Earth after ending up at the wrong destination to find that he wasn't redirected but duplicated... and his duplicate had returned six weeks earlier only to be murdered. Very science fiction indeed, save that Maxwell's purpose for making the journey was to hunt dragons. He's a professor of Supernatural Phenomena and has for his closest friends a Neanderthal, a goblin, and a ghost.
The book continues in the same fashion, mixing time travel, fairies, aliens, and, yes, dragons, in with an appealing account of a man who's been offered the deal of a lifetime, if he can only get past the red tape. It's a funny book, and also a sad one, and not in the least what I was expecting. The 1960s fiction that I've read was either doom-and-gloom, hurrah for the apocolypse stuff or that frentic fantastic all-hail-the-god-of-technology style that's usually referred to as "Golden Age." Goblin Reservation is a neither/nor. It's too fanciful for science fiction and too prosaic for fantasy; too pleasant to be dystopian but too mixed to be utopian. One of the main hurdles the protaganist must overcome is a lack of departmental funding, for heaven's sake, an everyday sort of problem that both ends of the science fiction spectrum, happy and sad, would have turned up their noses at.
The thing that appealed to me the most about the story, in the end, wasn't the characters - workmanlike but hardly spectacular - or the plot, or even the fairies and aliens. It was the sense of play. All this technology, all these marvels, and what do people do? They bioengineer a sabretooth tiger for a pet. They use time travel to snatch a Neanderthal, or to borrow Will Shakespeare and make him give lectures to bored college students. They transport themselves halfway across the galaxy to hunt down a rumor of dragons.
It's not a serious book, but a whimsical one, fanciful and prosaic and touching because it's true. We won't do wonderful things with technology. We'll make pet tigers. It's what's wonderful and horrible about humanity, all at once, and something that science fiction is often reluctant to admit to.
Thanks for putting this in my stack, Dan.
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