City

Cleaning up another one of my experiments in speculative fiction—trying to get a grasp on Clifford Simak—has led me to this "novel", considered by many to be his best work. My problem was this: here is Clifford Simak, a five-time Hugo nominee and one-time winner (but City was released before either major award had been established and so could not even be nominated), but I barely know his work and am troubled by his popularity since I find what work of his that I have read to be somewhat pedestrian. And yet that work has to be pretty good: when his Way Station won the Hugo, it beat out a veritable who's who of speculative fiction greats—Robert Heinlein, Andre Norton, Frank Herbert, and Kurt Vonnegut. So my plan is that if I read the very best, perhaps I'll understand the reputation.

You'll note above that I used quotes around "novel" to describe City because it is actually a collection of short pieces with some interstitial material that is intended to try to force it all into a single narrative. The book pretends to be a collection of legends of old Earth describing the eventual disappearance of man from the planet, and the narrative between the stories is a scholarly analysis of the story to follow. It becomes apparent quickly that the scholar is a dog relying on the scholarship of other dogs as he tries to determine the provenance of the stories I the collection. Are they relics of early dog civilization, myth-like stories that describe the clearly impossible creature called Man? Or are they perhaps actual fragments of a history so lost in the past that they appear to be only legends or fables? The unnamed canine scholar never comes down on one side of the question or another, but he is also interested in the lessons that the stories teach as well as their potential insight into the time before dogs were literate.

Given the recent genre interest in apocalypses (again), Simak's City offers a different twist on the end of the world scenario, mostly because the world has not ended. Instead, parallel to Clarke's Childhood's End, mankind has evolved past caring about terrestrial issues and moved out into space. The world he has left behind is populated by the results of his scientific experimentation: animals given the power of speech and reason, led by the dogs. The dogs even have a sort of mythology about how they achieved this status without having the ability to use tools, since they each have a robot companion that can act as their hands and tools: the robots reproduce themselves in sufficient numbers for future generations of animals who need them, so clearly at some point, one dog was able to create the first robot and teach it to make more of itself. It's hard not to look at our own history and wonder if we have deluded ourselves about its finer points, but of course this is part of Simak's point.

But despite mankind's evolution to a better state, there is a whimsy to the stories that describe man's departure: City mourns the loss of what makes man essentially human as it recognizes that those same traits drive mankind to war against itself. By the end of the collection, the stories are suffused with a sort of unspoken melancholy regarding the path mankind could have taken rather than this radical branch in artificial evolution. Simak doesn't attempt to rectify these contrasting emotions; instead the stories lay out the circumstances and stir up the emotions in the reader.

By far the strongest story of the bunch is "Desertion", a story I've spoken of earlier (http://perrynomasia.blogspot.com/2009/08/skirmish.html). Put into the context of a future history and then followed up with a sequel, "Paradise," "Desertion" loses some of its power. The relationship between the protagonist and his dog receives commentary from the scholarly critic, who briefly describes how such a relationship while perhaps impossible still has resonances with the dogs in their literate state. But together, the two stories from the turning point of City, where mankind realizes that it will destroy itself if it stays in its current state. The process of becoming a new life form described in "Desertion" and the kind of life that it promises in both stories provides the escape man needs. Again, the melancholy of such a decision is not deep beneath the surface—man will fail unless he becomes something completely different, so different that it requires machinery to reach that state. It's hard to say whether the premise is an argument for the potential for humanism or a chilling renunciation of its limits.

Also weighing heavily on man's failure is "The Huddling Place," a short story selected for the Science Fiction Writers Hall of Fame. "The Huddling Place" was difficult because I cannot imagine the situation that the protagonist finds himself in, and I'm not sure if that is a failure on my part or Simak's. John Webster, an acclaimed physician and specialist in the treatment of the recently discovered Martians, is summoned to Mars to save the life of a dear Martian friend who also happens to have used advanced Martian ethics to determine a way for Man to escape the downward spiral of animosity that Simak describes. It doesn't take much cynicism for a citizen of the mid-20^th century to recognize the ongoing historical pattern—war follows war and only some force applied from the outside would appear to be sufficient to break the cycle—and Simak continues the pattern into his future history. But one Martian has found a way to break the pattern, and all Webster has to do to save mankind from self-destruction is heal him. And it's unclear what happens next, except that Webster doesn't do it. Is it because Webster suffers from agoraphobia so badly that he cannot leave the house? Or is it because his robot servant misunderstood Webster's orders? It's not completely clear, and it doesn't really matter—with the survival of humanity at stake, one would think nothing should stop Webster from doing his work. And he just fails—to err is human after all. And it's in that space, at once showing the potential of mankind but balancing it with our propensity to mess up, that the book situates itself.

City is thoughtful and somewhat stately in its description of the disappearance of man. I suspect the book would be far stronger without the scholarly interludes. It's pretty clear the stories succeed each other, especially since characters are repeated and a family name is used throughout. But it's not like a lot of science fiction in that it doesn't come down on the humanist view of man as being able to accomplish anything he sets his mind to. While it is an easy read—if you can get through the stories without pondering the larger questions they ask, you'll finish it quickly. But it is those questions, the ones lying just beneath the surface, that given City its heft.

Way Station

The great Clifford Simak experiment continues.

After reading a "forgotten classic" by Simak, The Goblin Reservation, and then a collection of short stories, Skirmish, I feel like I have a pretty good grasp of Simak's writing style. But what I haven't been able to figure out is why a number of fellow readers I trust feel so strongly positive about Simak's writing (cf. http://perrynomasia.blogspot.com/2009/08/skirmish.html). So, in a final effort to understand his appeal, I turned to Simak's Hugo-winning novel, Way Station, to try to find it. Given that the Hugo is a fan-voted award, it would seem a likely place to find the characteristics that make him so appealing. And given the novels that it beat to win the 1964 Hugo—Glory Road by Heinlein, Witch World by Norton, Dune by Herbert, and Cat's Cradle by Vonnegut—it would have to be pretty darned good.

What I found is a novel rich in potential with a startling scenario that develops some of that potential but is diminished by the ham-handedness of the writing, the same issues I have found with the other Simak I have read in the past couple of months. Imagine: soon after the Civil War, a weary Union soldier back at his home (probably in Wisconsin) is met by the emissary for a galactic confederation, who has decided to put a transfer station in their galactic transport system on Earth. For nearly 100 years, Enoch Wallace has been the sole representative of humanity to a galactic culture, and by all accounts is doing well; transportees apparently seek his station out in order to talk with him and his walls are lined with the gifts of thousands of visitors. Wallace has also taken some effort to learn skills to make him more effective at his job: he has learned the languages of some of the alien races that come to visit him and he has studied the philosophy of some of those races as well. And even when tragedy strikes, the accidental death of a visitor, he acts with care and grace, quickly meeting the mores of the alien culture. By all accounts, he is a model station master.

But Wallace's own earthly surroundings act against him. Given that he has been alive and apparently unaging for over a century brings him to the attention of the CIA, who have started monitoring his every activity (what few there are outside his home) and even go so far as disinterring the inhabitants of the family graveyard. Their concern is stoked by the ongoing cold war, so that the very oddness of Wallace stands out as either a threat or as the potential for a new weapon against American enemies. At the same time, Wallace's neighbor severely beats his deaf-mute daughter, who then seeks asylum with Enoch, sparking the ire and spite of a hillbilly clan. They attempt to force their way into Enoch's home in search for their missing Lucy, only to find that its alien composition is proof against their every attempt. Suddenly their suspicion is raised and they finally recall that Wallace hasn't aged in 100 years and so merits some level of suspicion anyway; they start muttering and gather together with their drinks, forming plans that Wallace is warned will turn into a lynch mob. And as he harbors the neighbor's daughter, Lucy, he discovers that she has some sort of ability to heal those around her.

And then the troubles on Earth seem to leech over to his interactions with Galactic Central. The CIA has disturbed the gravesite of the alien Wallace has buried, raising serious questions about ability of humans to appreciate different cultures and causing a move to have the way station removed from Earth to begin. Wallace uses high-level social mathematics on the cold war and determines that there is no solution that will not result in the Earth being destroyed by its angry inhabitants. Wallace discusses this issue with his best friend an alien he has named Ulysses, who tells him that the confederation might be able to help with its ultimate corrective technique—they can make the entire race stupid, so stupid that they will fall into a dark ages for generations and perhaps arise from it with a newfound appreciation for each other. Finally, the coping device that Wallace has been using for his solitude, an alien tool that allows him to create ghostly friends of any type and personality he wants, goes dreadfully awry such that his constructs—in the form of human companions—have developed sentience and no longer wish to exist only at Wallace's beck and call. To top off what is most likely the worst day in any individual human's experience, Wallace learns that his view of a peaceful harmonious galactic culture is completely wrong; the culture he has worked for and admired for nearly a century is just as fractured and factional as much as Earth's, and Wallace is actually employed by a faction that is slowly losing favor in the opinion of the rest of the galactic culture.

Every bad thing that can happen to Wallace, short of his own injury or death, happens in a single day. Leading up to this bad day, Simak introduces the oddity that is Wallace by letting his audience listen in to the CIA briefing someone about their investigations. This device actually works really well, evoking the strangeness and potential wonder that surrounds Wallace. And then just as we meet Wallace, he has the day from hell; Simak brutally piles up calamity after calamity on Wallace and thus the reader, so that there is a crushing weight of expectation on everything. Wallace actually spends most of his day in solitude and the few interactions we see with other characters, human or otherwise, indicates that he is basically a good person with a strong ethical center. But the calamities that befall Wallace cause him to have to become more independent, re-enforcing his solitude, such that large portions of the book are made up of extended passages of Wallace thinking. And while Simak describes action sequences well, even if that action involves two people having a conversation, when he turns to internal monologue (as he often does in his works), the writing becomes dramatically weaker. Unfortunately, the fairly strong premise of the novel, despite the piling on of catastrophe, forces Wallace to have no one to interact with except himself, in turn forcing the long-winded internal ramblings that we get.

In the moments when Wallace remembers, thinking back to the events that have led him to the situation he finds himself in now, Simak is able to continue to provide action, his strong suit. Simak uses fairly simple declarative sentences, a structure reflecting the relatively straightforward movements of the participants. But the passages when Wallace contemplates his options are also written in the same way, which imply a lack of depth in his thoughts. And since the events that have befallen Wallace are pretty much beyond his control, no solutions are forthcoming, so that we get short declarative thoughts that go around in circles, generally centered on despair at the events which have befallen him. And those passages go on and on, dragging down the tension created by all the calamities until I found myself just pleading with Wallace to do something, anything.

Lying just under the surface of these events is a contemplation of the role of man in a universe made at once more vast than previously imagined and also smaller because of its similarity. Wallace waffles back and forth between leaving Earth behind if the station is closed down and remaining on Earth. But if he were to leave, how would he cope, a lone human in a giant galactic civilization, more alone than any human ever had been before? But if he stays on Earth, how can he cope with having tasted the wonder of a galaxy filled with newness but having it cut off from him forever? And what is Wallace's responsibility to humanity when it seems hell-bent on destroying itself? And is humanity special, somehow different in its individuality or is it just another different species in a wide galactic civilization, not more or less deserving of consideration despite it being our species? These are huge questions, which in the hands of other writers might lead to long thoughtful treatises. But Simak makes such contemplation impossible because the protagonist must deal with his worst day ever, and by the rapidly approaching deadline of nightfall, when the lynch mob intends to arrive at his door.

And then everything gets resolved. I won't spoil it, but thoughtful readers should see the threads of the resolution in the narrative, but it is no less a deus ex machina solution for being foreshadowed. Nearly every single problem Wallace has is resolved in one fell swoop, and the last few pages are spent tying up the loose ends, until we are faced with Wallace's most personal problem, which remains inexplicably unfixable. Simak chooses to resolve the most human difficulty that Wallace faces by asserting human weakness over strength after humanity triumphs in the solution of all else. Simak strives for poignancy in this moment, but fails because his writing style does not allow for poignancy—poignant is not often found in short declarative sentences. The moment reinforces the dichotomy of humanity (or really any race) in this new culture, different but ultimately alone. But it is based on such a clichéd moment from other genres that it is ultimately unsatisfying and an unfortunate choice for the final moment in the novel.

I end up desperately wanting to like Way Station, wanting Simak to expand the possibilities by removing some of the disasters and giving Wallace and the readers time to think about the doorstep they find themselves on. Instead, it's compressed and rushed, written in a style not conducive to deeper thought. The result is confusion, a hurry up and wait pace that is resolved through the actions of no one in particular, and the desperate wish that all of it could be given more time to come together.

Skirmish

A respected reader of the blog suggested that I was being perhaps too harsh on Clifford Simak with my review of The Goblin Reservation. He fursther suggested I read a collection of Simak short stories, for which he was willing to loan me his copy of Skirmish, subtitled The Great Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak. Recognizing that Simak has been awarded a Grand Master award and that my friend and I tend to agree on golden and silver age SF, I dove into the book.

