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| live by the crossbow, die by the cross |
Several years ago,
I mentioned the similarities between
Isaac Asimov's time travel novel
The End of Eternity and John Boyd's
The Last Starship from Earth. Boyd died at the age of 93, far out-lasting Asimov in the flesh, but not in the memory of science fiction readers. Boyd's real name was
Boyd Bradfield Upchurch (1919-2013). When he started publishing his Sci Fi stories in 1968, Boyd still had a real job, so it is no surprise that he used a pen-name while publishing science fiction novels about Jesus as a time traveler and alien plants that impregnate a woman. Ah, the 60s.
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| Spider Robinson |
You can download the December 1976 issue of
Galaxy magazine (
here) and read the positive review ("
hilarious, with some breathtaking twists") of
The Last Starship from Earth (the review was written by
Spider Robinson).
I can't condemn anyone who decides to never read any of Boyd's novels; his maximum appeal is probably for nerdy 12 year-old guys, which was my status when I read
The Last Starship from Earth. {"
there's something about Boyd's writing which reminds one of a little boy peaking into the girls' bathroom"} However, I do recommend that you take the time to read
this funny review of Boyd's novel
The Pollinators of Eden. "
I just have to wonder how this book came about." Don't we all? You can also download (
here) the December 1969 issue of
If magazine and read
Lester del Rey's less amusing comments on
The Pollinators of Eden.
I have to wonder why someone like Boyd would suddenly start publishing science fiction stories at the age of 50. Was he near retirement and bored with his day job? Had he been writing stories for decades, but only decided to publish his "stuff" after science fiction moved past its early, mostly puritanical phase? In the late 60s, was the time finally right for the type of story that Boyd wanted to tell?
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| Spock is assaulted by an alien plant |
In the original
Star Trek television series, there was an episode called "This Side of Paradise" (first broadcast on March 2, 1967). In that episode of
Star Trek, the seemingly celibate
Mr. Spock finally gets to have sex... with help from some plant "
spores". Since that was 1960s television, the producers of
Star Trek could not even suggest that Spock might have sex with the alien plant. Viewers had to settle for the more pedestrian plot of Spock making love with a pointy-ear-loving woman. With his
green Vulcan blood, maybe Spock would have preferred the plant.
I have no idea if Boyd watched
Star Trek, but I can imagine him being inspired to write his
Pollinators novel by some earlier Sci Fi story about "plant people" that he had once seen. See
this article for more examples of Sci Fi plants.
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| myths: the roots of Sci Fi |
In 1975, Samuel R. Delany's novel
Dhalgren featured the protagonist having hot sex with a tree. That was my introduction to the idea of an animal having sex with a plant. In
Dhalgren, the main character, "
Kid" would probably have sex with anyone, but I suppose we are supposed to imagine that he has sex with a vaginal secretion-producing woman-like tree-spirit, not the abrasive, bark-protected tree itself.
Sex with plants? Why is this a Sci Fi plot element? I blame all those 20th century sex education classes with school teachers talking earnestly to students about the birds and the bees. Germinating Sci Fi story writers were sure to wonder: why should humming birds and insects get to have all the fun? Maybe on some distant planet the plants enjoy having their stamens rubbed.
Sex in Science Fiction
The genre of written science fiction was named and established at a time when there were legal consequences for sending pornography through the mail system. Some of the early science fiction magazines were oppressively censored so as to exclude topics related to human (or alien) sexuality. By the time when Boyd began publishing his stories, the taboo against explicit sexuality in Sci Fi stories had been broken. Don't be surprised to find some type of romance thread running through a John Boyd story. Boyd's "leading ladies" tend to be highly educated professional women.
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| they got along swimmingly |
If you want a quick sample of Boyd's writing, and you prefer to restrict your fictional sexcapades to the animal kingdom, then download the
1973 issue of Galaxy magazine that includes the short story called "The Girl and the Dolphin". The story is told from the perspective of a dolphin who falls in love with a woman. I'm not sure that "The Girl and the Dolphin" is really science fiction. I'm tempted to classify it as sexual fantasy, possibly written for
Playboy. In "The Girl and the Dolphin", the "girl" is a skilled marine biologist with a big government research grant. She invents a device that allows her to understand the speech of dolphins.
While you are in that 1973 issue of
Galaxy, read the biographical information at the end of "The Girl and the Dolphin" which mentions "
The Doomsday Gene", a longer story by Boyd which was published in two issues of
Galaxy (downloads
here and
here). Boyd was born in Georgia, and part of "The Doomsday Gene" is set inside a simulation of the rural South as it was in the 1930s. Boyd went to college in southern California (he earned a B.A. degree and his stories are an unusual stew of imaginary technology floating in a syrupy effluent of the humanities). Most of the plot for "The Doomsday Gene" leads up to a powerful earthquake that hits Los Angeles. "The Girl and the Dolphin" is set in southern California.
Coincidence and Counterfactuality by Hilary P. Dannenberg.
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| Noÿs has the Technician's Touch |
I'm thankful for Hilary Dannenberg because without her I don't know if there would be any other person who has read both
The End of Eternity and
The Last Starship from Earth. In Asimov's story, time travel is used to alter the course of human technological development, allowing nuclear energy to be harnessed in the first half of the 20th century. The main character in
The End of Eternity is an "Eternal", so-called because he lives in a special space-time bubble called
Eternity. Eternity and its residents exist outside of the normal flow of Time, so when the
Eternals alter the course of events in Time, they are not effected. Part of the story involves the unsubstantiated belief of people who live in Time that the Eternals have eternal life.
In
The Last Starship from Earth, Boyd imagines an alternate timeline for Earth in which an all-powerful Christian Church controls human reproduction. Mathematicians must marry other mathematicians, leading to genetically planned lineages that push the rate of scientific advance ahead at a quicker rate than here in our timeline. For example, lasers already exist during the life of Abraham Lincoln. A technology is found that confers practical immortality on people, particularly the protagonist of the story (Haldane IV) who gets sent into the far past on a mission designed to break the stranglehold that the Church has on human freedom. He then spends a couple of thousand years waiting for advanced technology to once again be developed on Earth.
For
The End of Eternity, Asimov imagined the existence of "
temporal inertia". Temporal momentum causes the same people to be born in the world, even if you travel through time into the far past and trigger a
Reality Change. For
The Last Starship from Earth, Boyd seems to have adopted the idea of temporal momentum, so time travel is a kind of alternative reality generator; each new timeline will have analogues of the same people such as Abraham Lincoln. In the
Exode Saga, I explore a technology that can create this kind of temporal inertia. One of my favorite games is to imagine alternate versions of science fiction writers in other Realities (such as a Joan Boyd in the Ekcolir Reality).
What I find quite intriguing is the difference between how Boyd and Asimov wrote computers into their time travel stories. I would not be surprised to learn that Boyd had read the 1966 novel
Colossus (mentioned in passing
here) by
D. F. Jones (who was born in 1918). The plot of
Colossus involves a "giant brain" (computer) that takes control of the entire planet, turning Earthlings into it servants. This imaginary dystopian future is the opposite of Asimov's imagined future of
positronic robots. (Asimov may have been born in 1919, but he calculated 1920 as the most likely year of his birth.)
In Asimov's
robot stories, humanoid robots with human-sized positronic brains secretly guide Humanity towards a safe future. Robots are not mentioned explicitly in
The End of Eternity, but the Eternals make heavy use of computing machines when planning the Reality Changes that they impose on Earth's timeline of events. In Asimov's story, it is the men (the Eternals are mostly men) using the computing devices who are call "Computers" and they are the leading Professional class in Eternity, depicted as the ultimate authorities for making decisions about which
Reality Changes to implement. The story protagonist is a Time Technician (Andrew Harlan), but he has a special interest in the history of Mathematics.
Boyd also made defined classes of Professionals a key feature of
The Last Starship From Earth. Boyd's protagonist (Haldane IV) is a professional Mathematician who casually discovers a "magic equation" that has the same relation to the development of time travel technology as Einstein's E = MC
2 had to the development of nuclear bombs.
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Noÿs and Harlan - into the primitive era
image source |
Harlan is recruited by the mysterious Noÿs (she's from 7 million years in the future); he eventually joins her mission (which is to to destroy Eternity) and create a new timeline for Earth in which there is no more time travel and instead, Humanity spreads outward to other planets of the galaxy.
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Helix, searching for Haldane IV
at the Museum of Mathematics |
Similarly, Haldane IV is recruited by the mysterious Helix, the girl from Hell. Hell is a planet where time travel technology has been developed and plans are afoot for changing the entire history of Earth. Haldane IV is the man who must go into the past and change the course of history, liberating Humanity from the restrictions imposed by the computerized Pope who rules the world.
For Asimov, the central issue in
The End of Eternity is correcting the balance between two competing technologies. He tells a tale about the replacement of
1) a human obsession with using time travel technology as a means to prevent technological catastrophe
with
2) human devotion to interstellar space travel, pursued at the risk of atomic catastrophe.
Asimov even managed to include passing reference to space aliens in
The End of Eternity.
For Boyd, who never obtained a science degree,
The Last Starship From Earth is full of poetry and social science digressions; his Hi Tek Gizmos are kept well out of the spotlight. What is the point of the Reality Change engineered by Haldane IV? To subtract a religious revolutionary named "
Jesus" from the historical timeline of Earth and in so doing create our Reality and give us the free-love culture of 1960s California?
There is a throw-away sub-plot in
The Last Starship From Earth that concerns Haldane IV's plan to use computers to write poetry. Helix is a poet and when Haldane IV falls in love with her, he needs a strategy that will allow him to hang-out with a poet. He pretends to do research on using computers to write poetry. I wish that Boyd had developed this thread into a type of
Turing Test: can a robot create
poetry?
"
his work as a sf novelist is an acquired taste" an overview by J. McEvoy
Review by a fan of Boyd's novel
Andromeda Gun (scroll down the page).
Review of
The Rakehells of Heaven.
Review of
Sex and the High Command.
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| the reversible elixir of life |
Review of
The Gorgon Festival (The
cover by Carl Pfeiffer is from the edition published in 1974.)
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| 1919 - 2019 |
For a better story that features Gorgons, I recommend
Jack Vance's novel
Trullion. It would be crazy if Boyd was inspired by books such as Vance's
The Killing Machine to write a story about an elixir of youth and then Vance promptly wrote
Trullion after seeing
The Gorgon Festival.
Review of
The Girl With The Jade Green Eyes
Quick review of
The Last Starship from Earth
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| Pohl's memoir |
Frederik Pohl (like Boyd, 1919 - 2013). During 2019 I'll have to take time to read one of the novels that was written by Pohl, a chore I have not been able to complete in the first 60 years of my life.
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| The Future |
Apparently several birth dates were applied to Isaac Asimov early in his life, including one as early as October 1919. However, I'll celebrate Asimov's life (January 2, 1920 - April 6, 1992) next year along with Franklin Patrick Herbert, Jr. (October 8, 1920 – February 11, 1986).
Celebrating Isaac Asimov's fiction in 2020.
Looking back at Frank Herbert's fiction.
Next:
reading Pohl's novel Gateway
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