For one thing, it's missing a subtitle. At the end of The Invaders Plan we were ordered to read MISSION EARTH: Volume 2: BLACK GENESIS: Fortress of Evil. But I've looked all over my copy of Black Genesis and can't find the Fortress of Evil part anywhere. Volume 3, The Enemy Within, doesn't have a subtitle, nor did Volume 1. So someone somewhere decided four lines in the book's title were too many, and cut Fortress of Evil out everywhere except the last pages of The Invaders Plan. Sloppy.
I like it the best of the three cover variants I've found poking around online, though.
And then there's cover the third.
Actually, I think I like this one the best, because it's just so friggin' goofy. We've got some poor bastard trying to look heroic in a banana-yellow matador's outfit with black turban and huge red feather. He's somehow concealed a bulky, obviously alien ray gun in this light, festive vest. He's posing in front of... let's call it Mount Hubbard; Wikipedia says the highest point in Istanbul is Çamlıca Hill at 945 feet, and from what I've gleaned from Google Images, it looks like part of steadily-rising terrain surrounding the city, not the bulwark of stone depicted here. There's also a lot of lighting involved to give the banana-man some sense of drama and danger. Maybe there's a bad thunderstorm in the book, I dunno.
Moving past that... outfit, we've got some blurbs assuring us of the great time to be had, three of which are recycled from the last book. Orson Scott Card warns "You will lose sleep, you will miss appointments... if you don't force yourself to put it down." He didn't say it'd be hard to make ourselves put it down, though. The Bristol Evening Post claims that "Hitchhiker's Guide fans will love it," which I can only respond to with expletives. And the Derby Evening Telegraph states "Mission Earth is addictive reading - you dare not put the book down." Which makes me feel quite heroic every time I set my copy aside to do something else. Yeah, I dare.
After an order to buy The Invaders Plan and read it unless we have done so already, we get maps of Turkey, the eastern United States, and Manhattan Island. On the corner of each is a little warning from Lord Invay, Chief Censor, assuring us that Earth does not exist and the maps are based on a work of fiction. Above each is a counter-claim of "NOT TRUE!" or "FALSE!!" by one Monte Jo... Je... something-well. It's in cursive, and I am apparently bad at reading cursive. But on the upside, given the maps of actual Earth locations, I think the odds are good that we might make planetfall before the end of the book!
Eventually we reach the Voltarian Censor's Foreward, a brief two paragraphs about this book's fictitiousness, and then 54 Charlee Nine is back to explain the difficulties in translating the story; such as how Earthlings, who believe faster-than-light travel is impossible, have no word for the "hyperluminary life-color" ghrial, so it's been rendered as "yellow-green" instead. The "robotbrain in the translatophone" also laughs how our puny Earth science is like "the dog chasing its tail or the man trying to jump on the head of his shadow," what with our concepts of electron rings and so forth, without elaborating how we're wrong.
Charlee also mentions that Earth is supposedly 22 light-years from Voltar. Now, those bloody stupid "will-be was" engines were developed for intergalactic trips, and the Voltarian Confederacy came from outside this galaxy to invade ours. Yet despite being on Voltar for thousands of years now, and despite the mere 22 light-year distance between it and our world, they still haven't gotten around to conquering Earth yet?
Oh wait, they're mindlessly following the sacred Invasion Timetable handed down by their honored ancestors, waging their campaigns of conquest based on thousand-year plans rather than actual contemporary circumstances. Hence why, when they feared Earth was going to self-destruct before they could invade it, they sent out a mission to covertly rescue it instead of launching the damned invasion ahead of schedule.
And in all of the empire's 125,000 year history, nobody has decided this is a stupid, stupid idea.
The next bit between the cover and the story proper is the "Key to BLACK GENESIS," part cast list, part encyclopedia. It explains what a "hypnohelmet" is in case the reader can't hazard a guess him- or herself, confirms that a "lepertige" is a cat as tall as a man, and assures us that a "Manco devil" is a mythological creature from Manco. It also finally defines "cellology" as "Voltarian medical science that can repair the body through the cellular generation of tissues, including entire body parts." So doctors are for the most part uncaring, borderline-psychopathic quacks, but they can perform some real miracles.
More interesting are the characters listed - or rather how they're listed. Good old Spurk is listed as dead, for the simple reason that Gris murdered him while stealing the bio-bugs last book. But Ske and Meeley, who Gris gave counterfeit money to in hopes of getting them executed when they tried to cash it, are not. So either they'll be listed as alive until they're confirmed as dead later, or they were never in any real danger to begin with. Also, that random human abductee Gris bumped into in the hangar that one time is not listed, so maybe he's not significant after all.
I have to wonder, why not include something like this in the first book? Is it because the concepts are more relevant then, so there's no reason to list them since they're popping up in the story? Does this mean that concepts like "tup" and "jolt" aren't going to appear in this story? So why are they listed?
After this Key, Part Twelve begins on page 13. Which is a relief to me, as I was worried that I'd have to label which Part One, Chapter Seven I'd be talking about for a given post. It's another prison letter from Soltan Gris to Lord Turn the Judiciary, giving an abridged version of The Invaders Plan. There is no mention of the time he spent in the wilderness with Ske, or the time he almost starved to death and hallucinated Bugs Bunny, or the riot at the Artists' Club, or even the time he spent figuring out that the Countess Krak had hypnotized him. And I have to ask - if these events aren't worth mentioning here, why did I have to read through them in the first place?
Gris spends an inordinate amount of time recounting the lift-off party and how high he was during it, helpfully reminding the reader about the parts they would have most recently read. It ends with Gris describing how the drugs wore off, he realized that this was an "UNsecret secret mission," and scrambled off to find Heller. And that's where we'll fade into Black Genesis.
So, here we go again, eh?
Note that, due to circumstances both beyond and entirely within my control, I have failed to pre-read Black Genesis. This will be a blind run, which will both save me from the danger of misremembering things and lead me to speculate over future chapters more than usual. Any shock and outrage will be nice and fresh. Who knows how many murders Gris will commit this book, if he'll branch out into different crimes against humanity? Could there be an even more offensive gay character than "Too-too" and "Oh Dear?" We'll find out together!
Back to the Intermission
Back to Part Eleven, Chapter Nine
I think the flower in the first illustration IS symbolic. It’s a poppy flower. (And only now do I realize how similar Mission Earth’s “this planet is important for the drugs” theme is similar to Dune. Was the “dekalogy” inspired by Herbert’s writings? Was it Hubbard’s attempt at a science fiction epic with political intrigue?)
ReplyDeleteAmazing job with Book One - looking forward to your commentary on book two!