This is my review of Ben Bova’s ‘The Dueling Machine’, copyrighted in 1969 and, in the edition reviewed, published in 1978 by Ace Books, with cover art by Ken Burr.
The book doesn’t really fit into a particular genre; the Star Watch aren’t strictly a military organisation, being a peacekeeping force, with the power to enforce a peace within the Terran Commonwealth, nor is there a mass confrontation of forces. There is a fair bit of political manipulation and interstellar intrigue however! Bova’s also added a dash of comedy as well. The cast of characters is kept relatively small as well.
As mentioned in my review of Bova’s ‘Star Watchman’, this and the former book form a rough series, though the Terran Empire from ‘Star Watchman’ is now the Terran Commonwealth, which is either a completely new polity, or a reformed entity. Given that there are still knights, at least by title, in the Star Watch, it sounds more likely to be the latter. There’s also more evidence of independent star nations in existence, with most of the action taking place on the capital planet of the Acquataine Cluster, Acquatainia, a liberal democracy, and on the planet of Kerak, revealed as a dictatorship run by the dastardly Kanus (and there are no prizes as to which Terran regime Kerak was modelled on…).
In the book, most planets, particularly in the Commonwealth, were highly automated and were what in earlier ages, would be considered to be virtual paradises. But they were also heavily populated, for though space travel was fast, it was also awfully expensive. And who wanted to go to a planet that lacked all the benefits of civilisation? Dr Leoh had invented the Dueling Machine, a device that allowed two people to create a consensual virtual reality where they fight each other to whatever they wished – first blood, or a virtual death – to resolve their differences in a legally binding duel. This duel wasn’t supposed to have a lasting effect on the duellists. That anyone was aware of, anyway!
As the book opens, Dueling Machines are pretty ubiquitous and no-one thinks there’s more than the usual politics going on when Major Odal of Kerak picked a quarrel with the Prime Minister of the Acquataine Cluster, so it’s news, but when this confrontation leads to Dulaq’s mental collapse, the politics of the Acquataine Cluster, and the surrounding star nations descend into chaos as Kerak begins to make it’s move to dominate the region.
Dr Leoh is called in to study the Dueling Machine on Acquataine but he’s unable to find anything wrong. When reports come in from those surrounding nations of actual deaths, Dr Leoh finds himself travelling, desperately searching for the cause of these catastrophic events as the galaxy spirals towards war. In this, he’s aided by Star Watchman Hector Hector (because he had really evil parents! ). Hector is a mathematical genius, but utterly inept physically.
Finally, the current prime minister of Acquataine is challenged to a duel by Major Odal and we get to see his side of the duel where he chooses the conflict zone as a high gravity world he had once spent time on as a supervisor, but it’s the brutality of Major Odal’s setting that kills him in the return bout.
Dr Leoh finds himself on the receiving end of Odal’s insults in an attempt to get him to challenge the Major. Lieutenant Hector, acting on his own behalf as Dr Leoh’s bodyguard, intercepts a tray of food on its way to the table in such a fashion that it ends up all over the Major making the Major mad enough to insult the Star Watchman, leading to a duel, giving Dr Leoh and Hector a window of a week to find out what’s causing all these uncanny deaths. Mechanical examination of the machine had found no problems so Leoh and Hector used the machine to fight duel after duel, with no effect, or result, so they prevail on the daughter of former Prime Minister Dulaq to allow her father to be remotely connected to the Dueling Machine so they could see what he’d seen. They get their answer; apparently Odal was a telepath and enabled fellow members of Kerak’s military to join him in the duel and gang up on the unsuspecting Dulaq. Unfortunately, this revelation leads to the death of Dulaq and a scathing call from his daughter. But it does enable Leoh and Hector to work out a counter to Odal’s shenanigans leading to the latter’s fall from grace in Kerak.
The threat from Kerak isn’t over, though, and Leoh is enjoying being the saviour of Acquataine while Hector is enjoying being around Geri Dulaq, though she’s beginning to hint that there’s something she’d like him to do the next time they ran across Major Odal. She’d really love it if Hector could arrange to make sure Odal could end up dead, pretty please! If he really loved her, he’d kill Odal, wouldn’t he? Hector, not used to pretty girls in general, never mind pretty girls making eyes at him, sort of agrees.
In the meantime, Odal’s superiors are doing their best to fulfil Geri’s desire as they push his telepathic powers as much as they can in an effort to see what use they can make of the disgraced major and his powers. The foreign minister of Kerak is also running a double bluff with his leadership and sees the disgraced major as a route to power, but when he contacts Odal to sound him out, Odal spots the problem pretty quickly – he’d either have to agree and die a martyr immediately after killing Kanus, or disagree and die as soon as he left the Dueling Machine… As he contemplates his choices, Odal finds he can also teleport. All the way to Acquataine as it turned out. Unfortunately, things went wrong on the Acquataine side of the transfer with Hector going to Kerak where he becomes a pawn in the hands of Romis, the foreign minister as he tried to get the Star Watch to help in his coup against Kanus and return Odal, who’s enjoying even solitary confinement on Acquataine more than he would have dying in a futile coup attempt...
Thankfully, everything does come to a successful conclusion for the Terran Commonwealth and Acquataine, though not necessarily for Kanus.
Overall, the book was a fun romp, particularly with poor old Lieutenant Hector, and there were some fairly obvious parallels to a certain period in the not-too-distant past from when it was written. I first read this in my early teens, certainly while I was in Secondary school (11 to 16, if you’re not familiar with English school years) and technologically it’s aged reasonably well, mainly because the Dueling Machine doesn’t pretend to be generating the imagery its users are immersed in a physical sense – it’s all in your head, which is one reason why what Odal managed was so devastating. I’d say it’s a recommended read if you’re looking for a light read. ( )

