Avram Davidson, Rork! / Mutiny In Space / The Island Under The Earth

Avram Davidson was one of the top-tier writers of clever and memorable cross-genre short stories (most could be classified as fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and magical realism) through the 60s and 70s, and all of the collections I've come across have been great, especially the greatest hits-ish Avram Davidson Treasury and The Other Nineteenth Century. Adventures In Unhistory was also a treat, sort of a slightly more in-depth version of the slim paperbacks on real-life hauntings, mysteries, and myth (they'd touch on pirate treasure on Oak Island, the Bermuda Triangle, the occult, secret societies, pyramids, etc.) I would pick up at those Scholastic book fairs in elementary school. But apart from scattered praise for an unfinished series involving the poet Virgil as sort of a magician, I've never heard any praise for Davidson's novels, so when I saw a cheap stack of them, I decided to pick them up to judge for myself. I started on the ones that looked less interesting (room for improvement, right?), and I hope I was right in my surface assessment, because if these are representative of his novel-length work, I can see why nobody talks about them. They've given me nothing nice to say.

Rork!: Ran Lomar, a fairly average middle manager, mild-mannered but talented and committed (with hidden heroic depths he never knew he had, of course), is sent by a galaxy-spanning company to a backwater planet which is noteworthy only for being the sole source of redwing, a plant from which certain medicines and treatments for rare illnesses are made. The production of redwing has steadily dropped for quite some time, and Ran has been tasked with reversing that figure within five years, which seems like an awfully generous time limit. When he arrives, however, he finds that he has very little power to actually do anything when he comes up against a fatalist bureaucracy that is stubbornly resistant to change; when Ran tries to sway the functionaries and bosses, they discount all of his ideas for improving productivity as unworkable and blame the Tocks, the planet's labor force. The Tocks, the planet's human but culturally distinct (we know this because they speak in a cutesy ungrammatical dialect peppered with slang and lame idioms) natives, are heavily oppressed, and the ruling class dismisses the host of problems plaguing Tock communities as self-inflicted, using the whole range of historical racial stereotypes as justification -- they're unintelligent and superstitious, they're lazy, they're drunks, they wouldn't know what to do with freedom if they had it, and so on. Ran is not so sure about this assessment, as observation reveals the main contributor to the drop in production to be a disease that afflicts the Tocks, a seasonal fever which worsens by the year.

Unfortunately, despite some focus on the roots and consequences of systemic racism and pressure to make minor percentage gains when major reform is necessary, Rork! is a run-of-the-mill adventure yarn, not a science fictional version of The Wire. While traveling to visit Tock community leaders in order to drum up goodwill and support for his measures and ideas, Ran is captured by a villainous Tock patriarch named Flinders who hates interfering offworlders and plans to incite violence and uprisings against the corporate leadership of the planet. With the help of a young Tock woman who wants to get away from an unwanted arranged marriage, Ran escapes and, stranded in the dangerous wilderness with Flinders on his trail, he decides to cross the dreaded Rorkland to return to civilization in time to warn his superiors.

Crossing Rorkland is unheard of. Nobody crosses Rorkland because it's infested with rorks [1]. Everyone hates and fears the monstrous, stupid, incredibly dangerous spider-like rorks. The vast majority of people have never seen a rork, but everyone has uncorroborated stories from cousins or friends-of-a-friend about horrific rork attacks or the disappearances of unattended babies. That's almost proof! It is no surprise when Ran and Norna (the woman he escapes with) learn that, yes, the prejudice is indeed unfounded, the rorks are intelligent and good-natured, they've raised the lost children on their own, they are in general all puppies and rainbows despite looking kind of scary. The rorks are also being hurt by the seasonal fever, and with this information, Ran is eventually able to piece together the source of the infection, a local animal whose lemming-like rampages spread the sickness. His solution is to make that animal extinct; this seems shortsighted to me, since I'm sure the creature plays a valuable role in the ecosystem, but no one questions his solution. To bring about this genocide, however, requires the cooperation of everyone -- Tocks and rorks alike. Thus, Ran must convince a populace with a deep-seated fear and hatred of rorks that everything they've heard is completely wrong. He does this remarkably easily. There's a little hitch -- Flinders' gang massacres the first rork-human diplomatic summit -- but the rorks are remarkably understanding and forgiving, trusting Ran's explanation completely and dutifully sending out more rorks who are happy to assist. Wrongs are righted, the status of Tocks is improved, and the ignorant are enlightened.

Each and every victory is quick, relatively painless, and has exactly the effects that are intended and nothing more. Because discrimination in Rork! is something that isolated individuals do, something that people will abandon when confronted with facts and evidence, the story is way too simplistic and grotesquely optimistic to portray anything resembling human behavior. When Ran finally dumps his shallow, bigoted fuckbuddy for Norna, the Tock woman who has displayed selflessness, loyalty, and intelligence through the several life-threatening situations they've faced together, it's supposed to affirm the values of open-mindedness and depth and rationalism. But there are no stakes here; Ran isn't risking anything important in making this stand. There's no implication that Ran's friends might be uncomfortable hanging out with him or that Ran and Norna would find it more difficult to find jobs or housing or that they might be the target of harassment or any of the things you would expect in a situation like this. The conclusion of the novel teases a unsettling implication -- yes, the problems are solved, and production is back on track to grow and grow, but the rorks feed on redwing, which means that eventually, inevitably, the needs of one group will come in conflict with the needs of another -- but immediately defuses it -- the rorks use a different part of the plant than the Tocks gather -- in such a way as to completely miss the fact that the rorks might need legal rights and protections so that the company doesn't just decide to wipe them out or take their land if it helps their profit margins. In trying to make statements so vague and positive as not to alienate anyone in the audience (prejudice is bad, brotherhood is good, fighting is cool as long as you're fighting bad guys), Davidson says nothing of value and undermines the points he's trying to make. These are not atypical flaws in genre fiction of the period (and they aren't exactly rare in genre fiction right now, of course), but they do make it difficult to find anything enjoyable about the book.

