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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
Mostly mediocre,
By
This review is from: HELL'S PAVEMENT. (Paperback)
I don't know much about Damon Knight or his work, but I have heard that he had a very low opinion of A.E. Van Vogt's writing. So I was a little surprised by how similar Hell's Pavement was to some of Van Vogt's work; the focus on mental abilities, for example, and the small elite of superior people who are both oppressed and driven into hiding and more or less pulling the strings of history.Scientists develop a technique of hypnotizing people so they will be unable to commit anti-social acts, and violent crime and many other problems are essentially eliminated. Unfortunately, government and big business use the hypnotizing technique to turn everybody into a slavishly obedient consumer, and the world is split up into competing totalitarian states where people live drab lives. There are, however, people who are genetically immune to the hypnotic treatment, and they form secret resistance groups working behind the scenes to end the tyranny, or simply use their immunity to take advantage of everybody else and achieve positions of power. The characters in the book are not very interesting, and the plot at times can be hard to follow, with all the different competing states and competing groups within the states, and there were some inconsistencies and plot holes that had me scratching my head. For example, the leader of a powerful faction of Immunes says near the end of the book that people don't have toy guns anymore, the way their ancestors had, so it is hard to train people to use weapons. However, earlier in the book there are many scenes in which people use nonlethal weapons, including a scene in which large numbers of people play paintball in a facility built for that purpose, a scene in which a dispute is solved by a duel with whips and it is made clear that such duels are common, and several scenes in which security personnel and others shoot people with a gun that propels adhesive strands. Also, we are told that criminals are routinely sent to a "blank zone" from which nobody ever returns. The main character is dropped into this blank zone from a government helicopter, but it turns out that helicopters don't work in the blank zone, so it crashes. Are we expected to believe that the governments lose a helicopter and its crew every time they sentence a criminal? And then there is the woman who kills a guy by biting him in the neck. Hell's Pavement has some interesting ideas and some good scenes, but as a whole it is a mediocre adventure story (all the usual chasing, capturing, escaping, sneaking around dressed as the enemy, etc.) and a mediocre satire of religion and capitalism (in one of the states the Store is like a church and the parishioners are called Consumers and must spend as much money as possible on goods that are intentionally made shoddily, in another state money has to be spent, generally on gambling or in an amusement park, before a certain time or the money expires, in a third a female priesthood buys and sells men and enforces worship of a Goddess.) I plan on seeking out other Damon Knight stories and novels, and hope they are better than this one. I read 1955 Lion paperback. The cover is apparently by Richard Powers, but it is not one of his better works.
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