Customer Reviews

CV

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The late Damon Knight was an SFWA Grand Master, a Futurian, one of the Golden Age SF writers (though his major work only appeared later, in the '50s and beyond), truly one of the greats. But it seems to me he is remembered more as a critic (mostly for _In Search of Wonder) and editor (mostly for _Orbit_), than as a writer. He was, however, one of the field's great writers! Perhaps his best work was at shorter lengths: "The Country of the Kind", "Masks", "Four in One", "Stranger Station", "I See You", even the late "Fortyday", as well as such enjoyable joke stories as "Eripmav", "Not With a Bang", and of course "To Serve Man". But he wrote a number of novels as well, and these are by and large quite interesting. I've read most of his novels, but only just came to CV, the first of a trilogy continued with The Observers, and A Reasonable World.

CV is the story of one cruise on a very large ship, the Sea Venture (usually called CV, hence the title). This is a structure designed as a self-sustaining city, basically, but to make ends meet in this prototype stage it is also a cruise ship. This novel concerns a particularly dramatic cruise. The story follows several points of view: the Captain, a couple of ordinary tourists, a space colonization advocate, and also an assassin. The assassin, we gather, is supposed to kill the space advocate: it seems that the government can either support space colonies or sea colonies, but not both, and if a leading, but aging and disposable, space advocate is murdered on board CV, that might sway votes towards the space venture.

But all this intrigue becomes sort of moot when another of CV's side efforts, scientific research, unearths a strange rock. Suddenly, an odd plague seems to take over CV. It is curious in that it seems directly transmissible to only one person at a time. This is a mystery to the ship's doctor, and to everyone else, but we are allowed to know that the cause is an alien being, who takes over people's minds. Then the alien jumps to another mind. The people taken over go into a coma for a few days or weeks, then awake, mostly totally normal, only improved in a sense -- they think much more rationally, but perhaps less morally.

The novel follows the efforts of the authorities to battle this
plague, and the way the survivors deal with their cold new rationality. The ship's doctor actually manages to figure out what's going on, more or less, and comes up with a couple of strategies to foil the alien, which almost work ...

To some extent this novel reminded me of Joe Haldeman's much more recent _Camouflage_ (which, indeed, has just won the Best Novel Nebula). But probably a more significant comparison is with Knight's own long novella "Rule Golden", in which an alien comes to Earth and enforces a "reverse Golden Rule" on humanity. At any rate, the ultimate interest of this whole idea will surely be what the effects of this new rationality will be on the world. But this novel only slightly considers that idea. I assume the sequels (A Reasonable World is surely a provocative title in context) will go into more detail. CV is, in the end, somewhat interesting, certainly readable, but kind of disjointed and not really a success.

Sea Venture, CV for short, is the largest ocean-going vessel ever built by man. It is not a ship but a huge sea habitat housing a scientific research station, an entire city of two thousand permanent residents and a thousand passengers.

For some, CV is the vacation dream of a lifetime; for others, a vision of man's conquest of the seas; for two men it becomes the arena for a deadly game of cat and mouse.

But for one, CV is something else: a place to stalk its next victim. It is not human, it is not even of Earthly origin. To be touched by it is deadly.

What importance are the hopes and dreams, fears and schemes of the people of Sea Venture when they are threatened by a force that could destroy all of human civilization.