Customer Reviews

Mission: Manstop

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When Kris Neville is at his best, he is one of the most subtle and intelligent writers of the science fiction short story. His style is crisp and clear, he has a fine sense of drama, and his stories often work on several different levels of meaning. His better stories also have some memorable characters. The catch, of course, is in that phrase "when he is at his best". He does not always perform at that level. _Mission: Manstop_ is a collection of seven stories by Neville that has received very little critical attention to date. While the collection was published in 1971, all of the stories are from the early 1950s. The title story has been rewritten, presumably to update historical references in the story; the others seem to be unchanged from their earlier magazine appearances. All of the stories are representative of Neville's early work.

Three of the stories are from _Fantasy and Science Fiction_, one is from _Galaxy_, one is from _Thrilling Wonder_, one is from _Super Science Stories_, and one is from _Imagination_. (Many of Neville's early stories were published in this last magazine.) None of the stories comes from John Campbell's _Astounding_, but we should not attach too much significance to this. Neville frequently appeared in the pages of _ASF_. Nevertheless, it is probably true that Neville's stories were usually a bit darker than the type of tale that Campbell usually published.

Two of the stories-- "Mission: Manstop" and "Hunt the Hunter"-- represent Neville at his very best. The first story centers around a time traveler on a mission. The identity of the traveler and the nature of the mission is gradually revealed in a suspenseful confrontation with the time traveler's contact. The characters are deftly but clearly drawn, and the conclusion is a powerful one. "Hunt the Hunter" is a hard and completely unsentimental tale about a dictator's hunting party in quest of the deadly farn beast. The last line of the story is a final snapper that seems to be a _deus ex machina_ pulled out of thin air. But read the story again, and you will find that Neville was carefully building up to that ending all along. The story may be fairly described as a cunning trap.

Three of the stories are good, but not exceptional. "Take Two Quiggies" is the somewhat predictable tale of mankind overrun by cute aliens that breed like rabbits; but Neville redeems the story somewhat by dramatising how it is mankind's greed and corruption, not the aliens themselves, that is the actual cause of defeat. "Underground Movement" is a character study of a telepathic agent working with the F.B.I. to investigate a rise in dying mutants around the world. It contains another carefully developed final twist at the end. "Marginal Error" is a competently done study of what creates revolutionaries in a conformist society. But the society itself has little detail or complexity. We know that it manipulates mass media and statistical analysis to insure conformity, but we are shown little else.

The remaining two stories are clunkers. "Experimental Station" involves a mutant that turns on its masters and destroys them, while "The Toy" centers around innocent and noble aliens who ultimately defeat bloodthirsty Earthmen with a gift from the gods. Neither story offers any originality of plot, ideas, or characterization to redeem it.

All in all, then, we have two A's, three B's, and two D's. An acceptable batting average, but nothing outstanding. The collection would have been much better if it had dropped several of Neville's lesser stories from the fifties and had included several good ones from the sixties ("Shamar's War" and "The Forest of Zil" come to mind). The posthumous collection, _The Science Fiction of Kris Neville_ (1984) comes closer to presenting Neville in his best light.