Starchild: Boysie Gann and the plan of man

Starchild by Frederik Pohl & Jack Williamson

By the end of Frederik Pohl & Jack Williamson’s 1963 novel The Reefs of Space, all of the reader’s many questions had been answered, and all of the loose ends tied up in a neat bow … at least, so we would have thought. The book could very easily have stood on its own, so perhaps it came as something of a surprise when the authors came out with a sequel two years later. In the first book, set some 200 years in the future, we’d been shown how a vast underground computer system, aka the Machine, was in charge of the so-called Plan of Man, and regulated every facet of the lives of Earth’s 13 billion people. And we’d also been given a glimpse of those titular Reefs of Space … planetoids composed of the minute fusorian life-forms that were able to condense hydrogen and convert it into living matter; an area now sparsely populated by those Terran folks who were in defiance of the Machine and its human representative, the Planner. The novel had been as colorful and event filled as any reasonable reader could expect, and had ended on a note of hopefulness as the Machine had suddenly allowed mankind access to the previously proscribed Reefs. Who could have guessed that Pohl & Williamson’s sequel, entitled Starchild, would not only be more colorful and action packed than Book #1 had been, but more mind-blowing, as well? Unfortunately, that did not necessarily result in something better than the original, as will be seen.

Like The Reefs of Space, Starchild first saw the light of day as a three-part serial in the digest-sized magazine If (for which Frederik Pohl served as managing editor from 1962 to ’69); in this case, the January, February and March 1965 issues. (I’m not sure why my 1977 Doubleday hardcover – which includes both novels as well as the third novel, Rogue Star, in this so-called STARCHILD TRILOGY – says that Starchild originally appeared in Galaxy magazine, for which Pohl was also editor at the time.) The book would be reprinted as a 50-cent Ballantine paperback later in ’65, and then as a $1.25 Ballantine paperback in ’73 (that’s inflation for you in a nutshell!). Internationally, Starchild would see editions in Italy (’65, ’77 and 2001), the U.K. (’66 and ’70), France (’66 and ’76), Germany (’67 and ’82) and Portugal (’70). For the savvy shopper today, all three books in the STARCHILD TRILOGY can be had in one giant volume from such publishers as the aforementioned Doubleday, Pocket Books (’77), Penguin (’80) and Baen (’86). The bottom line is that all three novels should pose no great difficulty for prospective readers to track down today.

Starchild is set some 20 years following the events of Book #1. The Machine has mysteriously rescinded its permission for mankind to explore and colonize the Reefs, and as this Book #2 gets under way, the worlds of our solar system are in something of a tizzy. Someone or something called Starchild has threatened to make our sun and some dozen neighboring stars wink out for a short time unless its demands to the Planner and the Machine are met. Those demands include the release of all the Starchild’s devotees, as well as the dismantling of the so-called Spacewall, a string of armed ships and stations beyond Pluto’s orbit that make passage to the Reefs an impossibility. And then, to the system’s consternation, the stars and our Sol do indeed wink out for a period of time! The reader is then introduced to 26-year-old Machine Major Boysie Gann, who, besides being a commissioned tech expert, is also a graduate of the spy school on Pluto. The Machine sends Boysie to the Polaris Station, one of the many links in the Spacewall, to investigate supposed anti-Plan activities therein. But Boysie’s mission is soon uncovered by one of the station’s personnel and he is summarily knocked out cold, only to awaken on one of the minor Reefs … 20 billion miles away from the sun! While there, Boysie meets an old, grizzled farmer named Harry Hickson, who takes care of the bewildered spy until he, Hickson, mysteriously vanishes one day. But Boysie is rescued from his marooned condition by the lovely Quarla Snow, who flies Boysie to another Reef, via her pet spaceling, after telling Boysie that Harry Hickson had died of a fusorian infection three years earlier! Wha? Boysie is taken to the largest settlement of the Reefs, Freehaven, where he stays for a time with Quarla and her father, a physician. But then, a short while later, Boysie suffers some extreme vertigo, and returns to consciousness in what is probably the most heavily guarded area in the entire solar system: the control complex of the Machine itself, thousands of feet underground, on Earth!

Now thoroughly discombobulated (and who wouldn’t be?), Boysie is of course immediately arrested, beaten and interrogated. He is even brought in front of the Planner himself (a different, harsher Planner than the one we’d encountered in Book #1), but of course is completely unable to explain his presence there. Later, Boysie is shocked to find that his old girlfriend, Julie Martinet, has now become an acolyte of the Machine; one of the cowled women who have arduously learned how to speak Mechanese and who have had a plate surgically implanted into their forehead so as to physically connect themselves to the Machine via a linkbox! Julie, who is now called Sister Delta Four, interrogates Boysie even more closely, as does the fanatic General Abel Wheeler. Soon, this most-secure underground installation is overwhelmed by the sudden appearance of dozens of monstrous pyropods – enormous scorpion/dragon/living rocket creatures of the Reefs – that spontaneously materialize just like Boysie had done earlier. And soon, Boysie’s lot grows even stranger, when he learns that he is now being accused of being the Starchild itself … and stranger still, when the Machine orders that Boysie must begin training to become its new, surgically enhanced acolyte! And incredibly, even stranger things will befall poor Boysie, before all is said and done…

