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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Presidential Year,
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This review is from: Next Door to the Sun (Paperback)
Damon Knight (1967) first noted that Stanton Coblentz had the unexpected strength of vivid description of alien settings that sometimes evoked a sense of wonder, and I have dealt with this quality of his in some other reviews.
But Coblentz thought of himself primarily as a writer of satire, and so did most of his readers in the 1930s. It seems appropriate to write a review of a Coblentz novel that focuses on his skill as a satirist. _Next Door to the Sun_ was published in 1960, the year of the Kennedy--Nixon presidential race. It was certainly written earlier than the Democratic and Republican conventions, but Coblentz almost surely was conscious of the upcoming election year insanity when he wrote the novel. The novel is set under the plastidome of the lost colony of Mercury. The primary ruler on Mercury is the Bureaudent: ...a butterfly-looking man about five feet tall, with a bland, round face on which a perpetual grin seemed pasted. His colorless eyes, above bags of fat, were dull and inexpressive; his chin was barely noticeable; and his low forehead was overtopped by a reddish pate. His skin, less waxy than seemed usual among his countrymen, had a yellow tinge; his voice reminded Roy of smooth, soft soap. (48) His second in command is the Planicrat, who "smiled knowingly out of two weasel-dark eyes" (54) as he explains how to gull the public with prerecorded speeches. It is hard not to think of Eisenhower and Nixon. John Kennedy is not satirized. This is not because Coblentz admired Kennedy (he was a staunch conservative) but because Kennedy was not a well-known political figure when the novel was written. The political satire involves the old device of introducing two Gulliver-like heroes (a couple of spacemen from Earth) into a society of strange political customs and conventions. One hero is attracted to the granddaughter of the Bureaudent; the other hero is attracted to a girl in the Women's Dissedent Party. (The Concurrent Party is the political party in power, while the Dissedent Party is the opposition party. Neither has any real platform.) The heroes have adventures and misadventures with applause machines, transportational devices, recording wires, man multipliers, handshake machines, manufactured press releases, and generally dirty campaign tactics. Finally, in order for one of the heroes to escape a Fate Worse Than Death (marriage to an odious newswoman), the heroes manufacture a hoax of their own in order to escape. The Mercurians talk in a stilted stye of English that Coblentz seems to believe is riotously funny. Here are a few samples: "How you like?... This we call modern architecting." (25) "Whoo-whoo! Whoo! Whoo-whoo! Sss-sh! S-s-sh!" (33) "Come here! You may a bath take in the Sprayleter." (39) "O-way! Way-o! O-way!... Wheek! Wheek! Wheek!" (55) "Mennen and women, we repeat! Mennen and women, we repeat!... There is not any proof yet of danger!" (75) Science fiction satirists of the 1950s and the 1960s like Fred Pohl, C.M. Kornbluth, Bernard Wolfe, and John Brunner drew on the tradition of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. They wrote novels that were subtle and literate. Stanton Coblentz drew on the tradition of Jonathon Swift and wrote in the style of the 1920s and the 1930s. The result was a novel that was heavy-handed and leaden.
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