I read Red Flame Burning, by Ward Hawkins. I chose it because the cover art was wild. The story was wild as well, but also quite bad. It felt fake in a way that none of the literature we’ve been reading so far has. I’ll get into this later, though.

This book is about Harry Bork, a 65-year old alcoholic who has a doorway between dimensions opened up in his room when Gus Rassan, a lizard man – is putting up a cabinet in his own room in his own world and knocks a hole in both his wall and the fabric of reality. Gus’s surgeon friend cures Harry of his alcoholism and rehabilitates his ruined body. Harry then visits Gus’s world and finds that humans are used as cattle. The lizard people – called the Jassans – are very timid, and need Harry’s help to avert war. This is as far as I got before I stopped reading and skimmed the rest.

I don’t know exactly what style of SF this book is, but it seems to fall into a few catagories. Ward Hawkins has a pretty poor grasp of evolution, which also happens to be a central concept in this book. The manner in which Jassans and the humans of their planet – which they call “bassoes” have evolved is not particularly feasible, and is explained with a simple “who knows how these things work”. I guess it isn’t outside the realm of theoretical possibility, but having the only explanation be “I don’t know, evolution, I guess” brings this outside the realm of hard science fiction and into the realm of soft sci-fi. The only thing that occasionally pulled this novel out of the category of sociological science fiction this is that Harry is an engineer, and the mechanical descriptions of the Jassans’s technology are somewhat detailed. Despite this, the science was always secondary to the sociological elements of examining Jassan and Human society, which puts this book decidedly in the camp of soft science fiction.

As I said above, this book was not good. The writing was decidedly mediocre. The characters talked like they were from an old western serial, which made perfect sense after doing some research into Ward Hawkins, who was primarily an author of pulp westerns. Red Flame Burning and the rest of the books in the Harry Borg and Gus Rassan series are comedic sci-fi novels. This comedy does sometimes come through. However, it is often racist, sexist, or homophobic in concept, which certainly ruins it. I liked the character of Gus, who was endearing and who’s humor seemed to be largely un-bigoted in nature. However, he didn’t make up for the rest of the book.

I would not recommend Red Flame Burning, except as a not-too-horrible way to experience a pulp science fiction novel. The fact that it always stayed one step above being horribly bad (barring the bigotry, which was always just around the corner) and stayed in the realm of mediocre-to-bad makes it all the more skippable. However, if one is interested in pulp, this is a quick read and may be a good way to understand the genre.

Citation:

Hawkins, Ward. Red Flame Burning: A Novel. Ballantine Books, August, 1985.

I would like to talk briefly on one of my personal favorite Sci-fi novels, Frank Herbert’s Dune, and the ways in which machines are and aren’t a part of the universe that Herbert creates in that novel and in all the stories following it.

Machines are central to the space-faring humans of Herberts future world. Interplanetary travel is carried out on massive tubular ships called “Heighliners” Spice is harvested in crawling factories. The Fremen, natives of the planet Arrakis (the proper name for the titular planet), have created desert-proof outfits called “Stillsuits”, along with a host of other bits of tech that enable them to live in parts of their planet deemed uninhabitable by offworlders. In short, there is no lack of cool future technology for Sci-Fi fans to get excited about.

However, there are two very notable absences that make Herbert’s books stand out from many other works of science fiction. There are no computers or artificial intelligences of any kind and there are very few lasers or projectile weapons.

In regard to the former, the absence of computers is explained in-universe by a war between humans and AI that took place 10,000 years before the events of Herbert’s 1st book. The humans won this war, and proceeded to outlaw artificial intelligence of any kind, replacing it with humans trained to be computers themselves, called “mentats”. These individuals have all the processing power of a computer, if not more, and yet are still definitively human. They have received no cybernetic augmentation, but have rather had their minds cultivated from a young age to hone them into powerful computing forces.

In terms of lasers and guns, their absence is explained by the creation of personal body shields that keep fast-moving bullets from hitting the wearer and which, if hit by a laser, create a reaction that kills both the shooter and the shield-wearer. This means that most combat is done with body shields and bladed weapons. A very fun twist.

Herbert, as with most great science fiction writers, is as intentional about the technologies that he leaves out as the ones that he includes. Many readers of science fiction would expect to see computers and lasers in a future society such as the one Herbert creates, and I appreciate his leaving them out.

Also, if you’re interested in Herbert’s work, there’s a screening of Dune this Friday, hosted by the Bowdoin Film Society!

I would like to take a minute here to begin traveling down a line of reasoning that, I’m sure, will be a perennial one in this course; this being the ability of human beings to imagine what alien life would be like.

The nature of aliens is a question that appears all over science fiction literature, film, and television, with interpretations ranging from people in green body paint to giant pixelated amorphous blobs. The Kanamits of To Serve Man are – and I say this as somebody who thoroughly enjoyed the episode – a good example of a rather unimaginative take on alien life. They are simply tall humans with bulbous heads. Visual mediums like The Twilight Zoine seem to be more commonly guilty of such portrayals, partially because it is much easier to leave appearances up to the imagination in writing than it is in film or the visual arts.

I understand that, often, the physiological nature of the aliens is besides the point. For many works of science fiction, it is enough that they are signified as “other”, and that signifier can be as simple as a pair of antennae attached to a headband. This, paired with a narrative, is enough to let us know that, wherever the beings are from, it isn’t Earth. However, biologically speaking, I can think of no good reason that a species which developed on a planet other than ours should look too humanoid in nature. To me, visualizing aliens as such all to often reeks of an anthropocentric point of view that I find to be quite aggravating.

That, or a lower-than-optimal budget.

There are some exceptions to this viewpoint of mine. For example, it may be the case that an author wishes to explore the possibility that human life came from another planet. In which case, the inhabitants of that planet would likely look quite a bit like us. And yes, if aliens were to be subject to similar selective pressures as life on Earth, they could certainly evolve similar features to organisms on our planet. Fin-like organs, for example, would be useful in water on any planet. These are, however, specific exceptions and somewhat besides the point. Assuming that the alien life is truly alien and thus evolved on a planet far from Earth in response to a different set of selective pressures, to have them resemble life on Earth – especially human beings – too closely would be unrealistic and unimaginative.

Or would it? As I write this, I am reminded of the incredible diversity of life on this planet and the many and varied solutions that different species have developed to cope with many and varied selective pressures. The odds that some form of life on another planet might have evolved a similar solution to a similar challenge as has an Earth-creature are nonzero. So maybe it isn’t the plain fact of alien life being often portrayed as similar to life on Earth that’s getting to me, but the reasons for that trend. It often seems to occur due to a lack of interest in the nature of alien physiology and, though I am not at all saying that that is the most worthwhile question for science fiction to pursue, I do wish it were pursued more often.

This is why I am so excited by science fiction stories like Prott, which really take the time to delve into alien biology and to ask what alien physiology would really be like. Just how far from what we are used to would it be? Would we even recognize it as life? How would a human being react to the truly alien, to life different in every way to that which we are used to and understand? All these are wonderfully interesting questions that make for wonderfully interesting literature.