2015 read #69: The Light of Lilith by G. McDonald Wallis.

The Light of Lilith by G. McDonald Wallis
123 pages
Published 1961
Read from December 4 to December 7
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

Where do I even start with this one? It was all over the goddamn place, a B-movie in book form crammed with half a dozen plot directions, each discarded as soon as it was tried on, a muddled Biblical allegory of evolution, flailing toward profundity with absurd technobabble, mingling MST3K-worthy ridiculousness with moments of sheer awesome. Lilith was a hot mess, but I take back what I said in my review of The Sun Saboteurs: G. McDonald Wallis never produced any unfairly forgotten classics (in fact, I seem to have read every book she ever published, aside from a handful of young adult adventure stories), but here, at least, she showed a glimmer of potential. I could easily imagine the general gist of this book working like gangbusters in the hands of Zelazy (in full Roadmarks mode) or even Le Guin (as one of the lesser Hainish novels).

Spoilers, if you care...

So, we start out with a "reporter" (a sort of galactic inspector-bureaucrat) named Russ Mason landing on Lilith, an "experimental planet," the star and atmosphere of which together produce unusual optical phenomena. A few giant leaps of technobabble take us from "the real center of light itself" (whatever the hell that means) to experiments in mutating life, a big no-no in this particular Federation -- hence why humans (that nefarious breed) keep the experiments secret, and the official reporters largely ignorant of the science involved. Our hero Russ Mason lands in the aftermath of an accident at the lab, which mangled one scientist and picturesquely atomized another: even more reams of technobabble bring us the memorable image of this scientist's component parts -- his metal watch, his still-beating heart -- attracting concentric circles of sympathetic color, which gives us one of the very best (read: pulpiest) pulp covers ever. These color circles give Mason visions of the future. In the first, he enters the mind of a Black man "ten thousand million years" into the future of Earth, a time sufficiently distant, perhaps, that a white writer in 1961 could dare to imagine that a Black man could be a sympathetic and intelligent scientist hoping against hope to save the now-mature and wise human race, isolated in its dying solar system for its long-ago crimes against the Federation.

(My "Yay, a central character of color!" was quickly shut down with the passage, "His race endured the shimmering waves of heat better than most. The last people to come out of the earth and win their place among men, the last to find their place in the sun, and now the last to die under that sun." I mean, I think that qualifies as a sympathetic view by the standards of the time, but not even ten billion years in the future could a Black character escape 1961 racial "theory.")

That's enough, surely, for a book of this length: planetary romance, fantastic new spectra of light, secret weapons base, beating hearts in concentric rings of magenta, Dying Earth shenanigans, and oh, there's a Himalayan mystic showing the future scientist a vision in the vision of Russ Mason. But that's all by page 34.

Lilith, honestly, peaks with Mason's visions of the future and his escape into the jungles of the experimental planet, certain the next ten billion years of galactic history depend on him. After he gets picked up by his ship (which of course he does), the momentum dies and whatever potent shit Wallis has been smoking up to this point is evidently exhausted. The dude gets a ride to Supreme Court Planet, literally strolls into the correct building by chance, and immediately gets aided by a friendly alien who happens to know everything Mason needs to know. There's another B movie plot twist with the continued radiation experiments resulting in reptilian pig monsters nearly wiping out the lemuroid critters whose distant descendants will rescue the worthy future humankind from their dying sun, but then the planet's star has a random solar storm which causes a recapitulation of Noah's Flood, and basically not a damn thing our time-tripping hero does has any real effect on anything, because the damn solar storm would have happened anyway. Oops.

Shaky plotting, endemic prejudices of the time, weak characterization, some of the crummiest technobabble I've ever seen or heard, massive anticlimax, the fact that none of it even mattered in the context of the story's universe -- I'm not sure why I like this book as much as I do. That first half was just what-the-fuck enough to be tremendously entertaining, and generated enough good will, I guess, to bear me through to the end. Now I'm a little sad, though, that it wasn't written by Zelazny.