I much marvel at this thing men call "the Internet."

No sooner was the ink dry (metaphorically speaking) on my entry from January 15th than kindly souls in far-off places were stumbling over it during web searches. One of these souls, Chuck Welch, looked over my account of my recent experiences with Doc Savage books and decided to offer me some solace. He heard my crie de coeur about bad writing in the books, "What if they were suffering from it all along?" and offered me an answer: "They were, but not to the degree you might imagine."

Apparently, the web research I'd done on the authors of the various Doc Savage books was flawed. (Does this mean that there are other websites out there make statements that aren't true?! I shudder to think!) According to Chuck, the man who created Doc, Lester Dent, wrote a full 137 Doc Savage books, not the mere 31 I'd credited him with. (A total of 189 were authorized.) In addition, Will Murray was NOT the author of a significant chunk of Doc's adventures after all; though he found the Lester Dent manuscript for The Red Spider in the 1970s (and may have edited it before publication), Murray wrote only seven Doc adventures, all of them after 1991. And I haven't read any of them. It also appears that most of my favorite Doc books (including The Derrick Devil, The South Pole Terror, The Majii, and The Seven Agate Devils) were in fact written by Dent.

In addition, of my recent disappointments in the Savage oeuvre, only two were penned by Dent: the aforementioned Red Spider (which may have shown Murray's hand) and The Magic Island. The other two novels weren't by Dent or Murray: Merchants of Disaster, which also ranks low in Chuck's estimation, was apparently penned by one Harold Davis, while World's Fair Goblin was written by the fortuitously-named William Bogart.

Thanks, Chuck. I feel better.

Mind you, I'm still feeling a little gun-shy about picking up favorites from my youth, but that's got less to do with reading Robeson than with my recent re-reading of the first three books of Jack L. Chalker's Well World series. When I was 14, I picked up a copy of Midnight at the Well of Souls and was completely bowled over. Chalker created a fabulous playpen for a writer, a world where 1560 different hexagonal zones existed, each with a different intelligent species dominating it, and where each visitor was turned into one of those species and assigned to the appropriate hex. He got to create a pastoral mountain community of centaurs, a high-tech research lab full of Gumby-like walking plants, a desert under which meter-high intelligent T-rexes built their cities, and got to play with the foundations of reality to boot. The Well World immediately became my favorite created world, and when Chalker decided to write a few sequels and return to the place, I gleefully went along for the ride. By the time the fourth and fifth books came out, the sheen was wearing off the concept somewhat, but I still felt as though the five books in the Saga of the Well World were good entertainment.

Ten years later, when Chalker went back to the Well (so to speak), I began to have doubts. Reading his other series (The Four Lords of the Diamond, the Dancing Gods books, the Flux and Anchor series) had led me to the realization that Chalker really has only one trick: turning people into other things. In the course of doing this, he usually works through some other tropes: men and women alike are regularly transformed into female sex kittens, usually with their minds controlled so that they can experience the degradation but not feel bad about it; hive minds and alien religious fanatics (and even fanatical alien religious hive minds) of various sorts often get involved in the action, usually as bad guys; and thinly-disguised creatures from Walt Disney's Fantasia crop up with some regularity. (On the Well World alone, I counted the centaurs, fauns, and pegasi, plus a ridiculous-looking donkeylike beast of burden, from the Pastoral Symphony section, the glowing fairies and whirling flowers of the Nutcracker Suite, the opera-caped crocodiles from the Dance of the Hours, and the dinosaurians of the Rite of Spring.)

The next three books of the series all had more or less meaningless titles--I think they started with Ghosts of the Well of Souls--that didn't bode well for their contents. Sure enough, though the old pieces had been taken out of the box, Chalker didn't seem to be playing a game with them; instead, he was just moving them around the board. As a result, though I know there's been a more recent book, set in the water hexes of the Well World, I haven't seen fit to look it over yet.

Instead, a few weeks ago I gingerly picked up the second and third books, Exiles at the Well of Souls and Quest for the Well of Souls, and re-read the adventures of Mavra Chang. The plot continued to work, and the story moved along at a fine clip, but the magic was gone, and the characters no longer resonated. Half-afraid, I picked up Midnight again, for the first time since 1996, and read it through. In past years, I'd always seen the fun of the place and enjoyed the "what-if?" element of the characters' various transformations. Now I saw painful lapses in characterization and clunky dialogue. Now I saw Chalker's well-ground axes getting their first touch against the whetstone. Now I couldn't enjoy the "what-if" because of improbable stretches of plausibility and lapses in basic continuity. I've lost the ability I had at fourteen to accentuate the positive, or maybe in those days I simply didn't know there was anything negative to be found in Midnight. Either way, though I value knowing the truth about it, I feel a real sorrow: I've lost a book I once considered wonderful

Marta Randall often quotes the old saw that "The golden age of science fiction is thirteen." I think she may be wrong, but only by a year.
2:16 PM

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