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ERIC FRANK RUSSELL

SINISTER BARRIER DREADFUL SANCTUARY WASP

SINISTER BARRIER

(April 20, 2003)

From the premiere March 1939 issue of UNKNOWN, this novel by Eric Frank Russell certainly got the magazine off to a running start. Man! Where do I even begin to explain SINISTER BARRIER? If you ever found the early X-FILES disturbing, if you have any tendencies toward paranoia and conspiracy theories, if you have ever had a sudden cold shudder and looked around to see nothing at all, then this book will give you something to think about, as well as a a serious case of Creeps.

It`s probable that most pulp and science fiction fans have an idea who Charles Fort was. During his lifetime, Fort amassed a small mountain of newspaper and magazine clippings about inexplicable phenomena and commented on them in his books LO!, THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED, NEW LANDS and WILD TALENTS. The books are still a lot of fun to read, with their immense bulk of bizarre events and Fort`s playful commentary. He had no axe to grind, and his explanatory theories were often whimsical or (more often) frightening. My favorite magazine in the world is THE FORTEAN TIMES, a British publication filled with alarming photos and startling articles with a slightly gallows humour to them.

One of Fort`s more unnerving concepts was that human beings were actually a sort of cattle being raised and manipulated by unseen overlords, and he ended one chapter with the quiet "I think we are property". Eric Frank Russell, a dedicated Fortean, picked up this idea and ran with it, and the result is SINISTER BARRIER*.

The book gets off to a strong start, as scientists all over the world learn too much, and either have "heart attacks" or commit suicide. The deaths are coming so frequently and dramatically, that a government investigator named Bill Graham looks into it and discovers the biggest secret in history. Invisible energy beings called Vitons are all around us, reading our thoughts and steering us to their purposes. These "luminosities" feed on emotional energy of flesh and blood creatures, and they relish strong emotions... so for thousands of years, they have been stirring up senseless wars and brutal murders and religious ecstasies.

The Vitons are responsible for all the unexplained mysteries like ships sailing in with the crew completely vanished,drifting fireballs in the sky, people being levitated into the air and disappearing, disasters and horrors of all kinds. Since they themselves are telepathic, the Vitons stimulate psychic powers in humans and those people who get glimpses of them have led to all the vampire, banshee, ghost and poltergeist sightings through the ages.

And if you find out about them and start to even THINK about their existence, the Vitons will pick up your thoughts and quickly come to finish you off before you can spread the word.

Whew. What a concept. I would hate to see someone on the brink of a paranoid episode read this book late at night. Graham doesn`t run in sweating panic, as most of us might do. Despite the enormous danger, he starts a counter attack, finding ways to evade and detect the Vitons. In a stunning moment, the government arranges to release the news to the entire world at once and the phrase "Hell breaks loose" never had more meaning. In the gigantic world war and chaos which follows, Graham and some surviving scientists resolutely look for a way to strike back. (Remember the old 1950s drive-in movies where the alien invaders could only be defeated by ultrasonic waves or electricity or common salt water?)

The book has many good things going for it. Russell supports the wild events with dozens of actual newspaper stories about related eerie things happening for centuries. After awhile, all the clippings and references have a real corroborating effect, making the story more convincing. I like the idea that Graham doesn`t simply go insane or die as would usually happen in a horror tale of this nature; instead, he and the human race roll up their sleeves and fight back, no matter what the cost.

Eric Frank Russell`s writing style is a bit crude but energetic. He goes in for hyperbole and pathos, rather than subtlety and it works fine for the story he`s telling. At times, a phrase stands out as being so awkward or purple that it stops you in your tracks. But the overheated prose is just what a book like this needs and sometimes it`s haunting. (As two men first begin to find out about the invisible monsters, they get that feeling of someone walking over your grave that signals the Vitons. ("...both felt a strange, nervous thrill. Something peered into their minds, grinned and slunk away." Wait, let me turn on a light.)

As much a classic as this novel is, it does have a few weak points. Russell sets it in 2015 (eek! that`s coming up fast) and his concepts of the then far-future are sometimes on target and sometimes way off, but they distract from the story itself. When you should be wondering if the Vitons are closing in, you`re musing over the two wheel gyrocars or pneumatic one-man elevator tubes. The effect is weakened a bit. And Will Graham, brave and resourceful and heroic, is also an unbelievably crude masher. The way he pesters a coldly unresponsive lady doctor is not cute, it`s just boorish. But these are minor quibbles. On the whole, I would recommend SINISTER BARRIER to anyone who enjoys pulp fiction, science fiction, conspiracy theories, you name it. And now I have still another writer on my list of names to look for in used book stores.
___________
*The title comes from the Vitons living outside our perceptions, beyond "the sinister barrier of our limitations."