There are some strong stories in the collection, including Simak's Hugo-award winning novelette, "The Big Front Yard." This story follows what feels like a fairly typical golden age plotline—enterprising human Hiram Taine discovers someone or something living in his house which in turn creates a gateway to another world before disappearing, and then Taine is left to deal with the consequences. Part of the strength of the story is the Taine is more developed than the protagonists in a number of other Simak stories. Taine is described as a Yankee trader, going out to the households near his home and trading for what his neighbors feel to be worthless junk which Taine is able to rehabilitate and sell for profit. We never really get to see Taine performing this skill but we get to see the results of it a number of times. In addition, we get to see that Taine is devoted to his dog, Towser; ironically, Towser is also more fully developed than a lot of the protagonists in the other stories. Simak gives Towser very human reactions to the stimulus around him and he and Taine are devoted to one another. Another character, Beasly, is also somewhat developed, but also serves as a plot device: as the story develops, it is apparent that although he is somewhat lazy and shiftless, he has the ability to communicate with animals, exemplified by the messages he passes to Taine from Towser. And when Taine and Towser come across the aliens inhabiting the world that suddenly appears outside his front yard, Beasly's gift allows him to serves a mode of communication between our ambassadors and the aliens. But others of the characters in "The Big Front Yard" are fairly flat, especially Henry and Abbie, Taine's neighbors who constantly strive to take advantage of Taine and everyone else they come in contact. They twist the truth, even to one another, and are generally the amicable Taine's foils in the action of the story, going so far as to antagonize the likable Beasly, further indicating their status outside the circle of "good people."

Another part of the strength of the story is that the aliens actually play a relatively minor part, ultimately becoming part of everyman Taine's overcoming the people around him who try to take advantage of his easy-going nature. While this could be seen as a weakness, it distills an important component of a lot of the best science fiction stories, that of describing human relationships. The fact that Taine finds aliens in his front yard isn't nearly so important as finding something that the people around him want to take advantage in the same way that they try to take advantage of Taine and Beasly. And then good instincts and honesty take over, helping the everyman to succeed when those socially or intellectually above them are struggling to cope with the huge changes about to overtake their world. This runs parallel to a relatively common idea in episodes of Twilight Zone: when aliens come to Earth, there is no guarantee that they will first run into the intellectual and economic upper class, and we may be better off in the long run if they deal with average humans first.

Perhaps my favorite story in Skirmish is "Desertion." Again, the main characters are developed nicely, especially Kent Fowler, a human officer at a planetary outpost on Jupiter. Fowler is tasked with exploring Jupiter via a tool that allows humans to take on the form of the dominant Jovian life form: people are refashioned to survive in the Jovian atmosphere without any machinery, but as a native life form. As the story opens, Fowler is sending out his fifth "volunteer" to explore; the previous two teams of two he has already sent out have never returned. When the fifth man does not return, his coworkers fear and despise Fowler for sending people out to their dooms, and the station nurse, Miss Stanley, typifies their reaction to him. For a good part of the story, it feels as if the conflict is going to be between Fowler's sense of duty to his employers and to the people he works with. Instead, Fowler resolves that conflict fairly easily by volunteering himself on the mission, undergoing the process. Part of the enjoyment of the story comes from Fowler's relationship with his dog (also named Towser) that he has had forever and who is in his waning years of a full life. When Fowler undergoes the process to become a Jovian life form, he puts Towser through it as well, giving Towser new life. And when they first meet up on the surface of Jupiter, Towser starts talking to him using the previously unknown communication senses the Jovians possess, so that the two best friends can explore together.

What they find, and the cause of the disappearance of the other explorers is fascinating. It doesn't matter that the tool Simak uses that allows Fowler and Towser to make their discovery is impossible. If a machine existed that could refashion humans and dogs so completely as the one in the story does, the scientists who run it should have an indication of what the explorers discover on their survey. The power of "Desertion" lies in the vision of the human place in the universe. Fowler discovers that Towser is a far better companion than he could ever imagine, hinting that humans are a special creature for the love they inspire in such devoted creatures as dogs. But immediately following that discovery, Fowler learns that humans are in fact very very small in the grand scale of things. It is this dual sense of wonder—that we barely know who we are in any dimension that delivers the power of the story; Simak feeds our sense of wonder for the universe at large and at what humans are capable of at the same time.

