Other writing commitments have taken precedence recently, but here's my review of the Fortean-inflected science fiction novel, Jack of Eagles, by James Blish:
Solid.
This is the first book-form novel published by James Blish, one of the well-known names of science fiction’s golden age, and it stands up more than sixty years later as a good read.
The story focuses on Danny Caiden, who thought he was normal; a bachelor, ex-soldier, drone for agricultural publications (a job very similar to Blish’s own early career), except that he keeps hearing voices talking about him. And he has this weird ability to find things that are lost. His weird talents get him in trouble when he publishes a story about International Wheat being charged with price-fixing before the news is actually leaked by the government. Then he gets in more trouble—sensing he might be psychic, he sells International Wheat short, the only one to do so, and makes a bunch of money.
Confused, he sets out to figure out what is happening with him, consulting wight he Fortean Society, the parapsychologist at university, and the psychical research society. He also reads through likely books in the library. Combining what he learns from Dunne’s An Experiment with Time, Korzybski’s General Semantics, and the parapsychologist, Dr. Todd, Caiden is on the brink of controlling his new-found psychic powers—and Dr. Todd on the verge of understanding them mathematically—when the FBI, the SEC, his Caiden’s budding love interest (and her gargantuan brother) all descend on his apartment, interrupting the studies. Caiden escapes the frying pan, only to end up in the fire: he runs to the psychical research society, but there he is imprisoned and slotted for death.
Another escape brings him back to a friend, Sean Hennessy, who it turns out is in league with the Fortean Society in a battle against the psychical research society. The PRS is muddle-headed, not understanding psychic powers, but uses them for ill gains, anyway, controlling gamblers and playing the market. It was the PRS that had fixed the prices, and made International Wheat look guilty. Caiden and Hennessy plot together to rescue Todd, Caiden’s lady love, and stop the PRS. And, of course, they succeed.
The plot shows more than a little influence by A E Van Vogt, what with the complications upon complications and the call outs to Korzybski. But ti doesn’t bog down into pure chase scenes: rather it showcases that classic science fiction technique of the protagonist reasoning through abstruse scientific theories to re-interpret the structure of the universe—solve the mystery—and then act.
The last bit, with Caiden having to move through different possible futures, is just shy of a tour de force, especially in a book this short and fast moving, It was a bravura idea, but the problem is there is no real threat to it. Caiden can move through each of the possible tomorrows—strange or horrible as they might seem—never having to interact with it.
The story is also interesting in light of Blish’s convictions. He did not really like the Fortean Society—and gives his reasons here: the Forteans were too likely to support the odd merely because it was odd—and had little patience for John W. Campbell’s interest in Psi—but here he wrote a novel about psi being real.
Some of the book will seem dated—the references to Gypsies, the boy-girl relationship, the patter, and the ease with which Caiden can remember scientific concepts. But the fairly solid structure, quick pace, precise language, and brevity make the book worthwhile.
Note that there is an extended discussion--by Blish's standard, anyway--of the Fortean Society, Fort, and Tiiffany Thayer, here thinly disguised as Cartier Taylor:
“The Forteans were even less helpful, though friendly. The local branch of the Fortean Society had only a post office box address. When he finally found them, it was by way of Who’s Who. Their local leader turned out to be Cartier Taylor, a popular author, a man who had written so many colorful and occasionally acute thrillers that even Danny had heard of him. Indeed, the Fortean group seed to be crawling with writers of various calibres, most of whom were more impressed by their Master’s brilliant writing style than with his disordered metaphysical theories.
Taylor,a slickly handsome man past middle age in the process fo going to seed, but with a gift fot brilliantly bitter chatter which dazzled Danny into complete inarticulateness, was more than willing to load Danny up with half a hundred reports of wild talents of every conceivable kind. He had bins of them, collected by assiduous Forteans all over the world, and filed under such titles as ‘Pyrotics,’ ‘Poltergeists,’ ‘Rains of Frogs,’ and ‘Oil-Prones.’ But nothing that he had to offer in the way of theories to account for such reports seemed better than idiotic. Indeed, he seems dot have a special bias toward the idiotic, and to be out to trap Danny into every possible concession that ‘orthodox’ theories of the state of the universe were nonsense.