DREADFUL SANCTUARY (Feb 15, 2004) From ASTOUNDING, where it appeared in the June through August 1948 issues, this is another stimulating blend of action and paranoia by Eric Frank Russell. It`s not as ambitious as his very first novel, SINISTER BARRIER (which tried to explain absolutely everything mysterious in history) and it`s pretty much ruined by a depressing ending* which lurches in from nowhere and completely contradicts the cocky optimism of the rest of the book. (It almost feels as if a different writer finished an incomplete manuscript) But, up until those final few pages, DREADFUL SANCTUARY is fascinating reading, filled with quotable one-liners ("They`re maniacs, I tell you... maniacs with delusions of sanity!"), snappy dialogue and unexpected turns. This book also has some of the most outlandish and hard to defend scientific concepts I`ve seen outside of Adam Strange. SEVERE SPOILERS AHEAD Seriously. Now, normally, I don`t mind learning about a book before reading it (and most people seem to be okay with reviews and previews as well, even if they give away quite a bit). DREADFUL SANCTUARY, though... if you are likely to read it soon, the story`s effectiveness would be diminished by too much foreknowledge. Just so you know. All right, then. We`re in the futuristic year 1972, where life is much as it was back in 1948 except for minor gadgets like videophones (some of which pop up a little too conveniently as needed). Seventeen unmanned rockets to Venus have exploded before landing for no known reason, and the eighteenth is being readied. This time, there will be a human pilot on board. A research scientist named John J. Armstrong develops a driving obsession to find out what the problem is and quickly becomes entangled in uncovering the hidden history of not only those secret societies which run the world, but the staggering true origin of the human race(s). Hold on to your hats. The four inner planets have long been inhabited by human beings, and each planet has produced a different subspecies or "race". Black people come from Mercury, brown people are from Venus, yellow people are the only native humans from Earth itself and white people are from Mars. Sounds like one of those simplistic relationship manuals, eh? Once the stunning audacity of this concept sinks in.... that different ethnic groups had their skin tones determined by how close they were to the Sun (?!)... things get steadily even more bizarre. The reason our little planet has so many specimens of the different human varieties is that, a hundred thousand years ago, the Martians developed a machine which can determine whether or not someone is insane. They (the Martians, the white people, remember) deported all their lunatics to the Earth to get rid of them as a humane solution. Sheesh, we are the Botany Bay of the Solar System! Kind of explains all the war and crime and perversions and pop music, doesn`t it? All the descendants of the Martians who have been tested and found sane by that psychotron gizmo have formed a worldwide society with cells in every major city. Forget the Si-Fan or the Illuminati or even HYDRA, the real hidden power behind governments is the insidious Norman Club. ("Norman" for "normal man"...do you think Russell was familiar with the Great Shaver Mystery with its teros and deros?) Complicating things still more is that those who know of their real ancestry back on Mercury or Venus have different agendas than those descended from Martians. It`s quite a tangle, with three different ET clans plotting and scheming behind the scenes. Luckily, our boy John J. Armstrong is just the right guy to get mixed up in the whole sordid mess. Not only is he a huge hulking brute (Russell constantly mentions what a moose this guy is) who can yank an unwilling man out of a car, break free of restraining straps and require six guards to pin him down, he has that inquisitive and ingenious mind we find in most Eric Frank Russell protagonists. Once he starts digging into something, he won`t be intimidated or deterred. Of course, he also has those strange moods of anxiety and depression... This brings us to the theme of the book, repeated many times in a phrase intended to be haunting and unsettling: "How do you know you are sane?" Well, frankly if we are in fact descended from aliens specifically banished from their home worlds because of mental illness, the odds are not in favor of any of us being sane. (It certainly helps explain some of the things I did in college; it`s not my fault, it`s my Martian ancestry!) Nearly all the book has Armstrong on the run, picking up reluctant allies and leaving a trail of carnage behind him. I never knew research scientists were so handy with guns and fists. With the alien factions right on the verge of starting a new World War for their own heartless reasons, and with murderous agents of different groups breathing down his neck, our hero shows amazing resourcefulness and initiative. This is why it`s so depressing when (at the very end of the book) everything goes all futile and negative. It`s like watching a version of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK where the Nazis suddenly shoot Indy dead and carry off Marion, THE END. Still, nearly all of DREADFUL SANCTUARY is packed with those little bits of Fortean speculation which made SINISTER BARRIER so intriguing. Where did inexplicable characters like Princess Cariboo and Kasper Hauser come from? Why, they were lunatics dropped off here by the Martians. Where did spiritual leaders like Buddha get their insight? They were enlightened emissaries from the Martian civilization. (Buddha was a North Venusian, by the way.) There are also many unsettling details, like the subtle flashlight weapon which silently causes blood clots so that, not only don`t you know when its effect will kill you, you can`t even be sure IF you have been hit by it. Russell`s books would not be a good choice for someone with paranoid tendencies, that`s for sure. ______________ *Several good folk have informed me that the original magazine ending was in fact much more upbeat and positive; Russell himself, for whatever reason, revision the story for its 1963 Lancer paperback edition (which is what I was going by, wouldn`t you know it?)