eBook, Science Fiction, A imagine a universe where interstellar conflicts are now being resolved by world leaders entering cyber space and fighting in virtual worlds with bloodless duels. Now ask what happens when the rules of game change? This was Ben Bova's second novel. It accurately predicted the internet in the 1950's before man had even orbited the planet. ( )

http://culturalsnow.blogspot.com/2008/11/together-in-electric-dreams.html

Oddly enough, I didn't read much science fiction as a child. I'm sure I looked and dressed as if I did; and plenty of my friends were the sort of high-functioning sociophobes who devoured the oeuvres of Isaac Asimov and Stanislaw Lem and L. Sprague du Camp and Dean Koontz. (Incidentally, I've long believed that all the birth names of actors that are rejected as marquee-inappropriate - names such as Issur Danielovich Demsky and Spangler Arlington Brugh and Herbert Kuchacevich zu Schluderpacheru and Diana Fluck - are redistributed to SF authors whose monickers are deemed to be too ordinary.)

I loved Dr Who, of course, and must have had about 40 of the Target novelisations, but that wasn't *proper* SF, any more than Star Wars was. I think I dabbled with a bit of HG Wells and John Wyndham, and I know I read Fahrenheit 451. But one book that has stuck in my memory is Ben Bova's The Dueling Machine, which I remember borrowing from Leigh Park library at least three times.

So when I picked up a second-hand copy a few weeks ago, it was more than a potential read or even a re-read; it was a matter of revisiting my own younger self. What was it that grabbed my eight-year-old imagination so fiercely?

The eponymous machine is a device that allows people to settle disputes without bloodshed, in a virtual arena; problems arise when combatants actually start dying. The obvious comparison is with the Dr Who story The Deadly Assassin, written by Robert Holmes, which would have been transmitted at around the time I first read Bova's book. Passably interestingly, the conceptual battleground in which the Doctor takes on Chancellor Goth is called The Matrix, and if we leap forwards a further 20-odd years, there are also clear similarities between ideas in Bova's and Holmes's works and the notions that underpin the Wachowski franchise (although that's really only a remake of Tron, but with better clothes and worse acting).

Not only does Bova get his head round the concept of virtual reality over three decades before Second Life, he also second-guesses both how the Web would work, and the uses to which it would be put:

The order was scanned and routed automatically and finally beamed to the Star Watch unit commandant in charge of the area closest to the Acquataine Cluster, on the sixth planet circling the star Perseus Alpha. Here again the order was processed automatically and routed through the local headquarters to the personnel files. The automated files selected three microcard dossiers that matched the requirements of the order...

The personnel officer selected the third man, routed his dossier and Sir Harold's order back into the automatic processing system, and returned to the film of primitive dancing girls that he had been watching before this matter of decision had arrived at his desk...

When I first read The Dueling Machine it was a fantasy; now it seems almost spookily perceptive (although the gender roles underpinning the entirely superfluous love story must have looked pretty outmoded even in 1969) . Back then, I missed his nods to Marshall McLuhan and Vance Packard, which may even have extended to the Situationist appreciation for the subversive power of the decontextualised slogan. The hero and villain are fighting in a TV editing suite, and one of them falls onto a row of switches:

"LOOKING FOR THE IDEAL VACATION PARADISE?" a voice boomed at them. From behind Odal's shoulder a girl in a see-through spacesuit did a free-fall somersault. Hector blinked at her, and Odal looked over his shoulder, momentarily amazed. the voice blared on, "JOIN THE FUN CROWD AT ORBIT HOUSE, ACQUATAINIA'S NEWEST ZERO-GRAVITY RESORT..."

Through his mind flashed another maxim from his old instructor: "Whenever possible, divert your opponent's attention. Create confusion. Feint, maneuver!"

Hector rolled off the desk top and ran along the master control unit, pounding every switch in sight.

"TIRED OF BEING CALLED SHORTY?" A disgruntled young man, standing on tiptoes next to a gorgeous, statuesque redhead, appeared beside Odal...

Of course, it's only when they're out of context that these texts and images make us feel truly uneasy. Under normal circumstances, they're designed to lull us into a dream state, as much a replacement for reality as the dueling machine itself; even if they create insecurity, the solution is inevitably in the next paragraph. And when the prescribed solution to a financial crisis caused by injudicious consumption is for people to go out and buy stuff, sometimes with fatal consequences, you know the slogan-makers have won the war.

Which is why I find the newest purported mental dysfunction on the block so unconvincing. People afflicted with Truman Show syndrome apparently believe they are unwitting performers in some kind of reality TV show, and their only desire is for some omnipotent director to call "cut!"

But surely that's not a psychiatric disorder. Rather, it's the most sensible coping mechanism for modern existence, and I suspect everyone in the developed world does it to some extent. When I was a child, when I first read The Dueling Machine, I would sometimes create a fantasy life, and believe it to be reality. Now, I tend to look at reality, and wish it were a fantasy. ( )