Fred's Book Club: Divisive Sci-Fi.

Hello, kids, and welcome to our Wednesday feature, the Humpback Writers' book club, named for the fact that it's held on Wednesday. No camels involved, at least not until we do some H. Rider Haggard books or something.

This week we have a book I adored as a teenager and read again last year:

When I was a kid I read all the science fiction I could grab, from my dad's dusty collection to the school library to what I could find in the local used-book stores to what I could afford in the new-book stores. Doing so was a great education in the history of the field, as I read widely in books from the thirties through the eighties.

Robert Sheckley became a particular favorite, because he had something that most other writers of SF did not have: a real sense of humor. I read a lot of his short stories, which were collected in paperback editions like Untouched by Human Hands and Citizen in Space, but Crompton Divided was the first novel of his I read. I was maybe fifteen at the time. Boy, was it an eye-opener.

The thing about Sheckley is, he was a real sixties counterculturalist, and if you've ever seen films like the 1970 version of The Corsican Brothers or the infamous 1967 Casino Royale, or the celluloid nightmare that is 1968's Skidoo, you know what they did with heroic stories. And while original, Crompton Divided is a heroic story that's been given the hippie treatment, even though it was initially published in 1978.

Alistair Crompton is a successful perfumist on Earth, a man known for his single-minded dedication to the position of chief tester, making expensive scents from rare and alien elements that are hallucinatory in their power. What his coworkers at Psychosmell do not know is that Crompton is only one third of the man he was. As a child he was a violent schizophrenic, and the only hope to save him was to split his personality into three and put the other two portions -- the violent, angry one and the groovy, pleasure-seeking one -- into artificial bodies and send them to live in colonies in space, leaving the analytical Alistair behind. Sometimes the personalities of the patients who undergo this radical treatment are able to integrate successfully later in life, but never at Crompton's age. Still, he knows he is a shadow of what he should be, and he is determined to make himself whole.

Crompton steals priceless samples from his company, sells them to the Freesmellers (Illegal) Guild, and goes on a quest to find his other thirds and integrate them into a single human being. All he needs to do to reunite is locate the other guys somewhere in the crazy galaxy and make contact -- but it only works if the other guys want to rejoin Crompton... and if the boss of Psychosmell doesn't destroy Alistair first.

It's a great, really sixties plot for a science fiction adventure, and Sheckley has a lot of fun with it, making some terrific gags about humans in general and their antics in space -- and his sense of humor undermines the story at every turn. As an absurdist, he loves to build up suspense and throw it away. I didn't see this as a teenager, but it's true. Crompton's quest is exceptionally dangerous and difficult, with many scary twists, but Sheckley kills the tension almost every time for the sake of a gag. He even inserts himself as a cameo on the exotic planet, Aaia, where Crompton's hedonistic personality, Edgar, lives:

As Crompton passed through the main gate, he saw a lean, intense-looking man in blue jeans and black-rimmed spectacles sitting on a stool and working away on a portable typewriter on his lap. Crompton stared at him with amazement, and the man looked up and said, "Yes, what is it?"
     "I'd like to know what you're doing," Crompton said.
     "I'm writing a novel," the man said, typing as he talked. "This dialogue goes in, of course. My detractors accuse me of mere fantasizing, but I put in only what I see and hear."
     "It seems to me --"
     "Never mind," the writer said. "No line of dialogue beginning with 'It seems to me' ever turns out to be amusing. Perhaps I should deliver a set speech at this point. There are several delicious ironies that perhaps have not occurred to you to date. For example --"
     "I hate sentences that begin 'For example,'" Crompton said.
     "I was going to rewrite that, actually. 'Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself -- I am large, I contain multitudes.' How well old Whitman put it! The peculiar relevance of that conception --"
     "I must be going," said Crompton.
     "Good-bye," the writer said. "It's been a short scene, but a snappy one."

And by the way, Aaia, which has a kind of seventies California feel, is as loaded with sex and drugs as any teenage boy might want to hear about. You can see how this kind of stuff might appeal to a guy hoping to misspend his youth.

So I have to say that while I still admire Sheckley's ideas, his ability to build up the story, his wild imagination, and some really A+ jokes, I was disappointed in revisiting the novel. It's a time capsule of his era, and more dated in that regard than most of the more staid SF from the forties and fifties. However, it does have a wild, psychedelic ending, which has something interesting to say about what it means to be a human being in full.

I had to purchase the book again, by the way, getting an edition for the Kindle, because I had not owned it in decades. I had raved about it to a friend and insisted he read it, a friend who was not into SF but knew The Silmarillion forward and backward, and all he ever did was make fun of the title and lose my copy. Never lend a book to a friend who isn't eager to read it. In fact, never lend a book to a friend if you want to keep it at all.

P.S.: Sheckley's best known book has to be The 10th Victim, which began life as the story "The Seventh Victim," and was made into an Italian film in 1965. I've never seen it, but as sixties assassination films go, it has much to recommend it, mainly Ursula Andress.