He studied the skyline around his house, looking hard at everything: Were things where and how he had left them?  Or had he introduced some small, slight change, 130 million years ago, a change that had made a different world?

I purchased Robert Chilson's 1976 novel Shores of Kansas because of its creepy waterbound dinosaur and axe man cover, the work of Mark Mariano.  (When I see a painting in which the feet are hidden I always wonder if it is because feet are so hard to draw--it's not every dauber who can grace the world with depictions of feet as convincing and charming as those of Edward Burne-Jones or William-Adolphe Bouguereau.)  Then I read Chilson's short story "People Reviews" and was impressed by how original and clever it was, which gave me high hopes for this novel.

It is the late 20th century.  It has been discovered that a tiny minority of people (about sixty in the whole world, we are told) have the ability to travel back in time!  Grant Ryal is the only one of these people who can travel back to pre-human times, and he has become rich and famous by bringing back film and specimens from the Mesozoic Era.  Instead of moving to New York and enjoying a life of lavish leisure (that is how I would play this scenario), Missouri country boy Grant has sunk all his wealth into starting the Chronographic Institute, an entity devoted to educating the public about life in the Age of the Dinosaurs.

Years ago I read Algis Budrys' famous Rogue Moon, and was disappointed that very little of the book focused on exploring the alien death labyrinth on Luna--most of the text was a lot of psychological relationship drama revolving around a guy trying to prove he was a real man or whatever.  Somewhat similarly, after that first thrilling battle scene, Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers is mostly philosophical discussion (though I found Heinlein's philosophical talk far more interesting than Budrys' soap opera.)  Like those celebrated SF classics, The Shores of Kansas spends more time on relatively mundane dialogue and human relationship scenes than the life and death struggles on distant landscapes which attract most readers to these books in the first place.  Of the book's 13 chapters, only three and a half, that is, about 60 of its 220 pages, are spent in the Mesozoic.  Fortunately for us adventure-fiction-loving types, as with Starship Troopers, the adventure sequences are very good.

The bulk The Shores of Kansas is concerned with Grant's relationships with the management and employees at the Institute.  Chilson really harps on the fact that Grant is an honest country boy who sees things differently from the self-serving and manipulative executives and scientists whom he has had to hire to operate the Institute; they are obsessed with PR and office politics, while all Grant wants to do is educate the public about the past.  Much of Shores of Kansas reads like a mainstream novel about a self-made tycoon or a talented artist trying to maintain control of the enterprise he built with his own sweat, blood and genius, hounded by people riding his coattails.  There are lots of scenes about how, while Grant was in the prehistoric past collecting specimens and shooting film, Business Manager Martin, Institute Director Dr. Shackelford, and Director Dr. Adrian have been ignoring his orders, allocating more resources to PR than research, and doing elitist stuff like reserving parking spaces for the executive staff (Grant orders the names painted over but then has to do it himself) and moving the copy machine out of the conference room because it looked "vulgar" in there (Grant has it moved back.)  And lots of scenes about how the Institute needs money, and so pure research has to take a backseat to schemes to raise revenue.

There are also scenes with Grant's family--fiercely independent Missouri hillbillies--that give us an idea of where he came from, and lots of discussion of his relationships with women.  Now that he is famous women are always throwing themselves at him ("Before he became famous, he had never been popular; now even the wives of his best friends propositioned him...."); Grant is not comfortable with the "legend of the ax-wielding superstud" which has grown up around him.  He also resents an up and coming female time traveller, Marian Gilmore, whom Shackelford and Adrian are grooming with the hope that she will become the second person capable of traveling back to the Mesozoic and, as Grant's partner, double the Institute's production.

The main theme of the book is that Grant is an outsider; the only human being ever to have seen the Mesozoic, a hillbilly among college graduates, a rural MidWesterner forced to attend parties in New York and Washington and hobnob with the idle rich and the politically powerful.  In one chapter he finds himself the only white person among a community of blacks when he rematerializes in an African-American neighborhood after one of his trips back in time.  (The blacks prove more eager to help and more competent than any of the whites in the novel.)  This theme is most starkly reflected in Grant's fears that his expeditions are changing history (like in Ray Bradbury's immortal classic of dino-lit, "The Sound of Thunder"), that the 20th century he returns to is not the one he left. Upon returning he carefully scrutinizes the stars, road signs, the hills on the horizon, searching for little differences that might indicate he has returned to an altered future, a similar but alien world.  This is probably my favorite element of the book, Grant's feeling that he perhaps is in a world where he doesn't belong, not merely due accidents of birth, but because of his own choices.  This is a feeling I can identify with; I have paid but little attention to current pop culture for over a decade, and when I have to spend time in doctor's offices or grocery stores, or with my family or inlaws, and see 21st century TV shows or hear 21st century music and talk about sports or politics, I feel like I am an alien in a strange and unpleasant world.

(Early in the novel Chilson gives us a clue that indicates that Grant's world is not our own: he suggests that Theodore Roosevelt was assassinated.  In real life, Teddy survived an assassination attempt and died years later in his sleep.  This brief passage added a sense of unease to the whole novel, as, in the same way Grant scanned the landscape for clues he was in the wrong 20th century, I kept expecting to discover a second clue indicating what was different between my real world and Grant's.  A cool move by Chilson.)  

British hardcover edition

I was sort of expecting a sad or defiant ending, in which Grant died or elected to remain in the Mesozoic because he hated the 20th century.  Instead, in the last 35 pages of the book we learn all about Grant's secret sorrow (a failed relationship with a woman, Nona Schiereck) and he has a psychological breakthrough after getting seriously wounded.  He makes his peace with the 20th century, and starts an intimate relationship with Marian Gilmore, taking her back with him to share with her the pure natural life of the Mesozoic; we are lead to believe that they will live happily ever after, shuttling between both time periods.

I liked Shores of Kansas; it is probably about as good as we can expect a book about a dude fighting dinosaurs with an axe to be.  All the Mesozoic stuff (though I guess nowadays all the science would be considered wrong) is entertaining and the 20th century human drama isn't bad.  However, as they say, your mileage may vary: I perhaps need to include some trigger warnings for anyone considering reading this novel.  The novel's depiction of women (I guess based on crude Freudianism) is not exactly complimentary--they all want to have sex with Grant because he is famous, and are fascinated by the axe he carries with him because it is a phallic symbol.  There is also Grant's exasperated complaint about the way the news media covers women--our hero reads a newspaper article about Marian Gilmore and finds:

...a lengthy parenthesis here about how this would advance the attitudes of women towards themselves, etc., etc., the obligatory refrain over any woman who did anything.

If women's sexual desires are portrayed as shallow and simple, so are Grant's: it feels like he fell in love with Nona Schiereck and then Marian Gilmore simply because they have red hair.  (If I was Chilson's editor I would have suggested focusing a little less on the Institute's finances and a little more on Grant's love life.)  Also noteworthy is how Grant's standoffish attitude towards women leads to rumors he is gay--in a New York lavatory a homosexual wearing makeup and perfume makes aggressive advances, and Grant uses force to dissuade this ardent fan.

All in all, an enjoyable addition to the dino SF canon.  Seven out of ten pilfered sauropod eggs.  If I didn't already own way way too many books I haven't read yet, I would be interested in reading more of Chilson's work.

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The page after the last page of text in my copy of Popular Library's The Shores of Kansas was torn out by a previous owner--jagged little remnants of it peek out at me from the gutter.  Though I would certainly like to see what sort of advertising was on this page, I think this vandalism is a sign of a life well-lived.  Maybe some SF fan ordered more books, using the page as a handy coupon.  Perhaps he or she tore it out to use as a shopping list on his or her next expedition to the local bookstore.  Or maybe the page was called into service as a makeshift notepad, and bore an address or phone number that opened the door to a new career or relationship for the book's owner.  Let's look on the bright side for once!    

