Book haul from Dinham Massey National Trust Pre-Loved Book Store.

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Short Book Reviews: Fritz Leiber, Jr.’s Gather, Darkness! (1943, novelized 1950) and Gillian Freeman’s The Leader (1965)

Note: My read but “waiting to be reviewed pile” is growing. Short rumination/tangents/impressions are a way to get through the stack before my memory and will fades. My website partially serves as a record of what I have read and a memory palace for future projects. Stay tuned for more detailed and analytical reviews.

1. Fritz Leiber’s Gather, Darkness! (1943, novelized 1950)

• Uncredited cover for the 1950 1st hardback edition

3.25/5 (Above Average)

Frtiz Leiber’s Gather, Darkness! first appeared across the May, June, and July 1943 issues of Astounding Science-Fiction, ed. John W. Campbell, Jr. It was novelized in 1950. Written in the midst of WWII, Gather, Darkness! is a product of an important moment in Leiber’s life. The previous year he abandoned his profession as a speech and drama instructor at Occidental College (1941-1942) and decided that “the struggle against fascism mattered more than his long-held pacifist convictions.” He joined Douglas Aircraft as a quality inspector and continued to publish science fiction.1

Gather, Darkness! likewise imagines a just war, in this case against an all-encompassing technocracy. This technocracy birthed from cataclysm dolls up their technologies—including a looming “Almighty Automation” (17) that literally smites those who defy from above–as a religion. It’s here where Leiber fascinates. While the scientists theoretically know that there is no cosmic power behind their inventions and manipulations of the masses, they can’t resist interpreting their own actions as either some part of a divine plan or spiritual vision or secretly believing their own religious invocations meant to control and manage the crowds.2 The scientists fall victim to their own invented religion. The story, told from a variety of viewpoints within and outside the technocracy, follows Brother Jarles, an idealistic young man, who attempts to convince others of the Great God’s sham. Jarles is an appealing character. Resistance isn’t enough. There must be a believable moral stratum supporting all actions. Simultaneously, another force appears to be at work—using similar technological tricks to manipulate and subvert. The population, and even those within the Apex Council, view the rebellion through a religious lens. There’s witchcraft afoot!

It’s all told with an exciting visual and textual exuberance. There’s brainwashing, a half-hearted love story, escapes through the tunnels of the old civilization, strange new technologies, plots and plots and plots, and an endless sequence of holographic permutations. However, it reads as a grandiose pulp adventure that never pauses long enough to consider its own ruminative implications. I imagine it was still one of the better works to appear in those early days of Campbell, Jr.’s Astounding. If you’re new to Leiber’s work, I recommend starting with his Hugo-winning The Big Time (1958) or spectacular short stories like “Coming Attraction” (1950), “The Moon is Green” (1952), “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” (1949), and “A Bad Day for Sales” (1953). He certainly hit his stride in the 1950s.

Somewhat recommended for fans of 40s science fiction and Fritz Leiber completists.

2. Gillian Freeman’s The Leader (1965)

• Uncredited cover for the 1st edition

3.5/5 (Good)

First, the inevitable “is this genre” question: maybe? SF Encyclopedia suggests, and this time I support John Clute’s entry, that The Leader (1965) is set in a “kind of near future dystopian UK” that charts the emergence of Britain First, a fascist, anti-Semitic, and nativist political party.3 Gillian Freeman (1929-2019) does not directly indicate a date. If it’s near-future, it’s the sense that it was moments from her now. Freeman strikes an interesting figure. She was a Jewish author who wrote an important early novel of gay love, The Leather Boys (1961). She turned her novel into a screenplay for the 1964 film of the same name and even wrote the screenplay to Robert Altman’s early psychological thriller The Cold Day in the Park (1969). To the best of my knowledge, The Leader is her only work that could be described as science fiction.

There’s an effective incremental terror to the proceedings. The novel builds step-by-step through its relentless logic made all the more uncomfortable by historical parallels and references. Freeman deliberately positions the origin of the native fascism within the “respectable” middle classes of Britain–the bankers, the office workers, the veterans, and the educated youth. She elides contemporary fetishization of Nazi artifacts and memorabilia with far more sinister obsessions. As a visitor pointed out two years ago when I purchased the book, Freeman’s text harkens to earlier manifestations of that “fragmented-but-organized neo-Nazi contingent in the UK that’s never really gone away and continues to work its way into various subcultural spaces.”4 It’s a hard read made all the more chilling due to the rise in right-wing nationalist groups in the US that openly espouse anti-Semitic views.5

If you’re a sucker for British near-future dystopias then check this one out. It’s of the unsettlingly real variety that will get under your skin and horrify.6

Notes

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For TV and film reviews consult the INDEX

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