Chip on the shoulder. (The Blind Worm - Brian Stableford)

Member Name: Brett Bligh

Product:	The Blind Worm - Brian Stableford
Date:	02/10/01 (139 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Interestingly enigmatic and manipulative central character, some background locations and circumstances with genuine novelty value, a fast and exciting concluding section.

Disadvantages: The novel fails to cohere as a whole, the second and third sections seem oddly irrelevant to each other, many of the ideas are not expanded fully due to the books slim size.

‘The Blind Worm’ was Brian Stableford’s second novel following his debut with ‘Cradle of the Sun’. First published in 1970, it is actually a set of three successive tales involving the same characters rather than one complete narrative, but as with many other science fiction novels of the period its overall length is still not particularly large.

Part One of the novel is entitled ‘The Quadrilateral’, and sets up the backdrop against which the book is set. Humanity, it seems, has long since ceased to rule the Earth and the ruins of its ancient civilization are slowly decaying under the massive forests which comprise Earth’s new dominant force, the plant-based hive mind known as Sum. Against this backdrop a small group of humans, led by John Tamerlane (“the Black King”), a man who seeks power for himself over a future great human civilisation, choose to help Sum in its quest to join the other three great minds of the Universe known as the Quadrilateral, in the hope that if they succeed then humanity will be given some power on planet Earth once again. In order to do this they acquire the talents and services of Swallow, a young boy with apparent mental powers and travel to see Sum. Further complicating the matter is The Blind Worm, a non-human being of enigmatic and mysterious stature whose loyalties and priorities are unclear, but whose actions could affect the entire future of humanity.

In Part Two, ‘Blind God’, the Blind Worm has become God of his own universe, granted such power by the fourth member of the Quadrilateral. In this universe he chooses to resurrect Jose Dragon, his creator, as well as the group of humans he met in Part One. His motivation for this is made quite clear: he wishes the humans to kill Jose Dragon, in order that they also kill that part of him which he feels is limited by the limitations of his creator. That this is ridiculous is also quite clear, and
it becomes evident that The Blind Worm has allowed blind hatred to consume even his rationality.

Part Three of the book, ‘The Army of the Dead’, rejoins the original group of humans (i.e. not the resurrected ‘copies’ of the second tale), as they find themselves forced once again to help Sum and the Quadrilateral. The enemy is a dead army resurrected by an unknown force originating in the city of the Great Gulf. If left unchecked it will destroy everything in its path, including both Sum and those humans who still live on the surface of the Earth. In this eventuality, humanity will not even have the reduced civilization it now possesses; it will be extinct. By helping Sum, therefore, humanity helps itself, and it is up to the Black King to convince the disparate Wildmen and city dwellers of this and unite them into some kind of army. But the truly important man, the hero of the force, is predestined to be Vanice Concuma, a man whom the Black King once killed, and it is preordained that, no matter how great the Black King’s efforts in battle are, it will be Vanice Concuma who will enter the city and face whatever malevolent presence lies in wait there.

Like much of Stableford’s other work, The Blind Worm is a book brimming with ideas and, like his previous novel, it very much wears its 1960s sf inspiration on its shoulder, with much overt characterisation in the form of open discussion of character motivation in the text which would probably be implied in a novel written today (or might not be included at all, in a bad novel written today).

The central theme of the book, it seems to me, is the titular character’s deeply unhealthy psychological state. The Blind Worm hates his creator, and has spent his entire life trying utterly destroy anything associated with his creator and his work. The creator, it turns out, is just a man, Jose Dragon, but to kill him would simply not be enough for the Blind Worm
, as he discovers. Dragon must be utterly destroyed at a much more fundamental level, a level at which, the Blind Worm hopes, the traces of the creator inside *himself* also exist and can be destroyed. In order to do this, the Blind Worm manipulates the characters around him, although he is not so much working to a plan as to a set of utterly compelling instincts which drive him on and which he can only attempt to rationalise to others later. At this level, the novel is a tale of revenge, although revenge for WHAT is not entirely clear!

This aspect of the novel, however, is buried under much other material, and since there is much on display herein which will still have some novelty value even to a modern sf reader there is a very great possibility that the Blind Worm’s importance will be lost to the reader amongst the remaining literary cacophony. The hive mind of Sum, for example, was a particularly interesting concept in my opinion, and Stableford succeeded against my expectations by actually thinking up four components of the Quadrilateral who were ALL interesting in some way. The great strength of the Quadrilateral is emphasised enough to be noted, but their eventual impotence to stop the destruction of Sum on Earth by the army of the undead and their reliance on humans to defend them in this battle is still reasonably plausible. As well as the motivations of the Blind Worm and the interestingly realised backdrops against which the novel is set, The Blind Worm offers a range of other characters of interest, notably the Black King (who it is difficult to think of as a hero even though he is actually humanity's most likely saviour) and Zea, a remnant of another civilization which once rivalled Sum but which eventually failed in its conflict with him.

Despite the fact that many aspects of the book are interesting, it has to be acknowledged, however, that The Blind Worm does not cohere together particularly well as an overall whole. This
is partly to do with the novel’s structure, with the fact that the characters in Part Two are not actually the same people as in the other two sections being a source of a sense of discontinuity, a sense that what happens in the second section does not actually matter. There is also the sense that the third section abandons many of the ideas set up earlier on in favour of a straight action narrative — admittedly, this is an action narrative well accomplished, but the entire section feels tacked on, and in fact might have been more suitable as an entire novel in itself, even if that potential novel might have had less in the way of new ideas than a Stableford reader would expect.

Altogether, I feel that Stableford attempted to throw too many things into the melting pot with this novel, and ended up with insufficient room to fulfil his obvious ambitions.

In recent times science fiction novels have tended to become thicker and thicker because publishers believe thick novels are perceived by the public as better value for money. This has led to criticism of many authors, who are accused of simply using the same amount of plot as in the old days, and making up the page count with padding material which actually adds little (if anything) to the book.

Having read Stableford’s first two books (at the shorter length of old) and a more recent example of his work (‘The Empire of Fear’) which was much longer, I would have to hold up Brian Stableford as an exception to the general truth of this accusation. Stableford has ALWAYS had enough Idea to fill a modern length novel, and his earlier novels, even if they are still enjoyable in many aspects, feel crammed into too little space. For those who have read other works by the author and are interested in seeing how he started out, this will probably provide considerable entertainment. For a Stableford newcomer, however, I would recommend something more recent.

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This novel:

‘The Blind Worm’ is long since out of print. It was published in 1970 by Sidgwick & Jackson in the UK and Ace in the US. Cover images, blurb and another review of the book can be found at http://freespace.virgin.net/diri.gini/blind.htm, a location within the Brian Stableford fan website (click on the autographs in the corner to access the menu from there).

I obtained my copy of this novel through www.abebooks.com, a second-hand Internet chain of booksellers, and specifically from Halcyon Books through the abebooks site.

Summary: