Ineradicable mark of the Beast. (The Days of Glory - Brian M. Stableford)

Member Name: Brett Bligh

Product:	The Days of Glory - Brian M. Stableford
Date:	14/10/01 (145 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Straightforward space opera tale quirkily executed, interesting written format allows a large cast of characters to be defined purposefully, reasonably well-realised, if rather unconvincing, galactic civilisation.

Disadvantages: Lack of any real ideas at the heart of the book, over-reliance on violence to further the story (although, of course, this is a book about a war!), barely above average pulp science fiction.

‘The Days of Glory’ is essentially a pulp sci-fi retelling of the Iliad published as the first volume of a trilogy with the collective title ‘Dies Irae’ (the two further volumes include a retelling of the Odyssey).

David Starbird of Home, a human, falls in love with Angeline of Sula, a Beast (this will be explained later) and takes her back with him to Earth. This provokes a swift response from the Beast Lord Daniel Skywolf of Sula (to whom Angeline was supposed to be married), who challenges the House of Stars (humanity, based around Earth) to a duel between his fleet and an equivalent fleet formed by his Beast allies. Although initially intended to be an honourable and brief affair intended to settle the dispute between the two men, this conflict is manipulated by Heljanita the Toymaker into an all out war between humanity and the Beasts that will cause the downfall of human civilisation.

The Days of Glory is somewhat complex in more ways than one: it is set against the background of a civilisation which requires substantial exposition to explain; its plot, although simplistic in its nature of being one battle followed by another, also manages to come across as full of convolutions; and the cast of characters is also rather lengthy. All of this is combined with an unconventional written presentation — there are no chapters, just very short sections each with its own explicit heading, and there is rather a low proportion of actual dialogue, with descriptions of the contents of discussions replacing the actual words themselves — to produce a book which I did not find easy to get on with, so to speak.

That is not to suggest, though, that this is a book which is not worth reading. Given the fact that this is pulp science fiction, there is actually a surprisingly high number of interesting ideas presented in the book — although, given the author, perhaps this is not so surprising after all.

S
tableford had used the idea of a malaise affecting all of humanity before in his very first novel ‘Cradle of the Sun’, but here the same idea is studied from a very different angle. After a long stretch of confinement on planet Earth, humanity’s civilisation adopts a tradition of not having many children, hence leading to a reasonably constant population. After travel to other planets is made possible, the need for population control becomes obsolete as there is space in abundance on those other worlds — an, in fact, humanity’s economy might well benefit from the expansion. Unfortunately, the human mindset has become so stuck to the concept of not bearing many children per family that humanity is unable to fulfil this potential. Into this situation steps Adam December, who genetically engineers the Beasts, who are essentially identical to humans except that they bear a tattoo-like Mark. These Beasts have no such problem with reproducing at vast rates, and are soon populating hundreds of colony worlds, usually with only a few hundred humans running the economy of each planet. Of course, after a while a certain resentment forms: Beasts consider themselves equal to humans, but society does not really reflect this, with humanity (which is now outnumbered by hundreds-of-thousands to one by the galaxy’s Beast population) still dominating galactic society economically. The Days of Glory is set ten millennia after this society was formed, and shows the fall of Adam December’s carefully constructed Order and the destruction of humanity and their leaders, the House of Stars.

The given situation, in which a set of people maintain their economic superiority within a society simply because of the mechanisms set up within that society, is of course inherently interesting to anyone interested in politics and an ever-relevant subject of discussion within capitalist society. But The Days of Glory is no snidely-hidden political comme
ntary on modern society, and neither is it an equal opportunities diatribe; it merely uses a background which, whilst possessing great differences from the society we know today, is inherently loaded with the cultural baggage of human civilisation — and in doing this, it offers us a future scenario which is interesting if not entirely realistic.

Apart from the nicely realised background, The Days of Glory offers some rather skewed characterisation, with a sizeable proportion of the novel given over to discussion of the motives of various characters and their own backgrounds — including, in some cases, characters whose overall impact on the novel is slight — in sections whose heading is simply the name of the character under discussion. Given the rather large and frankly unwieldy number of characters in the book and the fact that the characters have faintly ludicrous names in an obvious attempt to recall the style of the source material, this is probably the only way any kind of characterisation could have been meaningfully attempted, and it is to Stableford’s credit that he manages to imbue a large number of different individuals with characters which simultaneously distinguish them from each other and mark them as the inevitable products of the novel’s society, even if he does not succeed in making many (if any) of the characters truly memorable (although this may, once again, have something to do with naming).

Perhaps the major feature of this book still to discuss is the violence. Modern Stableford fiction has tended to be marked by big ideas and the glorification of thinkers and intellectuals, but it is obvious that here Stableford in an earlier incarnation was quite content to fit his work into the pulp sf mode and introduce some gratuitous violence to please the assumed tastes of the masses. The violence within is actually quite graphically described, and at considerable length. The Days of Glory may be about a f
uture war, but it is still a book primarily about physical conflict, much of which occurs in the fashion of hand-to-hand combat or pitched battles with what are essentially the traditional early-sf laser guns. Once again, Stableford actually does succeed in raising a factor of the novel which could have been rather mundane above this through the style of his writing, but personally I thought much of the limb-removal a bit unnecessary.

And this is a part of the central problem with the novel. Brian Stableford is nowadays admired by the sf community as an author of ideas, and even many of his earlier works contained such ideas even if they were not so well realised as in his more modern works. The Days of Glory, however, seems to be a book written to order, a simple retelling of a classic story set in space, whose main function is to describe large amounts of blood-letting. Thankfully, the quirky writing style and characterisation and the mildly interesting civilisation within which the novel is set manage to raise the book above the level of standard pulp sci-fi but the honest truth is that the dearth of any major point at the heart of the novel means that they do not raise it by all that much.

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Obtaining this novel:

This novel has been out of print for quite a number of years, although second-hand copies should not be all that difficult to find. I obtained my copy through www.abebooks.com; details of the various editions which are available can be found on the Brian Stableford website, the URL for this novel being http://freespace.virgin.net/diri.gini/glory.htm.

Summary: