review of
John Brunner's The Dramaturges of Yan
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 31, 2014

As w/ so many Brunner bks, most of what I potentially have to say about this 1 wd contain too many spoilers so I'll approach it somewhat abstractly instead. I've been on a Brunner review spree ever since my review of The World Swappers
of February 18, 2013 ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2398747.The_World_Swappers ). This is approximately the 39th bk I've read & reviewed by him so far & I'm still enjoying it so Brunner hasn't disappointed me (cf Keith Laumer whose work I got sick of pretty quickly).

Right off the bat, before we even have a chance to run for home-plate, or even to nibble off of it, there's 'wild vs gene tinkering', a subject of some interest to me since I tend to be an 'endless' object maker (&, hence, material-manipulator) who has deep respect for wildness:

"A few years ago he had decided to tinker with the faulty gene in the original species which sometimes caused it to revert to the wild state, its flowers mere balls of characterless green fluff, and achieved spectacular success" - p 5

Loaded words! "faulty gene"! What makes a gene "faulty" exactly?! In this case, its no doubt healthy reversion to its "wild state" wch, however, humans find aesthetically unappealing b/c its flowers become "characterless green fluff"!!!!! Ah, the endless myopic selfishness of humanity.

But that has nothing to do w/ anything so let's move on.

"He half-turned in his chair, stretching out a hand to prod Pompy, and froze in mid-motion. Over the distant silhouette of the Mutine Mandala the white disc of the moon was rising.

"But there was no moon on Yan, and had not been for nearly ten thousand years." - p 11

Now we've furtively groped our way to home-base & the story's beginning to pant or to be pantless.

"Briefly, he found himself wondering what it would be like to make love again with a girl having breasts and a skin all of one colour, who needed sometimes to break off from a kiss because she had to breathe in through her mouth. But that had nothing to do with his problem. Nothing at all. It was irrelevant." - p 12

Yes, we're at home base - or are we in left field? Regardless, add this one to the list of SF bks that touchdown upon sex between humans & humanoids (or non-humans) from other planets - the yr of publication being 1972: not the earliest such story but still having a place in this history before more recent, & probably more pretentious, contenders. But let's kick off elsewhere now:

"The notion of "carving softness" lacked the paradoxical quality of the original, because carving suggested knives or chisels, hard sharp edges, whereas the root associations of the Yannish words implied that the tool was softer than the material being worked—like water eroding a rock. Yet "eroding" had overtones of long patient geological processes, while the Yannish verse made it clear that what happened took place instantly!" - p 17

Translation thrown a curve ball, the broom of the curling iron, the grid-iron has got me by the short-hairs, a hairy predicament this mixed metaphors translation biz, a real KO. But Brunner's always higher than par for the course (of the River Smor):

"Now, as though a supernal finger had beckoned them equatorwards, the potential gradients of the polar stratosphere stretched into long easy declines down which poured the brilliant discharges of the arctic night. Huge draping curtains of luminosity shook out their folds along the course of the River Smor, bluish and yellowish and occasionally shifting without warning into deep red. Free radical sown from above sparked fresh reactions, so that the curtains seemed to draw apart, looping upwards and becoming vast double inverted rainbows with the colours interchanged. On the airy stage for which the aurora now formed a sort of proscenium arch, magnificent pyrotechnics began. Intangible jewels glittered, fiery wheels resolved, blasts of lightning threaded whiter than the eye could bear down the black-with-silver background of the night." - p 21

Love those fireworks after the game but is it really appropriate for checkers? Maybe it's b/c "They did not educate their children in groups; instead, they transferred them—starting the day after birth—along an incredibly subtle network of relations, which might easily taken them to a dozen cities or villages, to let them gradually absorb the "life-style" of their race." (p 36) One of those relatives being Dr. Lem, whose name is the spitting image of a certain Dr. Stanislav Lem, Polish SF writer extraordinaire. But I'm getting out of the ball-park here. These sportscasters are a pain-in-the-ass while the plaster-casters are something else entirely:

""Oh, it's only a news-machine," he said after a pause. "What's wrong with that?"

""You'll find out," Ducci said grimly. He had his own premonitions of what was going to emerge from all this, and they weren't pretty. "Get over there and inactivate it."

""But that's illegal! They're allowed to go anywhere, if they don't invade privacy," Guiseppe pointed out.

""I don't mean wreck it," his father snapped. "Just delay it for a while." Retrieving the binox, he studied the thing's angular, glinting form, long legs tipped with climbing hooks and suction-pads disposed around the self-powered motor unit and the cluster of extensible sensors. "Luckily it's one of the old marks, an Epsilon, not a recent one like a Kappa or Lambda. It'll take a while to orient itself. Go on—feed it a rumour or something, send it on a false trail. It's important!"" - p 38

That's right, it's "illegal"! Three strikes & you're out! But it's not really foul play. But I'm giving you a bad tip on the horses, the cock fights, the fowl play.

""Alchemy," Chart said, "Are you familiar with the magical and alchemical manuals they wrote on Earth some fifteen hundred years ago?"

[..]

""They were composed in a sort of association-code, using agreed conventional images—dragons, astrological figures, various oblique references of that kind. Provided one had been trained in the jargon, one could read them with relative ease. Outsiders, however, found only obscure and baffling nonsense.["]" - p 84

Like Crowley's "drinking the elixir from the curcubite", eh? Witness "The Postman Always Rings the Homunculous of Woody Allen & Hollis Frampton Twice" here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovbUqP23VZ0 . "["]Is there a human culture in the galaxy? If there is, then I built it."" (p 90) Home run!! ( )

I picked this up in a second hand bookshop as I'd been blown away by Stand on Zanzibar by the same author, but this isn't in remotely the same league. An odd little book with a smattering of interesting sci-fi concepts, and something of a shock twist ending, but not very much to sustain the interest here if you aren't a fanatical sci-fi completist. ( )

For a novella, this story has a very slow start. It picks up over halfway through and then ends with a long sensawonda coda. Brunner's worldbuidling is excellent and there's a neat prediction of the internet. The sensawonda ending has a lot of interesting ideas, most of which weren't really explored in the book. I'd call it a failed novel with enough good bits to make it worth reading for the Brunner fan. ( )