WASP (May 5, 2003) From 1957, this is a real treat. I want to thank all of you who recommended this book. Eric Frank Russell`s SINISTER BARRIER I had heard about, because of its Fortean themes and I would likely have read it at some point, but his later book WASP would have been just another title in a long row of science fiction books. "The Terran agitator was the sting to cripple the invincibility of the Sirian empire", hmm doesn`t look like anything special, I would have mistakenly thought. (As an aside, I picked up a copy of the slightly abridged 1971 Bantam edition because, hey there it was, and if I waited to find the longer version, I might never get to read it. As it is, my stack of books to be read is taller than I am at this point.) The essential theme of the book is presented in having a tiny wasp, less than half an ounce in weight, sting at just the right moment. "Neverthless, that wasp killed four big men and converted a large, powerful car into a heap of scrap." In a similar way, a single clever agent provocateur with a plan can start the downfall of a military regime. So the agent is called a wasp, and wasp imagery is repeatedly used to reinforce the point. WASP is not a book that necessarily has to be science fiction or fantasy by its basic premise, as say DONOVAN`S BRAIN or DARKER THAN YOU THINK are. It would only take an editor a short time to change a detail here and there to make this a plausible spy story taking place in modern times. Reportedly, the book had its origin while Russell was working on ways that a saboteur could undermine the Japanese empire during World War II (he was in the RAF for four years), and the resemblance of the story to an English agent infiltrating Japan is overwhelming (the Kaitempi, or Sirian secret police, is so close to the historical Kempetai as to seem like a punchline). In fact, the Sirian word for "yes" is "hi", so close to "hai" that I inevitably began picturing scenes as taking place in wartime Japan. The idea that, although the Sirians have great numerical superiority, their technology is crude compared to the Terrans, means that Russell is showing a society essentially identical to mid20th century Earth`s. Taxis, phones, newspapers, trucks...the few advanced gadgets shown are not essential to the story and could be disregarded. We follow the mission of James Mowry, who has been slightly altered with purple skin to look like a Sirian and dropped on the planet Jaimec. Mowry has some equipment, disguises and supplies with him, most notably a huge amoun of counterfeit money, but what he chiefly uses is a devious and cunning mind. Over the following weeks, by putting up stickers and graffiti all over the city, the wasp creates the illusion of a vast underground resistance movement aimed at ending the war with Earth. This fictional D.A.G. (the Dirac Angestun Gesept, a wonderful item for a science fiction trivia quiz) shortly has the secret police in an uproar especially after a few select assassinations which Mowry executes or arranges are credited to the D.A.G. The more furious and frantic he makes the Sirian auhorities, the less manpower and attention they have to expend on the war itself. As amusing and alarming Mowry`s tactics are, the story is always enjoyable in itself. The agent steadily heat things up and places himself agent in increasingly dangerous spots. The more successful Mowry is, the less safe he becomes. Although he`s usually just shown as competent and professional, the wasp has enough of a clear personality to make him interesting. He never quite disappears under the plot. Eric Frank Russell`s writing has that seemingly effortless clarity that seems to have a journalistic effect. Even in tense or hectic moments, there is often a satiric undertone that keeps the story from being too grim. (Although I thought the heavily ironic ending fell a bit flat.) One phrase impressed me so much that I wrote it down as an example of how, in our own world`s real history, governments and the military have always tried to put a positive spin on dismal events: "For months we have been making triumphant retreats before a demoralized enemy who is advancing in utter disorder." What`s unnerving is that an official spokesman could say that on the evening news and most people would just nod and accept it.