One Thousand Times the Speed of Light
John Locke
About halfway through, the promise of this book petered out. It had been a rough diamond from the start, needing a touch of a cutter to bring out its best facets and perhaps a light polish as well on the punctuation. There came a time however when the diamond seemed to revert to a lump of coal.
During the early days of World War II, David Wagner and his son Jack save the life of Tiberius, a visitor from the planet Zadiac. In gratitude, Tiberius gives them a spaceship of incredibly advanced design and teaches them how to use it. Over the next few decades JOE (Jack of Earth) becomes a renowned defender of our planet and is responsible for, or else directly involved in, many UFO sightings around the world.
Not too bad so far. However when David and his wife Mary along with their grandson David Jnr arrive on the alien planet, the reader is treated to a spectacle that just isn’t alien. David Jnr has supposedly gone to Zadiac to get an education he couldn’t get on Earth. Yet the alien military establishment conforms around him to an indulgent club of young bloods who all want to emulate Earth ways. As a result we catch more of a sustained glimpse of idealised 1950s Australian male-bonding than anything alien. (On the other hand, that is pretty alien to today’s kids, so perhaps I’m being too critical.)
But the real problem was that, after a while, despite the dangers, I realised that the main characters were never going to be actually in danger. Sure they were risking their lives but their lives weren’t really on the line until the very end of the book. Far too late to rack up the level of suspense in the story. By that time, it’s established that the cavalry will always arrive in the nick of time. Moreover, since the movements of the cavalry were always on show, so there was never any real thought that they’d be late.
The moral choices of the characters were always black and white: the good guys good, the bad guys bad and the only ambiguity was over which way the guys in the middle were leaning.
The humour unfortunately zoomed so over my head it was seemed to be in the lower stratosphere. At least I recognised it was there. A younger generation would, I suspect, find it whooshing past somewhere in orbit.
If you’re looking for a shot of nostalgia - both of the 1950s and of the sort of science fiction where Earthmen can teach quite a few things to even the most advanced race in the known universes - this is a superb book.
I’m not too sure about its philosophy, however. ‘Boys will be boys, trust ’em and they’ll turn out just right’ comes across repeatedly and overtly in many different contexts as one of the underlying themes of the book. Jack and David always make the right decisions. They never have to deal with the consequences of bad judgment, mistakes or the darker side of their own natures.
Having taught many thousands of boys over 30 years as a mathematics teacher, I found this philosophy naïve in the extreme. It seems to be a variant of the Darwinian philosophic belief that the human race is morally evolving. While humanity in the novel is falling deeper into corruption of every kind, the heroes are shining beacons of honour and principle. This just doesn’t ring true to me. I subscribe to the Lord of the Flies theory: put man in paradise and he’ll degenerate into a vicious brute.
One Thousand Times the Speed of Light is a type of speculative fiction long disappeared everywhere except the United States. John Griffiths in surveying the basic trends in British, American and Soviet science fiction in his brilliant critical analysis, Three Tomorrows, points out that in the genre as a whole, there was an actual moment when mankind came to be seen differently: not as the pinnacle of evolution, but as just another creature in a multi-faceted universe. While American writers have never truly embraced this view, there was, as far as the rest of the world was concerned, an historical watershed after which it started to become the commonly accepted outlook. The book which made the most significant contribution towards the furtherance of this new and revolutionary viewpoint was by C.S. Lewis. Out of the Silent Planet is, according to Griffiths, a radical break with the past in terms of philosophy:
Lewis repeatedly tries to break his readers of the mental conditioning which makes them assume that superhuman intelligence must go hand in hand with monstrosity of form and ruthlessness of will. He tries, by using a cosmic scale, to put Man in what he thinks is Man’s proper place, and deploys all sorts of tricks to do so:
They were much shorter than any other animal he had seen on Malacandra, and he gathered that they were bipeds, though the lower limbs were so thick and sausage-like that he hesitated to call them legs. The bodies were a little narrower at the top than at the bottom so as to be very slightly pear-shaped, and the heads were neither round like those of the Hrossa, nor long like those of the Sorns, but almost square. They stumped along on narrow, heavy-looking feet which they seemed to press into the ground with unnecessary violence. And now their faces were becoming visible as masses of lumped and puckered flesh of variegated colour fringed in some bristly, dark substance…Suddenly with an indescribable change of feeling, he realised that he was looking at men.
John Griffiths, Three Tomorrows, Aliens and Other Worlds
The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1980
Locke’s book is not in this mould - his heroes are gung-ho and militaristic; the behaviour for which they are praised and raised to the highest level of Zadacian society (and thus to the apex of the known universes) is simply a ‘no questions asked’ defence of Earth and Zadiac. And as David’s son John reaches some Everest of evolution as a re-incarnation of the Greek god Dionysius Zagreus, I left to wonder whether Locke really is advocating violence as an answer to all the world’s ill.
It’s a book that would have benefited by the introduction of shades of complexity in its black and white vision. It starts out well but doesn’t quite make it to the finish line in the same way.
AH