Hilbert SchenckCritiques

This is an odd little book. I heard of it while researching the NB-36 nuclear testbed, and it was obviously inspired by that. The author worked on that and related projects. The story is wild, with bizarre characters and a lot of steam train references. Fun, but weird. There is drug use, racism, sexism, you name it; it's a satire, so the author is making fun of his characters, but it is jarring sometimes.

It's a quick read, and actually so short that there is a short story afterwards about weather modification. Again, bizarre characters and a strange story.

Eve Pennington, along with a cast of lovable academics, discover an alien presence underneath an island off Nantucket. What does it want? And, rather more importantly for Eve and her friends, what do the major world governments want with it?
Seriously one of the best books I've read in quite some time. Though the characters spent a good portion of the pages pondering the philosophical realities and consequences of their current situation, and discussing those thoughts with each other as well, it was still a captivating tale.½

Time-loop, apocalyptic future that replays infinitely until the heroine makes a different choice. An excellent, intriguing read.

My reactions reading this novel in 1993. Spoilers follow.

This was an original, moving, fast moving tale.

The blurbs calling this a Lovecraftian tale are only partly right. There is delving into historical documents like journals and diaries and newspapers, but, whereas in a Lovecraft tale death and/or insanity follow such pursuits, here the result is, for protagonist Eve Pennington, much more benign and transcendental – though still deadly for her.

Schenck has a knack for creating characters. I not only liked Eve Pennington, but my favorite was old would-be spy Ed C. Berry who helps Pennington. Even the details of Pennington’s incest with her sister are handled naturally, realistically, and, though it’s normally an act I’d find repugnant and alien, I accepted it as a crucial, important event in her life, an experience she cherished.

On the down side, the evil government conspiracy was a bit hackneyed and predictable (I’m not sure Schenck even wanted to disguise biologist Marta Hoerner’s role as an evil government agent.), but I still cheered when the alien wasted them. I agree with Pennington and her lover Ian McPherson – the aliens power to control minds, bodies, and perceptions is too awesome to trust to government.

But the very best part of the book – a wonderful, clever, original and very good part it is – is the alien and the mystery around it, a lonely, shipwrecked alien on Muskeget Island, an alien that just wants to die. But to do that he must have human help, human aid, to override his survival programming. He must wait for a hurricane to threaten his hideaway on Muskeget, lure a human host nearby so the alien can put its personality into the host’s body and be destroyed with the host. To ensure the host stays, the alien replays intimate (in every sense of the word) sexual experiences of certain women (It finds women more receptive to its powers) to keep them while death closes in. It is by a indirect series of manipulations of people near the Island that Pennington is lured there to relive an incestuous incident with her beloved and dead sister. As the hurricane closes in, time slows and Pennington relives her experience with her sister and also the special, very detailed memories of others who have been to the island.

A fun space age take-off on the owl and the pussycat.

A novella and a short story. The title novella recounts the story of an eccentric Air Force Colonel's campaign to get the US Government to fund and build a nuclear-powered bomber for no better reason than that it would be powered by steam. It degenerates into a story about pointless bureaucracy and the oxymoron of 'military intelligence'.

The second story is a near-future tale of weather control by crude cloud-seeding techniques. It is built around a single joke about a pair of homosexual water-bomber pilots who call their aeroplane the 'Gay Enola' (for those who don't get that, the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima was called the 'Enola Gay' after the pilot's mother-in-law.)

Two slight stories, each based around a single premise, and overall an interesting curiousity. Vincent di Fate's cover art, though, steals the show with a rendition of the nuclear-powered bomber which looks like a giant mutant cross between a Handley Page Victor and a Convair B-36 - one of the latter was used as a flying atomic test-bed aircraft and demonstrated that the concept of a nuclear-powered aeroplane was utterly unworkable.½