Basically, if you're really jonesing for a novel with an exclamation point in its title, I recommend Absalom, Absalom! Or Oil!, if you want everyone on the bus to think you're being trendy but hey, you can't help it if they made some big critically acclaimed movie out of it, you didn't even see the film, Magnolia you liked at the time but now you don't know what you saw in it because you caught it on cable a few months ago and it was borderline unwatchable and, call you crazy, an intellectual heart-wrenching Adam Sandler movie does not sound appealing at all, and Daniel Day-Lewis sucked in Gangs Of New York, which was some noteworthy suckage considering the suckiness of the rest of the movie, and it's like he's playing the same character, you've seen the viral milkshake videos, and you really just picked up the Upton Sinclair novel for the exclamation point.

Mutiny In Space: Disappointingly, the mutiny (IN SPACE) has already happened as the novel begins. The captain of the starship Persephone and some assorted guys who were either too lazy or too loyal to have taken part in the takeover are sent out in a lifeboat (IN SPACE) by the greedy, mutinous crew members, who have no real plan or motivation other than to hock the starship in the nearby criminal quadrant and live large off the proceeds. Protagonist Jory Cane, Captain Rond, and the rest of the castaways (who are beneath mention; one goes on and on about his dream of starting a farm, cop-two-days-from-retirement-style, which is about as much characterization they get in total) are lucky enough to make it to a nearby planet, hoping to find it inhabited by a society that is technologically advanced enough for them to contact help (or at least to provide them with enough fuel to make it back to civilization). But soon, to their horror, they discover that they've been marooned on a low-tech world, and, even worse, the society is a matriarchal aristocracy. Look out! Something so evil cannot be permitted to stand!

Being outsiders (and giants in comparison to the locals), they quickly attract attention and supporters (due to a convenient prophecy whose requirements they happen to fulfill) but run afoul of the government, a bunch of xenophobic conservatives fearful of the sway these newcomers have over the public. All of this becomes moot when the mutineers show up again, having abandoned their original plan at the prospect of using superior firepower to loot the primitive planet, rape its warrior women, exploit the superstitions of the natives, and be revered as gods; the castaways resolve that they must fight off the invaders, and they succeed at destroying the Persephone and killing the bad guys, but the armies and their matriarchal leadership are decimated in the process. It's up to our valiant men to rebuild and reshape the society, and all of the sympathetic women agree that men should be in power. This comes from Jory's newly acquired girlfriend, who is pregnant and happy to be bearing a giant child (clearly she hasn't though of what labor is going to be like):


Should I count the many, many disturbing and completely irrational assumptions here? It's especially creepy that Davidson doesn't give the men these ideas; they have to be talked into this by women who are insistent that only men can be trusted with power. I mean, sure, one woman momentarily takes a stand to make sure that equality is enshrined in the law and everyone keeps the rights of women in mind, but this is just lip service to the subject. The emphasis is clearly on the sexist wank material, with Jory's girlfriend being the one to suggest an additional wife for him. I especially enjoy the assumption that polyandry and polygamy cannot exist together, that it's either one or the other. And more on the implications of these changes in power dynamics: "They would unite in more than rule. They would unite in marriage. Breed a new race. Their children would marry among themselves, and only among themselves. Doubtless the male genes would prove prepotent and the male children would be of normal size. Any exceptions would be rigidly excluded." There's a recipe for harmony! This is pukeworthy.

The Island Under The Earth: Yeah, there's an island under the earth, and it's inhabited by humans and centaurs. They don't always get along very well. The humans, in fact, are rather prejudiced against them, stereotyping centaurs as drunken, savage hooligans who let their beast sides taken in control. These allegations are clearly so unfounded and voiced by such unsympathetic characters that when a bunch of people are brutally slaughtered, ostensibly by centaurs, no reader is going to think that the "sixies" (more cutesy slang) did it, and yet it takes almost the entirety of the novel's needlessly confusing time travel plot to lead up to this shocking reveal. I say "needlessly confusing" because although what happens is simple and comprehensible, there are haphazard point-of-view shifts into different time periods that throw in a rivalry between traders and a quest for a super-powerful magical artifact that goes absolutely nowhere. The whole thing feels like a much longer and more elaborate novel was thoroughly and incompetently shredded to ribbons by an editor who was told to bring it down to 50,000 words by any means necessary. I doubt there was a decent novel here in the first place. The bizarre climactic ending resembles a punchline, but, although I'm not sure I get it, I also don't think there's much to miss.

[1] I don't know why Tocks are capitalized and rorks aren't.