John Wyndham: The Secret People

The Secret People was John Wyndham’s first novel, published in 1935 under his own name, John Benyon. A science fantasy of the Hidden World genre, The Secret People is set in Northern Africa, where the colonial powers have flooded the lower elevation regions of the Sahara Desert, creating a New Sea. Wealthy English tourist Mark Sunner decides to impress Margaret, the woman he’s recently met during a stopover in Algiers by giving her an airborne tour of the New Sea in his new rocket plane.

Naturally, there’s a mysterious explosion, the plane goes down in the middle of the Sea, and when our intrepid duo try to turn the cabin into a boat to sail it to shore, they are trapped by a whirlpool, where the weight of the water has broken through the ceiling of a vast cave beneath the former desert, and fall to the hidden depths below.

And of course, in the series of caverns below the desert, they encounter a civilisation of small, humanoid people. Of course, in traditional white man fashion, the first thing Mark does on encountering them is draw his pistol and shoot some of them, which does not turn out well for our imperialist gatecrashers. Mark is rushed and knocked out by the cavern inhabitants, and when he awakes, he finds himself without Margaret, but in the company of three men from the upper world, who tell him they have been trapped in the caverns, captives of the small humanoids living there, for years. It turns out that there is a colony of people who have blundered into the caverns over time, and their descendants, about 1,500 strong, and the little people have simply confined them in a lower part of the cave system from which there is no way out other than a difficult climb up which is watched and guarded. The outsiders are trapped, alive, with access to caves where they can grow food, but without any possibility of returning to the outside world and revealing the existence of their captors.

Naturally, there’s an escape tunnel being built, and traitors willing to expose it to their captors once they discover where it is, and factions within the captive population. Margaret has not been brought to the prisoners’ level, possibly because like the ancient Egyptians, the pygmy people see cats as gods, and Margaret had bought a cat with her into the caverns. There are plenty of plot twists before the final escape of our intrepid duo, with the cat and a few companions, just before the New Sea breaks through into the entire cavern system, bringing an end to the pygmy civilisation and their captives alike. It’s a decent enough adventure story of its kind, and show some signs of the writer that Wyndham would eventually become.

There’s also a great deal of casual racism directed against the Arab and black prisoners, and of course, the lost pygmy people. One of Wyndham’s virtues, which appears here in his first novel, is his ability to write believable female characters who are always much more than just the hero’s girlfriend. Margaret is resourceful, brave, and doesn’t faint any more than Mark does - and while she does scream, it’s deliberate, to draw the attention of people she knows are nearby and need to know what’s happening to her.

An interesting trip in the way-back machine.

Laurie King: Mary Russell’s War and Other Stories of Suspense

Mary Russell’s War and Other Stories of Suspense is a collection of short fiction by Laurie R. King. The title story, Mary Russell’s War, is a novella that I’ve previously read as a stand-alone ebook, but the other pieces, all part of the Mary Russell saga, were new to me.

“Mary Russell’s Christmas“ is a delightful story about Mary’s childhood, her charming rogue of an uncle, Jake, and her introduction into the fine arts of card sharking and con jobs. And how she got her throwing knife.

“Beekeeping for Beginners” retells the story of Mary Russell’s first meeting with Holmes, and the early days of her “apprenticeship,” from the perspective of the retired consulting detective.

“Mary Russell’s Marriage,” which is set just after the events of A Monstrous Regiment of Women, is exactly what the title suggests, an account of the wedding of Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes. Naturally, these two can’t just have a simple wedding, either in church or registry office - there has to be a mystery, a scheme, a unique circumstance, an adventure.

“Mrs. Hudson’s Case” features Holmes’s intrepid housekeeper in a case that both she and Mary Russell suspect that Holmes would not deal with appropriately - so they do what must be done, making certain that the great detective never knows the truth.

“A Venomous Death” is a short story indeed, merely a few pages in which Holmes almost immediately deduces the murderer. It’s mostly about bees.

“Birth of a Green Man” deals with the backstory of Robert Goodman, one of the characters of The God of the Hive.

“My Story” is a piece of metafiction, in which Mary Russells discusses how it came to be that she chose one Laurie R. King the editor of her volumes of memoirs, and the madcap adventures surrounding the timing of her decision. Its sequel, “A Case in Correspondence” is told entirely in postcards, letters and newspapers articles, and deals with the mysterious disappearance of Holmes and the political repercussions of the volume of Russell’s memoirs published as “The God of the Hive.”

In “Stately Holmes,” Russell and Holmes return to Justice Hall to deal with a singularly material ghost.

With the exception of the novella, Mary Russell’s War, which I have spoken about elsewhere these are for the most part slight pieces, enjoyable largely for the small glimpses into the characters lives when they are not in the throes of a full-blown adventure. I found the ones set earlier in Russell’s life the most interesting, with “Mary Russell’s Marriage” being perhaps the most moving, as it gives us a glimpse into the emotional lives of two people singularly notable for keeping their emotions quite firmly to themselves. The collection as a whole is best seen as something fun to read for Mary Russell fans awaiting the next novel.

John Scalzi: Head On

John Scalzi’s Head On is a stand alone sequel to Lock In, his powerful novel about people rendered completely immobile by the disease known as Haden’s Syndrome, and the society that develops around them once technology finds a way for Hadens, as they are known, to transfer their consciousness into mechanical robots called threeps.

Chris Shane is a Haden, a former celebrity - famous as a child victim of the Syndrome and child of a rich American sports star - and now an FBI agent with responsibility for investigating crimes involving Hadens, along with partner Leslie Vann.

In Head On, Shane and Vann are investigating the suspicious deaths of Duane Chapman, a Haden and a professional athlete, a utility player for a team engaged in the game of Hilketa - a violent sport, played professionally only by Hadens, in which the object of the game is to score points by decapitating the threep being worn by the designated ‘goat’ of the opposite team.

Chaoman’s death during a game, in which he served as goat three times and was decapitated three times, leads Shane and Vann into a convoluted web of corruption in sport and in the arras of high finance that surround it, dealing with issues including manipulation of wins and point spreads for gambling, money laundering, performance doping, corruption in sponsorship deals, and just about everything else you can think of, including multiple murders.

I did not enjoy this as much as I did Lock In, possibly because sport isn’t a big interest of mine, but it’s a good, solid mystery, and the continued exploration of a society that is no longer tied to the body, thanks to advances that make it possible for all humans to make use of the same technology that Hadens use to function in the physical world, is fascinating.

Not only does Scalzi use these novels to examine disability issues and the nature of consciousness, he also looks at the ways that funding for accessibility for the disabled, or the lack of it, makes people vulnerable and desperate. As a disabled person, It makes me happy to see a major genre author dealing with disability issues in a significant way.