Midsummer Century – James Blish

Tags

1970s, 1972, Chris Foss, DAW Books, James Blish, Josh Kirby, mind switching, New Wave SF, organic computer, psionics, science fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, time travel

Here’s a leftover from Vintage Sci-Fi Month; I almost managed to finish it in January, but fell short by a day or two. James Blish is best known for Cities in Flight and A Case of Conscience, two watershed novels that appear on numerous “best SF” lists. The rest of Blish’s bibliography isn’t as famous or well-regarded; his career started with the digest magazines of the ’50s and ended writing Star Trek novelizations for the money in the late ’60s and ’70s. Blish is one of those authors I’ve meant to read based on his two masterwork novels’ reputations; my buying habits being what they are, I got that chance after finding some of his books at a library sale. I admit, I started with Midsummer Century because it’s short; Cities in Flight is a tome (compared to other 1960s SF books) composed of four smaller novels.

Doubleday/SFBC – 1972 – Emanuel Schongut. I wonder if these book club editions were so cheap because of their mediocre art.

Some 25,000 years hence, the earth has become a tropical paradise, overrun by rainforest. Humanity has evolved—or devolved—into tribes of death-obsessed atavists capable of communicating with their ancestors by means of latent psychic powers. Too obsessed with the afterlife, they ignore the rise of their evolutionary adversaries, the Birds—intelligent forms of today’s hawks and sparrows, whose primary goal is to eradicate their human competitors.

Due to a freak accident, modern-day astrophysicist John Martels slides down a radio-telescope into the 26th-mellenium mind of the immortal Qvant, an organic computer-brain of an Autarch from the previous age, surviving in an abandoned museum-temple as counselor and oracle to the tribesman. The Qvant is none too pleased by Martels’ intrusion, and the out-of-place Martels would prefer one mind per body. As the tension mounts between the two minds, Martels decides to try his hand at rallying the tribesmen against their Bird adversaries before it’s too late by seeking out a group of humans entrusted with guarding technology from the Qvant’s earlier time. This includes a relay computer that could enhance the Qvant’s abilities—but it could also have the technology for Martels, in a stolen tribesman body, to return back to his own time.

DAW #89 – 1974 – Josh Kirby. A vibrant cover depicting one of the most coolest scenes, Martels’ Icarus-like flight to freedom.

Blish’s prose is loquacious and baroque—a vain attempt on my part to emulate his prose style, which is more easily summed up as “wordy,” with vocabulary choices that leans too cerebral. I love the imagination behind the novel; there’s a lot of great elements in there that makes the plot overview damn enticing to me. Yet it’s like Blish wasn’t sure what to do with the great ideas or impressive world-building, so the novel meanders around without making too much of a point or being an electric read. Part of the problem was that Blish was terminally ill with cancer, and would die just three years later in 1975.

My favorite science fiction stories either romping good action yarns or philosophical mind-benders, but Midsummer Century avoided both those categories. It’s also unbalanced: meanders around for a long first section, displays some interesting world-building in the second, and closes with a rushed last third. The slow build-up of the first two sections is tossed aside with the finale; the Man vs. Birds plot gets resolved in a matter of pages, tying up most of the loose ends without much depth or explanation, while burying it under a stream of mental state pscyhobabble. (There’s a surprising amount of psychic theories and spiritual reverence in the novel, but presented with a scientific eye.)

While I did enjoy the conclusion, I found it too unsubstantial to be fulfilling. Midsummer Century was originally a novella in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, but it wasn’t until the last chapters that it felt like one. Brevity works fine when you have a word limit; it’s annoying when fascinating plot elements have their climax glossed over. Again, it feels like Blish was working hard to expand the short novel into a full one, but ran out of steam by the end, the cancer taking the wind out of his sails.

Arrow – 1975 – Chris Foss. An interesting choice.

While I love the ideas behind it, Midsummer Century reads like it’s either too short (to be a real novel) or too long (to be an effective short story/novella). It misses both greatness and suckitude to fall into the wide gap of “average” novels, lacking any real spark that would make it extraordinary. It’s a relic of the New Wave era slush pile, a few neat ideas jammed into a basic and under-refined story. Which is a shame, because Blish writes well enough, has plenty of creativity on display, and pens a story offering much potential. There are better, more important works from the era to pay attention to—maybe I’m missing something but I found Midsummer Century just plain average, a decent novel but one that I would otherwise forget save for the fact I can come back and read this review.