The weaker stories in Skirmish do not have this same development of character, and so I found myself less invested in the outcome of the story; typical of this is "The thing in the Stone." Frankly, I feel Simak has too much on his plate in this story. Pity poor Wallace Daniels: he has lost his family in a car accident and has bought land in rural Wisconsin to try to recuperate. During his recuperation, he discovers that the accident has affected his brain such that he finds himself often displaced in time, but only backwards, travelling into the past and seeing the various early ages of life and their effects on his property. As if that weren't enough, these travels cause him to discover that something is buried deep in the rocky caves near his home, but he cannot determine its exact nature. This seems a workable premise, but Simak takes another step further by giving Daniels a nasty neighbor, Ben Adams, who is both lazy and jealous of those who work and succeed. Adams first calls out the sheriff to accuse Daniels of being a chicken thief, and when the sheriff refuses to believe the complaint after talking to Daniels, Adams turns to a murderous plot to get rid of Daniels. However, Daniels is a cipher; he evokes the reader's sympathy with his tragic tale of losing his family and by having to deal with Adams's evil scheme, but ultimately we don't learn anything about Daniels. Unlike Taine and Fowler in the other stories, there is nothing to remark the protagonist beyond being caught up in extraordinary events. And the only other character who could really use development, Adams, is more of a plot device than anything else. He complains to the sheriff, which leads to the dialogue that is the introduction of Daniels to the reader. And then he tries to kill Daniels in a horribly ill-thought out fashion, which forces Daniels to confront the thing he has found in the caves. Then, worst of all (plotwise), Adams relents and calls the sheriff out to help him rescue Daniels, who he has stranded, which in turn provides Simak the opportunity to give his denouement. Granted, Daniels finds something while he is snared in Adams's trap, fortunately travelling back in time and wandering out of the area where his trap lay, but the nature of what he finds is so horribly ambiguous that it offers no satisfaction to the reader at its discovery. There are moments in "The Thing in the Stone" where Simak writes evocatively of the geography and ecology of his native Wisconsin; these are some of the strongest moments in the story. But those descriptions do nothing to advance the movement or them of the short story and thus are mostly wasted. And the result is a weak story with all of its infrastructure showing, such that I am not transported by the story at all but saddened at the creaky bits that try to move the story.

One of my biggest complains about The Goblin Reservation was the way that characters have long internal dialogues that lead to incredibly accurate extrapolations/interpolations of the events that surround them, which in turn provide impetus for the plot to move along. This technique is useful in short stories—characters make incredible leaps in logic to advance the plot, and since the format is shorter, the author doesn't have time to waste by having characters think about alternatives to their decisions, at least not at any length. The novel form does have the space to allow this, and some interesting storytelling opportunities are presented when the character intuits badly and acts on that intuition (this would seem especially useful for mysteries). The main character in The Goblin Reservation was never wrong, thus stretching my readerly credulity. There are stories in Skirmish that use the same device, with a little more success."Good night, Mr. James" is one such story, using this kind of narrative tool nearly exclusively; in fact, Henderson James, the protagonist, knows absolutely nothing when the story begins and talks to practically no one through the course of the story. As a result, James must reason out every detail that he discovers by talking to himself. Unfortunately, how he reaches the conclusions he does are incomprehensible though they are never wrong. As I read, I was frustrated by this repeated process, feeling the author stick his finger into the plot with very little disguise and stirring things up, rather than using better writers' tools. It was merely confusing the first couple of times it happened, but eventually it feels like the machina of a terribly intrusive deus and just becomes annoying. When James finally figures out who he is, it would be a shocking and satisfying conclusion to an unusual mystery if the reader could have been included in the logic of how everyone got there. But with such mechanical intrusion, I only felt relief that it was over and agitation that it could have been better. It's no surprise that this story was used in a TV anthology series along the line of The Outer Limits, but I have no idea how such heavy-handed internal decision-making could be carried over to TV effectively.

I'm glad I have gone on to read more Simak. He's horribly frustrating to me because it all feels horribly uneven. His strengths seems to lie with developing stories that deal with what it means to be human and stretching those boundaries. When he goes for the shock ending that is fairly typical of the golden age science fiction, he appears to give up all his storytelling skills in service to the big surprise. Those stories have their place as well, but they are also fairly common and are part of what has led to speculative fiction getting the reputation it has among critics. It's the other kind of story, the thoughtful and insightful mediations on bigger things, that prove that speculative fiction can reach beyond the clichés that entrap it. Simak stands with one foot in both schools, making it a crap shoot for which kind of story you're going to get.

(A minor confession: I have read and own Simak's Hugo-Winning novel, Way Station. However, I have no recollection of it at all. I fear that it may have some of those same traits I didn't like in The Goblin Reservation, but I'll pull it out and go through it again, a vastly different reader than I was twenty years ago when I first read it.)

The Goblin Reservation

Sometimes, stretching outside your comfort zone can be a good thing. A lot of the new books being released I pick up based on the recommendation of a couple of trusted Web sites or the suggestion of friends or trusted readers. This has led to some wonderful finds that later turned into big deals, like China Mieville and Charles Stross.

And then sometimes, you find out there's a reason it's called a "comfort zone."

Clifford Simak's The Goblin Reservation has, at its core, a really wonderful idea that plays havoc with the idea of genre. What if all the legendary creatures of Earth—goblins and dragons and trolls—really exist? And further, what if they were colonizers of an ancient civilization that found a foothold on Earth but never got very far once human rose to dominance? It seems such an obvious idea that I'm sure someone else has carried it out more fully, but it's the first time I can remember encountering it in a novel. It also is just one of the many ideas that inform The Goblin Reservation: instantaneous matter transmission, time travel, and social ghosts. Any of these could make for a solid book if treated somewhat seriously. Instead, these ideas merely form a setting for the action of the novel and are never explored with any depth. And on the rare attempt by Simak to describe the social ramifications of these ideas, his extrapolation doesn't make a whole lot of sense—time travel is a failure because it doesn't lead to any income for the institutions that control it. Despite having rescued the scrolls at Alexandria before the library burnt, there is apparently not enough interest in them to recoup the cost of getting them. A museum of rescued artifacts has no visitors and the time travelers have to resort to stunts like plucking William Shakespeare out of the timestream and giving lectures on how he passed off the greatest literary fraud of all time. While I can't understand the logic behind assuming such discoveries would not pull in large audiences and numbers of researchers, it is a fascinating idea that I would like to see expanded. But it resides only in the background of a story that is nowhere near as interesting or compelling.

Peter Maxwell, a professor of the Supernatural, has returned from a trip to another planet and discovered that his doppelganger returned some weeks ago and has since died. While his friends are happy at his apparent resurrection, they and the authorities are puzzled by how the seemingly uncopyable matter transmitter waves have been duplicated. Slowly, as the story goes on, Simak reveals where Maxwell had been during his time off of Earth, and we are led into a conspiracy the parts of which are not really clear, especially since Maxwell is missing crucial information as well. So, for the course of most of the novel, Maxwell appears to wander fairly freely through the hills of Wisconsin as he tries to solve his problem…which rapidly becomes trying to complete his mission. But Maxwell has no personality, especially in comparison to the characters he is surrounded by—a Neanderthal who has been brought to the present and has become a lifelong student, a Ghost who cannot remember who he is the ghost of, and a young woman who while fairly normal has a pet saber-tooth tiger na whom she has named Sylvester (she even calls him her "putty cat"). It is pretty clear early on that these friends would do anything for Maxwell, and yet he never really confides in them about his adventures while off-planet.

Into this mix Simak adds a fairly hostile race of individuals made up of a hive mind and the container that holds each hive, a painter who has apparently travelled in time for the subjects of his art, and an impenetrable Artifact that the time institute has brought back from the Jurassic. Simak stirs all these ingredients into a mishmash that ends up being accidentally and coincidentally related, and in no way that the reader can figure out from the clues given in the story (some metafictional thought makes it obvious what the relationships are going to have to be—Simak must have introduced character A for some reason and the only place he fits in is that plot hole…). Oddly Maxwell can figure them out in leaps of intuition and logic that come very close to deus ex machina; his acting on those leaps is what propels the story forward. It reaches the state of a screwball comedy when all of the principle characters are gathered together in a single office, each telling their little bits of the over-arching conspiracy that drives the whole novel.

Perhaps that is the way to approach The Goblin Reservation after all, to forget about any sort of plot that holds it all together and instead concentrate on the goofy characters that inhabit the world, with Peter Maxwell as the Cary Grant straight man, trying to make sense of it all. If that's the case, it turns out that screwball comedies are better done in cinema than in novel form.