Customer Reviews

Dreadful sanctuary

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I am a fan of Eric Frank Russell's stories. This was one of his best in the magazine version. Unfortunately, for some unknown reason, he rewrote the ending for the book version, and he spoiled the story. I recommend that you try to find the magazine version -- you'll like it. And you will be surprised by its clever ending. (I would give the magazine version 5 stars.)

The writings of Charles Fort provided inspiration for a number of science fiction writers to spin out some of their stories and novels. Robert A. Heinlein, H. Beam Piper, Damon Knight, Avram Davidson-- all wrote the occasional off-trail Fortean story from time to time.* But the science fiction writer who was arguably the most fascinated with Fort was Eric Frank Russell. His first novel, _Sinister Barrier_ (_Unknown_, 1939; 1943), played with the idea that the human race might be property-- cattle managed and controlled by powerful aliens.

In _Dreadful Sanctuary_, Russell entertains a similar idea. The human race is again being manipulated. Not by aliens this time, but by a group of super humans known as the Norman Club. The Normans claim that they are virtually the only sane people on Earth... and that they would like to keep it that way. The hero of the story finds himself pitted against them.

Perhaps this would be an appropriate place to discuss the different versions of the novel. The earliest version was a three-part serial that ran in _Astounding_ in 1948. The first book edition was published in 1951. My edition is the Lancer edition of 1961, which I assume is essentially the same as the Fantasy House hardback. The _Astounding_ serial closely matches the book-- for the first two thirds of the novel. But the last third of the serial and the book differ drastically from one another. The ending to the book is much more hard-boiled and downbeat.

I know that a number of readers champion the original serial. And if I were making a movie of the novel, that is the version that I would use. It is the more entertaining of the two. But it strikes me that Russell displayed a certain amount of courage in revising his ending in the manner that he did. It was not the sort of story that many mainstream sf writers did in the early fifties. But it is logical. And it does have emotional punch.

The primary weakness of _Dreadful Sanctuary_ is its style, which seems overly pulpish by today's standards. Here are some samples, culled at random: "He was deader than last month's bottles" (8); "So you want to make sure Quinn gets back with all the dingbats and the stupendous epic?" (9); "If she condescends to listen to a wolf whistle, it's solely to study the Doppler effect" (10); "If you want to play Sherlock, I'll stooge along" (15); "If these tomes cunningly had been chosen to suit the situation, he'd best lay off them" (64); "They made him as ready for the roasting as any turkey on a spit" (69); "Came the sharp click of a closing door and three men entered Armstrong's field of vision as he slowly twisted his head around" (87). Russell sometimes gets away with an informal style in his stories. But it doesn't work in this novel, and it prevents me from giving it a top rating.

The basic story-- which involves a series of seventeen rockets to Venus that have all exploded-- may seem a bit dated to modern readers. Nowadays, we have been into space with manned ships and robot probes. We have landed on the Moon. We have probed other planets. But before we get too uppity, we might do well to remember that the question posed by Normans may still apply to us: "How do you know you are sane?"

* One writer who did _not_ do so was H.G. Wells. Theodore Dreiser, a friend of Fort's, kept trying to interest Wells in such a project. But Wells believed that Fort's writing was mostly nonsense. He was never tempted to write such a tale.