2016 read #71: The Earth Gods Are Coming by Kenneth Bulmer.

The Earth Gods Are Coming by Kenneth Bulmer
107 pages
Published 1960
Read from September 6 to September 11
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

Not far into my read of Laughter in Ancient Rome, I decided it would be a good idea to have a lighter, fluffier book on hand as an escape valve for when all the academic density got to be too much. Luckily I already had this one hanging around, the literal flipside to The Games of Neith, printed together as an old Ace Double. Yet, thanks largely to Mary Beard's skill as an engaging author, I remained more interested in Rome than in old-timey starship shenanigans, and couldn't bring myself to make much progress with Gods until I wrapped up Beard's history.

Another reason I couldn't get invested in this book, of course, is the book itself. I always seem to think these slim pulpers will be easy reads -- short, simplistic, the opposite of literary -- yet those same attributes make them not very good reads. Gods is an improvement over most of these Ace novellas, both in prose and in plotting, but that's a low bar to clear. Bulmer's style is mechanical, telling rather than showing, setting up personal motivations and interpersonal conflict with affectless efficiency. The main character, Roy, is henpecked into "softness" and defeat by his overbearing wife, as we are reminded many times. In space, a chain of command issue between the navy captain (commander of the starship) and marine colonel Roy (in nominal charge of the mission) is mentioned many times as a source of friction between the two men, just in case we didn't catch it the first time.

The cast is surprisingly diverse and relatively egalitarian for the date of publication, but I must stress "relatively." Women make up about half the starship crew, but are relegated to communications, medicine, and the domestic role of quartermaster; a major subplot in the closing chapters concerns itself with Roy's love interest dyeing her hair to a less flattering color so as to not "distract" the men. Characters of many ethnic origins are shown to be competent and intelligent, almost never reduced to contemporary ethnic stereotypes, though most of those of high rank are white men. Still, for 1960, that's pretty impressive.

The flimsiness of the characters kept me from feeling invested in anything that happened, and while interesting, the central conceit -- Terran civilization sends out android "Prophets" in a propaganda campaign to literally convert alien cultures into allies -- is undermined by the vagueness of what the Earthly religion even entails, or what constitutes its antithesis. I kept thinking that this would have been a lot better two or three decades later, as a late '80s "ideas novel" along the lines of Sheri S. Tepper's Arbai Trilogy (1, 2, 3). Bulmer's concept is worth pursuing, I think, but the trappings and conventions of mid-century sci-fi militated against it here.