Inside jacket flap of my copy

We all love these anthologies of original SF stories, don't we?  So let's read my copy of the hardcover book club edition of 1977's Universe 7, edited by Terry Carr.  We are told it is "acclaimed" and "an eagerly awaited event in science fiction."  Let's see if the acclaimers and eager waiters of that world of long ago in which I was a mere six years old were well-served by Carr and the "famous authors" and "stars of tomorrow" who appeared between Universe 7's covers. Today we've got two titans of speculative fiction, Fritz Leiber and Brian Aldiss, and two people whose work I have never before read, Julian Reid and Robert Chilson.

"A Rite of Spring" by Fritz Leiber

Like a lot of us who played 1st edition AD&D in the 1980s, I have a special place in my heart for Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Grey Mouser.  (Fave F&GM stories: "Seven Black Priests," "Lean Times in Lankhmar," "Bazaar of the Bizarre" and "Stardock.")  I also really liked Leiber's hard sf Hugo-winner "Ship of Shadows."  Hopefully "A Rite of Spring," which Terry Carr also included in Best Science Fiction of the Year 7, will join this list of solidly entertaining stories.

At the very start of the novelette (40 pages) Fritz hints that "A Rite of Spring" might be some kind of feminist switcheroo piece; the very first line is "This is the story of the knight in shining armor and the princess in a high tower, only with the roles reversed." I guess that is a fair description, but, equally justly, we can see the tale as a male wish-fulfillment fantasy in which some egghead who is ineffectual with women suddenly has his dream girl tossed in his lap.  It is also akin to those stories like Tom Jones and Citizen of the Galaxy in which a young person with an unhappy life suddenly learns he is the heir to a fortune or the son of a nobleman or whatever and is whisked away to a finer existence.

Matthew Fortree is a mathematical genius, a resident at a luxurious secret U. S. government campus where the finest of pure scientists are collected to pursue their research in hopes that they will produce breakthroughs which will aid our nation militarily or economically.  Matthew is eccentric and antisocial, a friendless virgin. During an electrical storm he (though an arrogant atheist) prays to the "Great Mathematician" and at his door appears a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl.  The girl, Severeign Saxon, is ostensibly at the secret installation to look for her brother.  She and Matthew play an intellectual party game, each in turn naming a famous thing associated with the number seven (e. g., Seven Sisters, Seven Against Thebes, Seven Samurai, etc.)  This game goes on for pages and pages, Leiber unleashing on the reader much erudite trivia from history, literature and religion, including references to Poul Anderson and to his own Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories.  The game also has integrated into it a somewhat elaborate sex scene between Matthew and Severeign.

At the end of the story it becomes evident that Severeign is from another dimension, one Matthew glimpsed in trances as a child, "a realm where he was in direct contact with the stuff of mathematics" and where the mathematical genius can live a happier, more fulfilling life.  The authorities suspect Severeign is some kind of foreign spy, and when Matthew carelessly reveals classified information to her they come gunning for the pair of them.  Luckily Severeign has a magical artifact that allows them to escape to her better world.

The story may be a bit too long, and some sections exhibit a sort of folksy colloquial style that is (I guess) supposed to remind you of fairy tales or sitting by the campfire hearing some oldster spin a yarn ("For it was a Gothic night, too, you see") which might be a little hard to take.  Some might find some elements of the story a little pervy; not only is Severeign 17 years old, but she says that in the "other realm" that she and Matthew are siblings--he is the brother she is looking for!  But "A Rite of Spring" is cleverly constructed and for the most part smoothly executed.  If you can take the barrage of trivia, it is worth your time.

 
"My Lady of the Psychiatric Sorrows" by Brian Aldiss

This is an effective sketch of a setting and characters; there isn't much plot here.

A decade or so (?) ago an energy-starved Earth sent aloft satellites (they call them "planetoids") that collected solar energy and beamed it down to the surface.  These satellites were like flying cities, full of fashionable stores and comfortable hotels and so forth for the benefit of crew and visitors.  But then six years ago some capital-C "Catastrophe" struck (a plague is mentioned) and the satellites drifted off into the sun or deep space or crashed on the Earth's surface.

Our characters are the Goddard family.  When the Earth was reduced to a medieval level of existence, Goddard, a designer of sportswear, and his father embraced the change and totally got into growing their own crops by hand and spending half the year leading a nomadic life, following a herd of reindeer.  Goddard's wife acted much more like I would--she was psychologically crushed by the collapse of our wealthy technological and capitalist society and became a hermit, moving into a crashed planetoid to take up residence in the ruined hotel therein and read books.  Periodically the four male Goddards--her husband, father-in-law, and her two young boys--go visit her.  On the visit covered in this story, Goddard tries to convince his wife to abandon her books ("Books are where you get your sick notions from") and join the family.  She dismisses them, saying they are living like mere peasants!  "I resent being kicked back to the Dark Ages, if you don't."  Amen, lady!

The story's title suggests, I guess, that we are to see these visits as similar to pilgrimages to a sacred site of a Marian apparition, like Lourdes or Guadaloupe.  Or maybe we are to consider that the fallen planetoid will be an incomprehensible artifact to future generations of Stone Age-level people, a place surrounded by outlandish legends vaguely based on the reality of our own high-tech society, the Catastrophe, and Mrs. Goddard's (tragic and heroic!) refusal to abandon the cultural heritage of our sophisticated modern society.

Not bad.  Terry Carr would also include "My Lady of the Psychiatric Sorrows" in his 1980 anthology Dream's Edge, published by the Sierra Club.  Reduce, reuse, recycle!

"Probability Storm" by Julian Reid

This is Reid's only published story, if isfdb is to be believed.  Carr tells us Reid attended the first Clarion West workshop, where Harlan Ellison was very critical of one of Reid's stories; the enfant terrible of speculative fiction is said to have "literally" torn it to pieces.

"Probability Storm" is a tedious 35-page sleeping draught about an alternate dimension New York City where ordinary people coexist with dryads and gremlins and ghosts and mad scientists.  Most of the story takes place in a bar called Rafferty's (could this be a reference to R. A. Lafferty?)  Our narrator is a ghost who can enter people's minds as well as visit some parallel plane to observe probability storms, which he can warn the regulars at the bar about.  A villainous businessman called "The Fat Man" comes into the bar, hoping to buy the place (or something), but the ghost narrator and the gremlins, empowered by one of those probability storms, invade his psyche and turn him into a thin man who doesn't want to make business deals, I guess.  The whole thing is very very verbose but at the same time very very vague; Reid willfully provides a very very low signal to noise ratio, even admitting to the reader that he is doing it (the narrator says things like, "as you may already have gathered, my attention has a tendency to wander at times.")  "Probability Storm" is supposed to be funny, but the jokes consist of comparing the fat guy to a pig again and again and again and describing how the gremlins spill drinks on him.

Very, very bad.  As far as I am concerned, Ellison could have ripped this one up as well; by excoriating his work Ellison was doing Reid a better service than Carr did him by encouraging him.  I really don't know what Carr was thinking when he elected to inflict this mess on readers of Universe 7.

"People Reviews" by Robert Chilson

I recently bought Chilson's novel Shores of Kansas for three whole bucks because it has a cool dinosaur cover.  Hopefully "People Reviews" won't make me regret the investment!  (Yes, "Probability Storm" has turned me cynical!)

My mind is grasping for a quote by, I think, editor John W. Campbell, in which he exhorted Astounding's writers to give him stories that felt like "newspaper articles of the future."  Chilson does just that in "People Reviews."  In the future, people will be able to wear headsets which record their thoughts; these recordings can be "listened" to by others, and a whole commercial industry, like the book publishing and record industries, has sprung up that produces and sells these thought recordings.  Chilson's nine-page story is a critical review like you'd find in a highbrow magazine like The New York Review of Books, a discussion of recent thought recordings and a series of musings on this art form's potential and current state.

Engaging and original, highly recommended to all you New Wave kids!  Cynicism storm abated!

**********

The Reid was astonishingly bad, but the Leiber, Aldiss and Chilson are all good; each is idiosyncratic and fresh, is well-executed when it comes to style and structure, and rests on a foundation of one or two interesting ideas.  Let's hope the second half of Universe 7 is as enjoyable.