As I inferred up top, Starchild arrives with more exciting sequences than Book #1, but somehow it is a much less satisfying experience. The major reason for this, I feel, is that most of the reader’s many questions this go-round remain unanswered. Do you remember the hit TV show Lost of some two decades back, and how it piled on one conundrum after another, week after week? I always maintained that if the writers on that series had only answered all the many questions that the show raised over the course of its six seasons, it would have been one of the greatest programs of all time. Sadly, and disappointingly, they didn’t, and neither do Pohl & Williamson here. How exactly does Hickson return to life, and come and go in a flash? How is Boysie teleported 20 billion miles across space? What precisely happened to the explorers on the missing Togethership? Who wrote those threatening notes to the Planner? Why was it necessary for Boysie, Wheeler and Sister Delta Four to go to the observatory on Mercury? If the answer is indeed a godlike sentient star, made conscious by dint of having merged itself with fusorians, then are all the stars sentient, like our Sol? And why is Deneb especially worshipped by the peoples of the Reef? So many things to ponder over, in the face of all the nondisclosures by the authors! I suppose it is possible that the answers to these posers will be vouchsafed in Book #3 (just as Starchild does clarify some gray areas in Book #1), but as I say, this reader was ultimately not left satisfied. Upon turning the final page of Starchild, I felt as if I had just finished half of a jigsaw puzzle, with the outline clearly visible but many pieces missing.

That said, I must admit that reading the book (like watching Lost) was as fun as can be … at times, even thrilling. The book gives us one remarkable sequence after another at a rapid clip; no wonder we’re told at one point that Boysie was trying “to recover from the shocks and stresses of the last few weeks. And how fast they had accumulated…” Among those bravura set pieces: Boysie’s awakening on the tiny Reeflet where he’d been marooned; Boysie regaining consciousness in the heart of the Machine (something akin to you being mysteriously teleported to a nuclear research facility in North Korea!); Gann’s interview by the Planner in his sumptuous audience chamber; the attack by dozens of murderous pyropods underground; Boysie being involved in a calamitous subtrain accident; the intensive training in Mechanese that Boysie undergoes, preparatory to becoming an acolyte of the Machine; that side trip to the Mercury observatory; and the finale aboard the so-called Togethership, lost and abandoned in the Reef Whirlpool.

Once again, the authors load their book with a generous amount of offhand, futuristic/imaginative touches. Putting aside the Spacewall and the cranial communion plates for a moment, we’re also given a nerve-pellet gun that renders its victim unconscious till given an antidote; the scars that one of the Plan majors sports, a souvenir from a “Venusian anaerobic parasite”; and the Mechanese trainer into which Gann is inserted … a kind of virtual-reality device that offers both positive and negative reinforcements. As to those acolytes of the Machine, they are presented in language that strongly suggests some kind of religious order. Thus, Sister Delta Four is not only dressed in a habit similar to a nun’s, but has a set of sonic beads, analogous to a rosary, that she constantly toys with to help perfect her Mechanese tonal qualities. Boysie goes through a novitiate period before becoming an acolyte, and the act of physical communion with the Machine is seen as a kind of nirvana. Too, Julie Martinet renounces all worldly interests after becoming an acolyte, to Boysie’s very great dismay.

Starchild again gives the reader some well-drawn descriptions of the Reefs themselves. And so, we are told:

…There are spiked forests of silicon plants, shining with their own light. Like jewels, and sharp enough to shred your spacesuit. There’s a growth that makes great brain-shaped masses of pure silver. There are thick stalks of platinum and gold, and there are things like flowers that are diamonds … The life in the Reefs was sometimes warm-blooded, carbon-based, oxygen-breathing animal. But more often it was metal or crystal – at best, worthless for food; at worst, a deadly danger…

We get to know more about the exact nature of those blasted pyropods, and are again given an interesting raft of secondary characters: the mad-for-power General Wheeler; the once-sweet, now dronelike Julie/Delta Four; and the enigmatic figure that is Harry Hickson. Steve Ryeland, our mathematician hero from Book #1, is absent from this sequel, although he is mentioned, and we do get to learn a little of his fate, as well as the fates of the Planner and Donna Creery from that first installment, as well. (This reader was not at all happy to learn what became of them!) And of course, one of the major selling points of Starchild is getting to observe how Boysie Gann changes over the course of the book, going from a loyal soldier/spy for the Plan of Man, to a person who dreads becoming one with the Machine, and finally, to an individual who actually begins to wish for the freedom of the Reefs. Boysie is a marvelous character who goes through way too much for any human mind to handle.

I have very few bones to pick with the authors here, other than their letting me down in the area of full explication. But I did notice one boo-boo that Pohl & Williamson make, and it is something of a major one. Early on, we are told that of the three residents in the Mercury observatory, one of them, the Techtenant, is Julie Martinet’s brother. But around 100 pages later, when Boysie & Co. find the bodies of the three in that observatory, we are told that Julie’s brother is the Technicadet! As I say, this is something of an embarrassing slipup, but I suppose that even future sci-fi Grand Masters are only human, after all. (And I suppose this is one of the dangers of a managing editor editing his own work!) So yes, Starchild remains something of a mixed bag, but surely an entertaining one. By the book’s end, the Machine has been outdone by the mysterious Starchild, and the seemingly sentient stars have given us their warning. What could possibly happen next? I suppose we’ll have to dive into Book #3, Rogue Star, to find out … and, hopefully, get some further enlightenment. Stay tuned…