He viewed scientists-in-the-mass as a kind of priesthood, and scientific method as a new form of mumbo-jumbo. This twist made him partial to astrology, hollowearth notions, Lemuria, pryamidology, phrenology, Vedanta, black magic, Koresanity, Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, crystalline atoms, lunar farming, Atlantis, and a long list of similar asininities—the more asinine the better. At bottom, however, every one of these beliefs (if Taylor believed any of them; Danny could nto tell whether he subscribed to any given doctrine because he liked it or only because he liked to be in revolt against anything more generally accepted) turned out to rest upon some form of personal-devil theory: Roosevelt had sold the world down the river, the world press was out to suppress reports of unorthodox happenings, astronomers conspired//50//to wangle money for useless instruments, physicists were secretly planning to promote the purchase of cyclotrons by high schools, the Catholic Church was about to shut down independent thinking throughout the United States, doctors were promoting useless or dangerous drugs because they were expensive—all with the glossiest of plausible surfaces, all as mad as the maddest asylum-shuttered obsession of direct persecution. Danny was not at all surprised that Taylor was determinedly and brilliantly trying to sell him Dianetics as Danny backed out of the door of the writer’s apartment.
Yet Fort himself assuredly made exciting reading, as Danny found directly afterward at the public library. He could see why writers loved the man, He wrote in a continuous and highly poetic display of verbal fireworks, superbly controlled, intricately balanced, witty and evocative at once. His attitude toward his world seemed to be a sort of cosmic flatulence, about midway between the irony of Heine epigrams which Danny remembered well and Ritz Brothers slapstick which he would be happy to forget.
But like Taylor, his explanation for the things he had observed, collected at second hand, or simply collated were deliberately outrageous. Every now and then Danny found in one or another of Fort’s four books a glimmering trail toward something useful—and every time Fort took the developing insight and stood it on its head, or worse, distorted it into complete childishness.
A scientist with a sense of humor and more than usual patience with sloppy thinking might have made something of Fort’s Wild Talents, the one book of the four which bore centrally upon Danny’s troubles. But for Danny, who had no scientific training and a desperate need to know now what it was all about, there was nothing to be found but the assurance that a lot of other people had been in his fix, or something rather like it.”
Solid.
This is the first book-form novel published by James Blish, one of the well-known names of science fiction’s golden age, and it stands up more than sixty years later as a good read.
The story focuses on Danny Caiden, who thought he was normal; a bachelor, ex-soldier, drone for agricultural publications (a job very similar to Blish’s own early career), except that he keeps hearing voices talking about him. And he has this weird ability to find things that are lost. His weird talents get him in trouble when he publishes a story about International Wheat being charged with price-fixing before the news is actually leaked by the government. Then he gets in more trouble—sensing he might be psychic, he sells International Wheat short, the only one to do so, and makes a bunch of money.
Confused, he sets out to figure out what is happening with him, consulting wight he Fortean Society, the parapsychologist at university, and the psychical research society. He also reads through likely books in the library. Combining what he learns from Dunne’s An Experiment with Time, Korzybski’s General Semantics, and the parapsychologist, Dr. Todd, Caiden is on the brink of controlling his new-found psychic powers—and Dr. Todd on the verge of understanding them mathematically—when the FBI, the SEC, his Caiden’s budding love interest (and her gargantuan brother) all descend on his apartment, interrupting the studies. Caiden escapes the frying pan, only to end up in the fire: he runs to the psychical research society, but there he is imprisoned and slotted for death.
Another escape brings him back to a friend, Sean Hennessy, who it turns out is in league with the Fortean Society in a battle against the psychical research society. The PRS is muddle-headed, not understanding psychic powers, but uses them for ill gains, anyway, controlling gamblers and playing the market. It was the PRS that had fixed the prices, and made International Wheat look guilty. Caiden and Hennessy plot together to rescue Todd, Caiden’s lady love, and stop the PRS. And, of course, they succeed.
The plot shows more than a little influence by A E Van Vogt, what with the complications upon complications and the call outs to Korzybski. But ti doesn’t bog down into pure chase scenes: rather it showcases that classic science fiction technique of the protagonist reasoning through abstruse scientific theories to re-interpret the structure of the universe—solve the mystery—and then act.
