The Gas [Paperback]

Charles Platt (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Loompanics Unlimited; Revised edition (September 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559501316
• ISBN-13: 978-1559501316
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #537,268 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Charles Platt became interested in computers when he acquired an Ohio Scientific C4P in 1979. After writing and selling software by mail order, he taught classes in BASIC programming, MS-DOS, and subsequently Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. He wrote five computer books during the 1980s.

He has also written science fiction novels such as The Silicon Man (published by Wired books) and Protektor (from Avon Books). He stopped writing science fiction when he started contributing to Wired magazine in 1993, and became one of its three senior writers a couple of years later.

Charles began contributing to Make magazine in its third issue and is currently a contributing editor. Make: Electronics is his first book for Make Books. Currently he is designing and building prototypes of medical equipment in his workshop in a northern Arizona wilderness area.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not your typical Charles Platt novel by any means, August 29, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Gas (Paperback)

Readers of science fiction, or Mr. Platt's columns, will be surprised by this foray. The gas of the title is an accidental release from a laboratory in England that strips people of all their inhibitions, revealing their darkest, taboo desires. The author is extremely passionate and explicit in his descriptions. I would rank this as one of the best, and dirtiest, rants on the nature of our subconscious. It will offend or disturb many readers, as the author freely admits. This is a paean to a time (the late 60's), when writers often challenged themselves to purge their psyches. So now you are properly informed. Dare you read this?

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Mainly porno, April 15, 2001

By 

David Lindbergh (Reading, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Gas (Paperback)

I read this on the recommendation of an aquaintance. The author's idea is to explore what might happen if everyone's sexual inhibitions were eliminated by "the gas". I didn't find it very interesting. Mostly it's just porno. I wasn't offended, just bored. Platt has matured since he wrote this - his later stuff is much better.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A disturbing blend of sex and satire, July 12, 2009

By 

T. McAuley (Sheffield, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Gas (Paperback)

Very few books are truly worth the adjective `notorious', but Charles Platt's The Gas might just be one of them. Originally written in the late 1960s for an imprint owned by Maurice Girodias - the publisher behind such classics as Tropic of Cancer and Lolita - it would be easy to dismiss it as a work of extreme pornography, and it is this reputation which led to copies of its 1980 reprinting initially being seized in the UK on grounds of obscenity, but there is, I think, something more to it than that. I'm not going to claim that it's in the same ranking as the two works I mentioned above, but the events described are, in places, so extreme as to defy definition as mundane means of arousal.

The plot is flimsy affair involving the escape of the mysterious gas of the title escaping from a secret laboratory somewhere in the south of England. Prevailing winds mean that it contaminates much of the southern half of the UK, sending everyone's sex hormones into overdrive while simultaneously lowering any inhibitions people might have preventing them from acting on their urges, and not surprisingly, civilisation implodes under the effects into orgy of perversion and violence. We witness these events through the eyes of Vincent, a scientist from the laboratory, seeking to escape to the relative safety of Scotland with his family. The scene is thus set for the description of a quite extraordinary gamut of sexualities: from commonplace heterosexual intercourse, through homosexuality, to incest and bestiality; and perversions ranging from coprophilia and cannibalism to ritual murder.

There is no doubting the extremity of the events and scenes described, but Platt lifts his work out of the realm of simplistic debauchery through careful choices of the characters with whom Vincent interacts: a priest, a young female hitchhiker, a science student; and by setting the climactic events of the novel in Cambridge, in and around the university. This enables him to inject a strong element of social satire into the novel, as each character reacts to the gas according to his, or her, type: the hitchhiker with the murderous fury of the oppressed, the scientist with a cold sadism worthy of Dr Mengele, and so forth. Through it all, Vincent just tries to survive, and avoid being dehumanised by the events he witnesses, and the acts he is forced to commit to get himself, and his family, to safety. Whether or not he succeeds is left open at the work's strikingly ambiguous conclusion, which challenges readers to make their own judgement.

Overall, then, The Gas is definitely not for the timid, or easily offended, but nor will it do much for those simply seeking a quick thrill - and a careful reading can be thought provoking.