The last bit, with Caiden having to move through different possible futures, is just shy of a tour de force, especially in a book this short and fast moving, It was a bravura idea, but the problem is there is no real threat to it. Caiden can move through each of the possible tomorrows—strange or horrible as they might seem—never having to interact with it.
The story is also interesting in light of Blish’s convictions. He did not really like the Fortean Society—and gives his reasons here: the Forteans were too likely to support the odd merely because it was odd—and had little patience for John W. Campbell’s interest in Psi—but here he wrote a novel about psi being real.
Some of the book will seem dated—the references to Gypsies, the boy-girl relationship, the patter, and the ease with which Caiden can remember scientific concepts. But the fairly solid structure, quick pace, precise language, and brevity make the book worthwhile.
Note that there is an extended discussion--by Blish's standard, anyway--of the Fortean Society, Fort, and Tiiffany Thayer, here thinly disguised as Cartier Taylor:
“The Forteans were even less helpful, though friendly. The local branch of the Fortean Society had only a post office box address. When he finally found them, it was by way of Who’s Who. Their local leader turned out to be Cartier Taylor, a popular author, a man who had written so many colorful and occasionally acute thrillers that even Danny had heard of him. Indeed, the Fortean group seed to be crawling with writers of various calibres, most of whom were more impressed by their Master’s brilliant writing style than with his disordered metaphysical theories.
Taylor,a slickly handsome man past middle age in the process fo going to seed, but with a gift fot brilliantly bitter chatter which dazzled Danny into complete inarticulateness, was more than willing to load Danny up with half a hundred reports of wild talents of every conceivable kind. He had bins of them, collected by assiduous Forteans all over the world, and filed under such titles as ‘Pyrotics,’ ‘Poltergeists,’ ‘Rains of Frogs,’ and ‘Oil-Prones.’ But nothing that he had to offer in the way of theories to account for such reports seemed better than idiotic. Indeed, he seems dot have a special bias toward the idiotic, and to be out to trap Danny into every possible concession that ‘orthodox’ theories of the state of the universe were nonsense.
He viewed scientists-in-the-mass as a kind of priesthood, and scientific method as a new form of mumbo-jumbo. This twist made him partial to astrology, hollowearth notions, Lemuria, pryamidology, phrenology, Vedanta, black magic, Koresanity, Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, crystalline atoms, lunar farming, Atlantis, and a long list of similar asininities—the more asinine the better. At bottom, however, every one of these beliefs (if Taylor believed any of them; Danny could nto tell whether he subscribed to any given doctrine because he liked it or only because he liked to be in revolt against anything more generally accepted) turned out to rest upon some form of personal-devil theory: Roosevelt had sold the world down the river, the world press was out to suppress reports of unorthodox happenings, astronomers conspired//50//to wangle money for useless instruments, physicists were secretly planning to promote the purchase of cyclotrons by high schools, the Catholic Church was about to shut down independent thinking throughout the United States, doctors were promoting useless or dangerous drugs because they were expensive—all with the glossiest of plausible surfaces, all as mad as the maddest asylum-shuttered obsession of direct persecution. Danny was not at all surprised that Taylor was determinedly and brilliantly trying to sell him Dianetics as Danny backed out of the door of the writer’s apartment.
Yet Fort himself assuredly made exciting reading, as Danny found directly afterward at the public library. He could see why writers loved the man, He wrote in a continuous and highly poetic display of verbal fireworks, superbly controlled, intricately balanced, witty and evocative at once. His attitude toward his world seemed to be a sort of cosmic flatulence, about midway between the irony of Heine epigrams which Danny remembered well and Ritz Brothers slapstick which he would be happy to forget.
But like Taylor, his explanation for the things he had observed, collected at second hand, or simply collated were deliberately outrageous. Every now and then Danny found in one or another of Fort’s four books a glimmering trail toward something useful—and every time Fort took the developing insight and stood it on its head, or worse, distorted it into complete childishness.
A scientist with a sense of humor and more than usual patience with sloppy thinking might have made something of Fort’s Wild Talents, the one book of the four which bore centrally upon Danny’s troubles. But for Danny, who had no scientific training and a desperate need to know now what it was all about, there was nothing to be found but the assurance that a lot of other people had been in his fix, or something rather like it.”
